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End of the Trail

From Volume 1, Number 4, October 1992 issue of The “Quote... Unquote” Newsletter

Chesterton.bmp - 108898 Bytes G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936) is buried in the Roman Catholic Cemetery at Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, beneath a stone incorporating a carving by Eric Gill and the text, ‘PRAY FOR THE SOUL OF GILBERT KEITH CHESTERTON...TERMINO NOBIS DONET IN PATRIA’. I wanted to know what these Latin words meant, where they came from and what their relevance was.

After a number of false starts, I was getting nowhere and so I wrote to the editor of The Tablet (John Wilkins) and he passed the query on to Father Ian Brady of St. Thomas More College, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Father Brady is editor of The Chesterton Review and revealed that the words were taken from the final stanza of the Martins hymn for the feast of Corpus Christi. The entire office was written by St. Thomas Aquinas, and Chesterton was said to have known large parts of it by heart. Fr. Brady points out that the words would also have been familiar to Chesterton because they formed part of the hymn sung at the popular show of devotional service of Benediction (until the introduction of the vernacular, about the time of Vatican 2). The hymn begins with the words, ‘O salutaris hostia’, and concludes with this prayer to the Holy Trinity:

Uni trinoque Domino
sit sempiterna gloria,
quivitam sine termino
nobis donet in patria.

(‘Everlasting glory be to the Lord, Three in One, who gives us life without end in heaven’.) In Maisie Ward’s Return to Chesterton, there is a letter from one of Chesterton’s Beaconsfield friends in which Chesterton is quoted as saying that he regarded the phrase ‘in patria’, as a perfect definition of heaven. ‘Our native land,’ he said, ‘it tells you everything.’ Fr. Brady added that Chesterton died on the Sunday within the Octave of Corpus Christi and this may also have influenced the choice of words for his monument.

Interestingly, the words were also an especial favourite of Chesterton’s friend and colleague, Hilaire Belloc. It is said that Belloc was unable to hear the closing lines of the hymn without being moved to tears.

[From an article in a subsequent issue of The Newsletter:]

... I mentioned that the words on G.K. Chesterton’s grave ‘Termino nobis donet in Patria’ were also an especial favourite of his friend and colleague Hilaire Belloc, who was unable to hear the closing lines of the St. Thomas Aquinas hymn without being moved to tears. Perhaps they would also be found on Belloc’s grave at the Church of Our Lady of Consolation, West Grinstead. Sussex? I paid a visit there, but no, they are not. A few yards away, however, a plaque on the tower commemorates Belloc, noting that he was a member of the congregation at the church for 48 years. The tower and spire were completed in 1964, ‘in grateful recognition of his zealous and unwavering profession of our Holy Faith which he defended in his writings and noble verse.’ Then follow Belloc’s lines from ‘The Ballade of our Lady of Czestocjowa’: ‘This is the Faith that I have held and hold and This is That in which I mean to die.’