The Messenger of the Sacred Heart for India February 1918

While Father Ricci of the Society of Jesus was seeking to convert the mandarins Of China through an intellectual appeal his religious brethren quite at the other end of the world in the far-famed Partiguay Reductions were winning the confidence and love of the Indians by teaching them to till the soil to work in metal to build permanent homes. [...] The greatest the most noble the most beneficial the sweetest the most solid of all devotions is undoubtedly the devotion to the Sacred _Heart of Jesus. [...] As he trudges along the dawning light lending ghostliness to the scene the tree stumps appear to him as spirits of men rising from the ground ; In the movement of the rank grass under the dawn breeze he sees the footsteps of an invisible army in the crackling of a dry twig he hears the shot of a long-dead sniper in the moan of a big shell passing overhead the wing-beats of the Angel of Death. [...] It is a false and perverted way of looking at things to imagine that the Sacraments of the Church and the Priests of the Church are something that come between us and God something that interpose a barrier btween the soul and God. [...] With such direct avenues of information it is to be expected' that Pope Benedict is not in_the dark about the inner mind of the rulers of the nations at war that he is in soniew hat intimate touch with he actual conditions in the various countries and knows the temper of the peoples their attitudes towardi peace or toward the continuation of the war.