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baTheTummttated aTe a^ to aU th-e modest, quiet, refined,

vmswear'mg, gefltieman-hke boys as hypocrites, but they are not all hypocrites, though 1 have had lots of stories poured into my ears to the contrary, 1 do not believe that it was so in the case of young Michael A. Corrigan. I believe that at bottom there was a strong force of pure sincerity.

I believe that either by heredity or careful early training- by his mother, or more probably by both lines, which in this case, as usual, were the same, the young Michael was modest, sincere, quiet, unobtrusive, unpugnacious and truly and devotedly pious, not foolishly or weakly pious; that he always could, at need, and always did, manifest a certain independence along with his mild reserve, a certain capacity for self-defense, and a certain persistence in carrying his point and attaining his end, whatever that end might be. In fact, that all this was a part of the atmospheric quasi-halo about him in his youth that led his schoolfellows to see, as in a mirror, the future greatness of the man, but a very limited greatness after all, if you please.

It is not a new thing that I am talking about. It applied to Socrates and Plato as truly as to Corrigan and other prelates that need not be named—had better not be named here.

In the face of the boy that is to suffer life-long or sudden martyrdom there are greater and deeper signs. Had we been there with open eyes we could have read those lines in the faces and in the sadder shadows that surrounded the faces of Socrates, of Jesus, of Paul, of the great company of Christian martyrs, and in our own day, of John Brown and Abraham Lincoln. For there is greatness and greatness in this world. There is the greatness of the careful and cautious and timid prelate and the greatness of the Saviour, the Son of God; and the greatness of those who take the latter's way of life and die, not of pneumonia in comfortable beds, surrounded by friends and luxuries, but by the halter, the rope, the dagger of hate, or the pistol, and

happy if they are spared the jeers, the taunts and the buffeting* of an uncivilized, but cultured world.

There is genius in each case and in every line of heroes. The supreme genius is in the line of Socrates and Paul and Lincoln; the comparative genius is in the line of Aristotle, Plato, Sophocles, Goethe, Shakespeare, Milton, Newman and far away of Corrigan.

It is a matter of fact that Archbishop Corrigan held and cherished this modest unassertiveness through all his life to the last. Yet I have never heard of but one man that ever undertook to down him on this ground—and he only partially succeeded. Even in his public utterances there was the simplicity of a well-behaved boy. This faculty always made him very attractive to and with women. The Sisters everywhere adored him. But women, especially Sisters or nuns, are not easily deceived. They do not adore mere effeminacy in any man, and even though a man were an Archbishop they would not love him on that account—I mean for mere effeminacy.

I profess to be something of a judge of character, and though, as I have already intimated, I have been deluged with yarns to make me believe in Archbishop Corrigan's subtle duplicity, and that this was at the heart of all his acts, I have never believed it; have never been able to bring myself to think so with any clearness, and at this writing I believe that his worst enemies were and are far more subtle and self-deceived and deceiving than the Archbishop ever was. We have holy writ for authority in stating that the human heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. I have no doubt that the Archbishop of New York shared this inheritance of the race along with the rest of us, but I hold that by the supernatural grace of God given him, in his mother's milk and in her prayers, and again in response to his own prayers and by the help of the Church and his advisers throughout life, he had conquered whatever of hell there was naturally in him, perhaps far more effectively and effectually than most of his enemies and traducers have ever done; more than most of us have ever done, for that matter. I do not think he was a saint, but that he was of the stuff that saints are made of.

I was first impressed with this almost womanly gentleness of manner when I first saw the Archbishop in the chapel of a conox ^ ^ noisy 5^°*f ?EVIEW'?

,VKmnt»Y*^Ufi»m sad ^l-assertiv * blustering gad

^> -edWs, to name learned afte^rd

reference oi trd^4 beetl Seeti ^ saVd *»ater, and by him had been interpreted- as an insincerity on my part. A liar always suspects other men °* oeing \iars. This man learned to know me better in later years> an<^ to hear irom my own lips, time and again, substantially what 1 am saying here, that said shrinking, modest gentleness oi the Archbishop was genuine, and that I liked, even loved him, and honored him and could not help myself.

Later still, this confident liking on my part received rather a severe shock, but was never actually broken. I loved and honored him to the end. Let the carpers carp as they may over what I said of him in connection with the McGlynn case years ago. But let us pass to other things.

Humility, whether assumed or conquered out of the rugged pugnacities of human uature, and made a genuine part of one's daily existence, is an excellent virtue, but it alone will not build pyramids or win Archbishoprics.

All the facts indicate that young Michael Corrigan, as a student and as a young man, was an all-round gifted young man. He seems never to have been a fluent writer or a ready and popular or effective speaker, and perhaps the absence of these faculties in his nature may explain eventually the fact that for men of literary faculty and for priests and others of the ready tongue or pen he never had any enthusiastic liking or appreciation, and this again will explain many negatives in his life for which he has been blamed, but which, after all, were as natural to him as it was natural for Cicero to spout speeches and for Carlyle to despise the gift of spouting. But it was not by modest humility alone that he won in comparative early life the greatest See in the Western hemisphere.

Priests of undoubted veracity, knowledge and reliability have told me, years ago, that when Corrigan and McGlynn were students together in Rome, McGlynn was considered, and as a

matter of fact was, the brighter young man of the two. Hereby hangs a long and interesting story. Before going into that story let us discuss a little the comparative brightness referred to.

This winning and taking brightness, readiness of speech, unbashfulness, etc., on the part of a student are often taken to represent brighter and even deeper qualities and faculties than the later facts of a man's career will allow us to accept, while the timidity, modesty and shrinking sensitiveness of a boy are often taken as indicating a lack of commanding genius.

The facts of after life again very often reverse this order, and the boy that is slow of speech, slow to answer questions in school or college, slow to fight, slow to joke, and who, as a rule, holds himself aloof from his fellows, likely as not, because of his introspectiveness and a corresponding self-consciousness and a feeling that he is not and cannot be popular or as ready as his fellows, many of whom he knows all the while to be his inferiors in talent and accomplishment, often turns out to be of exceptional greatness and a leader of thought or a leader of men.

I think that this contrast was the one that existed between Corrigan and McGlynn in their college days. McGlynn was always ready and assertive, Corrigan never so.

Then the young Michael had other things to make him modest, and it is infinitely to his credit that he held to the finer expression of gentleness that nature and his mother and perhaps his father gave him, and that the grace of heaven had fanned into a flame, than that he should, as many boys and young men similarly circumstanced have done and still do, viz.: bluff and swagger, and so try to down any humiliating facts of ancestry and early surroundings.

I understand, that while, as a young man, and in his early priesthood, Corrigan had means enough at his disposal to have justified any amount of bluff; as a matter of fact, he never indulged in that famous game.

He remembered, doubtless, that his parents had been very poor and in the humblest circumstances, and that, though like thousands of poor Irish, German and other emigrants, they had earned and made and saved money till they were well-to-do. Michael was a sensitive boy, knew all the facts, and again I say iT °°^/^, I49

\teVf toYttS tfeAVt tWt Vie, ♦ ^

PaT u It ot fkg^tW OS nature and at the same time %Vt J ^o^dCXCtoqU^UeS 0i mind and heart.

H J»«ot a MVb°Y at SCW; °T at colle&e. His classmates, C tholics as tbe>' V,eTe' ^ not have dubbed the boy the oung CkKMoisfe05 ^ad ^e beeTV a to°* or a blockhead at school.

He was «H m aUhls studies

He lacked or held in abeyance the open popular qualities of boyhood, perhaps was a little prematurely old, but he was a clear and clever thinker to the extent of his capacity from the very earliest days.

Young McGlynn was noble-hearted, open-handed, very assertive, egotistic, self-laudatory and quite capable always of giving a comrade not overly-liked a sly dig in his absence, but bright witted, e,asy with a joke or a story—as he grew older, eloquent, with a crude and rough sort of Irish eloquence—apt in repartee, and with bright and taking expressions, a quick and capable, but always an unbalanced and an unreliable mind and reason; his very egotism was enough to topple his judgment, and, as a matter of fact, it did so, though from noble and humane motives, in the Single Tax craze, which, in fact, led to his final break with the Archbishop of New York and their mutual humiliation.

We may refer to this later; we refer to it here only to say that these two boys, and these two men, spite of the grace of Catholic faith and their mutual dependence upon each other in the relation of bishop and priest in the same diocese, could never be mutually respectful of one another—in fact, could not get along. They had to quarrel and then die prematurely, both of them. These things do not happen. They grow.

The enemies of Corrigan have said, and do say, that he was jealous from the old college days, but what had he to be jealous of when he had risen to be Archbishop, while the other man had simply risen to an ordinary priestship, having a church with an immense debt upon it and himself contaminated with the foolish craze of Henry Georgeism on the Single Tax panacea for the redemption of the world, all things considered the stupidest craze of modern times.