A Storm Over France

The other day I was travelling in the South of France. When we were crossing the border the morning broke with a thunderstorm, with a lurid dawn in the East, such a morning as is described by Joel, “The day of the Lord cometh, for it is nigh at hand, a day of darkness and of gloominess, a day of clouds and of thick darkness, as the morning spread upon the mountains.”

The great thunderstorm was crushing the dawn like some immense judgement of the Eastern horizon. I got out at the station and came back to the carriage in which I had been alone all night. There I found the figure of a tall young priest against all this lurid background. I entered into conversation with him, and he told me in a simple way how he had been given to the Lord at his birth and his baptism, and how when he was thirteen years of age he had been taken away from his mother to study his profession in a religious seminary in Paris, and he had not seen her for seven years; he was not twenty.

He was now on a visit to her for two months, and he said it was the last he should ever pay, for he was going into the great Jesuit mission on the Congo. I said, “When will you be back again?”

He replied, “Not long. We have buried fifteen altogether, and the average period of life there is two years.” I had been speaking to him about his motive in choosing such a life, and as he left the carriage and grasped my hand he said, “The life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.”