all the while against the exhumation which stole from them their treasure. "We had only one saint," they cried, "and they have taken him away from us." But that saint will ever continue the protector of his dear Murois whom he loved so much.

That removal of Père Eymard's remains was, however, the occasion of the most energetic resistance on the part of the populace of La Mure, who desired at any price to retain him whom they revered as a saint. On February 12, 1877, the Minister of the Interior had already authorized the translation of the remains. But opposition from all quarters was so energetic that the Prefect of Isère, M. Paul Laucas, and the Mayor of La Mure, M. Gras, were powerless to execute the orders received. Several months passed before they came to terms.

The Mayor lost the esteem of the populace. They accused him of having received a sum of money to favor the taking away of the body, and nicknamed him "the seller of the dead." Under the pressure of public reprobation, he had to resign his functions as Mayor of La Mure. The people were greatly excited, and a tumult was feared. For several nights an armed force guarded the cemetery to prevent a clandestine removal of the remains. At last, however, they yielded to compulsion. The police force was called out to execute the orders of the Ministry of the Interior, who had given the Religious of the Most Blessed Sacrament the necessary authorization.

As soon as the body was exhumed and placed in the hearse that was to take it away, the whole populace of La Mure, a town of 5,000 inhabitants, lined up on the route and showed profound respect, many of them

on their knees and breathing a last prayer to him whom they so desired to retain among themselves.

The Very Reverend Father Superior General of the Congregation of the Most Blessed Sacrament and two of his Religious accompanied the precious trust. On their arrival in Paris, it was placed in a lighted chapel and at once became an object of veneration for crowds of the pious Faithful and of his own sons, who now found again their Father after so many years of separation. The impression was indescribable. It seemed to them that they were assisting at a kind of resurrection. He was there, they invoked him, and tears flowed from their eyes.

But it was very different when, yielding to the legitimate desires of those that had known and lived with him, the Superiors decided that they would open the zinc coffin to see the state of the blessed remains, I was going to say relics, of their saintly Founder.

What was not the intense joy of all, joy not unmixed with astonishment, when he was disclosed to the loving gaze of his children! They beheld him perfectly intact, perfectly preserved. They saw him, his own, very self with his sweet countenance, his expression of kindness which he had never lost. His sacerdotal vestments, the soutane, the alb, the stole, the chasuble had been respected by time. Death had guarded well his precious trust.

"I entertain the hope," wrote Père Tesnière the day after Père Eymard's decease, August, 1868, "that his carefully guarded innocence, that the Body of Jesus Christ so often and so well received, will restore him to us free from the attacks of corruption."

La Revue du Saint Sacrement, II Year, July 15, records the event in the following terms:

277

The coffin reached Paris on Friday, June

29, 1877. That same day they opened it and found the remains of the Father in such a state of preservation as to greatly astonish the assistants. The flesh, though a little darkened, was intact, and no corpselike odor was perceived. The features were so natural that not only they who had seen him during life, but they who knew him only by his portrait, exclaimed: "There he is! It is indeed he!" .. It was like an apparition, the return, the resurrection of a father whose absence had been wept for nine years.

"A funeral service was celebrated the following Tuesday, July 3, in the Chapel of Corpus Christi. M. Lagarde, Archdeacon of Notre-Dame and First Vicar General of His Eminence the Cardinal Archbishop of Paris, was pleased to accept the invitation to sing the Mass and give the Absolution. He wished to tender to Père Eymard this solemn testimony of a friendship which, born with the foundation of the Work, had gone on strengthening till his death.

"Almost all the Religious bodies were represented, and the sanctuary was crowded with priests, among them the honorary Chamberlain of the Pope, the Archbishop of Sussex, a friend of Père Eymard, and Mgr. Duplessis, Roman Prelate.

"The assistants were numerous. Some like Mme. Lepage, and Mme. de Grandville, had come from distant provinces to pay their respects to the Father. The tribunes were occupied by gentlemen, several among them friends of the venerated deceased."

The funeral oration was pronounced by Reverend Père Tesnière.

Filial piety was on this day gratified by the sight

of the venerated features of the saintly deceased, after which the coffin was closed and sealed, and lowered into the tomb prepared for it in the middle of the sanctuary, between the prie-Dieu of the adorers, at the foot of the Eucharistic Throne. There Père Eymard will be again and forever an adorer of the august Sacrament exposed. The dust of that body which had life only for the service of the Blessed Sacrament, will teach devotedness even till death to that glorious cause. Hidden in the depths of the tomb, he will repeat aloud the device of Eucharistic holiness: "Oportet illum crescere, me autem minui.-He must increase, and I must decrease."

Let us add that no means has ever been employed to maintain and spread such a reputation of sanctity, that no one either by word or writing has ever sought to oppose it, but on the contrary all who knew the Servant of God are deeply persuaded that his renown for sanctity is founded on his saintly life and apostolic Works, and that he is worthy of the honors of the altar. Their most ardent desire is to see the triumph of his Beatification.

XX

MIRACLES AFTER DEATH

We shall now speak of the miraculous intervention of the Servant of God after death. From the moment of that happy demise, his protection over his Congregation was felt most unmistakably in critical circumstances, whether in serious financial embarrassments, whether at the time of the war of 1870 and the Paris Commune, or later in 1880, at the period of the Decrees of expulsion; or in a project of transforming the Congregation into a Religious Order, a project which had brought division among its members and for a time menaced the existence of the Founder's Work.

Several members of his two Congregations and some seculars attribute to the prayers offered to God through the intercession of His Servant the different favors in the spiritual, as well as in the temporal order, which were granted them. Many pray to him daily, and feel assured of his powerful protection with God.

The following extraordinary fact took place August 1, 1868, at the Mother House of the Servants of the Most Blessed Sacrament:

"It was three o'clock in the afternoon. The sacristan, Sœur Marie of the Blessed Sacrament, being in the sanctuary, noticed the ostensorium very perceptibly oscillating. In presence of this fact she at once divined the cause and hesitated not to say that at the same hour her saintly Père Eymard had quitted the earth. Unable to restrain her sobs,