THE CATHOLIC WORLD.— Vol. IX. April, 1869, To September, 1869.

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The Catholic World.

Monthly Magazine

Of General Literature And Science.

Vol. IX.

April, 1869, To September, 1869.

Contents.

Poetry

New Publications.

The Catholic World.

Vol. IX., No. 49. April, 1869.

The Fable Of Pope Joan.

Every one is more or less familiar with the story of a female pope, which runs thus: Pope Leo IV. died in 855, and in the catalogue of Popes Benedict III. appears as his successor. This, claim the Joan story-tellers, is incorrect; for between Leo and Benedict the papal throne was for more than two years occupied by a woman. Her name is not permitted to appear in the list of popes, for the reason that historians devoted to the interests of the church desired to throw the veil of oblivion over so sacrilegious a scandal, and here, say they, is the true account of the affair.

On the death of Leo IV. the clergy and people of Rome met to elect his successor, and they chose a young priest, a comparative stranger in Rome, who during his short residence there had acquired an immense reputation for learning and virtue, and who, on becoming pope, assumed the name of John VII., or, according to some, John VIII. [Footnote 1]

[Footnote 1: And it was the most convenient one to take. Before 855 there were seven popes named John, and at the period when the story began to spread there had been twenty-one.]

Now, the pope so elected was, in fact, a woman, the daughter of an English couple travelling in Germany. She was born in Fulda, where she grew up and was well educated. Disguised as a man, she entered the monastery at Fulda, where she remained undiscovered for years, and from which she eventually eloped with a monk. They fled to England, thence to France and Italy, and finally to Greece. They were both profoundly versed in all the science of the day, and went to Athens to study the literature and language of that country. Here the monk died. Giovanna (her name was also Gilberta or Agnes, according to the fancy of the writer) [Footnote 2] then left Athens and went to Rome, where her reputation for learning and the fame of her virtue soon spread.

[Footnote 2: Her maiden name was for the first time given at end of 14th century. It was then Agnes.]

She gave public lectures and disputations, to which she attracted immense crowds of hearers, all delighted with her exemplary piety and astonished at her matchless learning.

All the students of Rome, and even professors, flocked to hear her. On the death of Leo, she was elected pope by the clergy and people of Rome from among many men preëminent for their learning and virtue. After governing with great wisdom for more than two years—there being not the slightest suspicion of her sex—she left the Vatican on a certain festival at the head of the clergy, to walk in procession to the Lateran; but on the way was seized with the pains of labor, and in the open street, amid the astounded bishops and clergy and surrounding concourse of people, then and there gave birth to a child—and died. After this occurrence, it was determined that the pontiff in procession should never pass that desecrated street, and a statue was placed on the spot to perpetuate the infamy of the fact, and a certain ceremony, minutely described, was ordained to be observed at the consecration of all future popes, in order to prevent the possibility of any similar scandal.

Of course there are numerous versions of the narrative, infinitely varied in every detail, as is apt to be the case with any story starting from no place or person in particular and contributed to by everybody in general.

As told, this incident is supposed to fill every polemical Protestant with delight, and to fill convicted Catholics with what Carlyle calls "astonishment and unknown pangs."

Now, granting every tittle of the story as related to be true, we see no good reason for delight on one side nor pangs on the other. We repeat, conceding its entire truth, there is nothing in the story that necessarily entails injury or disgrace on the Catholic Church. Why should it? Catholic morality and doctrine do not depend upon the personal qualities of popes. In this case, supposing the story true, who was elected pope? A man—as all concerned honestly believed—of acknowledged learning and virtue. There was no intrigue, no improper influence; and those who elected him had no share in the imposture, but were the victims, not the participators, of the deceit practised. The cunning and the imposture were all hers, and her crime consisted, not in being delivered in the streets, but in not having lived chastely. True, it was a scandalous accident; but the scandal could not add to the original immorality of which, in all the world, but two persons were guilty, and guilty in secret—for there is no pretence, in all the versions, that the outward life of the pretended she-pope was otherwise than blameless and even edifying. Those who elected her were totally ignorant of her sex—an ignorance entirely excusable—an error of fact brought about by artful imposture. To their honor be it said, that they recognized in their choice the sole merits of piety and learning, and wished to reward them.

But a female pope was once the head of the church! Dreadful reproach to come from those who call themselves Reformed, Evangelical, and Puritans, who have not only tolerated but established, nay, and even forced some queens and princesses to declare themselves Head of the Church or Defender of the Faith in their own dominions, and dispose—as one of them does to this day—of church dignities and benefices, and order other matters ecclesiastical according to their personal will and pleasure.

Let us now look into the story and examine the testimony on which it is founded. The popess is said to have reigned two years and more. Rome was then the greatest city and the very centre of the civilized world, and always full of strangers from all parts of the earth. {3} The catastrophe of the discovery brought about by the street delivery took place under the eyes of a vast multitude of people, and must have been known on the same day to the entire city before the sun had set. An event so strange, so romantic, so astounding, so scandalous, concerning the most exalted personage in the world, must surely have been written about or chronicled by the Italians who were there, and reported by letter or word of mouth by foreigners to their friends at home, and found its way from a thousand sources into the writings of the time; for it must be remembered the pope, of all living men, was of especial interest to the class who at that period were in the habit of writing. Such testimony as this, being the evidence of eye-witnesses, would be the highest testimony, and would settle the fact beyond dispute. Where is it? Silence profound is our only answer. Nothing of the kind is on the record of that period. Ah! then in that case we must suppose the matter to have been temporarily hushed up, and we will consent to receive accounts written ten, twenty—well, we'll not haggle about a score or two—or even fifty years later. Silence again! Not a scrap, not a solitary line can be found.

And so we travel through all the history which learning and industry have been able to rescue from the re-cords of the past down to the end of the ninth century, and find the same unbroken silence.

We must then go to the tenth century, where the murder will surely out. Silence again, deep and profound, through all the long years from 900 to 1000, and all is blank as before!

And now we again go on beyond another half-century, still void of all mention of Pope Joan, until we reach the year 1058, just two hundred and three years after the assigned Joanide.

In that year a monk, Marianus Scotus, of the monastery of Fulda, commenced a universal chronicle, which was terminated in 1083. Somewhere between these dates, in recording the events of 855, he is said to have written: "Leo the Pope died on the 1st of August. To him succeeded John, who was a woman, and sat for two years, five months, and four days." Only this and nothing more. Not a word of her age, origin, qualities, or circumstances of her death. So far it is not much of a story; but little by little, link by link, line by line, like unto the veridical and melodious narrative of The House that Jack built, we'll contrive to make a good story of it yet. The statement first appears in Marianus. So much is certain. For during the seventeenth century, when the Joan controversy raged, and cartloads of books and pamphlets were written on the subject—a mere list of the titles of which would exceed the limits of this article—every library and collection in Europe was ransacked with the furious industry of which a polemic writer is alone capable, for every—even the smallest—fragment or thread connected with this subject. Nevertheless, this ransacking was neither so thorough nor so successful as during the present century; for, as the learned Döllinger states, "it is only within forty years that all the European collections of mediaeval MSS. have been investigated with unprecedented care, every library, nook, and corner thoroughly searched, and a surprising quantity of hitherto unknown historical documents brought to light."

Comparing the so-called statement of Marianus with the latest sensational and circumstantial relation, it is plain that the story did not, like Minerva, spring full-armed into life, but that it is the result of a long and gradual growth, fostered by the genius of a long series of inventive chroniclers.

But where did the monk of Fulda get the story? Ah! here is an interesting episode. His chronicle was first printed at Basle (1559) from the text known as the Latomus MS. Its editor was John Herold, a Calvinist of note, who, in printing the pas-sage in question, quietly left out the words of the original, "ut asseritur"—that is to say, "as report goes," or "believe it who will"—thus changing the chronicler's hearsay to a direct and positive assertion.

But the testimony of the Marianus chronicle comes to still greater grief, And here a word of explanation. The Original MS. Of Marianus is not known to exist, but we have numerous copies of it, the respective ages of which are well ascertained. Döllinger mentions two of them well known in Germany to be the oldest in existence, in which not a word concerning the popess can be found. The copy in which it is found is of 1513, and the explanation as to its appearance there is simple. The passage in question was doubtless put in the margin by some reader or copyist, and by some later copyist inserted in the text, And so we return to the original dark silence in which we started.

A feeble attempt was made to claim that Sigbert of Gembloux, who died in 1113, had recorded the story; but it was triumphantly demonstrated that it was first added to his chronicle in an edition of 1513. The same attempt was made with Gottfried's Pantheon and the chronicle of Otto von Freysingen, and also lamentably failed. In 1261, there died a certain Stephen of Bourbon, a French Dominican, who left a work in which he speaks of the popess, and says he got the statement from a chronicle which must have been that of Jean de Mailly, a brother Dominican.

To the year 1240 or 1250 may then be assigned, on the highest authority, the period when the Joan story first made its appearance in writing and in history—nearly four hundred years after its supposed date.

In 1261, an anonymous unedited chronicle, still preserved in the library of St. Paul at Leipsic, states that "another false pope, name and date unknown, since she was a woman, as the Romans confess, of great beauty and learning, who concealed her sex and was elected pope. She became with child, and the demon in a consistory made the fact known to all by crying aloud to the pope:

  "Papa Pater Patrum papissae pandito partum,
   Et tibi tunc edam de corpore quando recedam."

Some chroniclers relate it differently, namely, that the pope undertook to exorcise a person possessed of an evil spirit, and on demanding of the devil when he would go out from the possessed person's body, the evil one replied in the Latin verses above given, that is to say, "O Pope! thou father of the fathers, declare the time of the pope's parturition, and I will then tell you when I will go out from this body."

The demon always was a fellow who had a keen eye for the fashions, and he appears to have indulged in alliterative Latin poetry precisely at the period when that sort of literary trifling was most in vogue among scholars who recreated themselves with such lines as

  "Ruderibus rejectis Rufus Festus fieri fecit;"

  "Roma Ruet Romuli Ferro Flammaque Fameque."

A few years later, Martinus Polaccus or Polonus, Martin the Polack, or the Pole, (Polack is now disused, Shakespeare makes Horatio say, "He smote the sledded Polack on the ice,") who died in 1278, the author of a chronicle of popes and emperors down to 1207, says: "John of England, by nation of Mayence, sat 2 years, 5 months, and 4 days. It is said that this pope was a woman." The chronicle of Polonus is merely a synchronistic history of the popes and emperors in the form of dry biographical notices. Nevertheless, from the fact that he had lived many years in Rome and was intimate with the papal court his book had, to use a modern phrase, an immense run. [Footnote 3]

[Footnote 3: The tradition concerning the resignation of Pope Cyriacus was also widely spread by the same chronicle. The story ran that Pope Cyriacus resigned the pontificate in the year 238, and first took its rise a thousand years after that date. It was pure fiction, and was connected with the legend of St. Ursula and her 11,000 virgins. No such pope as Cyriacus ever existed.]

It was translated into all the principal languages, and more extensively copied than any chronicle then existing. The number of copies (MS.) still in existence far exceeds that of any other work of the kind, and this fact suggests an important reflection. Great stress is laid by some writers on the multitude of witnesses for Joan. But the multitude does not increase the proof when they but repeat one another, and they suspiciously testify in nearly the same words. "The advocates for Pope Joan," says Gibbon, "produce one hundred and fifty witnesses, or rather echoes, of the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries. They bear testimony against themselves and the legend by multiplying the proof that so curious a story must have been repeated by writers of every description to whom it was known."

The various versions that copy one another must necessarily bear a strong family likeness. Their number can add nothing to their value as proof, and is no more conclusive than the endeavor to establish the doubted existence of a man by a great variety of portraits of him, all—as Whately so well remarks in his Historic Doubts—"all striking likenesses—of each other."

In this case the most ancient testimony is posterior to the claimed occurrence some four hundred years, and is utterly inconsistent with the indisputable facts related by contemporary authors. The erudite Launoy, in his treatise De Auctoritate Negantis Argumenti, lays down the rule that a fact of a public nature not mentioned by any writer within two hundred years of its supposed occurrence is not to be believed. This is the same Launoy who waged war on the legends of the saints, claiming that much fabulous matter had crept into them. On this account he was called "Dénicheur des Saints"—the Saint-hunter or router—and the Abbé of St. Roch used to say, "I am always profoundly polite to Launoy, for fear he will deprive me of St. Roch." The general rule (Launoy's) so important in historical criticism is in perfect harmony with a great and leading principle of jurisprudence. In the Pope Joan incident the silence of all the writers of that age as to so remarkable a circumstance is to be fairly received as a prerogative argument (Baconian philosophy) when set up against the numerous modern repetitions of the story. It may be taken as a general rule that the silence of contemporaries is the strongest argument against the truth of any given historical assertion, particularly when the fact asserted is strange and interesting, and this for the reason that man is ever prone to believe and recount the marvellous; and in the absence of early evidence, the testimony of later times is, for the same reason, only weaker. {6} Now this is in strict accordance with the principle of English common law, which demands the highest and rejects hearsay and secondary evidence; for scores of witnesses may depose in vain that they have heard of such a fact; the eye-witness is the prerogative instance. This is the logic of evidence.

And now we find that what happened to Marianus Scotus also befell Polonus. He was entirely innocent of any mention of Joan! The passage exists in none of the oldest copies, and is wanting in all that follow the author's close and methodical plan of giving one line to each year of a pope's reign, so that, with fifty lines to the page as he wrote, each page covered precisely half a century. This method is entirely broken up in those MSS. which contain the passage concerning Joan, and the rage to get the passage in was such that in one copy (the Heidelberg MS.) Benedict III. is left out entirely and Joan put in his place. Dr. Döllinger and the learned Bayle concur in the opinion that the passage never had any existence in the original work of Polonus.

And just at this juncture the testimony of Tolomeo di Lucca (1312) is important. He wrote an ecclesiastical history, and names the popess with the remark that in all the histories and chronicles known to him Benedict III. succeeded Leo IV. The author was noted for learning and industry, and must necessarily have consulted every available authority, and yet nowhere did he find mention of Joan but in Polonus. In 1283, a versified chronicle of Maerlandt (a Hollander) mentions Joan: "I am neither clear nor certain whether it is a truth or a fable; mention of it in chronicles of the popes is uncommon."

And now, as we advance into the fourteenth century, as manuscripts multiply and one chronicler copies another, mention of Joan increases; and successively and in due order, as the malt, the rat, the cat, the dog, and all the rest appear in turn to make perfect the nursery ditty, so the statue, the street, the ceremony, and all the remaining features of the story come gradually out, until we have it in full and detailed description, and our popular papal "House that Jack built" is complete.

Then we have Geoffrey of Courlon, a Benedictine, (1295,) Bernard Guidonis and Leo von Orvieto, both Dominicans, (1311,) John of Paris, Dominican, (first half of fourteenth century,) and several others, all of whom take the story from Polonus.

In 1306, we get the statue from Siegfried, who thus contributes his quota: "At Rome, in a certain spot of the city, is still shown her statue in pontifical dress, together with the image of her child cut in marble in a wall." Bayle says that Thierry di Niem (fifteenth century) "adds out of his own head" the statue. But it appears that it was referred to twenty-three years earlier than Siegfried by Maerlandt, the Hollander, who says that the story as we read it is cut in stone and can be seen any day:

  "En daer leget soe, als wyt lesen
   Noch aleo up ten Steen ghebouween,
   Dat men ano daer mag scouwen."

Amalric di Angier wrote in 1362, and adds to the story her "teaching three years at Rome." Petrarch repeats the version of Polonus. Boccacio also relates it, and was the first who at that period asserted her name was not known.

Aimery du Peyrat, abbot of Moissac, who compiled a chronicle in 1399, puts "Johannes Anglicus" in the list of popes with the remark, "Some say that she was a woman."

In 1450, Martin le Franc, in his Champion des Dames, expresses surprise that Providence should have permitted such a scandal as to allow the church to be governed by a wicked woman.

  "Comment endura Dieu, comment
   Que femme ribaulde et prestresse
   Eut l'Eglise en gouvernement?"

Hallam (Literature of Europe) mentions as among the most remarkable among the Fastnacht's Spiele (carnival plays) of Germany the apotheosis of Pope Joan, a tragic-comic legend, written about 1480. Bouterwek, in his History of German Poetry, also mentions it.

In 1481, "to swell the dose," as Bayle says, the stool feature of the story first comes in.

In the Nuremberg Chronicle of 1493 (Astor Library copy) Joan is put down as Joannes Septimus, and the page ornamented (?) with a wood-cut of a woman with a child in her arms. It relates that she gained the pontificate by evil arts, "malis artibus."

In the beginning of the same century there was seen a bust of Joan among the collection of busts of the popes in the cathedral at Sienna. And, more astonishing still, the story was related in the Mirabilia urbis Roma, a sort of guide-book for strangers and pilgrims visiting Rome, editions of which were constantly reprinted for a period of eighty years down to 1550!

In the middle of the fifteenth century we find the story related at full length by Felix Hammerlein, and later by John Bale, then Bishop of Ossory, who afterward became a Protestant. He pretty well completes the tale.

According to Tolomeo di Lucca, the Joan story in 1312 was nowhere found but in some few copies of Polonus. Nevertheless, it is notorious that at that time countless lists and historical tables of popes were in existence, in none of which was there any trace of the popess.

Suddenly we find extraordinary industry exercised in multiplying and spreading the copies of Polonus containing the story, and in inserting it in other chronicles that did not contain it. As the editors of the Histoire Littéraire e France aptly remark: "Nous ne saurions nous expliquer comment il se fait que ce soit précisëment dans les rangs de cette fidèle milice du saint-siège que se rencontrent les propagateurs les plus naïfs, et peut-être les inventeurs, d'une histoire si injurieuse à la papauté." [Footnote 4]

[Footnote 4: "We cannot understand how it is that, precisely among the ranks of the faithful soldiers of the holy see, we find the most credulous propagators and, perhaps, inventors of a story so injurious to the papacy."]

Dr. Döllinger answers this by stating that those who appeared to be most active in the matter were Dominicans and Minorites, particularly the former, (Sie waren es ja, besonders die ersten.) This is specially to be remarked under the primacy of Boniface VIII., who was no friend of either order. The Dominican historians were particularly severe in their judgments on Boniface in the matter of his difficulty with Philip the Fair, and appear to dwell with satisfaction upon this period of the weakened authority of the papal see.

In 1610, Alexander Cooke published in London, "Pope Ioane, a Dialogue Betweene a Protestant and a Papist, manifestly prouing that a woman called Ioane was Pope of Rome: against the surmises and objections made to the contrarie," etc. Cooke has a preface, "To the Popish or Catholicke reader—chuse whether name thou hast a mind to;" which is very handsome indeed of Mr. Cooke.

The papist in the Dialogue has a dreadful time of it from one end of the book to the other, and Gregory VII. is effectually settled by calling him "that firebrand of hell." Bayle grimly disposes of Cooke's work thus: "It had been better for his cause if he had kept silence."

Discussion of the story comes even down to this century. In 1843 and 1845 two works appeared in Holland: one, by Professor Kist, to prove the existence of Joan; the other, by Professor Wensing, to refute Kist. In 1845 was also published a very able work by Bianchi-Giovini: Esame critico degli atti e Documenti relativi alla favola della Papissa Giovanna. Di A. Bianchi-Giovini. Milano.

It is doubtful if in all the annals of literature there exists a more remarkable case of pure fable growing, by small and slow degrees through several centuries, until, in the shape of a received fact, it finally effects a lodgment in serious history. Taking its rise no one knows where or how, full four hundred years after the period assigned it, and stated at first in the baldest and thinnest manner possible, it goes on from century to century, gathering consistence, detail, and incident; requiring three centuries for its completion, and, finally, comes out the sensational affair we have related. All stories gain by time and travel; scandalous stories most of all. These last are particularly robust and long-lived. They appear to enjoy a freedom amounting to immunity. Just as certain noxious and foul-smelling animals frequently owe their life to the unwillingness men have to expose themselves to such contact, so such stories, looked upon at first as merely scandalous and too contemptible for serious refutation, acquire, through impunity, an importance that, in the end, makes them seriously annoying. Then, too, well-meaning people thoughtlessly accept reports and repeat statements that, through mere iteration, are supposed to be well-founded. Let any one, be his or her experience ever so small, look around and see how fully this is exemplified every day in real life.

Moreover, there was no dearth of writers in the middle ages who used, to the extent of license, the liberty of criticising and blaming the papacy. By all such the Joan story was invariably put forward by way of illustration; and they appear to have gone on unchecked until it was found that the open enemies of the church began to avail themselves of the scandal.

In 1451, AEneas Sylvius Piccolomini, (Pius II.,) in conference with the Taborites of Bohemia, denied the story, and told Nicholas, their bishop, that, "even in placing thus this woman, there had been neither error of faith nor of right, but ignorance of fact." Aventinus, in Germany, and Onuphrius Pauvinius, in Italy, staggered the popularity of the story. Attention once drawn to the subject, and investigation commenced, its weakness was soon apparent, and testimony soon accumulated to crush it.

Ado, Archbishop of Vienne, (France,) who was at Rome in 866, has left a chronicle in which he says that Benedict III. succeeded immediately to Leo IV.

In 855, the assigned Joanide period, there were in Rome four individuals who afterward successively became popes, under the names of Benedict III., Nicholas I., Adrian II., and John VIII. During the pretended papacy of Joan these men were all either priests or deacons, and must have taken part in her election, and have been present at the catastrophe, Now, of all these popes there exist many and various writings, but not a word concerning the popess. On the contrary, they all represent Benedict III. to have succeeded Leo IV.

Lupo, Abbot of Ferrières, in a letter to Pope Benedict, says that he, the abbot, had been kindly received at Rome by his predecessor, Leo IV.

In a council held at Rome, in 863, under Nicholas I., the pontiff speaks of his predecessors Leo and Benedict.

Hincmar, Archbishop of Rheims, writing to Nicholas I., says that certain messengers sent by him to Leo IV. had been met on their journey by news of that pontiff's death, and had, on their arrival at Rome, found Benedict on the throne. Ten other contemporary writers are cited who all testify to the same immediate succession, and afford not the slightest hint of any story or tradition that can throw the least light on that of the female pope. "The time of Pope Joan," says Gibbon, "is placed somewhat earlier than Theodora or Marozia; and the two years of her imaginary reign are forcibly inserted between Leo IV. and Benedict III. But the contemporary Anastasius indissolubly links the death of Leo and the elevation of Benedict; and the accurate chronology of Pagi, Muratori, and Leibnitz fixes both events to the year 857."

But there is no smoke without fire, it is said; and the wildest stories must have some cause, if not foundation. Let us see. Competent critics find the story to be a satire on John VIII. "Ob nimiam ejus animi facilitatem et mollitudinem" says Baronius, particularly in the affair with Photius, by whom John had suffered himself to be imposed upon. Photius, Patriarch of Constantinople, was known to be a half-man, and yet so cunning to overreach John. Therefore they said John Was a woman, and called him Joanna, instead Of Joannes, in that tone of bitter raillery constantly indulged in by the Roman Pasquins and Marforios, and this raillery, naturally enough, in course of time came to be taken for truth.

And again: Pope John X., elected in 914, was said to have been raised by the power and influence of Theodora, a woman of talent and unscrupulous intrigue. In 931, John, the son of Marozia and Duke Alberic, and grandson of Theodora, was said to be a mere puppet in the hands of his mother. "Their reign," (Theodora and Marozia,) says Gibbon, "may have suggested to the darker ages the fable of a female pope."

Again, in 956, a grandson of the same Marozia was raised to the papal chair as John XII. [Footnote 5] He renounced the dress and decencies of his profession, and his life was so scandalous that he was degraded by a synod. Onuphrius Pauvinius and Liutprand are quoted to show that a woman, Joan, had such influence over him that he loaded her with riches. She is said to have died in childbed.

[Footnote 5: At this period the church was as yet without the advantages of the great reform effected by Gregory VII. in 1073, and the choice of a pope by the bishops or cardinals was ratified or rejected by the Roman people, too often, at that time, the dupes or tools of such men as the marquises of Tuscany and the counts of Tusculum, who, says Gibbon, "held the apostolic see in a long and disgraceful servitude."]

Long series of years preceding and following these events were anything but times of pleasantness and peace to the successors of St. Peter. Even Gibbon says, "The Roman pontiffs of the ninth and tenth centuries were insulted, imprisoned, and murdered by their tyrants, and such was their indigence, after the loss and usurpation of the ecclesiastical patrimonies, that they could neither support the state of a prince nor exercise the charity of a priest."

Now, with such materials as these, a Pope Joan story is easily constructed; for, with the license of speech that has always existed in Rome in the form of pasquinades, it is more than likely to have been satirically remarked by the Romans under one or all of the three popes John, that Rome had a popess instead of a pope, and that the chair of St. Peter was virtually occupied by a female. These things would be repeated from mouth to mouth by men who, according to their temper and ability, would comment on them with bitter scoff, irreverent comment, snarling sneer, or ribald leer, and they might readily have been received as matter of fact assertions by German and other strangers in Rome.

Carried home and spread by wandering monks and soldiers, it is only wonderful that they did not sooner come to the surface in some such fable as the one under consideration. Diffused among the people, and acquiring a certain degree of consistence by dint of repetition through two centuries, it finally reached the ear of the individual who inserted it in the Marianus chronicle in the form of an on dit, and so he put it down "ut asseritur"—"they say."

Certain it is that no such story was known in Italy until it was spread from German chroniclers, and the absurdity was too monstrous to pass into contemporary history even in a foreign country.

But, it is answered, by Coeffetau and others, we do not hear of it for so many years afterward because the church exerted its omnipotent authority to hush up the story. There needs but slight knowledge of human nature to decide that such an attempt would have only served to spread and intensify the scandal. As Bayle wisely remarks, "People do not so expose their authority by prohibitions which are not of a nature to be observed, and which, so far from shutting their mouth, rather excite an itching desire to speak."

Then, too, it is claimed that for a period of several hundred years after 855, writers and chroniclers, by agreement, tacit or express, not only maintained a profound silence on the subject of the scandal, but, in all Christian countries of the world, conspired to alter the order of papal succession, forge chronicles, and falsify historical records. And yet those who use this argument tell us that in the city of Rome, under papal authority, a statue was erected, an order issued, turning aside processions from their time-consecrated itinerary, and customs as remarkable for their indecency as their novelty were introduced, in order to perpetuate the memory of the very same events tyrannical edicts were issued to conceal and blot out! Comment is not needed.

The total silence of contemporary writers, and the immense chasm of two hundred years (taking the earliest date claimed) between the event and its first mention, was, of course, found fatal. Consequently, an attempt was made to prop up the story by the assertion that it was chronicled by Anastasius the Librarian, who lived in Rome at the alleged Joannic period, was present at the election of all the popes from 844 to 882, and must, therefore, have been a witness of the catastrophe of 855. The testimony of such a witness would certainly be valuable—indeed irrefutable. Accordingly a MS. of the fourteenth century, a copy of the Anastasian MS., was produced, in which mention was made of Pope Joan. But this mention was attended with three suspicious circumstances. First, it was qualified by an "ut dicitur" "as is said." Anastasius would scarcely need an on dit to qualify his own testimony concerning an event that took place under his own eyes, and must have morally convulsed all Rome. {11} Secondly, it was not in the text, but in a marginal note. Thirdly, and fatally, the entire sentence was in the very words of the Polonus chronicle. Naturally enough, it was found singular that Anastasius, writing in the ninth century, should use the identical phraseology of Polonus, who was posterior to him by four hundred years.

But, in addition to these reasons, Anastasius gives a circumstantial account of the election of Benedict III. to succeed Leo IV., absolutely filling up the space needed for Joan. In view of all which the critical Bayle is moved to exclaim, "Therefore I say what relates to this woman (Joan) is spurious, and comes from another hand." A zealous Protestant, Sarrurius, writes to his co-religionist, Salmasius, (the same who had a controversy with Milton,) after examining the Anastasian MS., "The story of the she-pope has been tacked to it by one who had misused his time." And Gibbon says, "A most palpable forgery is the passage of Pope Joan which has been foisted into some MSS. and editions of the Roman Anastasius."

With regard to the early chronicle MSS., it must be borne in mind that it was common for their readers (owners) to write additions in the margin, A professional copyist—the publisher of those days—usually incorporated the marginal notes with the text. Books were then, of course, dear and scarce, and readers frequently put in the margin the supplements another book could furnish them, rather than buy two books. Then again—for men are alike in all ages—those who purchased valuable books wanted, as they want to-day, the fullest edition, with all the latest emendations. So a chronicle with the Joan story would always be more saleable than one without it.

But one of the strongest presumptions against the truth of the story is seen in the profound silence of the Greek writers of the period, (ninth to fifteenth century.) All of them who sided with Photius were bitterly hostile to Rome, and the question of the supremacy of the pope was precisely the vital one between Rome and Constantinople. They would have been only too glad to get hold of such a scandal. Numbers of Greeks were in Rome in 855, and if such a catastrophe as the Joanine had occurred, they must have known it. "On writers of the ninth and tenth centuries," says Gibbon, "the recent event would have flashed with a double force. Would Photius have spared such a reproach? Would Liutprand have missed such a scandal?"

We have disposed of the absurdity of the supposition that the power and discipline of the church were so great as to enforce secrecy concerning the Joan affair. But—even granting the truth of this assertion—that power and discipline would avail naught with strangers who were Greeks and schismatics. In 863, only eight years after the alleged Joanide, the Greek schism broke out under Photius, who was excommunicated by Nicholas I. There was no period from 855 to 863 when there were not numbers of Greeks in the city of Rome—learned Greeks too. Many of them agreed with Photius, who claimed that the transfer of the imperial residence, by the emperors, from Rome to Constantinople, at the same time transferred the primacy and its privileges. Yet not only can no allusion to any such story be found in any Greek writer of that century, but there is found in Photius himself no less than three distinct and positive assertions that Benedict III. succeeded Leo IV.

The Greek schism became permanent in 1053, under Cerularius, Patriarch of Constantinople, who undertook to excommunicate the legates of the pope.

With Cerularius, as with Photius, the papal supremacy was the main question, and neither he nor Photius would have failed to make capital of the Joan fable, had they ever heard of it. So also with all the Byzantine writers, and they were numerous. It was not until the fifteenth century that the first mention of the story was made by one of them, (Chalcocondylas,) an Athenian of the fifteenth century, who, in his De Rebus Turcicis, states the case very singularly: "Formerly a woman was in the papal chair, her sex not being manifest, because the men in Italy, and, indeed, in all the countries of the West, are closely shaved." It is true that Barlaam, a Greek writer, mentioned it in the fourteenth century; but Barlaam was living in Italy when he wrote his book.

And now, as we reach the so-called Reformation period, we find the tale invested with a value and importance it had never before assumed. It was kept constantly on active duty without relief, and compelled to do fatiguing service in a thousand controversial battles and skirmishes. Angry and over-zealous Protestants found it a handy thing to have in their polemical house. And, although the more judicious cared not to use it, the story was generally retained. Spanheim and Lenfant endeavored to think it a worthy weapon, and even Mosheim affects to cherish suspicion as to its falsity. Jewell, one of Elizabeth's bishops (1560) seriously, and with great show of learning, espoused Joan's claims to existence.

Nor were answers wanting; and, including those who had previously written on the subject, it was fully confuted by Aventinus, Onuphrius Pauvinius, Bellarmine, Serrarius, George Scherer, Robert Parsons, Florimond de Rémond, Allatius, and many others.

The first Protestant to cast doubt on the fable was David Blondel. A minister of the Reformed Church, Professor of History at Amsterdam, in 1630, he was held by his co-religionists to be a prodigy of learning in languages, theology, and ecclesiastical history. In his Fable de la Papesse Jeanne, with invincible logic and an intelligent application of the true canons of historical criticism, he demonstrates the absence of foundation for the story, the tottering and stuttering weakness of its early years, the suspicions which stand around its cradle; and, instead of disputing how far the Pope Joan story was believed or credited in this or that century, shows that by her own contemporaries she was never heard of at all; the whole story being, he says, "an inlaid piece of work embellished with time." Blondel was bitterly assailed by all sections of Protestantism, and accused of "bribery and corruption," the question being asked, "How much has the pope given him?" Blondel's work brought out a crowd of writers in defence of Joan, foremost among whom was the Protestant Des Marets or Maresius, whose labors in turn called out the Cenotaphium Papessae Joannae by the learned Jesuit Labbe, the celebrity of whose name drew forth a phalanx of writers in reply.

But the worst for Joanna was yet to come. Another Protestant, undeterred by the abuse showered upon Blondel, gave Joan her coup de grace. This was the learned Bayle, who, with rigid and judicial impartiality, sums up the essence of all that had been advanced on either side, and shows unanswerably the altogether insufficient grounds on which the entire story rests. More was not needed. Nevertheless, Eckhard and Leibnitz followed Bayle in the extinguishing process, and made it disreputable for any scholar of respectability to advocate the convicted falsehood.

There was no dearth of other Protestant protests against Joan. Casaubon, the most learned of the so-called reformers, laughed at the fable. So did Thuanus. Justus Lipsius said of it, "Revera fabella est haud longè ab audacia et ineptis poetarum." [Footnote 6] Schookius, professor at Groningen, totally disbelieved it. Dr. Burnet, Bishop of Salisbury, said, "I don't believe the history of Pope Joan," and gives his reasons. So, also, Dr. Bristow. Very pertinent was the reflection of Jurieu, (a fanatical Protestant, if ever there was one—the same noted for his controversy with Bayle, who was a "friend of the family"—so much so, indeed, as to cause the remark that Jurieu discovered many hidden things in the Apocalypse, but could not see what was going on in his own household,) in his Apology for the Reformation, "I don't think we are much concerned to prove the truth of this story of Pope Joan."

[Footnote 6: "In truth, it is a fable not much differing from the boldness and silly stories of the poets."]

The erudite Anglican, Dr. Cave, says: "Nothing helped more to make that Chronicle (Polonus) famous than the much talked of fable of Pope Joan. For my own part, I am thoroughly convinced that it is a mere fable, and that it has been thrust into Martin's chronicle, especially since it is wanting in most of the old manuscripts."

Hallam calls it a fable. Ranke passes it over in contemptuous silence. So also does Sismondi; and Gibbon fairly pulverizes it with scorn.

A favorite polemical arsenal for Episcopalians is found in the works of Jewell, so-called Bishop of Salisbury. Let them be warned against leaning on him concerning the Joan story. Listen how quietly yet how effectually both Joan and Jewell are disposed of by Henry Hart Milman, D.D., Dean of St. Paul's, in his History of Latin Christianity: "The eight years of Leo's papacy were chiefly occupied in restoring the plundered and desecrated churches of the two apostles, and adorning Rome.

"The succession to Leo IV. was contested between Benedict III., who commanded the suffrages of the clergy and people, and Anastasius, who, at the head of an armed faction, seized the Lateran, [Footnote 7] stripped Benedict of his pontifical robes, and awaited the confirmation of his violent usurpation by the imperial legates, whose influence he thought he had secured, But the commissioners, after strict investigation, decided in favor of Benedict. Anastasius was expelled with disgrace from the Lateran, and his rival consecrated in the presence of the emperor's representatives." [Footnote 8] Like Ranke, Milman also passes over the Joan story with contemptuous silence.

In his Papst-Fabeln des Mittelalters, the learned Dr. Döllinger has exhausted the erudition of the subject, and not only demonstrated the utter unworthiness of the invention, but— what is for the first time done by him—points out the causes or sources of all the separate portions of the narrative. Thus, the statue story arose from the fact that in the same street in which was found a grave or monumental stone, of the inscription on which the letters P. P. P. could be deciphered, there was also seen a statue of a man or woman with a child. It was simply an ancient statue of a heathen priest, with an attendant boy holding in his hand a palm-leaf, The P. P. P. on the grave-stone, as all antiquarians agreed, merely stood for Propria Pecunia Posuit; but as the marvellous only was sought for, the three P's were first coolly duplicated and then made to stand for the words of the line already referred to—Papa Patrum, etc.—much in the same way as Mr. Jonathan Oldbuck insisted that A. D. L. L., on a utensil of imaginary antiquity he had found, stood for AGRICOLA DICAVIT LIBENS LUBENS, when it only meant AIKEN DRUM'S LANG LADLE. {14} The controversy concerning the existence of Joan may be considered as long since substantially closed, and Joan, or Agnes, or Gilberta, or Ione, as she is called in the English (Lond. 1612) edition of Philip Morney's (Du Plessis Mornay) Mysterie of Iniquitie, to stand convicted as an imposter, or, more properly speaking, a nonentity. Her story is long since banished from all respectable society, although it contrives to keep up a disreputable and precarious existence in the outskirts and waste places of vagrant literature. We are even informed that it may be found printed under the auspices and sponsorship of societies and individuals considered respectable. If this be true, it is, for their sakes, to be regretted; and we beg leave severally to admonish the societies and individuals in question, in the words of the apostle: "Avoid foolish and old wives' fables: and exercise thyself to piety."

Translated From The French.

The Approaching General Council.

By Mgr. Dupanloup, Bishop Of Orleans.

This is the reason why that church, which is the friend of souls and which was never indifferent to the evils in society, is now so deeply moved. Undoubtedly the church and society are distinct; but journeying side by side in this world, and enclosing within their ranks the same men, they are necessarily bound together in their perils and in their trials. The church has called this assembly, therefore, because she feels that in regard to the evils which are common to both, she can do much to forward their removal.

However, let us be careful, as careful of exaggerating as of diminishing the truth. Does it depend upon the church to destroy every human vice? No. But in this great work, in this rude conflict of the good against the bad, she has her part, an important part, and she wishes to perform it. Man is free, and he does good of his own free-will. But he is also aided by divine grace, which assists him without destroying his liberty; for as the great Pope St. Celestine said, "Free-will is not taken away by the grace of God, but it is made free." Being the treasury of celestial goods, the church is man's divine assistant, and lends him, even in the temporal order, a supernatural aid. If to-day she is assembling in Rome, and, as it were, is collecting her thoughts, it is only in order to accomplish her task, to work more successfully and powerfully for the welfare of mankind.

"Who can doubt," exclaims the Holy Father, "that the doctrine of the Catholic Church has this virtue, that it not only serves for the eternal salvation of man, but that it also helps the temporal welfare of society, their real prosperity, good order and tranquillity?" And who will deny the social and refining influence of the church? "Religion! Religion!" an eminent statesman [Footnote 9] has recently said, "it is the very life of humanity! In every place, at all times, save only certain seasons of terrible crisis and shameful decadence. Religion to restrain or to satisfy human ambition--religion to sustain or to reconcile us to our sorrows, the sorrows both of our worldly station and of our soul. Let not statesmanship, though it be at once the most just and the most ingenious, flatter itself that it is capable of accomplishing such a work without the help of religion. The more intense and extended is the agitation of society, the less able is any state policy to direct startled humanity to its end. A higher power than the powers of earth is needed, and views which reach beyond this world. For this purpose God and eternity are necessary."

Then, too, the Holy Father, after he has alluded to the beneficent influence of religion in the temporal order, proclaims anew the concord, so often affirmed by him, between faith and reason, and the mutual help which, in the designs of Providence, they are called to lend one to the other. "Even," he says, "as the church sustains society, so does divine truth sustain human science; the church supports the very ground beneath its feet, and in preventing it from wandering she advances its progress." Let those who vainly strive to claim science as an antagonist to the church understand these words! The head of the church does not fear science, he loves it, he praises it, and with pleasure he remembers that the Christian truths serve to aid its progress and to establish its durability. The most illustrious scholars who have appeared upon the earth, Leibnitz, Newton, Kepler, Copernicus, Pascal, Descartes, before whom the learned of the present time, if their pride has not completely blinded them, would feel of very little importance, think the same about this question as does the Sovereign Pontiff. This is demonstrated, adds the Pope, by the history of all ages with unexceptionable evidence. This too is the meaning of the well-known phrase of Bacon, "A little learning separates us from religion; but much learning leads us to it." Presumptuous ignorance or blind passion may forget it; but the greatest minds have always recognized the agreement of faith and science, the harmony between the church and society, and rejected this antagonism of modern times, which is so contrary to the testimony of history and the interests of truth.

But let us not allow an ambiguous expression to become the pretext for our opponent's attacks; how then does the church attempt to reform society? History has answered this question. Prejudice alone fancies that it has discovered some secret attack upon the legitimate liberty of the human mind. The Council of Rome will be the nineteenth Ecumenical Council, and the forty or fifty nations which will be represented there have all been converted in the same way; that is, they have been brought from barbarism to civilization by the authority of her words, by the grace of her sacraments, by the teaching of her pastors, and the examples of her saints. Such are the ways of God and the action of the church, sometimes seconded, but more frequently attacked, by human powers.

Instructor of souls, the church uses the method of all good education--authority and patience. Where there is doubt, she affirms; where there is denial, she insists; where there is division, she unites; she repeats for ever the same lessons, and what grand lessons they are! The true nature of God, the true nature of man, moral responsibility and free-will, the immortality of the soul, the sacredness of marriage, the law of justice, the law of charity, the inviolability of private rights and of property, the duty of labor, and the need of peace. This always, this everywhere, this to all men, to kings and to shepherds, to Greeks and to Romans, to England and to France, in Europe and in Australia, under Charlemagne or before Washington.

I dare to assert that the continuity of these affirmations creates order in society and in the human mind, just as certainly as the repeated rising of the same sun makes the order of the seasons and success in the culture of the earth. O philosopher, you who disdain the church! be candid and tell me what would have become of the idea of a personal God among the nations, had it not been for her influence? O Protestants and Greeks! admit that without the church the image of Jesus Christ would have been blotted out beneath your very eyes! O philanthropist and statesman! what would you do without her for the family and the sanctity of marriage?

What the church has once done, she is going to do again; what she has already said, she is going to repeat; she will continue her life, her course, her work, in the same spirit of wisdom and charity; she will continue to affirm to man's reason those great truths of which she is the guardian, and it is by this means, by this alone, though by it most energetically, that she will act on society.

It has been said that the religion of the masses of the people is the whole of their morality. Then since morality is the true source of good statesmanship and good laws, all the progress of a people must consist in making the first principles of justice influence more and more their private and public life. From this it follows that every people which increases in its knowledge of Christian truth will make substantial progress, while at the same time every people which attempts to solve the great questions that perplex mankind in any way opposed to the gospel of Christ will be in reality taking the wrong road which can only end in their utter destruction. Who expelled pagan corruption from the world, who civilized barbarians by converting them? Look at the East when Christianity flourished there; and look at it now under the rule of Islam! The influence of Christianity upon civilization is a fact as glaring as the sun. But the principles of the gospel are far from having given all that they contain, and time itself will never exhaust them, because they come out of an infinite depth.

Now, although the centuries have drawn from the Christian principle of charity, equality, and fraternity of man consequences which have revolutionized the old world; still all the social applications of this admirable doctrine are very far from having been made. It is even, as I believe, the peculiar mission of modern times to make this fruitful principle penetrate more completely than ever the laws and customs of nations. If the century does not wander from the path of Christian truth, it will establish political, social, and economic truths which will reflect upon it the greatest honor. {17} But it is the mission of the church and her council to preserve these truths of revelation free from those interpretations which falsify their meaning.

Then every great declaration of the truths of the Bible, every explanation of the doubts and errors concerning it, every true interpretation of Christianity by the masses of the people is a work of progress, which is at once social and religious. This then is why the church is using every effort, or, as says the Holy Father, why she is exerting her strength more and more. This is the reason why Catholic bishops will come from every part of the world to consult with their chief.

It is in vain you say in your unjust and ignorant prejudice, the church is old, but the times are new. The laws of the world are also old; yet every new invention of which we are justly proud would not exist, and could not succeed, were it not for the application of those laws. You do not understand how pliant and yet how firm is the material of which her Divine Founder has built his church. He has given her an organization at once durable and progressive. Such is the depth and the fruitfulness of her dogmas, such too is the expansive character of her constitution, that she can never be outstripped by any human progress, and she is able to maintain her position under any political system. Without changing her creed in the least, she draws from her treasury, as our divine Lord said, things both new and old, from century to century, by measuring carefully the needs of the time. You will find that she is ever ready to adapt herself to the great transformations of society, and that she will follow mankind in all the phases of his career. The Christian revelation is the light of the world, and always will be; be assured that this is the reason why the coming council will be the dawn, not as many think the setting, of the church's glory.

What then do timid Catholics and distrustful politicians fear? Ah! rather let mankind rejoice over the magnanimous resolution of Pius IX. It should be a solemn hope for those who believe, as well as for those who have not the happiness of believing. If you have the faith, you know that the spirit of God presides over such councils. Of course, since it will be composed of men, there may be possible weaknesses in that assembly. But there will also be devoted service to the church, great virtues, profound wisdom, a pure and courageous zeal for the glory of God and the good of souls, and an admirable spirit of charity; and, besides all this, a divine and superior power. God will, as ever, accomplish his work there.

"God," says Fénélon, "watches that the bishops may assemble when it is necessary, that they may be sufficiently instructed and attentive, and that no bad motive may induce those who are the guardians of the truth to make an untrue statement. There may be improper opinions expressed in the course of the examination. But God knows how to draw from them what he pleases. He leads them to his own end, and the conclusion infallibly reaches the precise point which God had intended."

But if one has the misfortune not to be a Christian and not to recognize in the church the voice of God, from simply a human point of view, can there be anything more worthy of sympathy and respect than this great attempt of the Catholic Church to work, so far as it is in her power, for the enlightenment and peace of the world? {18} And what can be more august and venerable than the assembly of seven or eight hundred bishops, coming from Europe, Asia, Africa, the two Americas, and the most distant islands of Oceanica? Their age, their virtue, and their science make them the most worthy delegates from the countries in which they dwell, and the recognized representatives of men of the entire globe with whom they come in contact every day of their lives. It is a real senate of mankind, seen nowhere but at Rome. And although our mind should be filled with the most unjust prejudices, what conspiracy, what excess, what manifestation of party feeling need be feared from a meeting of old men coming from very different parts of the earth, almost every one a complete stranger to the others, having no bond of sympathy but a common faith and a common virtue? Where will we find on earth a more perfect expression, a more certain guarantee of wisdom, of wisdom even as men understand it? I have ventured to say that modern times, disgusted by experience with confidence in one man, have faith in their assemblies. But what gathering can present such a collection of the intelligent and the independent, such diversity in such unity? Who are these bishops? Read their mottoes:

     "In the name of the Lord!"
     "I bring Peace!"
     "I wish for Light!"
     "I diffuse Charity!"
     "I shrink not from Toil!"
     "I serve God!"
     "I know only Christ!"
     "All things to all men!"
     "Overcome Evil by Good!"
     "Peace in Charity!"

As to themselves, they have lost their proper names. Their signature is the name of a saint and the name of a city. Their own name is buried, like that of an architect, in the foundation stone of the building. Here are Babylon and Jerusalem; New York and Westminster; Ephesus and Antioch; Carthage and Sidon; Munich and Dublin; Paris and Pekin; Vienna and Lima; Toledo and Malines; Cologne and Mayence. And added to this, they are called Peter, Paul, John, Francis, Vincent, Augustin, and Dominic; names of great men who have established or enlightened various nations that profess Christianity, They do not bear the names of the past and present only, they also bear those of the future. One comes from the Red River, another from Dahomey, others from Natal, Victoria, Oregon, and Saigon. We are working for the future, although we are called men of the past. We are working for countries which to-day cannot boast a single city, and for people who are without a name. We go farther than science, even beyond commerce itself, until we find ourselves alone and beyond them all. When we cannot precede your most adventurous travellers, we tread eagerly in their footsteps; and why? To make Christians--that is to say, to make men, to make nations. What then do you fear? Why do you object to such a council when you entitle yourselves, with such proud confidence, the men of progress and the heralds of the future?

Will it be nations who are disturbed by the council? How can nations be menaced or betrayed by men who represent every nation of the civilized globe? The bishops love their countries; they live in them by their own free choice, and for the defence of their faith. Will the bishops of Poland meet the bishops of Ireland to plan the ruin of nations and the oppression of a fatherland? And is there a single French bishop, or one from England, or from any other country, who will yield to any one in patriotism, who does not claim to be as good a Frenchman, or Englishman, or citizen, as any one of his fellow-countrymen? {19} Is our liberty placed in jeopardy? What can you fear from men who, from the days of the Catacombs up to the massacre of the Carmelites, have established Christianity only at the sacrifice of their life, and whose blood flowed freely in the days that liberty and the church suffered the same persecution? Will the bishops of America join those from Belgium and Holland in a conspiracy against liberty? Will the bishops from the East unite with the bishops of France, and so may other European countries, in sounding the praises of despotism?

No, no; there is nothing true in all these fears; they would be only silly phantoms were it not that they are the result of a hatred which foresees the good which will be done, and wishes to prevent it. What will the council do? I cannot say; God alone knows it at this hour. But I can say that it is a council, because eighteen centuries of Christianity and civilization know and affirm it; a council, hence it is the most worthy exemplification of moral force, it is the noblest alliance of authority and liberty that the human mind can conceive; and I may boldly assert that it never would have conceived it by its own power.

I am not going to mark out the limits of liberty and power. I do not intend now to show the characteristics of schism and heresy, of English or German Protestantism, or of the false orthodoxy of Russia. I will say only one word, and then proceed to make my conclusions. It is this. If the Christian churches wish to become again sisters, and if men wish to become brothers, they can never do it more certainly, more magnificently, or more tenderly than in a council, under the auspices and in the breast of that church which is their true mother.

Do you imagine that you discover different opinions in the church, and make this an obstacle? I would have the right to be astonished at your solicitude, but I will suppose you to be sincere, and I answer, You know very little about the church, Her enemies daily declare that our faith is a galling yoke, which holds us down and prevents us from thinking. And therefore, when they see that we do think, they are perfectly amazed. This is one of the conditions of the church's life, and the greatest amount of earnest thinking is always within her fold. It is true that we have an unchanging creed, that we are not like the philosophers outside of the church, who do little more than seek a doctrine, and endlessly begin again their searches. They are always calling everything in question, they are continually moving, but never reach any known destination. With us there are certain established definite points, about which we no longer dispute. And thus it is that the church has an immovable foundation, and is not built entirely in the air. Yet liberty also has its place in the church, Our anchors are strong and our view is unlimited; for beyond those doctrines which are defined there is an immense space. Even in dogma the Christian mind has yet a magnificent work to accomplish, which can be followed for ever, because, as I have already said, our dogmas, like God, have infinite depths, and Christian intelligence can always draw from them, but never drain them.

No one should therefore be astonished to see that Catholics argue about questions not included within the definitions of faith, many of which are difficult and complex, and which modern polemics has only made more obscure. {20} The spirit of Christianity was long ago defined by St. Augustine in these memorable words: In necessary things unity, in doubtful things liberty, in all things charity. The course of centuries has changed nothing. Besides, I have before said, and I now repeat, that the council, precisely because it is ecumenical—that is, composed of representatives from all the churches in the world—bishops living under every political system and every variety of social customs—excludes necessarily the predominance of any particular school of a narrow and national spirit and of local prejudices. It will be the great catholic spirit, and not such and such particular notions, which will inspire its decisions; and whatever may happen to be the peculiar ideas of different schools or parties, the council will be the true light and unity. There will be complete liberty left in regard to all things not defined. But these definitions will be the Catholic rule of faith, and they should not disturb any one in advance. Again, they threaten nothing which is dear to you, men of this age, they threaten only error and injustice, which are your enemies as well as ours. If you wish to know the real opinions of this magnanimous pontiff, who is the object of so many odious and ungrateful calumnies, and of the bishops, his sons and his brothers; if you wish to conjecture the spirit of the future council, you will find it completely stated in these few words of Pius IX., which were addressed to some Catholic publicists, scarcely a year ago, and which have been inscribed on their standard as a sacred motto: "Christian charity alone can prepare the way for that liberty, fraternity, and progress which souls now ardently desire."

I cannot repeat too often, and you, my brethren of the holy ministry, cannot repeat too often, that great is the mistake of those who denounce the future council as a menace or a work of war. We live in a time in which we are condemned to listen to all. But nevertheless we are not bound to believe all. When, a year ago, the Pope announced to the bishops assembled in Rome his determination to convoke an ecumenical council, what did the bishops of the whole world see in this? A great work of illumination and pacification—these are the precise words of their address. The papal bull uses the same language. In this ecumenical council, what does the Pope ask his brothers, the bishops, to examine, to investigate with all possible care, and to decide with him? Before everything else, it is that which relates to the peace of all and to universal concord.

And when I read the bull carefully, what do I see on every page and in each line? The expression of solicitude well worthy the father of souls, and not less for civil society than for the church. He never separates them. He is careful always to say that their evils and their perils are mutual. The same tempest beats them both with the same waves. At this time, which is called a period of transition, religion and society are both passing through a formidable crisis. There are men to-day who would wish to destroy the church if they could; and who, at the same time, would shake society from its very foundations. And it is for the purpose of bringing help to them both, and to avert the evils which menace them together, that the holy father has conceived the idea of a council. The reason given by him to the bishops is precisely to examine this critical situation, and suggest the remedy for this double wound. {21} These are his words: "It is necessary that our venerable brothers, who feel and deplore as we do the critical situation of the church and society, should strive with us and with all their power to avert from the church and society, by God's help, all the evils which are afflicting them."

It has been told that the Pope wished to break off friendly relations with modern society, to condemn and proscribe it, to give it as much trouble as lies within his power. Yet never have the trials which you endure, Christian nations, more sadly moved the head of the church, never has his soul poured forth more sympathetic accents, than for your perils and your sorrows. And it has been noticed by every one, pillaged of three-fourth of his little territory, reduced to Rome and its surrounding country, placed between the dangers of yesterday and those of to-morrow, suspended, as it were, over a precipice, the Pope seems never to think of these things; he does not seek to defend his menaced throne; not a sentence, not a single word, about his own interests; no, in the bull of convocation the temporal prince is forgotten and is silent—the pontiff alone has spoken to the world.

But all has not yet been said, Other hopes may be conceived of the future council. We delight in anticipating other great results. The letters of the Holy Father to the Eastern bishops and to our separated Protestant brethren give us good ground for hope.

At two fatal epochs in the history of the world, two great divisions have been made in this empire of souls which we call the church—twice has the seamless robe of Christ been rent by schism and heresy. These are the two great misfortunes of mankind, and the two most potent causes which have retarded the world's progress. Who does not admit this? If the old Greek empire had not so sadly broken with the West, it would have never been the prey of Islamism, which has so deeply degraded it, and which even now holds it under an iron yoke. Nor would it have drawn into its schism another vast empire, in whose breast seventy millions of souls groan beneath a despotism which is both political and religious.

And who can say what the Christian people of Europe would be today, were it not for Lutheranism, Calvinism, and so many other divisions? These unhappy separations have made Christianity lose its active power in retaining many souls in the light of divine revelation which have since been wrested from it by incredulity. And who can tell us how much they have retarded the diffusion of the gospel in heathen countries?

Sorrowful fact! There are even now millions of men upon whom the light of the gospel has never shone, and who remain sunken in the shadows of infidelity. Think of the poor pagans on the shores of distant isles! They are vaguely expecting a Saviour; they stretch their arms toward the true God; they cry out by the voice of their miseries and their sufferings for light, truth, salvation, Eighteen centuries ago, Jesus Christ came to bring these good tidings to the world, and spoke these great words to his apostles, "Preach the gospel to every creature!" The church alone has apostles of Jesus Christ, emulators of that Peter and Paul who landed one day upon the coast of Italy to preach the same gospel to our fathers and to die together for the same faith.

But poor Indians! poor Japanese! Following the apostles of the Catholic Church sent by the successor of him to whom Jesus Christ said, "Thou art Peter, and on this rock I will build my church," we see other missionaries who come to oppose them. But who sends them? Is it Jesus Christ? What, then, is Christ, as St. Paul asked of the dissidents of the first century, divided? Is not this, I ask you, a dreadful misfortune for the poor infidels? And is it not enough to make every Christian shed tears?

And union, if it were only possible, (and why should it not be, since it is the wish of our Saviour)—union, especially because now the way is open and distance has almost vanished, would it not be a great and happy step toward that evangelization of every creature which Jesus charged his apostles and their successors to begin when he had left the earth?

Yes, every soul in which the spirit of Jesus dwells should feel within a martyrdom when it considers these divisions, and repeat to heaven the prayer of our Saviour and the cry for unity, "My Father, that they may be all one, as you and I are one." This is the great consideration which influenced the head of the Catholic Church when, forgetting his own dangers, and moved by this care for all the churches which weighs so heavily upon him, he convoked an ecumenical council. He turns toward the East and to the West, and addresses to all the separated communions a word of peace, a generous call for unity. Whatever may be the way in which his appeal is received, who does not recognize, in this most earnest effort for the union of all Christians, a thought from heaven, inspired by Him who willed that his Church should be one, and who said, as the Holy Father has been pleased to recall, "It is by this that you will be known to be my disciples"?

But will our brethren of the East and West respond to this thought, this wish? The East! Who is not moved before this cradle of the ancient faith, from whence the light has come to us? I saw the Catholic bishops of the East trembling with joy at the announcement of the future council, and expecting their churches to awake to a new life and to a fruitful activity. But will the Eastern churches refuse to hear these "words of peace and charity" that the Holy Father has lately addressed to them "from the depths of his heart"? [Footnote 10] And why should they be deaf to this appeal? For what antiquated or chimerical fears? Who has not recognized and been deeply touched by the goodness of the pontiff? How delicately, and with what accents of particular tenderness, does the Holy Father speak of our Oriental brethren, who, in the midst of Mohammedan Asia, "recognize and adore, even as we do, our Lord Jesus Christ," and who, "redeemed by his most precious blood, have been added to his church!" What consideration does he manifest for these ancient churches, to-day so unfortunately detached from the centre of unity, but who formerly "showed so much lustre by their sanctity and their celestial doctrine, and produced abundant fruits for the glory of God and the salvation of souls!" [Footnote 11]

[Footnote 10: Apostolic Letter of Pius IX., September 8th, 1868.]

[Footnote 11: ibidem.]

And, at the same time, we must admire his gentleness, his forgetfulness of all his irritating grievances. The Holy Father speaks only of peace and charity. {23} He asks only one thing, and that is, that "the old laws of love should be renewed, and the peace of our fathers, that salutary and heavenly gift of Christ, which for so long a time has disappeared, may be firmly re-established; that the pure light of this long-desired union may appear to all after the clouds of such a wearisome sorrow, and the sombre and sad obscurity of such long dissensions." [Footnote 12]

But let the Eastern bishops know that this deep longing for peace and union is not found in the heart of the Holy Father alone; the bishops and all the Christians of the West, how can they help desiring this most happy event? Can there be any good gained in keeping the robe of Christ torn asunder? And what—I ask it in charity and for information—what can the churches of the old Orient gain by not communicating with those of the entire universe? Who prevents them? Are we yet in the time of the metaphysical subtleties and cavils of the Lower Empire?

I have already alluded to the infidel nations. Let my brethren, the Eastern bishops, permit me to recall to them what is at this moment the state of the entire world and the situation of the church of Christ in all its various parts. If in every time the church of Christ has had to struggle, is she not now more than ever before resisted and fought against? Is not the spirit of revolution—and, unfortunately, it is an impious one—rising against her on every side? And you, Eastern churches, whether you are united or not, have you not also your dangers? Is not your spiritual liberty unceasingly threatened? Is not Christianity with you surrounded by determined enemies—at your right, at your left, on every side? And will not the storm of impiety which now disturbs Europe, since distance is no more an obstacle, burst upon Asia, and will not the Christian races of the East become contaminated by the repeated efforts of an irreligious press?

In such a critical situation, when every danger is directed against the church of Jesus Christ by the misfortunes of the time, the first need of all Christians is to put an end to division which enfeebles, and to seek in reconciliation and peace that union which is strength. What bishop, what true Christian, will meditate upon these things, and then say, "No, division is a good; union would be an evil"? On the contrary, who does not see that union, the return to unity, is the certain good of souls, the manifest will of God, and will be the salvation of your churches? What follows from this? Can there be any personal considerations, any human motives whatsoever, superior to these great interests and these grave obligations? Your fathers, those illustrious doctors, Athanasius, Gregory of Nazianzen, Basil, Cyril, Chrysostom, did not find it hard to bend their glorious brows before him whom they call "the firm and solid rock on which the Saviour has built his church." [Footnote 13] If they were living to-day, would they not, as Christians, and most nobly, too, trample upon an independence which is not according to Christ, but which is merely the suggestion of a blind pride? If past centuries have committed faults, do you wish to make them eternal?

[Footnote 13: Ibidem; words of St. Gregory of Nazianzen, quoted by the Holy Father.]

But the time, if you will hear its lessons, will bring before your mind the gravest duties. You who are surrounded on one side by despotism, and on the other by Mohammedanism, surely, you cannot fail to feel the peril of isolation, and the fatal consequences of disunion.

May God preserve me from uttering a word which can be, even in the most remote way, painful to you; for I come to you at this moment with all the charity of Jesus Christ.

Indeed, whether I think of those unhappy races whose souls and whose country have become sterile under the yoke of the religion of Mohammed, or whether I turn my eye toward those great masses of Russians, grave in their manners, religious, who have remained in the faith, notwithstanding the degradation of their churches, and notwithstanding the supremacy of a czar whose pretended orthodoxy has never inspired even the least pity and justice for Poland! equally do I feel the depths of my soul moved to pray for those many nations who are worthy of our interest and our sincere compassion. O separated brothers of the East!—Greeks, Syrians, Armenians, Chaldeans, Bulgarians, Russians, and Sclavonians, all whom I cannot call by name—see the Catholic Church is coming toward you, she stretches out her arms to embrace you! O brothers! come!

She is going to assemble, as the whole church, from all parts of the civilized world. From our West, from your East, from the New World, also, and from far distant islands, her bishops are now hastening to answer the call of the supreme chief, to meet at Rome, the centre of unity. But ah! she does not wish to assemble her council without your presence, O brothers! come!

This is one of those solemn and infrequent occasions which will take centuries before its equal is seen. The church offers peace. "With all our strength we pray you, we urge you, to come to this General Council, as your ancestors came to the Council of Lyons and the Council of Florence, in order to renew union and peace." [Footnote 14] But, On your Side, will you refuse to take a single step toward us, and allow this most favorable opportunity to escape? Who will venture to take this formidable responsibility upon himself? O brothers! come!

The heart of the church of Jesus Christ does not change; but the times change, and the causes which have, unhappily, made the efforts of our fathers fail, now, thank God, no longer exist. Then I say to you all, O brothers! come!

In regard to ourselves, we are full of hope; and, whatever may be the resistance that the first surprise, or perhaps old prejudices, have made, everything seems to us to be ready for a return. "Rome," said Bossuet, in former times—"Rome never ceases to cry to even the most distant people, that she may invite them to the banquet, where all are made one; and see how the East trembles at her maternal voice, and appears to wish to give birth to a new Christianity!"

O God! would that we could see this spectacle! What joy would it be for thy church on earth, in the midst of so many rude combats, and such bitter affliction! What joy for the church in heaven! And what joy, churches of the East, for your doctors and your saints, "when from the height of heaven they see union established with the apostolic see, centre of catholic truth and unity; a union that, during their life here below, they labored to promote, to teach by all their studies, and by their indefatigable labors, by their doctrine and their example, inflamed as they were with the charity poured into their hearts by the Holy Spirit, for Him who has reconciled and purchased peace at the price of his blood; who wished that peace should be the mark of his disciples, and who made this prayer to his Father, 'May they be one as we are one.'" [Footnote 15]

[Footnote 15: Ibidem. Unity will be the eternal characteristic of the true church. Every question concerning the church is reduced finally to this question, Where is unity?]

Oh! then, listen to the language of the church, the true church of Jesus Christ, who alone, among all Christian societies, raises a maternal voice, and demands again all her children, because she is their true mother! This is the reason why the Sovereign Pontiff, after he has spoken to the separated East, turns toward other Christian yet not catholic communions, and addresses to all our brothers of Protestantism the same urgent appeal.

Protestantism! "Ah!" exclaimed Bossuet, in his ardent love, in his zealous wish for unity, "our heart beats at this name, and the church, always a mother, can never, when she remembers it, repress her sighs and her desires." These are sighs and desires which we have heard from the Holy Father in an apostolic letter written a few days after the Brief addressed to the Eastern bishops, to "all Protestants and other non-Catholics," and in which he deplores the misfortunes of separation, and shows the great advantage of the unity desired by our Lord. "He exhorts, he begs all Christians separated from him to return to the cradle of Jesus Christ. … In all our prayers and supplications we do not cease to humbly ask for them, both day and night, light from heaven, and abundant grace from the eternal Pastor of souls, and with open arms we are waiting for the return of our wandering children." [Footnote 16]

See, then, what the Holy Father says, and, together with him, the whole church. Shall we hope and pray always in vain? Will the work of returning be as difficult as many think it? I know that prejudices are yet deep; and the difficulty that the work of tardy justice meets with in England is one proof among others; but it is the business of a council to explain misunderstandings, and, by appeasing the passions, prepare the mind to return to the church. And, should any one be tempted to think me deluded, I will answer that among those of our separated brethren who are not carried away by the sad current of rationalism, there is a daily increasing number who regret the loss of unity. I affirm that this is true of America, that it is true of England, I will answer, too, that more than once I have been made the recipient of grief-stricken confidence, and heard from suffering hearts the longing desire for the day in which will be fulfilled the words of the Master, "There shall be one fold and one shepherd." Will this day never come? Are divisions necessary? And why should we not be the ones destined to see the days predicted and hailed with joy by Bossuet? Here, undoubtedly, the dogmatic objections are serious. But they will disappear, if the gravest difficulty of all, in my opinion, is removed; and that difficulty is the negation of all doctrinal authority in the church, that absolute liberty of examination, which, willingly or unwillingly, is certain to be confounded with the principles of rationalism. It is for this reason that Protestantism bears in its breast the original sin of a radical inconsistency, which is lamented by the most vigorous and enlightened minds of their communion. And it is upon this that we rely, at least for numerous individual conversions, and, by God's grace, perhaps for the reconciliation of a large number.

If this essential point is solved—and the solution is not difficult to simple good sense and courageous faith—all the rest will become easy. Reason says, with self-evident truth, that Jesus Christ did not intend to found his church without this essential principle of stability and unity. {26} He did not propose to found a religion incapable of living and perpetuating itself, abandoned to the caprice of individual interpretations. This is so clear of itself that it does not need to be supported by any text of the Bible.

But there are texts which, to persons of candid mind, and without any great argument, are equally convincing. I will repeat only three; the first, "Thou art Peter," the primacy of St. Peter and the head of the church; the second, "This is my body," the most blessed sacrament; the third, "Behold thy mother," behold your mother, the Blessed Virgin, Are you able to efface these three sentences from the Gospel? Have you meditated upon them sufficiently, and upon many others which are not less decisive? Then from the Bible pass to history, and from texts to facts.

Do not facts tell you plainly that the living element of complete Christianity is wanting in you? For, on the one hand, you have had time to understand thoroughly the authors of rupture; and, on the other, you are now able to consider its results. For three centuries you have been reading the Bible; for three centuries you have been studying history. Have not these three centuries taught you a new and solemn lesson? The principle of Protestantism, by developing, has borne its fruits; and the predictions of catholic doctors in ancient controversies are realized every day beneath your eyes. Contemporaneous Protestantism is more and more rapidly dissolving into rationalism; many of her ministers acknowledge that they have no longer any supernatural faith; and recently a cry of alarm, proceeding from her bosom, has resounded even in our political assemblies. But a cry lost in the air! Dissolution will go on, notwithstanding noble efforts and Christian resistance, always increasing and ruining more thoroughly this incomplete Christianity, which needs the essential power that preserves and maintains, and which is nothing else than authority. To lose Christianity in pure sophistry, this is the tendency of modern Protestants, whether they are willing to admit it or not. But good may come from an excess of evil, And what is more calculated to enlighten many deceived but well-meaning souls concerning the radical fault of Protestantism than this spectacle of disintegration by the side of the powerful unity of the Catholic Church, and the council which is going to be its living manifestation?

There is another hope, little in accordance with human probabilities, I know, but which my faith in the Divine mercy does not forbid me to entertain, and that is, that even the Jews themselves, the children of Israel, who, associating with us, lead to-day the same kind of social life, will feel something touch their hearts and bring them, docile at last, to the voice of St. Paul, to the fold of the church. In the Jews, indeed, so long and so evidently punished, I cannot help recognizing my ancestors in the faith; the children of Moses, the countrymen of Joseph and Mary, of Peter and Paul, and of whom it is written, that they "who are Israelites, to whom belongeth the adoption as of children, and the glory and the testament, and the giving of the law and the service of God and the promises: whose are the fathers, and of whom is Christ, according to the flesh, who is over all things, God blessed for ever, Amen." [Footnote 17] I beg them, therefore, to believe in Him whom they are yet expecting; I beg them to believe eighteen hundred years of history; for history, like a fifth gospel, proves the coming and divinity of the Messiah.

Do not feel astonished, then, to see me full of compassion for Protestant, Greek, and Jew, while I am accused of being severe toward the abettors of modern scepticism. I recognize the difference between errors which are nearly finished, and errors which are just beginning; between responsible and guilty authors who knowingly spread false doctrines, and their innocent victims, who, after centuries, still cling to them. How can I help being moved to tears when I see the people of my country, its mechanics and its farmers, so industrious and so worthy of sympathy, young men of our schools, whose active minds call for the truth, both fall, almost before they are aware of it, into the hands of teachers of error? When the reawakening of faith was so perceptible a few years ago, and a decisive progress toward good seemed to be accomplished, how quickly did the shadows gather around us; dismal precipices opened beneath our feet, the breath of an impious science and violent press became most potent, and the beautiful bark of faith and French prosperity seemed ready to sink before she had fairly left her port! Ah! I do, indeed, execrate the authors of that cruel wreck, while I feel myself full of pity for the many sincere souls I see among our separated brethren, living in error, it is true, but they have never made error live! With warmth I extend to such captive souls a friendly hand. Let them come back to the church; for she it is who guards Jesus Christ, the God of the whole truth, and invites them to this great banquet of the Father of the family, where, as Bossuet has well said, "all are made one."

May the coming council, in its work of enlightenment and pacification, reconcile to us many souls who are already ours by their sincerity, their virtue, and, as I know of many, even by their desires. Let, at least, this be the heartfelt wish of every Catholic! Yes, let us open our hearts with more warmth than ever to these beloved brethren; let us wish—it is the desire of the Holy Father—that the future council may be a powerful and happy effort, and let us repeat unceasingly to heaven the prayer of the Master, "May they be one, as we are one."

And you, whom the duties of my position compel me to address persistently—in time and out of time, says St. Paul—adversaries of my faith, though I speak to you with austere words upon my lips, still know that it is with charity in my heart toward you all, whether philosophers, Protestants, or indifferent to all religion, yea, I would wish my voice could reach the most wretched pagan lost in the shadow of the superstition which yet covers half the globe. O brethren! I would that you could taste for a single moment the deep peace that one feels who lives and dies in the arms of the church! Bear witness with me to this peace, my brethren of the priesthood, and every Christian of every rank and of all ages! When one knows that he is surrounded by this light, assured by her promises, preceded by those sublime creatures who are called saints, and whose glory in heaven the church of the earth salutes, bound by tradition to all the Christian centuries by the successors of the apostles, and founded, at last, upon Jesus Christ, what joy! what a company! what power! and what repose in light and certainty!

I am firmly convinced, and each day brings forth a new proof, that the enemies of the church do not really detest her. No; the dominant sentiment among our enemies is not always hatred. There is another feeling which they do not admit, which is far more frequent among them, This is envy. Yes; they envy us; the atheist, at the moment he is insulting a Christian, says secretly to himself, "Oh! how happy he is!"

Let us not credit that which we hear said against the church, that her majestic face has been for ever disfigured by calumny, and that henceforth men can only see in her a mistress of tyranny and ignorance. These violent prejudices certainly do have an influence; our faults and our enemies undertake the business of propagating them. But the church, in spite of this—and the ecumenical council will prove this again to the world—will not be any less the church of Christ, "without blemish and without spot," notwithstanding the imperfections of her children; and there is not one among those that attack her who can tell us what evil the church has ever done to him. "My people, what have I done to thee?"

What evil! Citizens of town and country, you owe to the Catholic Church the purity of your children, the fidelity of your wives, the honesty of your neighbor, the justice of your laws, the gay festival which breaks in upon the monotony of your daily lives, the little picture which hangs upon your wall; and, more than these, you owe her the sweet expectation which waits by the cemetery and the tomb! This is the evil she has done you—this enemy of the human race!

And if you can raise your thought above yourself, above your own interests, above your homes; if you allow your thoughts to soar higher than the smoke which curls above your roofs, what a grand spectacle does the Catholic Church present! She is great and good, even in the little history of our life—greater and far better does she appear in the history of the laborious developments of human society. Inseparable companion of man upon this earth, she struggles and she suffers with him; she has assisted, inspired, guided humanity in all its most painful and glorious transformations. It was she who made virtues, the very name of which was yet unknown, rise up from the midst of pagan corruption; and souls, so pure, so noble, so elevated, that the world still falls upon its knees before them.

It was she who tamed and transformed barbarians; and who, during the long and perilous birth of modern races in the middle ages, has courageously fought the evil, and presided over all progress. And it must be again the Catholic Church which will help modern society to disengage from the midst of its confused elements that which disturbs its peace, the principles of life from the germs of death, by maintaining firmly those truths which alone can save it.

Ah! we do not know the Catholic Church well enough. We live within her fold, we are a part of her, and yet we do not understand her. We ignore both what she was and what she is in the world, and the mission God has given her, and the living forces, the divine privileges, bestowed upon her, so that she may accomplish eternally her task upon the earth, to maintain immutably here below truth and goodness, and to remain for ever, as an apostle said of her, "the pillar and the ground of truth."

Surely, we never hear it made a matter of reproach that a pillar remains unchanged; what would become of the edifice, if the pillar were to leave its place? {29} Why, then, reproach the church for being immovable, and why is not this immobility salutary for you? What will you do when there are tremblings in regard to the truth like the trembling of the earth? While you must disperse, we are uniting. What you are losing, we are defending. We can say to modern doctrines, "We knew you at Alexandria and at Athens; both you, your mothers, your daughters, and your allies." The church can say to the nations, when the Pope has gathered their ambassadors: "France, thou hast been formed by my bishops; thy cities and their streets bear their names! England, who has made thee, and why wert thou once called the isle of saints? Germany, thou hast entered into the civilization of the West by my envoy, St. Boniface. Russia, where wouldst thou now be, were it not for my Cyril and my Methodius? Kings, I have known your ancestors. Before Hapsburg, or Bourbon, or Romanoff, or Brunswick, or Hohenzollern—before Bonaparte or Carignan, I was old; for I have seen the Caesars and the Antonies die; to-morrow I will be, for I am ever the same. Do you answer that it will be without money, without dwelling, without power? It may be so, for I have endured these proofs a hundred times, always ready to address to nations the little sentence Jesus once spoke to Zaccheus, 'This day I must abide in thy house.' If I leave Rome, I will go to London, to Paris, or to New York." It is only of the church and of the sun that it can be said that to-morrow they will certainly rise; and this is the reason that the church, in the midst of the disturbances of the present time, boldly announces her council.

Admirable spectacle, that our century would wish not to admire, but whose grandeur it is forced to acknowledge. Yes, many a wearied eye rests with irresistible emotion upon this stately pillar, standing alone in the midst of the ruins of the past and of the actual destruction of all human greatness. The indifferent feel troubled, surprised, attracted at the sight of the church testifying her immortal power by this great act; and after they have exhausted all their doctrines, they are tempted to exclaim to the Supreme Pontiff that which Peter, the first pontiff, once said to Jesus, "Master, to whom shall we go? you have the words of eternal life."

Hear the words of life, you who doubt, who search, who suffer! Hear them also, you who triumph, who rejoice, who lord it over your fellowman! Hear the words that the church calls her little children to repeat at every rising of the sun: Credo, I believe! I believe in one God, the Creator. See, savants, here is the answer to your uncertainties. Credo, I believe! I believe in a Saviour of the world who has consecrated purity by his birth, confounded pride by his precepts, rebuked injustice by his sufferings, and proved his divinity and immortality by his resurrection, I believe in Jesus Christ! See in him, poor, afflicted humanity, poor, oppressed people, an answer to your despair. Credo, I believe! I believe in the Holy Ghost, in the Holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, in the judgment, and in a life of everlasting happiness to those who have fought the good battle. See in our creed, O Protestants and philosophers! so divided in your affirmations, so narrow in your hopes, the response to your disputes. See in it, oppressive monarch, the answer to your iniquities! And see, also, O pitiless death! the answer to your terrors.

To love, to hope, to believe! Everything is contained in these words; and it is the church who alone can preserve in unshaken majesty and in the universal truth this Credo, that the nineteenth century, now in the dawn of the twentieth, is going to repeat with the two hundred and sixty-second successor of the fisherman Peter, first apostle of Jesus Christ.

But, brothers, let us cease speaking; let us cease disputing, let us cease fearing, let us bend the knee and pray!

O God! who knows the secret of your Providence, and who knows the wonders which the church will yet display to the world, if men's faults and their passion do not retard her? If religion and society, leaning one upon the other, should advance, with mutual concord, on their blessed course, what great steps would there be toward the establishment of your reign upon the earth, toward the progress of nations, toward liberty by the way of truth, toward the real fraternity of men, toward the extinction of revolution and of war, toward the peace of the world. Then a new era would open before us, and a new great century appear in history. Let us throw open our souls to these hopes; let us beg these blessings of God, and let us foresee possible misfortunes only to prevent them. Let it be known at least that Catholics are not men of discouragement, of dark predictions, or of peevish menaces; but men of charity, of noble hopes, of peaceful effort, and, at the same time, of generous struggle.

Let us invoke St. Peter and St. Paul; let us invoke the Virgin Mary, Mother of Jesus, the honor and the heavenly guardian of the race of man; and, united to the souls of all the saints, let us pray to the adorable Trinity reigning in heaven!

Let us pray that the council may be able to fulfill its task; that the Christian world will not repel this great effort which the church is making to help them; that light may find its way into their minds, and that their hearts may be softened! That misunderstandings may be explained, prejudices removed; that unreasonable fears may disappear, and that Christianity, and consequently civilization, may flourish with a new and more vigorous youth. May the return to the church, so much desired and so necessary, take place!

Let us pray for the monarchs of the world, that the wish and formal request that the Holy Father made them in his letter may be granted, May they cast aside all silly objections, and favor by the liberty they give the bishops the future assembly of the church, and let her council meet in peace.

Let us pray, too, for their people, that they may understand the maternal intentions of the church; and, closing their ears to calumny, may hear with confidence and accept with docility the words of their mother.

Let us pray even for the avowed enemies of the church, that they make a truce with their suspicions and their anger until the church has announced, in her council and under the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, her decrees whose wisdom and charity can hardly fail to touch them.

Let us pray for so many men of good faith, men of science, statesmen, the heads of families, workmen, men of honor, whom the light of Jesus Christ has not yet enlightened, that they may now receive its beneficent rays.

Let us pray that the anxious wishes of so many mothers, sisters, wives, and daughters, who, in obscurity, are maintaining purity and holiness in their families, often without being able to bring our holy faith there, may at length be heard.

Let us pray for the East and the West, that they may be reconciled; and for our separated brethren, that they may leave the division which is destroying them, and answer the urgent appeal of the holy church, and come to throw themselves in those arms which have been open to receive them for three centuries.

Let us pray for the church, for her faithful children, and for her ministers, that each day may find them more pure, more holy, more learned, more charitable; so that our faults may not be an obstacle to the reign of that God whose love we are appointed to make known.

Let us also pray for the Holy Father. Deign, O God! to preserve him to your church, and enable this great pontiff, who has not feared, even amid the troubles of the age, to undertake the laborious work of a council, to see its happy issue! May he, after so many trials, bravely borne, rejoice in the triumph of the church, before he goes to receive in heaven the reward of his labors and his virtues!

Lent, 1869.

              I.

  We like sheep have gone astray,
      Kyrie eleison!
  Each his own misguided way,
      Kyrie eleison!
  Wandering farther, day by day,
      Kyrie eleison!


              II.

  Shepherd kind, oh! lead us back;
      Christe eleison!
  Wrest us from our dangerous track,
      Christe eleison!
  Lest the wolves thy flock attack;
      Christe eleison!


             III.

  Ope for us again thy fold,
      Kyrie eleison!
  Night approaches, drear and cold;
      Kyrie eleison!
  Death, perchance, and woes untold;
      Kyrie eleison!

                 Richard Storrs Willis.

The Modern Street-ballads Of Ireland.

The home of the street-ballad, pure and simple, is in Ireland. It has nearly vanished in England, destroyed by the penny newspaper, which contains five times as highly spiced food for the money. In Ireland it still exists and supplies the place of the newspaper, not only in appeals to the passion or reason, but as a general chronicle of every event of importance, local or national, Very often both are combined, and the leading article and the account of political insult will be run into rude rhyme together, and the story of a murder be interspersed with reflections on its sin. The quantity of ballads is, of course, enormous, and to expect that any but a small portion should possess more poetry than a newspaper article would be unreasonable. But all are not of this prosaic class, and some possess the genuine spirit of poetry under their rude but often spirited diction.

The first question naturally asked is, Whence comes this enormous flood of ballads? Who are the poets who produce them on every imaginable subject, even the most verse-defying public meeting, or in praise of humblest of politicians? Like the immortal Smiths and Joneses, that make the thunder of the Times, their names never appear, and though the ballad or the leading article—and both have done so—may influence the fate of nations, it will bring to the author only his stipulated hire. At present, the street-ballads of Ireland are mostly composed by the singers themselves. In ancient days, the weavers and tailors and the hedge-schoolmasters used to be a fruitful source of supply, the sedentary occupations of the former being popularly supposed to foster the poetic talent, The latter class has vanished, and if here and there one exists, it is in the shape of a red-nosed, white-haired veteran, who is entertained in farmers' houses and country shebeens, in memory of his ancient glory, when sesquipedalian, long words and "cute" problems made him the monarch of the parish next to the priest himself. However, the singer of the ballad is, in most instances, the writer, who is only anxious for a subject of interest on which to exercise his muse, and generally turns out half-a-dozen verses of the established pattern in half an hour. This he takes to the publisher, who not only allows him no copyright, but does not even make a discount in the price of his stock in trade, for which he pays the same as his brother bards, who, finding his ballad popular, will straightway strain their voices to it. But then he has the same privilege with their productions, so that it is all right in the long run. The ballads are printed on the coarsest of paper with the poorest of type, and generally with a worn-out woodcut of the most inappropriate description at the head. Thus, for instance, I have one, where a portrait of Jerome Bonaparte does duty over the "Lamentation of Lawrence King for the murder of Lieut. Clutterbuck."

The ballad-singers are of both sexes, and are very dilapidated specimens. The tone in which they send their voices on the shuddering air is utterly indescribable—a sort of droning, pillelu falsetto, at once outrageously comical and lugubrious. They sing everything in the same melancholy cadence, whether lamentation or love-song. Very often, two, more especially of women, will be together. {33} The first will sing the first two lines of a quatrain alone, and then the second will join in, and they rise to the height of discord together. Fair-days are their days of harvest, although in cities like Cork or Waterford they may be seen on every day except Sunday. A popular ballad will often have a very large sale, and will find its way all over the country.

The greater portion of ballads composed in this way are, of course, destitute of anything like poetry—mere pieces of outrageous metaphor and Malapropoian long words, for which last the ballad-singers have a ridiculous fondness. The singers sing in a foreign language; they have lost the sweet tongue peculiarly fitted for improvised poetry, in which their predecessors the bards, down to the date of less than one hundred years ago, sang so sweetly and so strongly, with such dramatic diction and happy boldness of epithet. The language of the Saxon oppressor is from the tongue, and not from the heart. As the mother of the late William Carleton used to say, "the Irish melts into the tune;" the English doesn't, and so many of the finest of the ancient melodies are now songs without words. "Turlogh O'Carolan," "Donogh MacConmara," and the "Mangaire Sugach" have not left their successors among the "English" poets of the present day. Among a people naturally so eloquent as the native Irish, not even the drapery of an incongruous language can entirely obscure the native vigor and strength of thought. A ballad is sometime seen which, though often unequal and rude, is alive with impassioned poetry, fierce, melancholy, or tender, and it almost always becomes a general favorite, and is preserved beyond its day to become a part of the standard stock. The songs of so genuine a poet as William Allingham, who is the only cultivated Irish poet who has had the taste and the spirit to reproduce in spirit and diction these wild flowers of song, have been printed on the half-penny ballad-sheets, and sung at the evening hearth and at the morning milking all over Ireland. "Lovely Mary Donnelly" and the "Irish Girl's Lamentation" have become, in truth, a part of the songs of the nation, touching alike the cultivated intellect and the untutored heart.

The street-ballads may be divided into five classes: patriotic, love-songs, lamentations, eulogies, and chronicles.

The patriotic songs are disappointing. There are few to stir the heart like the war-notes of Scotland. The reason is obvious. The triumphs were few and fleeting, and the song of the vanquished was only of hope or despair. They must sing in secret and be silent in the presence of the victors. In most of the political songs allegory is largely used. Ireland is typified under the form of a lonely female in distress, or a venerable old lady, or some other figure is used to disguise the meaning. Of course the street ballad-singers dare not sing anything seditious, and even the whistling of the "Wearing of the Green" will call down the rebuke of the "peeler." The ballads that express the hatred of the people to their rulers are sung in stealth and are often unprinted. They are not usually the production of the hackneyed professional ballad-singers, and are consequently of a much higher order. The following is a good specimen, It is entitled

     The Irishman's Farewell To His Country.

  Oh! farewell, Ireland: I am going across the stormy main,
  Where cruel strife will end my life, to see you never again.

  'Twill break my heart from you to part; acushla astore machree.
  But I must go, full of grief and woe, to the shores of America.

  "On Irish soil my fathers dwelt since the days of Brian Borue.
  They paid their rent and lived content convenient to Carricmore.
  But the landlord sent on the move my poor father and me.
  We must leave our home far away to roam in the fields of America.

  "No more at the churchyard, astore machree,
      at my mother's grave I'll kneel.
  The tyrants know but little of the woe the poor man has to feel.
  When I look on the spot of ground that is so dear to me,
  I could curse the laws that have given me cause to depart to America.

  "Oh! where are the neighbors, kind and true, that
      were once my country's pride?
  No more will they be seen on the face of the green,
      nor dance on the green hillside.
  It is the stranger's cow that is grazing now,
      where the people we used to see.
  With notice they were served to be turned out or starved,
      or banished to America.

  "O! Erin machree, must our children be exiled all over the earth?
   Will they evermore think of you, astore,
      as the land that gave them birth?
   Must the Irish yield to the beasts of the field?
      Oh! no—acushla astore machree.
   They are crossing back in ships, with vengeance on their lips,
      from the shores of America."

The songs which were in vogue among the young and enthusiastic Fenians were, as might be supposed, of an entirely different nature. They were not peasants, but half-educated artisans. The proscribed National Cork Songster contains probably more rant and fustian than any similar number of printed pages in existence. The verses, of course, bear a family resemblance to those that appeared in the Nation for a couple of years previous to the events of '48, and in many instances are reproductions. Those of a modern date are still more extravagant, if possible, than that deluge of enthusiastic pathos; for among the Nation poets were Thomas Davis and James Clarence Mangan, while among those of the Fenians of 1866 there is but one that deserves the slightest shred of laurel. Charles J. Kickham, now under sentence of fourteen years' penal servitude in her Britannic Majesty's prisons, has written two or three pieces of genuine ballad-poetry of great merit, which the people have at once adopted as household songs. "Rory of the Hill" is of remarkable spirit. It begins:

  "That rake up near the rafters,
     Why leave it there so long?
   The handle of the best of ash
     Is smooth and straight and strong.
   And mother, will you tell me
     Why did my father frown,
   When to make hay in summer-time
     I climbed to take it down?
   She looked up to her husband's eyes,
     While her own with light did fill,
  'You'll shortly know the reason why,'
     Said Rory of the Hill."

The love-songs, that are sung by the colleens at the soft dewy dawn, as they sit beside the sleek cows just arisen from beneath the hedge, the nimble finger streaming the white milk into the foaming pail, while the lark's song melts down from that speck beneath the cloud, and the blackbird and thrush warble with ecstasy in the hedge, the morning light shining across the dewy green fields; or at

when the shadows are growing long, although the tops of the swelling uplands are bright, and the crows are winging home, and the swallows darting in the still air; or, in the winter evenings, when the candles are lighted in the kitchen, and busy fingers draw the woof, while the foot beats time to the whirring wheel, are very numerous, and generally of a higher order of merit than the patriotic songs. The pulses of the heart are freer and its utterance dearer in human love than in love of country. The beauties in which the Irish girls excel all others—the blooming cheeks, and brilliant eyes, and wealth of flowing hair, are the main objects of compliment, and are often transformed into personifications of endearment. {35} Colleen, the universal term for young maidens, seems but a corruption of coolleen, which means a head of curls or abundant tresses. Grey and blue eyes are especially objects of endearment, and even in the ancient Irish poems, green-eyed is not unfrequently used, which is not so unnatural as the English reader may suppose, the Irish word expressing the indefinable tint of some lighter blue eyes, being untranslatable into English. [Footnote 18]

[Footnote 18: "Sweet emerald eyes."—Massinger. "How is that young and green-eyed Gaditana?" Longfellow's Spanish Student.]

Although the modern love-songs are inferior to those in the Irish language, for the reason that has been mentioned, that English is not yet the language of the Irish heart, they often possess a simple power, and, though seldom sustained throughout, a touch of nature's genius, which the highest poet cannot reach with all his art. How exquisite is the following:

  "As Katty and I were discoursing,
     She smiled upon me now and then,
   Her apron string she kept foulding,
     And twisting all round her ring."

Bits of poetry can be picked out of almost every love-ballad, as witness the following:

  "My love is fairer than the lilies that do grow,
   She has a voice that's clearer than any winds that blow."


  "With mild eyes like the dawn."


  "One pleasant evening, when pinks and daisies
   Closed in their bosoms one drop of dew."


  "His hair shines gold revived by the sun,
   And he takes his denomination from the drien don."


  "I wish I were a linnet, how I would sing and fly.
   I wish I were a corn-crake, I'd sing till morning clear—
   I'd sit and sing to Molly, for once I held her dear."


  "'Twas on a bright morning in summer,
     That I first heard his voice speaking low,
   As he said to the colleen beside me,
     Who's that pretty girl milking her cow?"


  "The hands of my love are more sunny and soft
     Than the snowy sea foam."


  "My love will not come nigh me,
     Nor hear the moan I make;
   Neither would she pity me,
     Though my poor heart should break."

There is not one, however, that would bear quoting entire, and none that comes anywhere near the flowers of the ancient Irish love-songs which are some of the finest in the world. The principal theme and delight of the ballad-singers are romantic episodes, where a rich young nobleman courts a farmer's daughter in disguise, and, after marriage, reveals himself, his lineage, and his possessions to his bride; or where a noble lady falls in love with a tight young serving-boy. Such a ballad will be as great a favorite among the colleens as the novels of romantic love are said to be among milliners' apprentices. One thing is especially noticeable among the love-ballads, and that is the total absence not only of licentiousness, but even of coarseness. The Irish peasant-girls at home are the most virtuous of their class in the world, owing to the influence of the confessional, the strong feeling of family pride, and the custom of universal and early marriage. Not but there are unfortunates who have made a "slip;" and when the ballad relates of such a tragedy, it shows of how deep effect is the scorn of the parish, and how wretched the fate of the unfortunate and her base-born offspring. The "lamentations" or confessions of condemned criminals are highly popular. Premeditated murder is rare among the Irish peasantry, in comparison with the records of ruffianism among the English laboring classes, and the interest excited by the event is deeper, and extends to a larger space of local influence. These lamentations are the rhymed confessions of the criminals, giving an account of the circumstances of the tragedy, sometimes in the third person, and sometimes in the first, always concluding with a regret at the disgrace which the criminal has brought on his relations, and imploring mercy for his soul. {36} They are of unequal merit, and, as a whole, not equal to the love-songs. Once in a while, there is a touch of untaught pathos; but being without exception the production of the hackneyed writers, they are as little worth preservation as the "lives" of eminent murderers which supply their places among us.

The narrative ballads tell of every event of interest to Irish ears, from Aspromonte to the glorious steeplechase at Namore; the burning of an emigrant ship, to a ploughing-match at Pilltown, the same language being used for the one as the other. During the late war in this country, every great battle was duly sung by the Irish minstrels. The sympathies of the peasantry were usually with the majority of their kindred in the North, but not universally so. Thus does a bard give an account of the battle of New Orleans, which would astonish General Butler:

  "To see the streets that evening,
     the heart would rend with pain.
   The human blood in rivers ran,
     like any flood or stream.
   Men's heads blown off their bodies,
     most dismal for to see;
   And wounded men did loudly cry
     in pain and agony.
   The Federals they did advance,
     and broke in through the town.
   They trampled dead and wounded
     that lay upon the ground.
   The wounded called for mercy,
     but none they did receive—"

The eulogies of person or place, some patron or his residence, are innumerable, and ineffably absurd. Some years ago, an idle young lawyer at Cork happened to be visiting Blarney Castle, when one of these wandering minstrels came to the gate, and asked to dedicate a verse to "Lady Jeffers that owns this station." The request was granted, and the laughter of the guests, as the bard recited his "composition," may be imagined. The occurrence and the style of verse were common enough, but an idle banter incited the gay youth into a burlesque imitation. The result was the famous "Groves of Blarney," that has been sung and whistled all over the world. Those who have not seen the originals might imagine the "Groves of Blarney" to be an outrageous caricature. But it is not so. It hardly equals and cannot surpass some of the native flowers of blunder. The original is still sold in the streets of Cork, and some extracts, in conclusion, will show how much Dick Milliken was indebted to his unwitting model:

  "There are fine walks in those pleasant gardens,
     And spots most charming in shady bowers.
   The gladiator, who is bold and daring,
     Each night and morning to watch the flowers.

  "There are fine horses and stall-fed oxen,
     A den for foxes to play and hide,
   Fine mares for breeding, with foreign sheep,
     With snowy fleeces at Castle Hyde.

  "The buck and doe, the fox and eagle,
     Do skip and play at the river side.
   The trout and salmon are always sporting
     In the clear streams of Castle Hyde."

Daybreak.

Chapter I.

A wide, slow whitening of the east, a silent stealing away of shadows, a growing radiance before which the skies receded into ineffable heights of pale blue and gleaming silver, and a March day came blowing in with locks of gold, and kindling glances, and girdle of gold, and golden sandals over the horizon.

Louis Granger, standing in the open window of his chamber, laughed as he looked in the face of the morning, and stretched out his hands and cried, "Backsheesh, O Howadji!"

Not many streets distant, another pair of eyes looked into the brightening east, but saw no gladness there. Margaret Hamilton remembered that it was her twenty-fifth birthday, and that she had cried herself to sleep the night before, thinking of it. But she would not remember former birthdays, celebrated by father, mother, and sisters, before they had died, one after one, and left her alone and aghast before the world. This, and some other memories still more recent, she put out of sight; and, since they would not stay without force, she held them out of sight. One who has to do this is haunted.

The woman looked haunted. Her eyes were unnaturally bright and alert, and shadows had settled beneath them; her cheeks were worn thin; her mouth compressed itself in closing. At twenty-five she looked thirty-five.

And yet Miss Hamilton was meant for a beauty—one of the brilliant kind, with clear gray eyes, and a creamy pallor contrasting with profuse black hair. The beautiful head was well set; something vivid and spirited in the whole air of it. Her height was only medium, but she had the carriage of a Jane de Montford, and there were not wanting those who would have described her as tall.

While she looked gloomily out, a song she had heard somewhere floated up in her mind:

  "The years they come, and the years they go,
   Like winds that blow from sea to sea;
   From dark to dark they come and go,
   All in the dew-fall and the rain."

It was like a dreary bitter wind sobbing about the chimneys when the storm is rising. She turned hastily from the window, and began counting the hideous phantoms of bouquets on the cheap wall-paper, thinking that they might be the lost souls of flowers that had been wicked in life; roses that had tempted, and lilies that had lied. The room, she found, was sixteen bouquets long, and fourteen and a half wide.

When her eyes began to ache with this employment, she took up a book, and, opening it at random, read:

  "A still small voice said unto me,
  'Thou art so full of misery,
   Were it not better not to be?'"

Was everything possessed to torment her? She dropped the book, and looked about in search of distraction. In the window opposite her stood her little easel with a partly finished cabinet photograph on it a man's face, with bushy whiskers, round eyes, an insignificant nose, the expression full of a weak fierceness superficially fell and determined, as though a lamb should try to look like a lion. {38} One eye was sharply finished; and, as Margaret glanced at the picture, this stared at her in so grotesque and threatening a manner that she burst into a nervous laugh.

"I must turn your face to the wall, Cyclops, till I can give you another eye," she said, suiting the action to the word.

A pile of unfinished photographs lay on a table near. She looked them over with an expression of weariness. "O the eyes, and noses, and mouths! Why will people so misuse the sunbeams? And this insane woman who refuses to be toned down with India ink, but will have colors to all the curls, and frizzles, and bows and ends, and countless fly-away things she has on her! She looks now more like an accident than a woman. When the colors are put in, she will be a calamity. Only one face among them pleases me—this pretty dear."

Selecting the picture of a lovely child, Margaret looked at it with admiring eyes. "So sweet! I wish I had her here this moment with her eyes, and her curls, and her mouth."

A sigh broke through the faint smile. There seemed to be a thorn under everything she touched. Laying the picture down, she busied herself in her room, opened drawers and closets and set them in order; gathered the few souvenirs yet remaining to her—letters, photographs, locks of hair—and piled them all into the grate. One folded paper she did not open, but held an instant in fingers that trembled as they clung; then, moaning faintly, threw it on to the pyre. Inside that paper were two locks of hair—both silver-threaded—twined as the two lives had been; her father's and her mother's.

The touch of a match, and the smoke of her sacrifice curled up into the morning sky.

"I cannot work," she said. "My hand is not steady enough, and my eyes are dim. What was it that Beethoven wrote to his friend? 'At times cheerful, then again sorrowful; waiting to see if fate will listen to us.' Suppose I should drop everything, since I am so nerveless, and wait to see what fate will do."

Here again the enemy stood, The picture of waiting that came up before her mind was that of Judge Pyncheon in the House of the Seven Gables, sitting and staring blankly as the hours went by—a sight to shriek out at when at length he was found. With a swift pencil this woman's imagination painted a companion picture: the door of her room opening after days of silence; a curious, frightened face looking in; somebody sitting there cold and patient, with half-open eyes, and not a word of welcome or questioning for the intruder.

A clock outside struck ten. Margaret rose languidly and dressed for a walk, after pausing to rest. Raising her arms to arrange her hair and bonnet, she felt so faint that for a moment she was obliged to lean forward on her dressing-table.

At length she was ready, only one duty left unperformed. Miss Hamilton had not said her prayers that morning, and had not even thought of saying them, or of reproaching herself for the omission—a scandalous omission, truly, for the granddaughter of the Rev. Doctor John Hamilton, and daughter of that excellent but somewhat diluted deacon, John Hamilton, his son. But to pray was to remember; and beside, God had forgotten her, she thought.

Miss Hamilton was not a Catholic, To her, Christ died eighteen centuries ago, and went to heaven, and stayed there, only looking and listening down in some vague and far-away manner that was easier to doubt than to believe. The church into which, at every dawn of day, the Beloved descends with shining pierced feet and hands; with the lips that spoke, and the eyes that saw, and the locks through which had sifted the winds of Olivet and the dews of Gethsemane; with the heart of infinite love and pity, yes, and the soul of infinite power—this church she knew not. To her it was an abomination. The temples where pain hangs crowned with a dolorous majesty, and where the path of sorrows is also the path of delights, her footsteps had never sought. To her they were temples of idolatry. Therefore, when troubles came upon her, though she faced them intrepidly, it was only with a human courage. What wonder if at last it proved that pain was stronger than she?

With her hand on the latch of the door she paused, then turned back into her chamber again. The society face she had assumed dropped off; a sigh went shivering over her lips, and with it a half-articulated thought, silly and womanish, "If I had some one to come in here, put an arm around me—I'm so tired!—and say, 'Take courage, dear!' I could bear up yet longer. I could endure to the end, perhaps."

Miss Hamilton was not by nature one of those who, as Sir Thomas Browne says, looked asquint upon the face of truth. But she had not dared to fully realize her circumstances, lest all courage should die out of her heart. Now you could see that she put aside the last self-delusion, and boldly looked her life in the face. It was Medusa.

One of the bravest of soldiers has said that in his first battle he would have been a coward if he had dared. Imagine the eyes of such a fighter, a foe within and a foe without, and but his own right arm and dauntless will between the two!

Such eyes had this woman. Of her whole form, only those eyes seemed to live. But for them she might have been Margaret Hamilton's statue.

At length she moved; and going slowly out, held on to the railing in descending the stairs. Out doors, and down Washington street, then, taking that direction involuntarily. It was near noon when she found herself in a crowd on Park street, hastening through it, without caring to inquire what the cause of the gathering was. Coming out presently in front of the state house, and seeing that there was space yet on the steps, she went up them, and took her stand near a gentleman whom she had long known by sight and repute. Mr. Louis Granger also recognized her, and made room, quietly placing himself between her and the crowd. Miss Hamilton scarcely noticed the movement. She was used to being attended to.

This gentleman was what might be called fine-looking, and was thoroughly gentlemanly in appearance. He was cast in a large mould, both form and features, had careless hazel eyes that saw everything, and rather a lounging way with him. Indeed, he owned himself a little lazy, and used laughingly to assert his belief that inertia is a property of mind as well as of matter. It took a good deal to start him; but once started, it took still more to stop him. His age might be anywhere from thirty to forty, the few silver threads in his fine dark hair counting for nothing. You perceived that they had no business whatever there. {40} He was not a man who would catch the eye in a crowd; but, once your attention was directed toward him, you felt attracted. The charm of his face depended chiefly on expression; and those who pleased him called Mr. Granger beautiful.

He stood now looking attentively at the lady beside him, finding himself interested in her. Her eyes, that were fixed on the advancing procession, appeared to see no more than if they had been jewels, and her mouth was shut as if it would never open again. The pale temples were hollow, the delicate nostrils were slightly pinched, the teeth seemed to be set hard. He studied her keenly, secure in her perfect abstraction, and marked even the frail hand that clinched, not clasped, the iron railing. Mr. Granger could read as much in a hand as Washington could; and this hand, dazzlingly fair, full-veined, pink-palmed, transparent, dewy, with heart-shaped finger-tips that looked as though some finer perception were reaching out through the flesh, was to him an epitome of the woman's character.

It was the 17th of March, and the procession in honor of St. Patrick an unusually fine one. It flowed past like a river of color and music, with many a silken rustling of the flag of their adoption, but everywhere and above all the beautiful green and gold of that most beautiful banner in the world—a banner which speaks not of dominion, but of song and sunshine and the green earth. While other nations, higher-headed, had taken the sun, the star, the crescent, the eagle, or the lion for an emblem, or, with truer loftiness, had raised the cross as their ensign, this people, with a sweetness and humility all the more touching that it was unconscious, bent to search in the grasses, and smilingly and trustfully held up a shamrock as their symbol. Those had no need to inscribe the cross upon their escutcheon who, in the face of the world, bore it in their faithful hearts, and upon their bowed and lacerated shoulders.

A pathetic spectacle—a countless procession of exiles; yet, happily for them, the generous land that gave them a home grew no dark willows to rust their harp-strings.

The music was, of course, chiefly Irish airs; but one band in passing struck up "Sweet Home."

Margaret started at the sound, and looked about for escape. She could not listen to that. Happening to glance upward, she saw a company of ladies and gentlemen in the balcony over the portico. Governor A—— was there, leaning on the railing and looking over. He caught her glance, and beckoned. Margaret immediately obeyed the summons, getting herself in hand all the way, and came out on the balcony with another face than that she had worn below. She had put on a smile; some good fairy had added a faint blush, and Miss Hamilton was presentable. The governor met her with a hearty smile and clasp of the hand. "I am glad to see you," he said. "Will you stand here, or take that seat Mr. Sinclair is offering you?"

"Yes, sir," he exclaimed, as Margaret turned away, continuing his conversation with a gentleman beside him, "the English treatment of the Irish is a clear case of cussedness."

"Our good chief magistrate is slightly idiomatic at times," remarked a lady near by.

A poetess stood in the midst of a group of gentlemen, who looked at her, while she looked at the procession. "It is Arethusa, that bright stream," she said with soft eagerness, "Pursued and threatened at home, it has crept through shadowy ways, and leaped to light in a new land."

Margaret approached Mr. Sinclair, who sat apart, and who made room for her beside him.

Even now she noticed the splendid beauty of this man in whom every physical attraction was perfected. Mr. Maurice Sinclair might have posed for a Jupiter; but an artist would scarcely have taken him for a model of the prince of the apostles. He was superbly made, with a haughty, self-conscious beauty; his full, bold eyes were of a light neutral tint impossible to describe, so transparent were they, so dazzling their lustre; and his face was delicately smooth and nobly-featured. One could scarcely regret that the long moustache curling away from his mouth, then drooping below his chin, and the thick hair pushed back from his forehead, were of silvery whiteness. It did not seem to be decay, but perfection. Mr. Sinclair used to say that his head had blossomed.

He smiled as Miss Hamilton stepped slowly toward him, the smile of a man entirely pleased with himself.

"Own now," he said, "that you are wishing to be Irish for the nonce, that you might feel the full effervescence of the occasion."

Mr. Sinclair perceived that she needed to be amused. "See the governor wave his handkerchief!" he said. "That man has been born twice, once into Massachusetts, and the second time into all creation."

She glanced at the object of his remarks, noting anew his short, rotund figure, his round head with all its crow's-nest of black ringlets, his prompt, earnest face that could be so kind. "There isn't a drop of mean blood in his veins," she said. "He is one of those rare men in whom feeling and principle go hand in hand."

Mr. Sinclair gave his shoulders a just perceptible shrug. "Do you know all the people here?" he asked, observing that Margaret looked searchingly over the company. "Let me play Helen on the walls of Troy, and point out the notables whom you do not know. That antique-cameo-faced gentleman whom you are looking at now is the Rev. Mr. Southard. He is misnamed of course. He should be called after something boreal, Does not he make you shiver? He lives with my cousin, whom I saw you standing beside down there. Louis likes him, or pretends to. Mr. Southard is not so much a modern minister, as a theological reminiscence. He belongs among the crop-heads; I have somewhere heard that he was a wild lad, and is now doing penance. It is likely. One doesn't bar a sheep-fold as one does a prison. He appears to be a little off guard now, for a breath seems to have forgotten predestination. When he looks like that, I am always reminded of something pagan, He'd be horrified, of course, if he knew it. Mark that Olympian look of painless melancholy, and the blue, motionless eye. What a cold, marble face he has! Being too polished to retain heat, he remains unmoved in the midst of enthusiasm. That's philosophy, isn't it? He is one of those who fancy that ceasing to be human, they become superhuman. They mistake the prefix, that's all. But Mr. Southard bristles with virtues. I must own that I never knew a man so forgiving toward other people's enemies."

"I know Mr. Southard well by reputation," Margaret interrupted rather warmly. "He is human, of course, and so, fallible; but every mountain in his soul is a Sinai!"

"Oh! he has his good points," Mr. Sinclair admitted tranquilly. "I have known him to be surprised into a glorious laugh, for which, to be sure, he probably beat himself afterward; and he has a temper that peeps out now and then in a delightfully human fashion. I have detected in him, too, a carnal weakness for French chocolate, and a taste for pictures, even the pictures of the Babylonians. Once I saw him stand five minutes before a faded old painting of Cimabue's; I believe it was a virgin standing between two little boys who leaned to kiss each other, a hand of hers on either head, I don't condemn the man in toto. I like his faults; but I detest his virtues!

"That stout, consequential person, with his chin in his cravat, who as Suckling says of Sir Toby Mathews, is always whispering nothing into somebody's ear, is Mr. ex-councilman Smith. He was thrown to the surface at the time of the Know-Nothing ebullition, and when that was over, was skinned off with the rest of 'em. He considers himself a statesman, and looks forward with prophetic goggle eyes to the time when his party shall be again in the ascendant. He comes here to nurse his wrath, and I haven't a doubt that he feels as though this procession were marching down his throat. He used to be to a joiner, then a house-builder, then he got to be a house-owner. Twenty years ago, my aunt Betsey, who lives in the country, paid him two dollars to build a trellis for her grape-vine, and he did it so well that she gave him his dinner after the family had got through. Now he has a mansion near hers that dwarfs her cottage to a bird-cage. His place is really fine, grounds worth looking at, and a stone house with bronze lions at the door. I don't know what he has lions there for, unless to indicate that Snug the joiner lives within. I'm not afraid of 'em. You've never heard of him here; but out there he is tremendous. 'Imposteur à la Mecque, et prophète à Médine.'

"Still there are people even here who blow about him. Psaphon's birds, of course, fed on Smith's oats, He hates me because he thinks that I laugh at him; but I don't doubt that it soothes his soul to know that the roses on his carpets are twice as large as those on mine, and that he has ten pictures to my one. The first thing you see when the vestibule door opens is a row of portraits, ten of 'em, Smith and his wife, and eight children. Ames painted 'em, and he must have had the nightmare regularly till they were done. They are larger than life, and their eyes move. I am positive that they move. I guess there are little strings behind the canvas. There they hang and stare at you, till you wish they were hanged by the necks. The first time I went there, I shook my fist at 'em behind Smith's back, and he caught me at it. I couldn't help it. The spectacle is enough to excite any man's worst feelings. The parlor walls are covered with landscapes painted from a cow's point of view, strong in grass and clover, with pleasant drinking-places, and large trees to stand under when the sun gets high. I never see such trees and water in nature, but I dare say the cows do. My wife and I dined there once. The eight children sat in two detachments and ate Black Hamburg grapes, skins and all; and the peaches were brought in polished like apples. My wife got into such a giggle that she nearly strangled. I see, you sharp-eyed Bedouin, you want to remind me that I have eaten of this man's salt. True, but he made it as bitter as any that Dante ever tasted.

"That sober, middle-aged man in a complete suit of pepper and salt, hair and all, is Mr. Ames, the member from N——, Polliwog Ames they call him, from his great speech. Is it possible you have never heard of it? It was the speech of the session. Some one had introduced a bill asking an appropriation of ten thousand dollars toward building a new museum of natural history. There was a little palaver on the subject, then Ames got up. All winter nothing had been heard from him but the scriptural yea and nay; so, of course, every one was attentive, 'Gentle-men,' he said, 'while thousands of men, women, and children, in the city, and tens of thousands in the commonwealth, are hungry to-day, and will be hungry to-morrow, and are and will be too poor to buy food; while paupers are crowding our almshouses, and beggars are swarming in our streets; while all this poverty is staring us in the face, and putting to us the problem, how are we to be fed and clothed and sheltered, and kept from crime, and taught to read and to pray? it would seem to me, gentlemen, an unnecessary not to say reprehensible act, to appropriate ten thousand dollars of the public money, in order that some long-nosed professor might be enabled to show us how polliwogs wiggle their tails.' Having said this, Mr. Ames shut his mouth, and sat down covered with glory."

Margaret's only comment was to look earnestly at this man who had remembered the poor.

They were silent a little while; then Mr. Sinclair spoke again, in a lower voice. "I am going to Europe in a few weeks."

"You know, and everybody knows," he went on hastily, "that my wife and I have not for years lived very happily together. I think that few blame me. I would not wish all the blame to be thrown on her, either. The fact is, we never were suited to each other, and every day we grew more antagonistic. We had a little sensible talk last week, and finally agreed to separate. She will remain here, and I, as I said, shall go to Europe for an indefinite time, perhaps for ever."

At any other time Margaret might have felt herself embarassed by such a confidence. As it was, she hardly knew what reply to make; but, since he waited, managed to say that if people could not live peacefully together, she supposed it was best they should separate.

"Margaret, you cannot, if you would, hide your misery from me. You are fitted to appreciate all that is beautiful in nature and art, yet are bound and cramped by the necessity of constant labor for your daily bread. You suffer, too, what to the refined is the worst sting of poverty, the being associated with, often in the power of, vulgar and ill-natured people, who despise you because you are not rich, and hate you because, being poor, you yet will not and cannot be like themselves. I know that there are those who take delight in mortifying you, in misinterpreting your every act and word, and in prejudicing against you persons who otherwise might be your friends. What a wretched, double life you live; petted by notable people on one hand, and insulted by inferiors on the other! How long is it to last? You must be aware that you are slipping out of the notice of your early friends. You cannot accept their invitations, because you have not time, and moreover, are not suitably dressed. By and by they will cease to invite you. Do you look forward to marriage? Every day your chances are lessening. {44} You are growing old before your time. I cannot see that you have anything to look forward to but a life of ill-paid toil, a gradual dropping out of the place that you were born and educated to fill, a loss of courage and self-respect, a lowering of the tastes, and at last, a sinking to the level of what you must despise. If you should be taken ill now, what would become of you?"

"I should probably go to the charity-ward of the public hospital," Miss Hamilton replied coldly.

"I hope for nothing," she answered. "I know all that you tell me, and far more."

Mr. Sinclair's eyes brightened. "What good are your fine friends to you? You would never ask them to help you, I know; but if you could bring yourself to that, would you not feel a bitter difference? It is not mean to shrink from asking favors, when they are for ourselves. Walter Savage Landor was neither mean nor a fool; yet he makes one of his best characters say that the highest price we can pay for a favor is to ask for it, and everybody who has tried knows that. You would sink at once from a friend to a dependent. Now your friends ask no questions, and you tell them no lies. If they give the subject a thought, they fancy you in some quiet, retired, and highly genteel apartment, if rather near the eaves, then so for a pure northern light, leisurely and elegantly painting photographs, for which you receive the highest prices, and thanks to boot. They don't see an upstartly assistant criticising your work, or a stingy employer taking off part of the price for some imaginary flaw. And if they did, they would only tell you that such annoyances are trivial, that you must rise above them. I've heard that kind of talk. But those who go down to battle with the pigmies know how tormenting their bites are. The worst of it is, too, that you cannot long maintain the dignity and purity of your own character in this petty strife, It isn't in the nature of things, I don't care what may be said to the contrary by parlor ascetics and philosophers. They have no right to dogmatize on the necessary influence of circumstances in which they have never been placed. Moreover, constant labor is lowering to the mind, and any work is degrading to the person who can do a higher kind of work. It may be saving to him whose leisure would be employed in frivolity and license; but that person is already base. The time you spend in studying how to make one dollar do the work of five makes a lower being of you. I can see this in you, Margaret. Your manners and conversation are not what they were. You have no time to read, or think, or look at pictures, or hear lectures, or listen to music—none. You have only time for work, and, the work finished, are too weary for anything but sleep; perhaps too weary for that even, How long do you expect to keep up with such a life dragging at you?"

Miss Hamilton lifted between her finger and thumb a fold of the dress she wore. "All the time I could spare from my painting in the last three weeks has been devoted to the task of making this dress out of an old one," she said. "It was a difficult problem; but I solved it. I was always fond of the mathematics. Of course, during those three weeks my universe revolved around a black bombazine centre. O sir! I know better than you can tell me, how degrading such labor is. God in the beginning imposed it as a curse; and a curse it is!"

There was again a momentary pause, during which Mr. Sinclair's merciless eyes searched the cold face beside him. {45} Margaret did not observe that all the company had gone, that the procession had disappeared, the crowd melted away. She had sat there and listened like one in a dream, too dull and weary to be angry, or to wonder that such words should be addressed to her, and such bold assertions made, where her most intimate friends had never ventured a hint even.

When Mr. Sinclair spoke again, his voice was soft and earnest. "Have you any friend so dear and trusty, that his frown would make your heart ache yet more? In all the world, do you know one to whom your actions are of moment, who thinks of you anxiously and tenderly, for whose sake you would walk in a straight path, though it might be full of thorns? Is there one?"

"Come with me, then!" he exclaimed. "Think of Italy, and what that name means, of the east, of all the lands that live in song and in story. Drop for ever from your hands the necessity for toil, and let your heart and mind take holiday. 'Not one,' you said; but, Maud, you mistook, I thought of you all the time, and got your troubles by heart. Leave this miserable, cramping life of yours, and come with me where we shall be as free from criticism as if we were disembodied spirits. Forget this paltry Boston, with its wriggling streets and narrow breaths. Fancy now that the breeze in our faces blows off the blue Mediterranean, the little dome above us rises and swells to St. Peter's, that last flutter of a banner over the hill is the argent ground with golden keys. Or Victor Immanuel has got Rome for his own, and there floats the red, white, and green of Italy. How you would color and brighten like a rose under such sunshine! Come with me, Margaret, come!

She looked at him with troubled, uncomprehending eyes, groping for the meaning under the flowery speech. His glance dazzled her.

"It is like a fairy-tale," she said. "How can it come true? I am poor, yet you bid me travel as only the rich can. How am I to go with you? who else is going?"

He smiled. "O silly Margaret! since there is no other way, and since in all the world there is no one to care for or to question you, come with me alone."

Then Margaret Hamilton knew that her cup of bitterness had lacked one poisoned drop. She got up from the seat, shrinking away, feeling as though she lessened physically.

She lifted her face at that, and looked at him with eyes that were bright, gray, and angry as an eagle's.

"Maurice Sinclair," she said haughtily, "I thank you for one thing. Weary, and miserable, and lonely as I have been, I could not have been certain, without this test, that such a temptation would not make me hesitate. But now I know that temptation comes from within, not from without, and that infamy attracts only the infamous. I care for you, you think? My admiration and my friendships are free; but I am not a woman to tear my hands on other people's hedges. Let me tell you, sir, that I must honor a man before I can feel any affection for him. {46} I must know that, though being human he might stumble, his proper stature is upright. If I cared for you, I could not stand here and scorn you, as I do; I should pray you to be true to your noble self, to give me back my trust in you. I should forgive you; but my forgiveness would be coals of fire on your head. If I could love a man well enough to sin for him, I should love him too well for that. Oh! it was manly, and tender, and generous of you, was it not? I had lost all but self-respect, and you would have taken that from me. But, sir, I have wings which you can never entangle!"

She stood one instant as though his words were indeed true, then threw her hands upward, "I turn to God! I turn to God!" she cried out.

But the strength that passion gives is brief, and when Margaret reached the street, she was trembling with weakness. Where to go? Not home; oh! not to that gloomy place! She walked across the Common, and thence to the Public Gardens, every step a weariness.

"I must stay out in the sunshine," she thought, taking a seat under the great linden-tree that stands open to the west. "Darkness, and chilly, shadowed places are terrible. Oh! what next?"

Though she had called on God, she yet believed not in him, poor Margaret! Hers had been the instinctive outcry of one driven to desperation; and when the impulse subsided, then darkness fell again.

Sitting there, she drew from her pocket a little folded paper, opened it in an absent way, and dreamily examined the delicate white powder it contained. More than once, when life had pressed too heavily, the enchanter hidden under this delusive form had came to her aid, had loosened the tense cords that bound her forehead, unclasping them with a touch as light and tender as love's own, had charmed away the pain from flesh and spirit. She recollected now anew its sinuous and subtile ways. First, a deep and gradually settling quietude of mind and body, all disturbing influences stealing away so noiselessly that their going was imperceptible, a prickling in the arms, a languor in the throat and at the roots of the tongue, a sweet fainting of the breath, an entire and perfect peace. Then a slowly rising perception of pleasures already in possession yet unnoticed before.

How delightful the mere involuntary act of breathing! How airily intoxicating the full, soft rush of blood through the arteries, swinging noisily like a dance to a song, never lost, in whatever labyrinthine windings it might wander. How the universe opened like a folded bud, like myriad buds that bloom in light and color and perfume! The air and the sunshine became miracles; common things slipped off their disguise, and revealed undreamed-of glories. All this in silence. And presently the silence would be found rhythmic like a tune.

She went no farther. The point at which all these downy influences became twined into a cord as potent as the fabulous Gleipnir, and tightened about both body and soul with its soft, implacable coils—that her thought glanced away from.

She carefully shook the shining powder into a little heap in the paper. There was ten times as much as she had ever taken at once; but then she had ten times greater need of rest and forgetfulness. Her head felt giddy, as if a wheel were going within it. {47} Catching at that thought of a wheel, her confused memory called up strange eastern scenes, a temple in a gorge among rocky mountains; outside, the dash of a torrent foaming over its rough bed between the palms; not far away, the jungle, where the tiger springs with a golden flash through the shadows; within, hideous carved idols with vestments of cloth of gold, and silver bowls set before them, the noiseless entering of a gliding lama, the bowed form and hand outstretched to twirl the praying-wheel, whereon is wound in million-fold repetition the one desire of his soul, "Um mani panee, houm!" O jewel in the lotos! Rest and forgetfulness! So her thought kept murmuring with weary persistency.

"I cannot go while you have such a face, and while that paper is in your hand," Louis Granger said firmly; and reaching, took the morphine from her.

She did not appear to hear him. She was swaying in her seat, and her breath came sobbingly.

Mr. Granger called a carriage that was passing, and led her to it. She made no resistance, and did not object, scarcely noticed, indeed, when he seated himself opposite her.

"Walk your horses till I find out where the lady wants to go," he said to the driver.

When, after a few minutes of sickening half-consciousness, Margaret began to realize who and where she was, and looked at Mr. Granger, she met his eyes full of tears.

"I have no claim on your confidence," he said, "but I desire to serve you; and if you can trust me, I assure you that you will never have reason to regret it."

Margaret dropped her face into her hands, and all the pride died out of her heart.

"I was starving," she said. "I have not tasted food for twenty-four hours; and for a week I have eaten nothing but dry bread."

Mr. Granger leaned quickly and took her hand in a strong grasp, as we take the hands of the dying, to give them strength to die.

"I worked day and night," she sobbed; "and I only got enough to make me decent, and pay for my room. I have done all I could; but I was losing the strength to do. I have been starving so for more than a year, growing worse every day. I wasn't responsible for trying to take the morphine. My head is so light and my heart is so heavy, that everything seems strange, and I don't quite know what is right and what is wrong."

Mr. Granger's sympathy was painfully excited. He was not only shocked and hurt for this woman, but he felt that in some way he was to blame when such things could be. He had also that uneasiness which we all experience when reminded how deceitful is the fair surface of life, and what tragedies may be going on about us, under our very eyes, yet unseen and unsuspected by us. "What if my own little girl should come to this!" he thought.

"No," Margaret replied sadly, "I think that according to his light, he had some kind meaning. You know he doesn't believe in any religion, that he denies revelation; yet you would not call him a villain for that. Why then is he a villain for denying a moral code that is founded on revelation? He is consistent. If God and my own instincts had not forbidden me to accept his proposal, nothing else would have had power."

"Promise to trust all to me now," Mr. Granger said hastily, "I am not a Maurice Sinclair."

"Have I not trusted you?" she asked with trembling lips. "Besides, it seems that God has sent you to me, and trusting you is trusting him. I didn't expect him to answer me; but I called, and he has answered."

Chapter II.

A Louis D'or.

With the exception of that perfect domestic circle not often beheld save in visions, there is perhaps no more delightful social existence than may be enjoyed where a few congenial persons are gathered under one roof, in all the freedom of private life, but without its cares, where no one is obliged to entertain or be entertained, but is at liberty to be spontaneously charming or disagreeable, according to his mood, where comfort is taken thought of, and elegance is not forgotten.

Into such an establishment Mr. Granger's home had expanded after the death of his wife. It could not be called a boarding-house, since he admitted only a few near friends; and he refused to consider himself as host, The only visible authorities in the place were Mrs. James, the housekeeper, whose weapon was a duster, and Miss Dora Granger, whose sceptre was a blossom.

The house was a large, old-fashioned one, standing with plentiful elbow-room in a highly respectable street that had once been very grand, and there were windows on four sides. All these windows looked like pleasant eyes with spectacles over them. There was a rim of green about the place, a tall horse-chestnut-tree each side of the street, and an irrepressible grape-vine that, having been planted at the rear of the house, was now well on its way to the front. This vine was unpruned, an embodied mirth, flinging itself in every direction, making the slightest thing it could catch at an excuse for the most profuse luxuriance, so happy it could never stop growing, so full of life it could not grow old.

In the days when Mr. Granger's grandfather built this mansion, walls were not raised with an eye chiefly to the accommodation of Pyramus and Thisbe. They grew slowly and solidly, of honest stone, brick, and mortar. They had timbers, not splinters; there wasn't an inch of veneering from attic to basement; and instead of stucco, they had woodwork with flutings as fine as those of a lady's ruffle. When you see mahogany-colored doors in one of those dwellings, you may be pretty sure that the doors are mahogany; and the white knobs and hinges do not wear red. Cannon-balls fired at these houses stick in the outer wall.

Such was Mr. Louis Granger's home. Miss Hamilton had looked at that house many a time, and sighingly contrasted it with the dingy brick declivity in which she had her eyrie, Now she was to live here.

"How wishes do sometimes come fulfilled, if we only wish long enough!" she thought, as the carriage in which she had come drew up before the steps. {49} Mr. Granger stood in the open door, and there was a glimpse of the housekeeper behind him, looking out with the utmost respect on the equipage of their visitor—for one of Miss Hamilton's wealthy friends had offered her a carriage.

But as the step was let down, and the liveried footman stood bowing before her, Margaret shrank back with a sudden recollection that was unspeakably bitter and humiliating. In spite of the mocking show, she was coming to this house as a beggar, literally asking for bread. On the impulse of the moment, she could have turned back to her attic and starvation rather than accept friendship on such terms. In that instant all the petty spokes and wheels in the engine of her poverty combined themselves for one wrench more.

Margaret gave him her hand, and stepped out on to the pavement, her face downcast and deeply blushing.

He made no reply, and seemed not to have heard her ungracious comment; but when they reached the threshold, he paused there, and said earnestly, "I bid you welcome to your new home. May it be to you a happy one!"

Mr. Granger's manner was joyful and cordial, as if he were receiving an old friend, or meeting some great good fortune. Bidding the housekeeper wait, he conducted Margaret to a room near by, and seated her there to hear one word more before he should go to his business and leave her to the tender mercies of his servants. As she sat, he stood before her, and leaning on the high back of a chair, looked smilingly down into the expectant and somewhat anxious face that looked up at him.

"I am so cruel as to rejoice over every circumstance which has been influential in adding to my household so welcome and valuable a friend," he said. "I have worlds for you to do. First, my little Dora is in need of your care. It is time she should begin to learn something. I have also consented, subject to your approval, to associate with her two little girls of her age, who live near, and will come here for their lessons. Besides this, a friend of mine, who is preparing a scientific work, and who does not understand French, wishes you to make some translations for him. Does this suit you?"

"But first you must rest," he said. "And now I will leave you to get acquainted with the house under Mrs. James's auspices. Do not forget that your comfort and happiness are to be considered, that you are to ask for whatever you may want, and mention whatever may be not to your liking, Have you anything to say to me now?" pausing with his hand on the door-knob.

"Yes," she replied, smiling, to hide emotion; "as in the Koran God said of St. John, so I of you, 'May he be blessed the day whereon he was born, the day whereon he shall die, and the day whereon he shall be raised to life!'"

He took her hand in a friendly clasp, then opened the door, and with a gesture that included the whole house, said, "You are at home!"

Margaret glanced after him as he went out, and thought, "At home! The French say it better: I am chez vous!"

"You have to go up two flights, Miss Hamilton," the housekeeper began apologetically, with the footman still in her eye. "But Mr. Granger said that you want a good deal of light. Mr. and Mrs. Lewis occupy that front room over the parlor, and the next one is the spare-chamber, and that one under yours is Mr. Granger's, and that little one is Dora's, and the long one back in the L is Mr. Southard's. Up this other flight, Miss Aurelia Lewis has the front chamber. She likes it because the horse-chestnut tree comes up against the window. In summer you can hardly see through. It's like being in the woods. There, this is your chamber," flinging open the door of a large, airy room that had two deep windows looking over the house-tops straight into the eyes of the east. The coloring of this room was delightfully fresh and cool, the walls a pale olive-green, the wood-work white, and the wide mantel-piece of green marble. There were snow-white muslin curtains, Indian matting on the floor, and the chairs were all wicker, except one, a crimson-cushioned arm-chair. The old-fashioned bureau and wardrobe were of solid mahogany adorned with glittering brass knobs and handles, and the black and gilt framed looking-glass had brass candle-sockets at each side. The open grate was filled with savin-boughs, and a bright shell set in the midst. In the centre of the mantle-piece was a white vase running over full of glistening smilax sprays, and at each end stood a brass candlestick with a green wax candle in it. There were three pictures on the three blank walls; one a water-color of moss-roses and buds dew sprinkled, the second, a chromo of a yellow-gray cat stretched out in an attitude of slumbrous repose, her tail coiled about her lithe haunches, her head advanced and resting on her paws, her eyes half shut, but showing a sly line of watchful golden lustre. The third was a very good engraving of the Sistine Madonna. A large closet with drawers and shelves, delightful to feminine eyes, led back from this quaint and pleasant chamber.

Margaret glanced around her pretty nest, then flung off her bonnet and shawl, and, seating herself in the armchair by the window, for the first time really looked at the housekeeper. Till that moment she had not been conscious of the woman.

Mrs. James was hospitably making herself busy doing nothing, moving chairs that were already well placed, and wiping off imaginary specks of dust. She looked as though she would be an excellent housekeeper, and put her whole soul in the business; but appeared to be neutral otherwise.

"Everything here was as clean as your eye this morning," she said, frowning anxiously as she stooped to bring a suspected table-top between her vision and the light.

"Everything is exquisite," Miss Hamilton replied. "One can't help having a speck of dust now and then, The earth is made of it, you know."

The housekeeper sighed wofully. "Yes, there's a great deal of dirt in the world."

When she was left alone, Margaret still sat there, letting the room get acquainted with her, and settling herself into a new and delicious content. Happening after a while to glance toward the door, she saw it slowly and noiselessly moving an inch or two, stopping, then again opening a little way. She continued to look, wondering what singular current of air or eccentricity of hinge produced that intermittent motion. Presently she spied, clasped around the edge of the door, at about two feet from the carpet, four infinitesimal fingertips, rosy-white against the yellow-white of the paint. Miss Hamilton checked the breath a little on her smiling lips, and awaited further revelations.

After a moment, there appeared just above the fingers a half-curled, flossy lock of pale gold-colored hair, and softly dawning after that aurora, a beautiful child's face.

Miss Hamilton leaned back in her chair again, and began to recollect the tactics for such cases made and provided by the great law-giver Nature. She affected not to be aware that the silken locks reappeared, and after them a glimpse of a low, milk-white forehead, then a blue, bright eye, and finally, the whole exquisite little form in a gala-dress of white, with a gay sash and shoulder-knots.

Dora came in looking intently at the mantel-piece, and elaborately unconscious that there was any one present but herself. Miss Hamilton's attention was entirely absorbed by the outer world.

"I never did see such a lovely flower as there is in that window," she soliloquized. "It is as pink as ever it can be. Indeed, I think it is a little pinker than it can conveniently be. It must have to try hard."

"And I see three tiny clouds scudding down the east. I shouldn't be surprised if their mother didn't know they are out. They run as if they didn't mean to stop till they get into the middle of next week."

Dora took a step or two nearer, looked warily at the speaker, and peeped out the window in search of the truant cloudlets.

"And there is another cloud overhead that has gone sound asleep," Miss Hamilton pursued as tranquilly as if she had been sitting there and talking time out of mind. "One side of it is as white as it can be, and the other side is so much whiter than it can be, that it makes the white side look dark. If anybody wants to see it, she had better make haste."

"Anybody," was by this time close to the window, looking out with all her eyes, her hand timidly, half unconsciously touching the lady's dress.

"Oh! what a splendid bird!" cried the enchantress. "What a pity it should fly away! But it may come back again pretty soon."

"I suppose you don't care much about sitting in my lap, so as to see better," was the next remark, addressed, apparently, to all out-doors.

The child began shyly to climb to the lady's knee, and was presently assisted there.

"Such a bird!" sighed Margaret then, looking at the little one, thinking that by this time her glance could be borne. "It had yellow specks on its breast," illustrating with profuse and animated gestures, "and a long bill, and a glossy head with yellow feathers standing up on top, and yellow stripes on its wings," pointing toward her own shoulders, her glance following her finger. Then a break, and an exclamation of dismay, "What has become of my wings?"

Dora reached up to look over the lady's shoulder, but saw only the back of a well-fitting bombazine gown.

"Then I'll tell you a story," said Margaret. "Once there was a lady who lived in a real mean place, and she didn't have a good time at all. She was just as lonesome and homesick as she could be. One day she brought home the photograph of a dear little girl, and that she liked. And she wished that she could see the real little girl, and that she could talk to her; but she had only the paper picture. {52} Well, by and by she went to live in a delightful house; and while she sat in her chamber, the door opened, and who should come in but the same dear child whose picture she had loved! Wasn't the lady glad then?"

The answer was a shower of kisses all over her sweet face, and two tears that dropped unseen into her sunny hair.

Comparative Morality Of Catholic
And Protestant Countries.

It is truly refreshing to read in Putnam's Magazine for January, 1869, the article entitled, "The Literature of the Coming Controversy," written, as we now know, by Rev. Leonard W. Bacon, a Protestant minister of Brooklyn, In it, he castigates most soundly the well known anti-popery society called "The American and Foreign Christian Union," "numbering," as he says, among its vice-presidents and directors, some of the most eminent pastors, bishops, theologians, and civilians of the American Protestant churches. Some of its publications he calls "wicked impostures" and "shameful scandals," and wonders "how they can stand, from year to year, accredited to the public by some of the most eminent and excellent men in the country." Our wonder is still greater how he can call men who countenance such things "excellent." He says: "All the time that this society has been running its manufactory of falsehoods and scandals, only the resolute good sense of the public, in not buying the rubbish, has saved the church of Christ from a burning and ineffaceable disgrace." The disgrace to the church, it seems to us, is the same, since its chief men are implicated in this proceeding, "whether the public buy the rubbish or not." We honor Mr. Bacon for his manly, straightforward conduct, and thank him for this act of justice. It is the first we have had to rejoice in for a long while, but we hope it will not be the last. The time seems to be approaching, when calumny and abuse will no longer be received with favor by the public, and the Catholic Church be allowed to speak in her own defence, and listened to, and judged of, according to her own intrinsic merits. All we ask is fair play, and we are confident the truth will make itself known.

But the Rev. Mr. Bacon, after denouncing the lying and scurrilous attacks against the church, goes on to say: "It is a pleasant relief to take up another author—the Rev. M. Hobart Seymour, of the Church of England. His two books, entitled Mornings with the Jesuits at Rome, and Evenings with the Romanists, are models of religious controversy. The latter of the two, especially, being the more popular, is peculiarly fitted to be effective in general circulation." …. "This sprightly, instructive, and interesting book has gone out of print." … It is out of print in English; but desiring to gladden our eyes with a copy of this model of "courtesy, fairness, ability, and religious feeling," we procured a translation into Spanish, entitled, Noches con los Romanistas, issued by The American Tract Society, for the use of benighted Spaniards. {53} We have read the opening chapter, and found it enough. We are tempted to exclaim with bitter disappointment, Is this all the fairness and justice we are to expect from one who is described as the "model" of a Protestant controversialist? We prefer the McGavins, the Brownlees, or the Kirwans whom Mr. Bacon so justly holds up to public scorn. This man stabs you in the dark; he is a Titus Oates, who swears away your life by false testimony—by telling just enough to convict you, when he knows enough to give you an honorable acquittal.

This opening chapter has for its theme the relative effects of Protestantism and the Catholic religion upon the morality of those under their respective influence; and to show that Catholic countries, in comparison to Protestant, are sinks of crime and impurity. This, if fairly proved, would be a practical argument of overwhelming force, sufficient to close the mind against all that can be said in favor of the Catholic Church; and be a sufficient reason, with most people, for refusing even to entertain her claims to be the Church of God. We know that she is Christ's Church, and that just in proportion as she exerts her influence, virtue and morality must prevail; and that it is impossible to prove, unless through fraud and misrepresentation, that the practical working of her system produces a morality inferior to that of any other.

We know all the importance of the question; it is one that touches our good name, and we feel indignation against any one who shall attempt to rob us of it, by any mean or unfair tricks. Let us see how our "model" controversialist deals with this matter. "In order not to cause a useless waste of time by going over all sorts of crimes," he selects the greatest one, that of murder or homicide. Then he selects England, and compares it with nearly all the Catholic countries of Europe, and shows it to be at least four times better than the very best of them. We do not propose to ferret this out; we cannot lay our hands upon the statistics of this particular crime, which seem to be everywhere very loosely given; but we can show shortly, that his conclusions are utterly false. He gives the number of persons imprisoned on this charge of homicide in England and Wales, during 1852, as 74, and the annual mean for three years as 72. This will strike every one as simply ridiculous. Luckily, the Statistical Journal of 1867 gives the following tables of this crime for 1865, as follows:

Verdicts Of Coroners' Juries.
Wilful murder	227
Manslaughter	282
Total	509

Police Returns
Wilful murder	135
Manslaughter	279
Concealment of birth	232
Total	646

Criminal Tables
Wilful murder cases tried	60
Manslaughter, cases tried	316
Concealment of birth, cases tried	143
Total	519

If 519 were tried, we may judge of the number imprisoned. The author of the article in the Journal says: "The police returns do not correspond with the coroners', and the discrepancy is so great that I can only account for it on the supposition that, according to the police view of it, infanticide is not murder." The number of coroners' inquests held in 1865, in England and Wales, was

Total	25,011
Verdict of accidental deaths	11,397

He continues, "Open verdicts, as they are termed, such as, 'found dead,' or 'found drowned,' are rendered in many cases when a more accurate knowledge would have led to the verdict of 'wilful murder.'"

It is just as easy to compare the total of first-class criminals of all sorts, as to select homicide.

Alison [Footnote 19] says, "The proportion of crime to the inhabitants was twelve times greater in Prussia (Protestant) than in France, (Catholic,) and in Austria, (Catholic,) the proportion of convicted crime is not one fourth of what is found in Prussia." The Statistical Journals for 1864-65 show that France is better than England.

There were no less than 846 deaths of children under one year old, in 1857, in England and Wales from violent causes, [Footnote 20] from which we may form some little idea of the extent of only one sort of homicide.

Only 74 incarcerations for homicide in all England and Wales for the year 1852! Why, it is stated in the New York Herald of February 4th, that 78 persons were arrested last year for murder in New York alone. We can easily imagine what the grand total for the United States must be, and how much better is England, with its pauperism and crime, than the United States?

Mr. Seymour undoubtedly is "sprightly" enough, but only "instructive" by showing us the amount of nonsense which the public is expected to swallow without examination, where the Catholic Church is concerned, and the amount of fair play to be expected from a "model" of a Protestant controversialist.

But as a comparison based on "homicide" alone would prove nothing, any more than one based on drunkenness or robbery, Mr. Seymour institutes another, in respect to unchastity, or immorality, and here he sets up as his criterion the amount of illegitimacy among Catholics and Protestants respectively. In any community, the moral condition is to be estimated by the greater or smaller proportion of illegitimacy. We object to this as a very unreliable test. In some communities, an illegitimate birth is almost unknown, and yet they are the most corrupt and licentious on the face of the earth. Infanticide and foeticide replace illegitimacy. A young woman falls from virtue; but in spite of the finger of scorn which will be pointed at her, her sense of religious duty restrains her from adding a horrible crime to her sin. What is her moral condition in the sight of God, compared with that of the guilty one whom no fear of the Almighty has restrained from the commission of this crime? The absence of illegitimacy may be the most convincing proof of a state of moral corruption, as in Persia and Turkey, where no children except in wedlock, are suffered to see the light of the world. [Footnote 21]

There are good reasons why more illegitimate children might be expected to be born among Catholics than among Protestants, and yet the former be much more the moral than the latter. "The doctrine of the Catholic Church," says Bishop Fitzpatrick, "her canons, her pontifical constitutions, her theologians, without exception teach, and constantly have taught, that the destruction of the human foetus in the womb of the mother, at any period from the first instant of conception, is a heinous crime, equal at least in guilt to that of murder." [Footnote 22]

This is understood by Catholics of all classes, and inspires a salutary horror of the crime. Protestantism does not teach morality in this definite way, but leaves people to reason out for themselves the degree of criminality of particular offences. Let us listen to Dr. Storer, an eminent Protestant physician. "It is not, of course, intended to imply that Protestantism, as such, in any way encourages, or indeed permits, the practice of inducing abortion; its tenets are uncompromisingly hostile to all crime. So great, however, is the popular ignorance regarding this offence, that an abstract morality is here comparatively powerless; our American women arrogate to themselves the settlement of what they consider, if doubtful, purely an ethical question; and there can be no doubt that the Romish ordinance, flanked on the one hand by the confessional, and by denouncement and excommunications on the other, has saved to to the world thousands of infant lives." [Footnote 23] Rev. Dr. Todd, a Protestant minister of Pittsfield, Mass., to his honor be it said, has had the courage to declare the same thing in similar words. [Footnote 24] Dr. Storer proceeds, "During the ten years that have passed since the preceding sentence was written, we have had ample verification of its truth. Several hundreds of Protestant women have personally acknowledged to us their guilt, against whom only seven Catholics, and of these we found, upon further inquiry, that but two were only nominally so, not going to the confession." [Footnote 25]

[Footnote 23: Criminal Abortion, P. 74.]

[Footnote 24: Serpents in the Dove's Nest.]

[Footnote 25: Criminal Abortion, p. 74.]

Two communities exist, in which, say, an equal amount of unchastity occurs. In one, religion restrains from the commission of further crime, and there is much illegitimacy apparent; in the other, criminal abortion destroys all the evidence, and though horribly corrupt in comparison, the appearance is all the other way. Some such comparison might be made between Paris and Boston; with what truth, each one can determine for himself, And there is another reason which adds force to what has been said. In Catholic countries, foundling hospitals, established for the very purpose of saving infant life, exist everywhere, Knowing that the temptation to conceal one's shame will, in many cases, be too strong to be resisted, and thus one crime be added to another, the impulse of Christian charity has caused the founding of these hospitals, so that the infant, instead of being killed, may be provided for, and the mother have a chance to repent, without being for ever marked with the brand of shame. Scarcely any such exist among Protestants. To set up, then, illegitimacy as the best criterion of the morals of a community, is a palpable injustice to Catholics.

But let us, nevertheless, follow Mr. Seymour on his own chosen ground, He thinks the Catholic country people may, in the absence of peculiar temptations, be as good as the Protestant; and that the state of great cities will show more the influence of religion on the morals of the people, We think the opposite; for in great cities there are immense masses of degraded people, who abandon the practice of religion, never go to church, and for whom the Protestant church, at least, would be apt to disclaim all responsibility. The country people are within the knowledge and the voice of the preacher or the priest, and religion exercises its proper influence upon them.

He selects London, on the Protestant side, as the largest city in the world, the richest, and where there are "the most numerous, the strongest, and the most varied temptations;" and, of course, where there should naturally be the most vice and crime. But facts contradict theory. The percentage of illegitimate births in London is 4.2, while that for all England and Wales is 6.5, and in the country districts, where the "numerous, strong, and varied temptations" are wanting, it varies from 9 to over 11. [Footnote 26]

London is compared with Paris, Brussels, Munich, and Vienna; and the rates are given as follows:

In Paris	Roman Catholic	thirty-three per cent
In Brussels	Roman Catholic	thirty-five per cent
In Munich	Roman Catholic	forty-eight per cent
In Vienna	Roman Catholic	fifty-one per cent
In London	Protestant	four per cent

and then, to show that this fearful disproportion exists not only in the capital cities, but also in other smaller ones, we have another table:

Protestant England.		R. C. Austria
Bristol and Clifton	4 per ct.	Troppau	26 per ct.
Bradford	8 per ct.	Zara	30 per ct.
Birmingham	6 per ct.	Innspruck	22 per ct.
Brighton	7 per ct.	Laybach	38 per ct.
Cheltenham	7 per ct.	Brunn	42 per ct.
Exeter	8 per ct.	Linz	46 per ct.
Liverpool	6 per ct.	Prague	47 per ct.
Manchester	7 per ct.	Lemberg	47 per ct.
Plymouth	5 per ct.	Klagenfort	56 per ct.
Portsea	5 per ct.	Gratz	65 per ct.

The inference from these figures, drawn with many exclamations of surprise and horror, is, that the Protestant religion is ten times as powerful against crime and vice as the Catholic, and to create an overwhelming conviction of the essential corruption of the latter. Nothing is further from the truth. London, Liverpool, Birmingham, etc., are as corrupt as any cities of the world. The cities of France and Austria need not fear the comparison, and the more thoroughly it is made the better.

"And here a few words on the unhappy reason why London and other large towns of Great Britain and also Holland are comparatively moral in this respect, and that in their cases the average of this species of immorality is far below that of the great cities of the continent; the fact that in this respect the urban population of Great Britain appears to be what it most certainly is not, comparatively pure, the rural the most corrupt; whilst on the continent the reverse is evident. There can be no doubt, as Mr. Lumley, in his able Poor-Law Reports, has often hinted, that this difference is owing to the prevalence of what has been justly called the 'social evil;' to the license, it may, in truth, be called encouragement, which, in the populous districts of this country, and notoriously in Holland, is given to public prostitution. Of course there will be no illegitimacy among Mohammedans and Hindoos, in Japan and China, or the African tribes, nor also among those who live much in the same manner." And, we might add, who practise infanticide and foeticide as they do. He goes on, "In London, the fallen women may be taken, at the mean of the estimates, at 40,000. … In Birmingham, in 1864, there were 966 disreputable houses where they resorted; in Manchester, 1111; in Liverpool, 1578; in Leeds, 313; in Sheffield, 433. [Footnote 28] And here we have revealed a plague-spot in English society which runs through every grade, especially the artisan, manufacturing, and lower commercial classes, who, as we have seen, in general never enter a church. … There is no need, in addition, to dwell on the revelations of the divorce court, which prove that Englishmen are nearly as bad in this respect as the northern Germans. There is no one who is acquainted with the condition of the families of artisans who does not know the sad frequency with which they abandon their wives, and how frequently they live in a state of concubinage."

Alison corroborates this: "In London the proportion (of illegitimacy) is one to thirty-six, the effect, it is to be feared, of the immense mass of concubinage which there prevails, under circumstances where a law of nature renders an increase of the population from that source impossible." [Footnote 29]

[Footnote 28: Statistical Journal, 1864.]

[Footnote 29: Vol. ii. chap. xvii. 122.]

"In London, however, and the English cities, there are more illegitimate births than appear on the registers, because children of people who live together without being married are registered 'legitimate.'" [Footnote 30] So much for London, Liverpool, etc.

In Paris, a great proportion of the children reckoned illegitimate are born in the lying-in hospitals, or brought to the foundling hospitals, and the greater proportion of the mothers are from the provinces, as will be seen from the following table for 1856:

Mothers known	3383
Department Seine	551
Other departments	2550
Foreign countries	282

Children born in concubinage are reckoned illegitimate, and about one-ninth of such children, on an average, are afterward legitimated. The proportion of illegitimacy, then, for Paris proper, on the best calculations, is not over 12 per cent; and that of London, calculated on the same data, would probably be quite as large, if not larger.

The same considerations apply to Brussels, Vienna, and Munich. Large foundling and lying-in hospitals exist in al these places, and are resorted to by all the country round. The figures for these cities are in no sense a criterion of their morals.

In Munich and Vienna, there is another important thing to be taken into account, which we shall explain when we come to speak of countries. We see, then, how much value is to be attributed to the heavenly purity of Protestant London, Liverpool, etc., in comparison to the "astonishing," "horrible" corruption of Catholic capitals on the continent. Moreover, in the latter the "social evil" is kept within strictest limits, and under the complete control of the government, and is not allowed to flaunt itself in public, as in London and New York, These considerations are strengthened by the case of Protestant Stockholm, where, public prostitution being prohibited, the rate of illegitimacy is over fifty to the hundred—quite equal to that of Vienna. [Footnote 31] Why did not Mr. Seymour cite Stockholm, which is notorious? I will answer: It was not convenient to spoil a good story.

Now as to the smaller cities of Austria, which, according to Seymour, beat the world for corruption, what is to be said? Simply, that they are no worse than their neighbors. What we have said of the foundling and lying-in hospitals of Paris explains the whole matter. "In Austria, excluding Hungary, there are forty foundling and forty lying-in hospitals, and the number of foundlings provided for by the government is over 20,000." [Footnote 32]

These hospitals exist, without doubt, in all these cities; and if we subtract their inmates who come from the country we should find that they do not compare unfavorably with their neighbors. They include the chief cities of the German provinces of the empire; and allowing only 4273 foundlings from the country to be in their hospitals, which is certainly a very moderate calculation, their own proper rate of illegitimacy would not exceed ten per cent. This would be the case in Innspruck, for example, if 53 only were received. Our "model of fairness" from such data draws his main conclusions, which prove that he is very "sprightly" at the figures, if nothing else. Shall we excuse him on the plea of ignorance? No! he was bound to verify his statements, and the conclusions from them; and if he had chosen to take the pains, the sources of information were open to him. {58} An infamous calumny against the Catholic Church is invented by somebody, and the whole tribe of popery-haters forthwith swear roundly that it is "undoubted," "notorious," etc., and, by dint of clamor, force the public to give credit to it.

But, seemingly aware that comparing London with cities so different in climate, position, language, etc., has rather an unfair look, he says he will take cities of two adjoining countries of the same race, and gives us the following table:

Austria, Rom. Cath.		Prussia, Protestant.
Vienna	51%	Berlin	18%
Prague	47%	Breslau	26%
Linz	46%	Cologne	10%
Milan	32%	Konigsberg	28%
Klagenfort	56%	Dantzig	20%
Gratz	65%	Magdeburg	11%
Lembach	47%	Aix la Chapelle	4%
Laybach	38%	Stettin	13%
Zara	30%	Posen	19%
Brunn	22%	Potsdam	12%

The only thing this table proves is, that in Prussia the two Catholic cities of Cologne and Aix la Chapelle are better than any of the Protestant ones. They show excellently well in the Protestant column; but then the reader who is not well-posted or observant might suppose that, being in Protestant Prussia, they are Protestant cities. We can hardly suppose Mr. Seymour, who is a traveller, to be ignorant of so well known a fact. And how comes it that Protestant Prussia makes so poor a show alongside of the pure and virtuous cities of Birmingham and Liverpool, where there are "so many and varied temptations"?

"If, then," he says, "the question of the comparative efficacy of Romanism and Protestantism to restrain vice and immorality is to be decided by the comparison of Austria and Prussia, we have as a basis of a certain judgment this notable fact, that in ten cities of Austria we find forty-five illegitimate births in the hundred, and in ten cities of Prussia, sixteen only." We have seen what this is worth. It seems to us that it would be more satisfactory to compare Austria and Prussia at once than to pick out cities here and there to suit one's purpose. And this seems to strike our author; for he says, "They often assure us that some Protestant countries, as Norway, Sweden, Saxony, Hanover, and Wurtemberg are as demoralized as Roman Catholic countries. I shall not deny the allegation; but if a profound demoralization exists in some Protestant countries, that in Catholic countries is much worse." Then he goes on in this style to make his assertion good:

Protestant		Catholic
Norway	10%	Styria	24%
Sweden	7%	Up. & L. Austria	25%
Saxony	14%	Carinthia	35%
Denmark	10%	Salzburg	22%
Hanover	10%	Prov. of Trieste	23%
Wurtemberg	12%	Bavaria	24%

Here we have Styria, Upper and Lower Austria, Carinthia, Salzburg, Trieste, which are not separate countries at all, but simply the German provinces of the Austrian empire, and Bavaria, compared with countries so different and wide apart as Norway, Sweden, Saxony, Hanover, and Wurtemberg. This is tricky in the extreme. Moreover, there is no reliance to be placed on the figures which express their rate of illegitimacy, for a very good reason. Marriage is forbidden to great numbers in German Austria and Bavaria. "No person in Austria can marry if he does not know how to read, write, and cipher." [Footnote 33] Besides, in both countries, a man, before being permitted to marry, had to possess a sum of money quite out of reach of a great many. Appleton's Cyclopaedia [Footnote 34] says, "In some German states the obstacles to legal marriage are so great that numbers of people prefer to live together in what would be perfectly legal wedlock in Scotland and America, but is only concubinage by the local laws of the state."

[Footnote 33: Alison, vol. iii. chap, xxvii. 9.]

[Footnote 34: Article Europe.]

They marry, but the state will not recognize the children as legitimate, and the official registers are no criterion of the real state of the case. Mr. J. D. Chambers says, [Footnote 35] "In Bavaria, moreover, where the population is one-third Protestant, there exists an atrocious state of law which forbids marriage unless the contracting parties satisfy the authorities that they are capable of maintaining a family without extraneous aid. This, of course, leads to many secret marriages and illicit connections, so that this country ought to be excepted from the average."

The Bavarians are as good a people as any in Germany, and it is a shame to libel them. If countries are to be compared—and it is the only fair and honest way to proceed—why not compare them in a straightforward, obvious way—France and England, Prussia and Austria—in fact, all the countries we can get the statistics of, and show the result in a tabular form, so that we can understand the whole thing at a glance? This would effectually put a stop to the cry of the vice of Catholic countries, which the Chicago Press, of January 11th, declares to be "notorious throughout the country." It is "notorious," because statements like Seymour's, cooked up for a purpose, give rise to utterly false conclusions, which are easily caught up and trumpeted, through the pulpit and the press, all over the country.

We shall now, leaving out Bavaria, for the reasons above given, give the latest and best statistics, in respect to illegitimate births, which it is possible to get. They are taken from the journals of the Statistical Society of London of the years 1860, 1862, 1865, 1867, the principal portions being compiled by Mr. Lumley, Honorary Secretary of the society, and contained in that of 1862, to be seen in the Astor Library. It will be interesting to the general reader, apart from its controversial bearings.

In Prussia, we have statistics according to the religious creed of the people. We shall, therefore, divide it into Catholic and Protestant. We wish the same could be done for Holland and Switzerland. Where there is a large minority differing from the majority, it would be most interesting; but it cannot be done except in Prussia. The number of illegitimate births in the hundred is as follows, according to the latest accounts given:

	Catholic Countries.
1828-37	Kingdom of Sardinia	2.1
1859	Spain	5.6
1853	Tuscany	6.
1858	Catholic Prussia	6.1
1859	Belgium	7.4
1856	Sicily	7.4
1858	France	7.8
1851	Austria	9.
	Protestant Countries.
1859	England and Wales	6.5
1855	Norway	9.3
1858	Protestant Prussia	9.3
1855	Sweden	9.5
1855	Hanover	9.9
1866	Scotland	10.1
1855	Denmark	11.5
1838-47	Iceland	14.
1858	Saxony	16.
1857	Wurtemberg	16.1

1859	Holland	4.1
1852	Switzerland	6.

Lest we be deemed to wish to conceal the depravity of Ireland, we give what is given by Mr. J. D. Chambers, [Footnote 36] who probably has access to the registrar's reports, which, of course, we have not:

1865-66

Catholic Ireland,

The particulars of the statistics throw a good deal of light on the morality of the different countries, for instance, in France and England. The rate of illegitimacy in all

England and Wales is	6.5
London only	4.2
Birmingham	4.7
Liverpool	4.9

In spite of the "numerous and varied temptations" of the large towns, the rate is much less in them than in the country, which runs after this fashion:

Nottingham	8.9
York, N. Riding	8.9
Salop	9.8
Westmoreland	9.7
Norfolk	10.7
Cumberland	11.4

In all France	7.8
In Paris	27.
Urban districts	12.
Rural districts	4.2
La Vendée	2.2
Brittany, Dep't. Cote D'Or	1.2

Brittany and La Vendee remained Catholic through the storm of the French Revolution, and at this moment are thoroughly so. In Austria, the rate is: whole empire, only 9; urban districts, from 25 to 65; therefore, rural districts cannot be more than 5 or 6.

Prussia gives us, perhaps, the most conclusive test of the effects of religion on morals; for the census has been carefully taken according to creed, for many years, with uniform result thus. There are over 11,000,000 Protestants, and over 7,000,000 Catholics, principally in the Rhine provinces, Westphalia, and Posen. [Footnote 37] The rate

Among Catholics	6.48	Among Protestants	10.0
Westphalia	3.7	Prov. of Prussia	6.7
Rhineland	3.7	Pomerania	10.3
Posen	6.8	Brandenburg	12.0

Rev. T. W. Woolsey, of Yale College, New Haven, bears testimony to this relative state of morals in regard to the kindred subject of divorce, in an address before the Western Social Science Convention, at Chicago, as follows: "We have made some comparisons between the frequency of divorce in this country and in other parts of Protestantism. Prussia had the reputation of having the lowest system of divorce laws anywhere to be found. But the ratio there of annual divorces to annual marriages in 1855 was, among non-Catholics, one to twenty-nine, or about 3.5 per cent less than in Vermont or Ohio, and far less than in Connecticut, where it is 9.6 per cent. The greatest ratio nearly thirty years ago in the judicial districts of Prussia was 57 divorces to 100,000 inhabitants; the least, 16 to 100,000: nay more, in the Prussian Rhenish provinces, where the law is based on the Code Napoleon, and where the Catholic inhabitants, being numerous, must have some influence on the social habits of Protestants, there were but four fair divorces to 100,000 Protestants, or twenty-four in all among 600,000 of that class of inhabitants. I write this in pain, being a Protestant, if, as the Apostle Paul says, 'I may provoke to emulation them which are my flesh, and might save some of them.'"

Scotland might be supposed by our Protestant friends to be high up on the list, having always been so completely under the influence of the pure gospel of Calvin and Knox; but the rate for Scotland is 10.1.

In the Lowlands, where Presbyterianism carried all before it, the rate is from 10 to 15. In the Highlands, which remained to a considerable extent Catholic, the average is 5.6.

Supposing the immorality of the large cities, Protestant and Catholic, to be the same, though it is pretty sure the Catholic are much the best, and confining our comparison to the mass of the rural population, which is the fairer test, and the countries would stand in the following order, beginning with the most favorable:

Sardinia	Catholic
Ireland	Catholic
Holland	Mixed
Spain	Catholic
Switzerland	Mixed
Tuscany	Catholic
Catholic Prussia	Catholic
Belgium	Catholic
France	Catholic
Sicily	Catholic
Austria	Catholic
England	Protestant
Norway	Protestant
Protestant Prussia	Protestant
Scotland	Protestant
Denmark	Protestant
Sweden	Protestant
Hanover	Protestant
Iceland	Protestant
Saxony	Protestant
Wurtemberg	Protestant

Thus, to sum up, the Catholic countries of Europe, perhaps without an exception, are above the Protestant, if the number of illegitimate births is accepted as a criterion of morality. Could we get the statistics of infanticide, and of a still more common and destructive crime, foeticide, and add them to the above, then we could form a more just idea of the benefit the Catholic religion, with her divine ordinance of Confession, has conferred on the human race. But of course it is impossible to determine with exactness the amount of this crime which hides itself in profound darkness; we can only conjecture from sure indications that it is one of fearful magnitude.

We need not go abroad; the evidence is at our own door. Take the State of Rhode Island as a specimen. The number of children annually receiving Catholic baptism exceeds the half of all the children born in the State, although the Catholic population does not exceed the third part; in other words, there are two Protestants to every Catholic, and yet there are more Catholic children born than Protestant. Illegitimacy is almost unknown among Catholics, and the birthrate is at least 1 to 25, which demonstrates that criminal abortion cannot exist to any extent worth speaking of. The birth-rate among Protestants is i to over 50. What becomes of the children who ought to be born? Let Dr. Storer speak: [Footnote 38] "Hardly a newspaper throughout the land that does not contain their open and pointed advertisements. … The profits that must be made from the sale of the drugs supposed abortifacient, may be judged from the extent to which they are advertised and the prices willingly paid for them." "We are compelled to admit that Christianity itself, or, at least, Protestantism, has failed to check the increase of criminal abortion." [Footnote 39] To the same effect we have a writer in Harper's very anti-popery Magazine: "We are shocked at the destruction of human life upon the banks of the Ganges, as well as on the shores of the South Sea Islands; but here in the heart of Christendom, foeticide and infanticide are extensively practised under the most aggravating circumstances. … It should be stated that believers in the Roman Catholic faith never resort to any such practices; the strictly Americans are almost alone guilty of such crimes." And Bishop Coxe, of the Protestant Episcopal Church, has published to his people the following: "I have hitherto warned my flock against the blood-guiltiness of ante-natal infanticide. If any doubts existed heretofore as to the propriety of my warnings on the subject, they must now disappear before the fact that the world itself is beginning to be horrified by the practical results of the sacrifices to Moloch which defile our land."

How is it with Protestant England? Dr. Lankester, one of the coroners of London, declares that there are 12,000 mothers in London alone, guilty of infanticide. [Footnote 40] In Prussia, Mr. J. Laing says that, "Chastity, the index virtue of the moral condition of the people, is lower than in almost any part of Europe." [Footnote 41] Let us look at home. Our attention has been so diverted to the vice and immorality of our Catholic neighbors, that we have begun to imagine ourselves the most moral, the most virtuous, the most enlightened people on the face of the earth, while, in reality, we are fast getting to be the most corrupt and abominable. It would be well to call to mind a little oftener the saying of our Lord, "First pull the beam out of thine own eye, and then thou shalt see clearly to pull the mote out of thy brother's eye."

[Footnote 40: Church and World, 1866, p. 57.]

[Footnote 41: Spald. Miscell. p. 484.]

We have thus exposed the untrustworthiness of Mr Seymour's Nights among the Romanists. With the evidence before him, he has kept back any honest and fair statement of it, and only put forward such portion as would serve to substantiate an utterly false conclusion, most injurious to us Catholics, both religiously and personally; for we cannot be looked upon in the mass as corrupt and vicious, without a great deal of personal ill-will and contempt and hatred being engendered.

We call the attention of the Rev. Mr. Bacon to this. He has taken a noble stand against base and unfair practices in the controversy with the Catholic Church, and we hope he will persevere in spite of the opposition he has raised against himself. We feel inclined to forgive him for some sins of his own, in this respect; for example, in speaking of the "Tax-Book of Roman Chancery," when Bishop England has so clearly shown it to be a base forgery. We hope our exposure of Mr. Seymour will be met in a generous and Christian spirit, and that he will promptly disavow all connection with him as an amende honorable for having recommended him.

We see, by The Christian World of September, that the American and Foreign Christian Union are going to reissue this book, and we hope these "eminent and excellent" men, now that their attention is called to it, will clean this out with the rest of the filth of their Augean stable. And also the directors of the American Tract Society are requested to consider seriously whether defamation is exactly the most Christian weapon to fight with, or the one most likely in the long run to overcome the Catholic Church, and whether they should not withdraw from circulation a book so damaging to their reputation as lights of the pure Protestant Gospel, shining amongst the darkness and moral corruptions of Popery.

Heremore-Brandon; Or,
The Fortunes Of A Newsboy.

Chapter VIII.

As might have ben supposed, Dick was at Mr. Brandon's office long before that gentleman made his appearance down-town. It was a sultry morning, with occasional snatches of rain to make the gloomy streets more gloomy, and the depressing atmosphere more depressing. Mr. Brandon was sensitive to heat; he had no cool summer retreat to go to in the evenings, and return from with a rose in his button-hole in the mornings; and as, instead of being grateful for the many years in which he had enjoyed this luxury, he was disposed to consider himself decidedly ill-used in not having it still, so soon as he found Dick waiting for him, he began his repinings in the most querulous of all his tones:

"Pretty hard on a man who has had his own country-place, and been his own lord and master, to come down to this blistering old hole every morning, isn't it, Mr. Heremore? Well, well, some people have no feeling! There are those old nabobs who were hand and glove with me, mighty glad of a dinner with me, and where are they now? Do they come around with 'How are you, Brandon?' and invitations to their dinners? Indeed not!"

"Mr. Brandon, I have come to talk to you about some business," began Dick, who had prepared a dozen introductions, all forgotten at the needed moment; then abruptly, "Mr. Brandon, did you ever hear my name, the name of Heremore before?"

It would be false to say that Mr. Brandon showed any emotion beyond that of natural surprise at the abruptness of the question; but it is safe to add that the surprise was very great, almost exaggerated. He replied, coolly enough, as he hung up his hat and sat down, wiping his face with his handkerchief: "Heremore? It is not, so to say, a common name; and I may or may not have heard it before. One who has been in the world so long as I have, Mr. Heremore, can hardly be expected to know what names he has or has not heard in the course of his life. I suppose you ask for some especial reason."

"I do," said Dick, a little staggered by the other's unembarrassed reply, "Did you not once know a gentleman in Wiltshire, called Dr. Heremore?"

"This is close questioning from a young man in your position to an old gentleman in mine, and I am slightly curious to know your object in asking before I reply."

"I believe you were married twice, Mr. Brandon, and that your first wife's maiden name was Heremore?"

"And that she died while you were away, believing you were dead; and and that she had two children," said Dick, who began to feel uneasy under the steady, smiling gaze of the other—"and that she had two children, a son and a daughter."

"Almost any one can tell you that my family consists of my first wife's daughter, and two sons by my second wife. But that's of no consequence. Two children, a son and a daughter, you were saying."

"Yes, two; although you may have been able to trace only one. She died in great poverty, did she not?"

"I decline answering any questions, I am highly flattered—charmed, indeed—at the interest you show in my family by these remarks; and I can only regret that my fortunes are now so low that I know of no way in which to prove my grateful appreciation of the manner in which you must have labored in order to know so much. In happier times, I might have secured you a place in the police department; but unfortunately, I am a ruined man, unable to assist any one at present."

At this speech, which was delivered in the most languid manner, and in a tone that was infinitely more insulting than the words, Dick was on the point of thrusting his mother's letter before the man's eyes, to show by what means he had obtained his knowledge; but the cool words, the indifferent manner, had a great effect upon our hero, who found it every moment more difficult to believe in the theory that from the first had seemed so likely to be the real one, and so he answered respectfully:

"I assure you, I mean no rudeness to you, Mr. Brandon; but I am engaged in the most serious business in the world, for me. I may be mistaken in you, and shall not know how to atone for the mistake, should I come to know it; but I hope you will be sure of my respectful intention, however I may err."

Mr. Brandon bowed, smiled, and played with his pen, as if the conversation were drawing to a close. Dick, heated and more embarrassed than ever, was obliged to recommence it.

"But was not your first wife's name Heremore? I beg you to answer me this one question, for all depends upon it."

"A very sufficient reason why I should not answer it. But as you to have something very interesting to disclose, perhaps we had better imagine that her name was Heremore before it was Brandon. Permit me to ask if, in that case, I am to own a relation in you? I certainly cannot make such a connection as advantageous as I could a year or so ago; but though I cannot prove the rich uncle of the romances, I shall be glad to know what scion of my wife's noble house I have the honor of addressing."

It seems easy to have answered "your son" but the words would not come. More and more the whole thing seemed a dream. What! a man so hardened that he could sit before his own son, whom by this time he must have known to be his son, and talk after this fashion of his dead wife's house! Impossible! If, then, he should tell his tale, and tell it to an unconcerned listener, what a sacrilege he would commit!

"A very near relative," Dick said at last. "I know that Dr. Heremore's daughter married a Charles Brandon about twenty-five years ago."

"Ah! I see! And you thought there was but one Charles Brandon in in the world! You see I shall have to learn a lesson in politeness from you; for I could conceive that there should be room in this world even two Richard Heremores."

Poor Dick was silenced for the moment. He knew he was taking up Mr. Brandon's time, and so the time of his employer. He walked up and down the little office and thought it all over. Certain passages in his mother's letter came to his mind. In this way, perhaps, had her appeals been sneered at in the olden times!

"Mr. Brandon," he said, standing in front of his tormentor, his whole appearance changed from that of the hesitating, embarrassed boy to the resolute, high-spirited man— "Mr. Brandon, there has been enough trifling. {65} I insist upon knowing if you were or were not the husband of Miss Heremore. If you were not, it is a very simple thing to say so. There are plenty of ways by which I can make myself certain of the fact without your assistance; but out of consideration for you, I came to you first."

"Heaven knows I do not ask anything of you, beyond the information I came to seek. I wondered yesterday why she should have given me her father's name instead of mine; now I can understand it. I had doubts while first speaking to you, but now they are gone. I believe it is so. If you will not tell me as much as you know of Dr. Heremore, I can go to his old home for it. It would have saved me time and expense if you had answered my questions; but as you please."

"My wife's name was Heremore," he said very indifferently, "and her father has been dead these twenty years. You have your answer. Permit me to ask what you mean to do about it?"

"Ah! indeed!" politely; "he was a very excellent old gentleman in his way; it is much to be regretted that he and you should have been unable to make each other's acquaintance."

"Are you quite sure?" asked Mr. Brandon in the same languid tones; but, for the first time, it seemed to Dick that they faltered.

"I should say this was a portrait of the first Mrs. Brandon," he said, taking that which Dick handed him and, looking at it, not without some signs of embarrassment, "or of someone very like her. And this is not unlike her writing, as I remember it. Oh! you wish me to read this?"

Dick signed assent, watching him while he read. Whatever Mr. Brandon felt while reading that letter, he kept it all in his own heart.

Then Mr. Brandon arose, handed the paper back, and said very quietly but deliberately:

"My first wife is dead and gone; her daughter lives with me, and, as long as I had the means, received every luxury she could desire. The past is past, and I do not wish it revived. Understand me. I do not wish it revived. I want to hear nothing more, not a word more, on this subject. If I were rich as I once was, I could understand why you should persist in this thing. I am not yet so poor that the law cannot protect me from any further persecution about the matter. Your mother, you say, named you for your grandfather, not for me. {66} If you wish paternal advice—all that my poverty would enable me to give, however I were disposed—I advise you to go for it to her father, for whom she showed her judgment in naming you. Good morning."

"You cannot mean this! You must have known me as a child, and known my name before, long, long ago, and surely consented to it, or she would not have so named me. Of course, it was by some mistake the Brandon was dropped at first, not by her, but by those who took care of me when she died; she could never have meant such a thing; it was undoubtedly an accident. You cannot mean to end all here—that I am not to know, to see, my sister!"

"I tell you I wish to hear not another word of this matter; do you hear me? Have I not troubles enough now without your coming to bring up the hateful past? You shall not add to your sister's, whatever you may do to mine."

"You shall not. I positively forbid you to go near her. Now leave me! I have borne enough."

"But I cannot let the matter rest here; you know I cannot. The idea of it is absurd! If you do not wish me for a son, I have no desire to force myself upon you. I do not know why you should refuse to own me; I am not conscious of any cause I have given you to so dislike me."

"I don't dislike you, nor do I like you particularly; I have no ill-feeling against you, but I don't want this old matter dragged up. I am not strong enough to bear persecution now."

"I hardly know. I may have had an idea that you would welcome your oldest child after so many years of loss, however unworthy of you he might be. I may have thought that if you once were not all you should have been to one who, likely, was at one time very dear to you, it might be a satisfaction to you, even at this late day, to retrieve—"

"You thought wrong, and it is not worth while wasting words on the matter. I have got over all that, and don't want it revived. I can't put you out, but I beg you to go; or, if you persist in forcing your words upon me, pray choose some other subject."

"I will go, since you so heartily desire it; but I warn you that I will not give up seeing Miss—my sister."

"As you please. You will get as little satisfaction there, I fancy; though it may not be quite as annoying to her as to me."

"Try. Go to her; say anything to her; make any arrangement with her you choose; take her away altogether. I don't care a button what you do, so you only leave me."

"I will leave you willingly, and am indeed sorry to have put you to so much pain."

"Not a word, I pray you," answered Mr. Brandon, now polite and smiling. "You have performed a disagreeable duty in the least disagreeable way you could, I do not doubt. All I ask is, never to hear it mentioned again."

Dick stayed for no more ceremony. Glad to be released from such an atmosphere of selfishness and cowardice, he hardly waited for the answer to his good-morning before turning to the street.

In less than an hour he was in the dreary room, with boarding-house stamped all over its walls, saying good-morning to a stately young lady, very pale and weary-looking, who kindly rose to receive him. {67} The little room was hot and close; there were no shutters to the windows; the shades were too narrow at the sides; besides being so unevenly put up that the eyes ached every time one turned toward them, and the gleaming light was almost worse than the heat.

"I have been trying for the dozenth time to straighten them," said Mary, drawing one down somewhat lower, "but it's of no use."

"Well, yes, rather," answered Mary, smiling. "I think I never saw anything before that was so near the perfection of crooked."

"I have seen your father this morning," Dick began, taking a chair near the table.

"Nothing that any one but myself need mind. I made some discoveries about myself last evening that I would like to tell you. Have you time?"

"I have nothing to do. I shall be very glad if my attentive listening can do you any service." She moved her chair, in a quiet way, a little farther from his, and looked at him in some surprise. She saw he was very earnest, excited, and greatly embarrassed. She could not help seeing that his eyes were anxiously following her every movement, eagerly trying to read her face.

"I am afraid I shall shock you very much, and you are not well; I am sorry I came. I thought only of my own eagerness to see you; not, until this moment, of the pain I may cause you."

"Do not think of that. I do not think, Mr. Heremore, you are likely to say anything that should pain me. I think you too sensible—I mean, too gentlemanly for that."

"I hope you really mean that. I am sure I must seem very rude and unpolished in your eyes; but I would have been far more so, had it not been for you."

"And you remembered that little thing all this time!" Mary exclaimed. "And you were once a newsboy!"

"Yes; I was once a great, stupid, ragged newsboy. I do not mean to deny, to conceal anything. I am so very sorry, for your sake; but I hope you will like me in spite of it all. If just those few words and that one smile did so much for me, what is there your influence may not do?"

"I don't know where to begin; this has excited me so that I do not know what I am saying, and now I wish almost that you might never know it; there is such a difference between us that I cannot tell how to begin."

"Is it necessary that you should begin?" asked Mary. "You told me you wished to speak to me, of some discoveries you had made in regard to yourself. To anything about yourself I will listen with interest; but I do not care to have anything said about myself; there can be no connection between the two subjects that I can see; so pray do not waste words on so poor a subject as myself; but tell me the discovery, if you please."

"But it concerns you as much as it does me. Do you know much about your own mother? She died, you told me, long ago."

"I know very little about her. I presume her death was a great grief to papa; for he has never permitted a word to be said about her, and anything that pains papa in that way is never alluded to. {68} The little I do know I have learned from my old nurse."

"Did you ever see her portrait, or any of her writing, or hear her maiden name?"

"Yes; I went to him at once. At first he was very determined I should not see you; but in the end, he seemed glad to get me silenced at any price, and I was so anxious to see you that I did not wait for very cordial permission."

"How did you dare to do it? Was he not very angry? I am sure you know something about mamma."

"Her portrait! My mamma's portrait! O what a beautiful face! Is this really my mamma? Did papa see it? Did he recognize it?"

"Deny it was hers! What in the world do you mean, Mr. Heremore? Where did you get it?"

Then Dick, in the best way he could, told the whole story of the box, and gave her the letter to read. When Mary came to the part which said, "Will you love your sister always, let what may be her fate? Remember, always, she had no mother to guide her," she turned her eyes, full of tears, to Dick, saying no words.

"She did not know that it would be the other way," Dick replied to her look, his own eyes hardly dry. "She would have begged for me if she had known that—" farther than this he could not get. Mary put her hands in his, and said earnestly:

"No need for that; her pleading comes just as it should. Will you really be my brother—all wearied, sick, and worn-out as I am? Oh! if this had only come two years ago, I could have been something to you!"

But Dick could not answer a word, He could only keep his eyes upon her face; afraid, as it seemed, that it would suddenly prove all a dream.

But the day wore on and it did not prove less real. The heat and the glaring light were forgotten, or not heeded, while the two sat together and talked of this strange story, and tried to fill up the outlines of their mother's history.

"I feel as if our grandpapa were living, or, if not living, there must be somebody who knows something about him," she said.

"I think so; even if you learned nothing, it would be a good thing for you just to have tried."

"I know I can get permission to stay away for a few days longer; there's nothing doing at this season, Would it take long?"

"I don't know much about it; not more than two days each way, I should think. There is a steamer, too, that goes to Portland, and you can find out if Wiltshire is near there. The steamer trip would be splendid at this season. Are you a good sailor?"

"I don't know. You have got a great ignoramus for a brother. I have never been half a day's journey from New York in my life."

"Is that so? Well, you must go to Portland. How you will enjoy the strong, bracing sea-breezes; they make one feel a new life!"

Then suddenly Dick's face grew very red, but bright, and he said eagerly: "Would you trust me—I mean could your father be persuaded—would you be afraid to go with me?"

"Oh! I wish I could! I would enjoy it as I never did a journey before! Just to see the sea again, and with a brother! I can't tell you how I have all my life envied girls with great, grown-up brothers. Nobody else is ever like a brother. Fred and Joe are younger than I, and have been away so much that they never seemed like brothers. A journey with you on such a quest would be something never to be forgotten."

"It doesn't seem as if such a good thing could come to pass," answered Dick. "I don't know anything about travelling; you would have to train me; but if you will bear with me now, I will try hard to learn. Do you think your father would listen to the idea?"

"No; he would not listen to ten words about it. He hates to be troubled; he would never forgive me if I went into explanations about an affair that did not please him; but if I say, 'Papa, I am going away for a couple of weeks to New England, unless you want me for something,' he will know where I am going, what for, and will not mind, so he is not made to talk about it; that is his way."

"Will you really go, then, with me? You know I shall not know how to treat you gallantly, like your grand beaux."

"Ah! don't put on airs, Mr. Dick; you were not so very humble before you knew our relationship. Remember, I have known you long."

"Ah! very well indeed; he comes to see us every New Year's day; he actually found us out this year, and I got to liking him more than ever; he has come quite often since, and we talked of you; he says you are a good boy. I am going to be grande dame to-day, and have lunch brought up for us two, unless Madame the landlady is shocked."

"No, indeed. Mrs. Grundy never interferes with people with clear consciences, at least in civilized communities; in provincial cities, and country towns she will not let you turn around except as she pleases; that's the difference. There are no bells in this establishment, or, if there are, nobody ever knew one to be answered, so I will start on a raid and see what I can discover."

In course of time she returned with a servant, who cleared the little rickety table, and then disappeared, returning at the end of half an hour with a very light lunch for two; but that was not her fault, poor thing!

Then hour after hour passed and still Dick could not leave her; he had gone out and bought a guidebook, which required them to go all over the route again, and there was so much of the past life of each to be told and wondered at, that it was late in the afternoon and Mr. Brandon's hand was on the door before Dick had thought of leaving. Of course he must remain to see Mr. Brandon, who, however, did not seem any too glad to see him. Nothing was said in regard to the matter which had been all day under discussion. Mr. Brandon talked of the news of the day, of the weather, and the last book he had read, accompanied him to the door, and shook hands with him quite cordially, to the surprise of the landlady, who was peeping over the banisters in expectation of high words between them. {70} Mr. Brandon even went so far as to speak of him as a very near relative, as several of the boarders distinctly heard. Mr. Brandon hated to be talked to on disagreeable subjects, but he knew the world's ways all the same.

"Come very early to-morrow morning," Mary said in a low voice as they parted, "and I will let you know if I can go."

Dick did not forget this parting charge, and early the next morning had the happiness of hearing that her father had consented to let her go.

"Papa isn't as indifferent as he seems," she said. "When it is all fixed and settled, he will treat you just as he does the rest of us, only he hates a scene and explanations. I suppose he was unkind to poor mamma, and now hates to say a word about it; but you may be sure he feels it. And now you must take everything for granted, come and go just as if you had always been at home with us, and he will take it so."

"Why, we will tell the truth, only as simply as possible—as if it were an everyday affair—that papa's first wife died while he was away from home, and that when he returned from Paris, where he says he was then, the people told him you were dead too. I don't know why that old woman should have told such a story."

"Nor I, but perhaps, poor, ignorant soul, she thought the boy was better under her charge than given over to a 'Protestant,' who had acted so like a heathen to the child's mother; but good as was her motive, and perhaps her judgment, I hope she did not really tell a lie about it, so peace to her soul. Who knows how much Dick owes to her pious prayers?"

A very proud and happy man was Dick in these days, when he journeyed to Maine with his newly-found sister. It is true that the change in Mr. Brandon's circumstances did not enable Mary to have a new travelling suit for the occasion, and that she was obliged to wear a last year's dress; but last year's dress was a very elegant one, and almost "as good as new;" for Mary, fine lady that she was, had the taste and grace of her station, and deft fingers, quick and willing servants of her will, that would do honor to any station; so her dress was all à la mode, and Dick had reason to be proud of escorting her. She had, however, something more than her dress of which to be proud, or Dick would not have been so grateful for finding her his sister; she had a kind heart, which enabled her always to answer readily all who addressed her, to make her constantly cheerful with Dick, and to keep everything smooth for the inexperienced traveller, who otherwise would have suffered many mortifications; she had, too, a womanly dignity, a sense of what was due to and from her, not as Miss Brandon, but as a woman, which secured her from any incivility and made her always gentle and considerate to every one. Dick could never enough delight in the quiet, composed way in which she received attentions which she never by a look suggested; for the gentle firmness, the self-possession, the quiet composure, the perfect courtesy of a refined and cultivated woman were new things to him; and to say he loved the very ground she walked on would be only a mild way of expressing the feeling of his heart toward her.

Added to all this, giving to everything else a greater charm, Mary's mind was always alive; she had been thoroughly educated, and had mingled all her life with intelligent and often intellectual people, whose influence had enabled her to seek at the proper fountains for entertainment and instruction. {71} Whatever passed before her eyes, she saw; and whatever she saw, she thought about. In her turn, Mary already dearly loved her brother; although two years younger than he, she was, as generally happens at their age, much more mature, and she could see, as if with more experienced eyes, what a true, honest heart, what thorough desire to do right, what patience and what spirit, too, there was in him, and again and again said to herself, "What would he not have been under other circumstances!" But she forgot, when saying that, that God knows how to suit the circumstances to the character, and that Dick, not having neglected his opportunities, had put his talent out to as great interest as he could under other influences. There was much that had to be broadened in his mind, great worlds of art and literature for him to enter; but there was time enough for that yet; he had a character formed to truth and earnestness, and had proved himself patient and energetic at the proper times. It now was time for new and refining influences to be brought to bear; it was time for gentleness and courtesy to teach him the value of pleasant manners and self-restraint; for the conversation of cultivated people to teach him the value of intelligent thoughts and suitable words in which to clothe them; for the knowledge of other lives and other aims to teach him the value or the mistake of his own. These things were unconsciously becoming clearer to him every day that he was with his sister, who, I need hardly say, never lectured, sermonized, or put essays into quotation marks, but whose conversation was simple, refined, and intelligent, whatever was its subject. Others greater than Mary would come after her when her work was done, we may be sure; but at the present time Dick was not in a state to be benefited by such.

When?

  Come, gentle April showers,
  And water my May flowers.
      The violet—
  Blue, white, and yellow streaked with jet—
  Thickly in my bed are set;
      Gay daffodillies,
  Tulips and St. Joseph's lilies;
      Bethlehem's star,
  Gleaming through its leaves afar;
  Merry crocuses, which quaff
  Sunshine till they fairly laugh;
  And that fragrant one so pale,
  Meekest lily of the vale,
  All are keeping whist, afraid
  Of this late snow o'er them laid.
  Come, then, gentle April showers,
  And coax out my pretty flowers.

  I am tired of wintry days,
  Have no longer heart to praise
  Icicles and banks of snow.
  When will dandelions blow,
      And meadow-sweet,
  And cowslips, dipping their cool feet
      In little rills
  Gushing from the mossy hills?
  I am weary of this weather.
  Vernal breezes, hasten hither,
  Bringing in your dappled train,
  Tearful sunshine, smiling rain,
  And, to coax out all my flowers,
  Fall, fall gently, April showers.

Translated From The French Of Le Correspondant.

Influence Of Locality On The Duration Of Human Life.

In every place there are influences which are favorable or unfavorable to the duration of human life. The nature of the soil, the atmospheric changes, the variations of the temperature, the position of one's abode with respect to the points of the compass and its elevation above the level of the sea, act in a powerful manner upon the organization.

A vast forest is one the grandest, most enchanting and enlivening scenes in nature. What an ineffable and touching harmony comes from the varieties of foliage, and what a sweet perfume they lend to the caressing breeze! What a soothing charm in their cool shade, calming the fever of life, purifying the soul from all passion, expanding and elevating the mind, and making man realize more fully his celestial origin. All men who are endowed with superior mental faculties have a natural and powerful inclination for solitude—especially the solitude of a vast forest. The soft light of its open spaces, the deep shades, the endless variety of tones from the quivering leaves, the pungent sweetness of the odors, the air full of vibrations and sparkling light, surround and penetrate them. It seems to them a glimpse of a world of mystery to which they have drawn near, and which harmonizes perfectly with all the thoughts and feelings in which they love to indulge.

Not only persons capable of reading the divine lessons written on space, love to wander in the shades of vast forests, but great noble hearts that have been wounded, also find here a balm. The soothing melancholy they drink in, the divine presence they feel, fill up the void left by some charming illusion that has been dispelled. There are special places where the air we breathe, and every exterior influence, tend to nourish and develop not only physical but intellectual life. A beneficent spirit seems to watch over the safety of humanity and to promote its happiness. The fluids, the emanations that surround us, penetrate our organization and become a part of our being; and in consequence of the wonderful sympathy between the body and soul, it is evident that they also influence our intellectual faculties.

Umbrageous forests are especially favorable to our existence; trees are devoted and faithful friends that never reproach us for their benefits, and their love is susceptible of no change, Plants are for us a real panacea. They are the natural pharmacies which Providence has established on earth for the prevention or cure of our diseases. From their wood, barks, leaves, flowers, and fruits, are exhaled essences which strengthen our organs, purify the blood, and neutralize the noxious air around us.

The history of all ages shows that those regions which are favored with vast forests have always been healthy and propitious to man; but where the forests have been cut down, those same regions have become marshy and the source of deadly miasmas, The marsh fevers which now prevail in certain parts of Asia Minor render them uninhabitable. {74} Nevertheless, ancient authors speak of marshes of small extent, but not of marsh fevers, because then the forests still remained.

A thousand years ago, La Brenne was covered with woods, interspersed with meadows. These meadows were watered by living streams. It was then a country famous for the fertility of its pastures and the mildness of its climate. Now the forests have disappeared. La Brenne is gloomy, marshy, and unhealthy. The same could be said of La Dombe, La Bresse, La Sologne, etc.

The following is a permanent example exactly to the point. In the Pontine marshes, a wood intercepts the current of damp air laden with pestilential miasmas, rendering one side of it healthy, while the other is filled with its destructive vapors. The places where forests have disappeared seem as if inhabited by evil genii, who eagerly seek to enter the human frame under the form of fevers, cholera, diseases of the lungs and liver, rheumatism, etc. For example, it is sufficient to breathe for only a few seconds in certain regions of Madagascar, or some of the fatal islands near by, for the whole organization to be instantly seized with mortal symptoms. The most robust and vigorous young man, who goes full of ardor to those shores with the hope of a bright future, affected by these miasmas, feels as if dying with the venom of the rattlesnake in his veins; and, if he recovers from his agony, it is often to drag out in sorrow the small remnant of his days. How many unfortunate people of this class have I not met during my voyage in the Indian Ocean. What a sacrilege to think of destroying these delicious and mysterious forests, with their atmosphere full of celestial vibrations, and their divine orchestra, where the breeze murmurs in a thousand tones the hymn which reveals the Creator to the creature! Every sorrow is soothed in the depths of those beneficent shades. There the soul, as well as the body, finds a repose which regenerates it. The divinity descends; we feel its presence. It moves us to the depths of our souls. It caresses us like the breath of the mother we adore!

Man may live to an advanced age in almost every climate, in the torrid as well as the frigid zone; but he cannot everywhere attain the utmost limit of human life. The examples of extreme longevity are more common in some countries than in others. Although, in general, a northern climate may be favorable to long life, too great a degree of cold is injurious. In Iceland, in the north of Asia—that is, in Siberia—man lives, at the longest, but sixty or seventy years. The countries where people of the most advanced age have been found, of late years, are Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and England. Individuals of one hundred and thirty, one hundred and forty, and one hundred and fifty years of age, have been found there. Ireland shares with England and Scotland the reputation of being favorable to the duration of life. More than eighty persons above fourscore years of age have been found in a single small village of that country, called Dumsford. Bacon said that he did not think you could mention a single village of that country where there was not to be found at least one octogenarian. Examples of longevity are more rare in France, in Italy, and especially in Spain. Some cantons of Hungary are noted for the advanced age to which their inhabitants attain. Germany also has a good many old people, but few who live to a remarkable age. Only a small number are to be found in Holland. It is seldom that any one reaches the age of one hundred in that country. {75} The climate of Greece, which is as healthy as it is agreeable, is considered now, as it formerly was, favorable to longevity. The island of Naxos is specially noted in this respect. It was generally admitted in Greece that the air of Attica disposed those who breathed it to philosophy.

Examples of longevity are to be found in Egypt, and in the East Indies, principally in the caste of Brahmins and among the anchorets and hermits, who, unlike the rest of the inhabitants, do not abandon themselves to indolence and excesses of every kind.

A careful computation of the comparative longevity, in the different departments of France, has been made for 1860 and the preceding years. The medium annual number of deaths in France, at the age of one hundred years and upward, is 148. The following fifteen départements, given in decreasing order, are those which have the greatest number: Basses-Pyrenees, Dordogne, Calvados, Gers, Puy-de-Dôme, Ariége, Aveyron, Gironde, Landes, Lot, Ardèche, Cantal, Doubs, Seine, Tarn-et-Garonne. It will be seen that a great number of mountainous districts are to be found in these departments. It is surprising to see that of la Seine on this list. Nevertheless these departments do not hold the same rank in respect to the ordinary duration of life; which would seem to prove that some examples of extreme longevity are not a sufficient index that a country is favorable to long life. I give their numbers in order: Basses-Pyrénées, 7; Dordogne, 42; Calvados, 2; Gers, 9; Puy-de-Dôme, 30; Ariége, 48; Aveyron, 34; Gironde, 18; Landes, 52; Lot, 33; Ardèche, 43; Cantal, 23; Doubs, 25; Seine, 53; Tarn-et-Garonne, 13.

The fifteen departments in which ordinary life is most prolonged are: Orne, Calvados, Eure-et-Loir, Sarthe, Eure, Lot-et-Garonne, Deux-Sèvres, Indre-et-Loire, Basses-Pyrenees, Maine-et-Loire, Ardennes, Gers, Aube, Hautes-Pyrenees, et Haute-Garonne.

It is evident that places need not be very remote from each other to produce a different influence on the duration of life.

That cold is injurious to the nerves, remarks M. Reveille-Parise, is a truth almost as old as the medical art. A low temperature produces not only a painful effect upon the skin, but it benumbs and paralyzes the nerves of the extremities, and diminishes the circulation of the fluids, and this gives rise to all sorts of diseases.

Men of intellectual pursuits, having an extremely nervous susceptibility, are particularly affected by change of temperature. It is not surprising, then, to find that the mental faculties have attained their utmost degree of perfection in certain climates. Choice natures, such as poets and other men of genius, only produce the finest fruit under the influence of an ardent sun and a pure and brilliant atmosphere. It is only in warm and temperate climates that nature and life are most lavish of their treasures; there we find genuine creations; elsewhere are imitations only, with the exception of the physical sciences, which depend on continued observation. It is remarkable that, if the men of the North have conquered the South, the opinions of the South have always held sway in the North. Besides, fertility of the soil and a mild temperature set man free, in southern countries, from all present care and all anxiety respecting the future, and infuse that blissful serenity of soul so favorable to the flights of the imagination. In the misty climate of the north, he has to struggle incessantly against the influence of the weather, which so greatly diminishes the powers of the mind. {76} This struggle is almost always a disadvantage to the minds of men, who are particularly impressible and often reduced to a state of muscular enervation. Cold, dampness, fogs, violent winds, sudden changes of temperature, frequent rains, endless winters, uncertain summers with their storms and unhealthy exhalations, are fearful enemies to an organization which is delicate, nervous, irritable, suffering, and exhausted.

The state of the atmosphere, then, acts powerfully on the mental faculties. There are really days when the mind is not clear. The thoughts, sometimes so free and abundant, are suddenly arrested. The sources of the imagination are expanded and contracted according to the degrees of the barometer and thermometer. The different seasons of the year have more influence than may be thought, upon the master-pieces of art, upon the affections, the events of life and even upon political catastrophes. History relates that Chancellor de Cheverny warned President de Thou that if the Duke de Guise irritated the mind of Henry III during a frost, (which rendered him furious,) the king would have him assassinated; and this really happened on the twenty-third of December, 1588.

"Napoleon could not endure the least cold without immediate suffering. He had fires made in the month of July, and did not understand why others were not equally affected by the least wind from the northeast. It was Napoleon's nature to love air and exercise. The privation of these two things threw him into a violent condition. The state of the weather could be perceived by the temper he displayed at dinner. If rain or any other cause had prevented him from taking his accustomed walk, he was not only cross but suffering."

"With the rain, cold winds, wintry skies, the nightingales singing from time to time under the dead leaves, we have a gloomy month of May. I wish my soul were not so much influenced by the state of the atmosphere and variations of the seasons, as to be like a flower that opens or closes with the cold and the sun. It is something I do not understand, but so it is as long as my soul is imprisoned in this frail body."

Ask the poets, artists, and men of thought, if a lively feeling of energy and of joy, prompting to action and labor; or, otherwise, if a certain state languor—of strange and undefinable uneasiness—does not make them dependent on the state of the atmosphere.

It may be considered, then, as an established principle, that a temperate climate, mild seasons, and pure air constantly, renewed constitute not only the highest physical enjoyment but the indispensable conditions of health.

The physical character of places has a truly astonishing effect upon man. A distinguished traveller, M. Trémaux, has endeavored to prove, in several mémoires to the Académie des Sciences, that man be changed from the Caucasian to the negro type simply by this influence. He calls attention to the coincidences that exist between the physical types and the geological nature of the countries acting especially through their products. The least perfect, or rather, the type which is farthest removed from our own, belongs to the oldest lands, and, in a subsidiary manner, to climates the least favored. The most perfect belongs to the countries which, within the smallest limits, offer the greatest variety of formations, allowing the most recent to predominate, and, in a subsidiary manner, to the most favored climates. The type is also influenced by other causes of a more secondary nature which are very complex.

The geological chart of Europe, says Mr. Trémaux, shows that the greatest surface of primitive rock formations is in Lapland, which possesses also the most inferior people; going to the south of Scandinavia, gneiss and granite occupy also a great part of the country, but that region is also connected with others more varied. It contains many lakes, and its climate is more favored, as well as its inhabitants. As to the Scandinavians of Denmark, they have a purely Germanic type and are, in effect, upon the same soil.

Russia possesses different formations of a medium age, but the extended surface of each kind does not permit its people to profit by the resources of those adjoining, and, consequently, they are but indifferently favored. If we turn to the countries which are in the best condition, we distinguish in general all the west and south of Europe, and more particularly France, Italy, Greece, the eastern part of Spain, and the north-east of England. It is here, in truth, that civilization and the intellectual faculties have most sway.

Race does not change while it remains upon the same soil and under the same natural influences; whereas, it is gradually modified, according to its new position, when it is removed to another place.

The physical influences of a region, and of mixture of race, have a distinct manner of acting. By cross-breeding, the features are at once strongly modified in individuals, but especially according to the region in which it takes place. Thus, in Europe, the mixed race is more strongly inclined to the type of the white man; in Soudan, to that of the negro. A type seems to be more readily improved than degenerated. The physical character of a place does not act in detail, but in a general manner, beginning by modifying the complexion more and more in each generation. It acts less quickly upon the hair, and more slowly still upon the features. Cross-breeding is considered the principal modifying agent only because its effects are at once perceptible, but it can explain evident facts only in an imperfect manner.

The elevation of a place above the level of the sea has a radical influence upon phthisis. With the design of indicating the regions and the degrees of elevation within which this malady is rare or completely unknown, Dr. Schnepp has made a compilation from a series of meteorological observations, made in the Pyrenees and at Eaux Bonnes, and from analogous documents furnished by travellers who have lived upon the elevated and inhabited plateaux of the old and new world.

The document on this subject which he sent to the Academy of Sciences shows that, in the choice of a healthy locality for invalids, people are too exclusively influenced by a warm temperature, disregarding the more formal indications of nature in distributing the maladies of the human race over the surface of the globe. For instance, phthisis exists in the tropical zone. In Brazil, it causes one fifth of the cases of mortality; in Peru, three tenths, and in the Antilles, from six to seven, in every thousand inhabitants. In the East Indies, the greater part of the English physicians report, among the causes of death, two cases from phthisis to every thousand people. In the temperate zones, phthisis is one of the most devastating of diseases. It generally attacks from three to four in every thousand inhabitants. The three countries in which it was not to be found, Algiers, Egypt, and the Russian steppes of Kirghis, have also been invaded by it, although in a smaller proportion, In Algeria, the deaths from phthisis are, to those from other causes, in the proportion of one to every twenty-four or twenty-seven; in Egypt, in the proportion of one to eight.

This old malady becomes more rare as we approach the higher latitudes. It is supposed not to exist at all in Siberia, in Iceland, and in the Faroe Islands. Thus, diseases of the lungs seem to be more rare in certain cold countries than in warm countries. It is also observed that at a certain altitude the number of cases greatly diminish, and even completely disappear. Brockman testifies that phthisis is rare on the plateaux of the Hartz mountains at the height of two thousand feet above the level of the sea; and C. Fuchs, stating the same fact concerning certain elevations in Thuringia and the Black Forest, was the first to advance the theory that phthisis diminishes according to certain altitudes.

Dr. Brüggens, also, has since testified to the infrequency of this disease in the Swiss Alps, at the height of 4500 to 6000 feet in the Engaddine; nor is it found among the monks of the Great Saint Bernard at the altitude of 6825 feet. According to M. Lombard, it completely disappears among these mountains at the height of 4500 feet.

The populous cities of the American continent, which are situated in the tropical zone at an altitude of six thousand feet above the level of the sea, are exempt from lung diseases; although, in the same latitude, phthisis is common in lower regions, This immunity exists on the other hemisphere in the same zone—on the elevated plateaux of Hindostan and the Himalaya. In examining the state of the climate on the heights in which phthisis is seldom or never found, we find there, even on the equator, a medium temperature sufficiently low throughout the year; between twelve and fifteen degrees on the heights below 9000 feet; between three and five degrees on those between 9000 and 12,000 feet.

In the temperate zone it is still lower. But the warmest months upon tropical heights do not vary more than six or eight degrees from the medium temperature. It is the same on the plateaux of the Alps and in Iceland, and is a general and common characteristic of the regions in which phthisis is not found. The deviations below the annual medium, appear even to increase this immunity. If sufficient observations have not been made to decide upon the degree of comparative humidity on the heights above 12,000 feet, we know that the elevation at which phthisis is wanting, is in a hygrometrical condition more nearly approaching saturation than the lower regions, and that the rains are also more abundant there.

It is desirable that the heights of Cévennes, the Pyrenees, the Alps, and, above all, the elevated parts of our Algerian possessions should be carefully studied, with a view to the treatment of lung diseases, which are the great scourge of the human race, and which annually cause the death of more than three millions of its number.

It is useful, not only to study different countries with respect to their salubrity, but also to observe the different situations in the same locality, and the different quarters of the same city. M. Junod presented to the Academy of Sciences, some years since, an essay on this subject, which is full of interest. In considering the distribution of the population in large cities, we are struck by the tendency of the wealthy class to move toward the western portions, abandoning the opposite side to the industrial pursuits, It seems to have divined, by a kind of intuition, the locality which would have the greatest immunity in the time of sore public calamities. {79} For example, let us speak first of Paris. From the foundation of the city, the opulent class has constantly directed its course toward the west. It is the same in London, and generally, in all the cities of England. At Vienna, Berlin, St. Petersburg, and, indeed, in all the capitals of Europe, this same fact is repeated; there is the same movement of the rich toward the west, where are assembled the palaces of the kings, and the dwellings for which only pleasant and healthy sites are desired.

In visiting the ruins of Pompeii and other ancient cities, I have observed, as well as M. Junod, that this custom dates from the highest antiquity. In those cities, as is seen at Paris in our day, the largest cemeteries are found in the eastern parts, and generally none in the western. M. Junod, examining the reason of so general a fact, thinks it is connected with atmospheric pressure. When the mercury in the barometer rises, the smoke and injurious emanations are quickly dispelled in the air. When the mercury lowers, we see the smoke and noxious vapors remain in the apartments and near the surface of the earth. Now every one knows that, of all winds, that from the east causes the mercury in the barometer to rise the highest, and that which lowers it most is from the west. When the latter blows, it carries with it all the deleterious gases it meets in its course from the west. The result is, that the inhabitants of the eastern parts of a city not only have their own smoke and miasmas, but also those of the western parts, brought by the west wind. When, on the contrary, the east wind blows, it purifies the air by causing the injurious emanations to rise, so that they cannot be thrown back upon the west. It is evident, then, that the inhabitants of the western parts receive pure air from whatever quarter of the horizon it comes. We will add, that the west wind is most prevalent, and the west end receives it all fresh from the country.

From the foregoing facts, M. Junod lays down the following directions: First, persons who are free to choose, especially those of delicate health, should reside in the western part of a city. Secondly, for the same reason, all the establishments that send forth vapors or injurious gases should be in the eastern part. Thirdly and finally, in erecting a house in the city, and even in the country, the kitchen should be on the eastern side, as well as all the out-houses from which unhealthy emanations might spread into the apartments.

M. Elie de Beaumont has since mentioned some facts which tend to prove the constancy and generality of the rule laid down by M. Junod. He noticed in most of the large cities this tendency of the wealthy class to move to the same side—generally, the western—unless hindered by certain local obstacles. Turin, Liége, and Caen are examples of this. M. Moquin-Tandon has observed the same thing at Montpellier and at Toulouse. Paris and London also present analogous facts, although the rivers which traverse those two great centres flow in a diametrically different direction. Paris increased in a north-easterly direction at the time when the Bastille, the Palais des Tournelles, the Hotel St. Paul, etc., were built; but the inhabitants were then influenced by fear of the aggressive Normans, whose fleets ascended the Seine as far as Paris, and were only arrested by the Pont-au-Change. At that time, and as long as this fear lasted, they must have felt unwilling to live in Auteuil or Grenelle, But since the foundation of the Louvre, and especially since the reign of Henri Quatre, the current has resumed its normal direction. {80} M. Elie de Beaumont is inclined to believe that, among the causes of this phenomenon, we should reckon the temperature and the hygrometrical state of the air, which is generally warmer and more moist during the winds from the west and south-west than during the east and north-east winds.

What most contributes to prolong existence is a certain uniformity in heat and cold, and in the density and rarity of the atmosphere. This is why the countries in which the barometer and thermometer are subject to sudden and considerable changes are never favorable to the duration of life. They may be healthy, and man may live a long time there; but he will never attain a very advanced age, because the variations of the atmosphere produce many interior changes which consume, to a surprising degree, both the strength and the organs of life.

Too much dryness or too much humidity are equally injurious to the duration of life; yet the air most favorable to longevity is that which contains a certain quantity of water in dissolution. Moist air being already partly saturated, absorbs less from the body, and does not consume it as soon as a dry atmosphere; it keeps the organs a longer time in a state of suppleness and vigor; while a dry atmosphere dries up the fibres and hastens the approach of old age. It is for this reason, doubtless, that islands and peninsulas have always been favorable to old age. Man lives longer there than in the same latitude upon continents. Islands and peninsulas, especially in warm climates, generally offer everything that contributes to a long life: purity of air, a moist atmosphere, a temperature often at one's choice, wholesome fruit, clear water, and a climate almost unvariable. I had an opportunity, long desired, of traversing the ocean as far the Tristan Islands, and of returning to the Indian Ocean by doubling the Cape of Good Hope with a captain who wished to observe the different islands on the way. I was thus able, in going as well as returning, to visit these numerous islands, and I can speak of them from reasonable observation. But it is sufficient to mention, from a hygienic point of view, the Isle of Bourbon, (where I lived for many years,) to give an idea of the sanitary condition of islands in general. Like most isles, the Isle of Bourbon has a form more or less pyramidal. The shore, almost on a level with the sea, is the part principally inhabited. There are few villages in the interior of the island, but many private residences. The temperature on the shore, though very high, is less intense than is supposed: the medium temperature being between 40° and 50°. The sea and land breezes, which succeed each other morning and evening, refresh the atmosphere and maintain a healthy moisture. It hardly ever rains except during the winter, Besides, it is very easy to choose the temperature one prefers. As the mountains are very lofty, they afford every season at once. On the summit are seen snow and ice, while at the foot the heat is tropical; so that it is sufficient to ascend for ten or fifteen minutes to find a marked change of temperature, And the colonists of but little wealth are careful to profit by this precious favor of nature. They select two or three habitations at different heights, in order to enjoy a continual spring, During the cool season, they reside on the sea-shore. Then they go to their dwelling a little above, where the temperature is mild. And in the hot season, they ascend to still higher regions.

It is impossible to express the pleasure of thus having several dwellings at one's choice, in some one of which desirable temperature can be enjoyed in any season. {81} I had three: one at St. Denis, capital of the colony, one at La Rivière-des-Pluies, and another at La Ressource. La Rivière-des-Pluies, belonging to M. Desbassayns, a venerable old man and president of the general council, is the finest situation on the island. It was formerly called the Versailles of Bourbon. I inhabited a summer-house above which the surrounding trees crossed their tufted branches, forming a dome of verdure in which the birds came to warble. Regular alleys, extending as far as the eye could reach, formed by superb mango-trees, were enclosed by parterres, groves, gardens, woods, and all the surroundings of a small village. Each large habitation in the colony had every resource within itself, and was the faithful copy of the old feudal castles.

La Ressource, a dwelling for the hottest season, belonging also to M. Desbassayns, presented another kind of beauty. There was less artistic luxury about it, but nature had lavished on it all her splendor. After dinner, admiring the panorama which was spread out as far as the horizon, I remarked to M. Desbassayns that I did not believe it possible for the entire world of nature to furnish a more beautiful perspective. "I have travelled a great deal," said he, "and in truth I have never seen anything like it, not even from the most magnificent points of view in America." The venerable old man then took me by the arm and invited me to visit his estate. He made me first look at his woods, with their tufted foliage; the cane-fields; the deep ravines; the streams, with their windings rising one above the other in such a manner that the lower ones were perfectly visible, and extending in successive circuits more or less varied to the shore of the sea, which gleamed like a mirror as far as the eye could reach, and upon the azure surface of which stood clearly out, like silver clouds, the white sails from all parts of the world which had given each other rendezvous here, and were constantly approaching this isle of lava, flowers, shadows, and light, which they had taken as the centre of réunion.

He made me afterward notice the verdant fields which had formerly belonged to the parents of Virginia, the heroine of the romance of Bernardin de St. Pierre. He related to me the true history of Virginia, who was his cousin. Her death happened nearly as described by the celebrated romancer. He made me notice, upon his genealogical tree, the branch that bore upon one of its leaves the name of Virginia!

M. Desbassayns had promised me some reliable notes respecting her, and I was glad to offer them to my illustrious friend, Count Alfred de Vigny, who, in giving me a farewell embrace, had commissioned me to bear his most tender expressions of love to the region which had inspired the touching narrative of St. Pierre. But alas! remorseless death warns us to remember the uncertainty of life, even when everything disposes us to forget it.

He took me to one after another of the most interesting trees, particularly to the arbre du voyageur, a kind of banana, the leaves of which are inserted within one another like those of the iris, so as to form, at the height of eight or nine feet, a vast fan. Rain-water, and particularly dew, accumulates at the bottom of these leaves, as in a natural cup, and is kept very fresh; and if the base is pierced with a narrow blade, the liquid will flow out in a thread-like stream, which it is easy to receive in the mouth. The venerable old man opened one of their vegetable veins by way of example, and I soon lanced a great number of these providential trees, and refreshed myself with their limpid streams.

Finally, he conducted me by a narrow path to the edge of a deep ravine in which flowed an abundant torrent, forming capricious cascades as it wound its way. After passing over a rustic bridge, an admirable spectacle was presented to our view. An alley was formed through a wilderness of bamboos, so sombre, so narrow, and high, that it would be difficult to give an idea of it. It was as if pierced through a forest of gigantic pipes; and when they were agitated by a storm, they produced a harmony so plaintive, so languid, and at the same time so terrible and full of poetry, that I often passed the entire night in listening to it. I am not astonished by what is related of these tall and sonorous culms.

In those fortunate countries that are shaded by the bamboo, it is said that happy lovers and suffering souls make holes in these long pipes and combine them in such a way that, when the wind blows, they give out a faithful expression of their joy or their grief. Nothing is sweeter than the tones that are thus produced by the evening breeze which attunes these harmonious reeds, rendering them at once aeolian harps and flutes. As soon as I found out this magical pathway, I betook myself there every day at the dawn, to read, to meditate, and to take notes till the hour of dinner. The next day after this visit, I had the curiosity to destroy one of the arbre du voyageur. It inundated me with its fresh stream, but I came near being punished for this profanation of nature, at the moment I expected it the least. A most formidable centipede escaped from the splinters which I made fly, and only lacked a little of falling directly on my face. M. Desbassayns was greatly astonished to see it; for it is generally believed, he said, that these venomous insects avoid this beneficent tree.

The enchanting heavens of that privileged region are always serene, and the air is so pure that no gray tint ever appears on the horizon; the mountains, hills, meadows, every remote object indeed, instead of fading away in a dim atmosphere, beam out against a sky of cloudless azure. This is what renders the equatorial nights so resplendent. The astonished eye thinks it beholds a new heavens and new stars. How charming is the moonlight that comes in showers of light through a thousand quivering leaves which murmur in the breath of the perfumed breeze! and when to that is joined the far-off moan of the sea, and the sounds that escape from the ivory keys or resounding chords, which accompany the sweet accents of a Creole voice, we feel as if in one of those islands of bliss which surpass the imagination of the poets.

One of the things that travellers have not sufficiently noticed, and which gives us a kind of homesickness for that beautiful region, is the enchanting harmony which results from the noise of the sea and the murmur of the breeze in the different kinds of foliage, a harmony which calms the agitation of the soul as well as the fever of the body. As there is every variety of temperature, so there is a great variety of trees. There is one especially remarkable, namely, the pandanus, which resembles both the pine and the weeping willow, Its summit is lost in the blue sky, and its numerous branches, borne by a pliant and elegant stem, support large tassels of leaves, long, cylindrical, and fine as hair; and when the breeze makes them tremble in its breath, they murmur in plaintive melancholy notes that, when once heard, we long to hear again and again.

The cocoanut or palm-trees, with their leaves long, hard, and shining like steel, give out a sound like the clash of arms. The gigantic leaves of the banana are the echo of the voice of an overflowing torrent, piercing the air like the vast pipes of an organ. The bamboos, with their tall reeds which moan and grind as they bend, uttering long groans which, mingling with the tones, the wailing, and the murmurs of a thousand other kinds of foliage, with the deep roar of the agitated sea afar off, and the sound of the waves breaking on the shore, form an immense natural orchestra, the varied sounds of which, rising toward heaven, seem to bear with them, in accents without number, all the joys and all the griefs of the world.

These trees with their tall, slender stems, and thick foliage, are continually bending in the incessant breeze, In the brilliant light of that climate their shadow looks black; and, as it is continually moving, you would think everything animate, and that sylphs and fairies were issuing forth on all sides.

There is a constant succession of flowers with the strongest perfume; and when those of the wood are in bloom, you would think that every blade of grass, every leaf and every drop of dew gave out an essence which the wind, in passing, absorbed in order to perfume with it the happy dwellers in this Eden.

Those enchanted regions have inhabitants worthy of their abode. The hospitality of the Creoles is proverbial. Every family is glad to receive the stranger and soon considers him as a friend and brother. The Creole women have the elegance of their palm-trees. They are as fresh and blooming as the corolla that expands at the dawn. Their kind courtesy envelops you like the penetrating odors which come from the wonderful vegetation that surrounds them. A Frenchman who meets another Frenchman in these far-off countries regards him as a part of France which has come to smile an him, and the intimacy, which is formed, is indissoluble.

The traveller can never forget the touching scenes of the varangue, the enchanting evenings passed there, and the joyous cup of friendship there interchanged; sweet emotions contributing to longevity more than is commonly believed.

One finds one's self in that fortunate land surrounded by hygienical influences which are most favorable to a long life. Let us add that the alimentary productions are of the first quality. The water in the stony basins is limpid, and the succulent fruits are varied enough to almost suffice for the nourishment of the inhabitants. How can one be a favorite of fortune and a prey to spleen without going to visit these places, which exhale a sovereign balm?

Nevertheless, under that sky brilliant with pure light, in that atmosphere of freshness of perfume and of harmony, it seemed to me that a tint of infinite melancholy was everywhere diffused. I regarded the glorious sky, I listened to the trembling foliage, I breathed the penetrating odors, but something was everywhere wanting. When I sought what it was that I missed, I found it was the trees of my native land, which do not grow in every zone, and where they do grow are not so fine as here. I instinctively sought the wide-spreading oak, the lofty walnut, the chestnut with its tender verdure, the tall slender poplar, the modest willow, and the birch with its light shadow. I recalled the odor of their foliage, associated with my dearest remembrances, but in vain. I felt then an immense and inexpressible void that nothing could fill, and tears naturally sprang from these vague and profound impressions. {84} I hungered, I thirsted for the odor of the trees that had overshadowed my infancy—an insatiable hunger, a thirst nothing could satisfy. On returning from that remote voyage, especially during the first weeks, I went to the nursery of the Luxembourg, (alas! poor nursery!) I sought the fresh shades of the Bois de Boulogne, and there, during long rambles, I crushed the leaves in my hands and inhaled the perfume they gave out. I felt my lungs expand, as if a new life was infused into them with the odor I breathed. This invisible aliment which we derive from the exhalations of the plants to which we have been accustomed from infancy, had become for me an absolute necessity, a condition of health.

A climate, a country may not at all times be favorable to longevity, or at all times unhealthy. The predominance of one industrial pursuit over another, the choice of one material instead of another for building houses, or a sudden change in the general habits, necessarily modifies, in a great degree, the conditions of longevity. This is what has happened in the Isle of Bourbon. Till within a few years, no epidemic or contagious malady was known in that fortunate island; no fever, no cholera, no throat complaints, no small-pox, etc. But all these diseases have attacked its inhabitants since our manures, our materials for building, and our products in general, have been used by them in large quantities.

The drying up of a marsh, the cutting down of a forest, the substitution of one crop for another, may effect atmospheric changes through an extended radius, which will strengthen or weaken the vitality of the people. Some years since, there was a marsh behind the city of Cairo, which was separated from the desert by a hill. It was always noticed that the pestilential epidemics appeared to spring from that unhealthy spot and finally to spread throughout the east. The Pacha of Egypt, without thinking of this coincidence, noticed, on the other hand, that the hill behind the marsh entirely concealed the fine view which he would have from his palace, if it were removed. He gave orders to cut the hill down and to fill up the marsh with its débris, so that the winds which were formerly checked, had free circulation and purified the atmosphere, while the soil, thoroughly modified, ceased to emit the pestilential effluvia, Since that event the plague has not reappeared. A caprice of the Pacha effected more than all the quarantines and all the efforts of science, He has freed the world, perhaps for ever, from the most terrible of scourges.

It is known that the cholera comes from India. It is engendered in the immense triangular space formed by two rivers: the Ganges and the Brahmapootra. It is the East India Company according to M. le Comte de Waren, that should be accused of treason to humanity. It is that power which has destroyed the canals and the derivations of the two finest rivers in the world. During the last twenty-five years of English occupation the number of pools in a single district, that of Nort Arcoth, which burst or were destroyed, amounted to eleven hundred. In the time of the Mogul conquerors, a fine canal, the Doab, extending from Delhi, fertilized two hundred leagues in its course. This canal is destroyed, and the lands, once so fertile and healthy, are now the infectious lair of wild beasts, having been depopulated by disease and death.

The hygienic condition of different countries, then, may be modified in various ways. In 1698, Bigot de Molville, president à mortier of the Parliament of Normandy, found, after careful research, that, of all the cities of France, Rouen possessed the greatest number of octogenarians and centenarians. Toward the middle of the last century this superiority was claimed by Boulogne-sur-mer, which retained it for nearly fifty years, and was then called the patrie des vieillards.

In a recent communication to the Academy, M. de Garogna remarked that, in the printed or manuscript accounts we possess respecting the former eruptions of Santorin, many very interesting details are found concerning the different maladies occasioned by these eruptions, and observed at that epoch in the island, which support what we have said of the variable hygienic state of different places. According to these reports, the pathological result of the different eruptions included especially alarming complications, serious cerebral difficulties, suffocation, and derangement in the alimentary canal. He proved that morbid influences were only manifest when the direction of the wind brought the volcanic emanations. The parts of the island out of the course of the wind showed no trace of the maladies in question. Moreover, the sanitary condition of the places within reach of the wind became worse or improved according to the rise and fall of the wind. It should also be noticed that the morbid influence of the volcanic emanations extended to islands more or less remote from Santorin.

1. The eruption in the Bay of Santorin, while in action, had a manifest influence on the health of the people in that island.

2. It especially occasioned complicated diseases, throat distempers, bronchitis, and derangement of the digestive organs.

3. The acidiferous ashes were the direct cause of the complications, while the other morbid complaints should be attributed to sulphuric acid.

4. Vegetation was likewise affected by the eruption while active, and particularly plants of the order Siliaceae.

5. The changes in the vegetation were probably produced by hydrochloric acid, at the beginning of the eruption.

6. The hydro-sulphuric emanations appear, on the contrary, to have had a beneficial effect on the diseases of the grape-vine. It perhaps destroyed the oidium.

It is evident that the question of local influences upon the duration of life is a most comprehensive and fruitful one. Nature gives us some formal indications, in dividing the maladies of the human race; and the study of places and climates in a hygienic point of view, although in its infancy, has already brought to our notice many valuable facts. This study is full of interest. We shall doubtless arrive at a knowledge of the exact relation between such a malady, such an epidemic, and such a place, or site, or position with respect to the points of the compass, as well as of the beneficial and special influence exercised upon our principal organs by the exhalations from different places, which might well be called the genii of those regions.

The Bishops of Rome.

[Footnote 42: Harper's New Monthly Magazine. The Bishops of Rome. New York: Harper and Brothers, January, 1869.]

Harper's Magazine, we are told, has a wide circulation, and some merit as a magazine of light literature; but it does not appear to have much aptitude for the scholarly discussion of serious questions, whatever the matter to which they relate, and it is guilty of great rashness in attempting to treat a subject of such grave and important relations to religion and civilization, society and the church, as the history of the bishops of Rome. The subject is not within its competence, and the historical value of its essay to those who know something of the history of the popes and of mediaeval Europe is less than null.

Of course, Harper's Magazine throws no new light on any disputed passage in the history of the bishops of Rome, and brings out no fact not well known, or at least often repeated before; it does nothing more than compress within a brief magazine article the principal inventions, calumnies, and slanders vented for centuries against the Roman pontiffs by personal or national antipathy, disappointed ambition, political and partisan animosity, and heretical and sectarian wrath and bitterness, so adroitly arranged and mixed with facts and probabilities as to gain easy credence with persons predisposed to believe them, and to produce on ignorant and prejudiced readers a totally false impression. The magazine, judging from this article, has not a single qualification for studying and appreciating the history of the popes. It has no key to the meaning of the facts it encounters, and is utterly unable or indisposed to place itself at the point of view from which the truth is discernible. Its animus, at least in this article, is decidedly anti-Christian, and proves that it has no Christian conscience, no Christian sympathy, no faith in the supernatural, no reverence for our Lord and his apostles, and no respect even for the authority of the Holy Scriptures.

The magazine, under pretence of writing history, simply appeals to anti-Catholic prejudice, and repeats what Dr. Newman calls "the Protestant tradition." Its aim is not historical truth, or a sound historical judgment on the character of the Roman pontiffs, but to confirm the unfounded prejudices of its readers against them. It proceeds as if the presumption were that every pope is antichrist or a horribly wicked man, and therefore every doubtful fact must be interpreted against him, till he is proved innocent. Everything that has been said against a pope, no matter by whom or on what authority, is presumptively true; everything said in favor of a Roman pontiff must be presumed to be false or unworthy of consideration. It supposes the popes to have had the temper and disposition of non-Catholics, and from what it believes, perhaps very justly, a Protestant would do—if, per impossibile, he were elevated to the papal chair, and clothed with papal authority—concludes what the popes have actually done. It forgets the rule of logic, Argumentum a genere ad genus, non valet. The pope and the Protestant are not of the same genus. We have never encountered in history a single pope that did not sincerely believe in his mission from Christ, and take it seriously. {87} We have encountered weakness; too great complaisance to the civil power, even slowness in crushing out, in its very inception, an insurgent error; sometimes also too great a regard to the temporal, to the real or apparent neglect of the spiritual, and two or three instances in which the personal conduct of a pope was not much better than that of the average of secular princes; but never a pope who did not recognize the important trusts confided to his care, and the weighty responsibilities of his high office.

We have studied the history of the Roman pontiffs with probably more care and diligence than the flippant writer in Harper's Magazine has done, and studied it, too, both as an anti-papist and as a papist, with an earnest desire to find facts against the popes, and with an equally earnest desire to ascertain the exact historical truth; and we reject as unworthy of the most fanatic sectarian the absurd rule of judging them which the magazine adopts, if it does not avow and hold that the presumption is the other way, and that everything that reflects injuriously on the character of a bishop of Rome is presumptively false, and to be accepted only on the most indubitable evidence. We can judge in this matter more impartially and disinterestedly than the anti-catholic. The impeccability of the pontiff, or even his infallibility in matters of mere human prudence, is no article of Catholic faith. The personal conduct of a pontiff may be objectionable; but unless he officially teaches error in doctrine, or enjoins an immoral practice on the faithful, it cannot disturb us. There are no instances in which a pope has done this. No pope has ever taught or enjoined vice for virtue, error for truth, or officially sanctioned a false principle or a false motive of action. With one exception, we might, then, concede all the magazine alleges, and ask, What then? What can you conclude? But, in fact, we concede nothing. What it alleges against the bishops of Rome is either historically false, or if not, is, when rightly understood, nothing against them in their official capacity.

The exception mentioned is that of St. Liberius. The magazine repeats, with some variations, the exploded fable that this Holy Pope, won by favors or terrified by threats, consented to a condemnation of the doctrine of Athanasius, that is, signed an Arian formula of faith. It has not invented the slander, but it has, after what historical criticism has established on the subject, no right to repeat it as if it were not denied. We have no space now to treat the question at length; but we assert, after a very full investigation, that St. Liberius never signed an Arian formula, never in any shape or manner condemned the doctrine defended by St. Athanasius, and consequently never recanted, for he had nothing to recant. The most, if so much, that can be maintained is, that he approved a sentence condemning the special error of the Eunomians, in which was not inserted the word "consubstantial," because it was not necessary to the condemnation of their special error, and the error they held in common with all Arians had already been condemned by the council of Nicaea. Not a word can be truly alleged against the persistent orthodoxy of this great and holy pontiff, who deserves, as he has always received, the veneration of the church.

The magazine repeats the slander of an anonymous writer, a bitter enemy of the popes, against St. Victor, St. Zethyrinus, and St. Callistus, three popes whom the Church of Rome has held, and still holds, in high esteem and veneration for their virtues and saintly character. {88} It refers to the Philosophoumena, a work published a few years ago by M. E. Miller, of Paris, variously attributed to Origen, to St. Hippolytus, bishop of Porto, near Rome, to Caius, a Roman Presbyter, and to Tertullian. The late Abbé Cruice—an Irishman by birth, we believe, but brought up and naturalized in France, where he was, shortly before his death, promoted to the episcopate—a profoundly learned man and an acute critic, has unanswerably proved that these are all unsustainable hypotheses, and that historical science is in no condition to say who was its author. Who wrote it, or where it was written, is absolutely unknown, but from internal evidence the writer was a contemporary of the three popes named, and was probably some Oriental schismatic, of unsound faith, and a bitter enemy of the popes. The work is not of the slightest authority against the bishops of Rome, but is of very great value as proving, by an enemy, that the papacy was fully developed—if that is the word—claiming and exercising in the universal church the same supreme authority that it claims and exercises now, and was as regular in its action in the last half of the second century, or within fifty or sixty years of the death of the apostle St. John, as it is under Pope Pius IX. now gloriously reigning. [Footnote 43]

[Footnote 43: Vide Histoire de l'Eglise de Rome sous les Pontificats de St. Victor, de St. Zephirin, et St. Calliste. Par L'Abbé M. P. Cruice. Paris: Didot Frères. 1856.]

When the magazine has nothing else to allege against the popes, it accuses them of "a fierce, ungovernable pride."

"The fourth century brought important changes in the condition of the bishops of Rome. It is a singular trait of the corrupt Christianity of this period that the chief characteristic of the eminent prelates was a fierce and ungovernable pride. Humility had long ceased to be numbered among the Christian virtues. The four great rulers of the Church, Bishop of Rome, and the Patriarchs of Constantinople, Antioch, and Alexandria, were engaged in a constant struggle for supremacy. Even the inferior bishops assumed a princely state, and surrounded themselves with their sacred courts. The vices of pride and arrogance descended to the lower orders of clergy; the emperor himself was declared to be inferior in dignity to the simple presbyter, and in all public entertainments and ceremonious assemblies the proudest layman was expected to take his place below the haughty churchman, As learning declined and the world sank into a new barbarism, the clergy elevated themselves into a ruling caste, and were looked upon as half divine by the rude Goths and the degraded Romans. It is even said that the pagan nations of the west transferred to the priest and monk the same awestruck reverence which they had been accustomed to pay to their Druid teachers. The Pope took the place of their Chief Druid, and was worshipped with idolatrous devotion; the meanest presbyter, however vicious and degraded, seemed, to the ignorant savages, a true messenger from the skies."

There was no patriarch of Constantinople in the fourth century, and it was only in 330 that the city of Constantinople absorbed Byzantium. The bishop of Byzantium was not a patriarch, or even a metropolitan, but was a suffragan of the bishop of Heraclea. It was not till long after the fourth century that the bishop of Constantinople was recognized as patriarch, not, in fact, till the eighth general council. There was no struggle in the fourth nor in any subsequent century, for the supremacy, between Rome and Antioch, or Rome and Alexandria; neither the patriarch of Antioch nor the patriarch of Alexandria ever claimed the primacy; but both acknowledged that it belonged to the bishop of Rome, as do the schismatic churches of the East even now, though they take the liberty of disobeying their lawful superior. In the fifth Century, when St. Leo the Great was pope, the bishop of Constantinople claimed the second rank, or the first after the bishop of Rome, on the ground that Constantinople was the new Rome, the second capital of the empire. {89} St. Leo repulsed his claim, not in defence of his own rights, for it did not interfere with his supremacy, or primacy, as they said then, but in defence of the rights of the churches of Antioch and Alexandria. He also did it because the claim was urged on a false principle—that the authority of a bishop is derived from the civil importance of the city in which his see is established.

It is not strange that the magazine should complain that the pontifical dignity was placed above the imperial, and that the simple presbyter took the step of the proudest layman; yet whoever believes in the spiritual order at all, believes it superior to the secular order, and therefore that they who represent the spiritual are in dignity above those who represent only the secular. When the writer of this was a Protestant minister, he took, and was expected to take, precedence of the laity. The common sense of mankind gives the precedence to those held to be invested with the sacred functions of religion, or clothed with spiritual authority.

That St. Jerome, from his monastic cell near Jerusalem, inveighs against the vices and corruptions of the Roman clergy, as alleged in the paragraph following the one we have quoted, is very true; but his declamations must be taken with some grains of allowance. St. Jerome was not accustomed to measure his words when denouncing wrong, and saints generally are not. St. Peter Damian reported, after his official visit to Spain, that there was but one worthy priest in the whole kingdom, which really meant no more than that he found only one who came, in all respects, up to his lofty ideal of what a priest should be. Yet there might have been, and probably were, large numbers of others who, though not faultless, were very worthy men, and upon the whole, faithful priests. We must never take the exaggerations of saintly reformers, burning with zeal for the faith and the salvation of souls, as literal historical facts. St. Jerome, in his ardent love of the church and his high ideal of sacerdotal purity, vigilance, fidelity, and zeal, no doubt exaggerated.

There can be nothing more offensive to every right and honorable feeling than the exultation of the magazine over the abuse, cruelties, and outrages inflicted on a bishop of Rome by civil tyrants. The writer, had he lived under the persecuting pagan emperors, would have joined his voice to that of those who exclaimed, Christianos ad leones; or had he been present when our Lord was arrested and brought as a malefactor before Pontius Pilate, none louder than he would have cried out, Crucifige eum! crucifige eum! His sympathies are uniformly with the oppressor, never, as we can discover, with the oppressed; with the tyrant, never with his innocent victim, especially if that victim be a bishop of Rome. He feels only gratification in recording the wrongs and sufferings of Pope St. Silverus. This pope was raised to the papacy by the tyranny of the Arian king Theodotus, and ordained by force, without the necessary subscription of the clergy. But after his consecration, the clergy, by their subscription, healed the irregularity of his election, as Anastasius the Librarian tells us, so as to preserve the unity of the church and religion. He appears to have been a holy man and a worthy pope; but he was not acceptable to Vigilius, who expected, by favor of the imperial court, to be made pope himself, nor to those two profligate women, the Empress Theodora and her friend Antonina, the wife of the patrician Belisarius. {90} Vigilius and these two infamous women compelled Belisarius to depose him, strip him of his pontifical robes, clothe him with the habit of a monk, and send him into exile; where, as some say, he was assassinated, and, as others say, perished of hunger. The magazine relates this to show how low and unworthy the bishops of Rome had become! Vigilius succeeded St. Silverus, and it continues:

"Stained with crime, a false witness and a murderer, Vigilius had obtained his holy office through the power of two profligate women who now ruled the Roman world. Theodora, the dissolute wife of Justinian, and Antonina, her devoted servant, assumed to determine the faith and the destinies of the Christian Church. Vigilius failed to satisfy the exacting demands of his casuistical mistresses; he even ventured to differ from them upon some obscure points of doctrine. His punishment soon followed, and the bishop of Rome is said to have been dragged through the streets of Constantinople with a rope around his neck, to have been imprisoned in a common dungeon and fed on bread and water. The papal chair, filled by such unworthy occupants, must have sunk low in the popular esteem, had not Gregory the Great, toward the close of sixth century, revived the dignity of the office."

We know of nothing that can be said in defence of the conduct of Vigilius prior to his accession to the papal throne. His intrigues with Theodora to be made pope, and his promises to her to restore, when he should be pope, Anthemus, deposed from the see of Constantinople by St. Agapitus for heresy, and to set aside the council of Chalcedon, were most scandalous; and his treatment of St. Silverus, whether he actually exiled him and had a hand in his death or not, admits, as far as we are informed, of no palliation; but his conduct thus far was not the conduct of the pope; and after he became bishop of Rome, at least after the death of his deposed predecessor, his conduct was, upon the whole, irreproachable. He conceded much for the sake of peace, and was much blamed; but he conceded nothing of the faith; he refused to fulfill the improper promises he had made, before becoming pope, to the empress, confessed that he had made them, said he was wrong in making them, retracted them, and resisted with rare firmness and persistence the emperor Justinian in the matter of the three chapters, and fully expiated the offences committed prior to his elevation, by enduring for seven long years the brutal outrages an indignities offered him by the half-savage Justinian, the imperial courtiers, and intriguing and unscrupulous prelates of the court party—outrages and sufferings of which he died after his liberation on his journey back from Constantinople to Rome.

We have touched on these details for the purpose of showing that the principal offenders in the transactions related were not the bishops of Rome, but the civil authorities and their adherents, that deprived the Roman clergy and the popes of their proper freedom. If the papal chair was filled with unworthy occupants, and had sunk low in the public esteem, it was because the emperor or empress at Constantinople and the Arian and barbarian kings in Italy sought to raise to it creatures of their own. They deprived the Roman clergy, the senate, and people of the free exercise of their right to elect the pope; and the pope, after his election, of his freedom of action, if he refused to conform to their wishes, usually criminal, and always base. Yet Harper's Magazine lays all the blame to the popes themselves, and seems to hold them responsible for the crimes and tyranny, the profligacy and lawless will of which they were the victims. If the wolf devoured the lamb, was it not the lamb's fault?

St. Gregory the Great was of a wealthy and illustrious family, and therefore finds some favor with the magazine; yet it calls him "a half-maddened enthusiast," and accuses him of "unsparing severity," and "excessive cruelty" in the treatment of his monks before his elevation to the papal chair. But his complaisance to the usurper Phocas, which we find it hard to excuse, and especially his disclaiming the title of "Universal Bishop," redeem him in its estimation.

"A faint trace of modesty and humility still characterized the Roman bishops, and they expressly disclaimed any right to the supremacy of the Christian world. The patriarch of Constantinople, who seems to have looked with a polished contempt upon his western brother, the tenant of fallen Rome and the bishop of the barbarians, now declared himself the Universal Bishop and the head of the subject Church. But Gregory repelled his usurpation with vigor. Whoever calls himself Universal Bishop is Antichrist,' he exclaimed; and he compares the patriarch to Satan, who in his pride had aspired to be higher than the angels."

John Jejunator, bishop of Constantinople, did not claim the primacy, which belonged to the bishop of Rome, nor did Gregory disclaim it; but called himself "oecumenical patriarch." The title he assumed derogated not from the rights and privileges of the apostolic see, but from those of the sees of Antioch and Alexandria. It was unauthorized, and showed culpable ambition and an encroaching disposition. St. Gregory, therefore, rebuked the bishop of Constantinople, and alleged the example of his predecessor, St. Leo the Great, who refused the title of "oecumenical bishop" when it was offered him by the Fathers of Chalcedon. It is a title never assumed or borne by a bishop of Rome, who, in his capacity as bishop, is the equal, and only the equal, of his brother bishops. All bishops are equal, as St. John Chrysostom tells us. The authority which the pope exercises over the bishops of the Catholic Church is not the episcopal, but the apostolical authority which he inherits from Peter, the prince of the apostles. St. Gregory disclaimed and condemned the title of "universal bishop," which was appropriate neither to him nor to any other bishop; but he did not disclaim the apostolic authority held as the successor of Peter. He actually claimed and exercised it in the very letter in which he rebukes the bishop of Constantinople. The magazine is wholly mistaken in asserting that Gregory disclaimed the papal supremacy. He did no such thing; he both claimed and exercised it, and few popes have exercised it more extensively or more vigorously.

The magazine is also mistaken in asserting that St. Leo III. crowned Charlemagne "Emperor of the West." Charlemagne was already hereditary patrician of Rome, and bound by his office to maintain order in the city and territories of Rome, and to defend the Holy See, or the Roman Church, against its enemies. All the pope did was to raise the patrician to the imperial dignity, without any territorial title. Charles never assumed or bore the title of Emperor of the West. His official title was "Rex Francorum et Longobardorum Imperator." The title of "Emperor of the West," or "Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire," which his German successors assumed, was never conferred by the pope, but only acquiesced in after it had been usurped. The pope conferred on Charlemagne no authority out of the papal states.

We have no space to discuss the origin of the temporal sovereignty of the bishops of Rome, nor the ground of that arbitratorship which the popes, during several ages, unquestionably exercised with regard to the sovereign princes bound by their profession and the constitution of their states to profess and protect the Catholic religion. {92} We have already done the latter in an article on Church and State in our magazine for April, 1867. But we can tell Harper's Magazine that it entirely misapprehends the character of St. Gregory VII., and the nature and motive of the struggle between him and Henry III., or Henry IV., as some reckon, king of the Germans, for emperor he never was. Gregory was no innovator; he introduced, and attempted to introduce, no change in the doctrine or discipline of the church, nor in the relations of church and state. He only sought to correct abuses, to restore the ancient discipline which had, through various causes, become relaxed, and to assert and maintain the freedom and independence of the church in the government of her own spiritual subjects in all matters spiritual.

"His elevation was the signal for the most wonderful change in the character and purposes of the church. The pope aspired to rule mankind. He claimed an absolute power over the conduct of kings, priests, and nations, and he enforced his decrees by the terrible weapons of anathema and excommunication. He denounced the marriages of the clergy as impious, and at once there arose all over Europe a fearful struggle between the ties of natural affection and the iron will of Gregory. Heretofore the secular priests and bishops had married, raised families, and lived blamelessly as husbands or fathers, in the enjoyment of marital and filial love. But suddenly all this was changed. The married priests were declared polluted and degraded, and were branded with ignominy and shame. Wives were torn from their devoted husbands, children were declared bastards, and the ruthless monk, in the face of the fiercest opposition, made celibacy the rule of the church. The most painful consequences followed. The wretched women, thus degraded and accursed, were often driven to suicide in their despair. Some threw themselves into the flames; others were found dead in there beds, the victims of grief or of their own resolution not to survive their shame, while the monkish chroniclers exult over their misfortunes, and triumphantly consign them to eternal woe.

"Thus the clergy under Gregory's guidance became a monastic order, wholly separated from all temporal interests; and bound in a perfect obedience to the church. He next forebade all lay investitures or appointments to bishoprics or other clerical offices, and declared himself the supreme ruler of the ecclesiastical affairs of nations. No temporal sovereign could fill the great European sees, or claim any dominion over the extensive territories held by eminent churchmen in right of their spiritual power. It was against this claim that the Emperor of Germany, Henry IV., rebelled. The great bishoprics of his empire, Cologne, Bremen, Treves, and many others, were his most important feudatories, and should he suffer the imperious pope to govern them at will, his own dominion would be reduced to a shadow. And now began the famous contest between Hildebrand and Henry, between the carpenter's son and the successor of Charlemagne, between the Emperor of Germany and the Head of the Church."

This heart-rending picture is, to a great extent, a fancy piece. The celibacy of the clergy was the law of the church and of the German empire; and every priest knew it before taking orders. These pretended marriages were, in both the ecclesiastical courts and the civil courts, no marriages at all; and these dispairing wives of priests were simply concubines. What did Gregory do, but his best to enforce the law which the emperors had suffered to fall into desuetude? The right of investiture was always in the pope, and it was only by his authority that the emperors had ever exercised it. {93} The pope had authorized them to give investiture of bishops at a time of disorder, and when it was for the good of the church that they should be so authorized. But when they abused the trust, and used it only to fill the sees with creatures of their own, or sold the investiture for money to the unworthy and the profligate, and intruded them into sees, in violation of the canons, and sheltered them from the discipline of the church—causing, thus, gross corruption of morals and manners, the neglect of religious instruction, and dangers to souls—it was the right and the duty of the pontiff to revoke the authorization given, to dismiss his unworthy agents, and to forbid the emperors henceforth to give investiture.

The magazine says that if the emperor should suffer the imperious pope to be allowed to govern at will the great bishoprics of Cologne, Bremen, Treves, and many others, which were the most important feudatories of his empire, his own dominion would be reduced to a shadow. But if the emperor could fill them with creatures of his own, make bishops at his will, and depose them and sequester their revenues if they resisted his tyranny, or sell them, as he did, to the highest bidder—thrusting out the lawful occupants, and intruding men who could have been only usurpers, and who really were criminals in the eye of the law, and usually dissolute and scandalous in morals—where would have been the rightful freedom and independence of the church? How could the pope have maintained order and discipline in the church, and protected the interests of religion? At worst, the imperious will of the pontiff was as legitimate and as trustworthy as the imperious will of such a brutal tyrant and moral monster as was Henry. The pope did but claim his rights and the rights of the faithful people. It was no less important that the spiritual authority should govern in spirituals than it was that the secular authority should govern in temporals. The pope did not interfere, nor propose to interfere, with the emperor in the exercise of his authority in temporals; but he claimed the right, which the emperor could not deny, to govern in spirituals; and resisted the attempt of Henry to exercise any authority in the church, which, whatever infidels and secularists may pretend, is of more importance than the state, for it maintains the state. He never pretended to any authority in the fiefs of the empire, or to subject to his will matters not confessedly within his jurisdiction.

Does the writer in the magazine maintain that the Methodist General Conference would be wrong to claim the right of choosing and appointing its own bishops, and assigning the pastors, elders, and preachers to their respective circuits; and that it could justly be accused of seeking to dominate over the state if it resisted, with all its power, the attempt of the state to take that matter into its own hands, and appoint for all the Methodist local conferences, districts, and circuits, bishops and pastors, itinerant and local preachers, and should appoint men of profligate lives, who scorned the Book of Discipline, Unitarians, Universalists, rationalists, and infidels, or the bitter enemies of Methodism; those who would neglect every spiritual duty, and seek only to plunder the funds and churches to provide for their own lawless pleasures, or to pay the bribes by which they obtained their appointment? We think not. And yet this is only a mild statement of what Henry did, and of what Gregory resisted. The pope claimed and sought to obtain no more for the church in Germany than is the acknowledged right of every professedly Christian sect in this country, and which every sect fully enjoys, without any let or hindrance from the state. Why, then, this outcry against Gregory VII.? Do these men who are so bitter against him, and gnash their teeth at him, know what they do? {94} Have they ever for a moment reflected how much the modern world owes for its freedom and civilization to just such great popes as Hildebrand, who asserted energetically the rights of God, the freedom of religion, and made the royal and imperial despots and brutal tyrants who would trample on all laws, human and divine, feel that, if they would wear their crowns, they must study to restrain their power within its proper limits, and to rule justly for the common good, according to the law of God?

What Germany thought of the conduct of Henry is evinced by the fact that when Gregory struck him with the sword of Peter and Paul, everybody abandoned him but his deeply injured wife and one faithful attendant. The whole nation felt a sense of relief and breathed freely. An incubus which oppressed its breast was thrown off. The picture of the sufferings of Henry traversing the Alps in the winter and standing shivering with cold in his thin garb, as a penitent before the door of the pontiff, is greatly exaggerated, and the attempt to excite sympathy for him and indignation against the pontiff can have no success with those who have studied with some care the history of the times. Henry was a bad man; a capricious, unprincipled, tyrannical, and brutal ruler, and his cause was bad. The pope was in the right; he was on the side of truth and justice, of God and humanity, pure morals and just liberty. Leo the historian, a Protestant, and Voigt, a Protestant minister, both Germans, have each completely vindicated Gregory's conduct toward Henry of Germany, though Harper's historian is probably ignorant of that fact, as he is of some others.

As to the pope's subjecting Henry to the discipline of the church, and depriving him of his crown, all we need say is, that all men are equal before God and the church, and kings and kaisers are as much amenable to the discipline of the church, acknowledged by them to be Christ's kingdom, as the meanest of their subjects. The pope assumed no more than the kirk session assumed when it sent their King Charles II. to the "cuttie stool." The revolutionists of Spain have just deprived Isabella Segunda of her crown and throne, with the general applause of the non-Catholic world, and no pope ever deprived a prince who denied his jurisdiction, or his legal right to sit in judgment on his case, nor, till after a fair trial had been had, and a judicial sentence was rendered according to the existing laws of his principality. We see not why, then, the popes should be decried for doing legally, and after trial, what revolutionists are applauded for doing without trial and against all law, human and divine—unless it be because the pope deprived only base and profligate monsters, stained with the worst of crimes; and the revolutionists deprive the guiltless, who violate no law of the state or of the church, The pope deprived for crime; the revolutionists usually for virtue or innocence, only under pretence of ameliorating the state, which they subvert.

But our space is nearly exhausted, and we must hurry on. Innocent III. is another of those great bishops of Rome that excite the wrath of Harper's Magazine—probably because he was really a great pope, energetic in asserting the faith, in removing scandals, in enforcing discipline on kings and princes as well as on their subjects; in repressing sects, like the Albigenses, that struck at the very foundations of religion and society, or of the moral order; in defending the purity of morals and the sanctity of marriage, and in espousing the cause of the weak against the strong, of oppressed innocence against oppressive guilt. {95} This is too much for the endurance of the magazine. It indeed does not say that Innocent did not espouse the cause of justice in the case of Philip Augustus and his injured queen, Ingeburga; but it contends that he did it from unworthy motives, for the sake of extending and consolidating the papal authority over kings and princes. Though he admits John Lackland was a moral monster, and opened negotiations with a Mohammedan prince to the scandal of Christendom, offered to make himself a Mussulman, and would have embraced Islamism if the infidel prince had not repelled him with indignation and contempt; it yet finds that Innocent was altogether wrong in taking effective measures to restrain his tyranny, cruelty, licentiousness, and plunder of the churches and robbery of his subjects. His motive was simply to monopolize power and profit for the papal see. He also, for like reasons, was wrong in resisting Frederic II. of Germany, who, he says, preferred Islamism to Christianity, as itself probably prefers it to Catholicity.

The article closes with a tirade against Alexander VI., and his children, Caesar and Lucretia Borgia, Roscoe, a Protestant or rationalist, has vindicated the character of Lucretia, that accomplished, capable, and most grossly calumniated woman, who, in her real history, appears to have been not less eminent for her virtues than for her beauty and abilities. Caesar Borgia we have no disposition to defend, though we have ample grounds for believing that he was by no means so black as Italian hatred and malice have painted him. Alexander was originally in the army of Spain, and his manners and morals were such as we oftener associate with military men than with ecclesiastics, He lived with a woman who was another man's wife, and had two or three children by her. But this was while he was a soldier, and before he was an ecclesiastic or thought of taking orders. He was called to Rome for his eminent administrative ability, by his uncle, Pope Callixtus III.; took, in honor of his uncle, the name of Borgia; became an ecclesiastic; was, after some time, made cardinal, and finally raised to the papal throne under the name of Alexander VI. After he was made cardinal, if, indeed, after he became an ecclesiastic, nothing discreditable to his morals has been proved against him; and his moral character, during his entire pontificate, was, according to the best authorities, irreproachable. The Borgias had, however, the damning sin of being Spaniards, not Italians; and of seeking to reduce the Italian robber barons to submission and obedience to law, and to govern Italy in the interests of public order. They had, therefore, many bitter and powerful enemies; hence, the aspersions of their character, and the numerous fables against them, and which but too many historians have taken for authenticated facts. The alleged poisonings of Alexander and his daughter Lucretia are none of them proved, and are inventions of Italian hatred and malice. Yet, though Alexander's conduct as pope was irreproachable, and his administration able and vigorous, his antecedents were such that his election to the papal throne was a questionable policy, and Savonarola held it to be irregular and null.

The magazine indulges in the old cant about the contrast between the poverty and humility of Peter and the wealth and grandeur of his successors; the simplicity of the primitive worship, and the pomp and splendor of the Roman service. {96} There is no need of answering this. When the Messrs. Harper Brothers started the printing business in this city, we presume their establishment was in striking contrast to their present magnificent establishment in Cliff street. When the world was converted to the church, and the supreme pontiff had to sustain relations with sovereign princes, to receive their ambassadors, and send his legates to every court in Christendom to look after the interests of religion—the chief interest of both society and individuals—larger accommodations than were afforded by that "upper room" in Jerusalem were needed, and a more imposing establishment than St. Peter may have had was a necessity of the altered state of things. Even our Methodist friends, we notice, find it inconvenient to observe the plainness and simplicity in dress and manners prescribed by John Wesley their founder. He forbids, we believe, splendid churches, with steeples and bells; and the earliest houses for Methodist meetings, even we remember, were very different from the elegant structures they are now erecting. We heard a waggish minister say of one of them, "Call you this the Lord's house? you should rather call it the Lord's barn."

The Catholic Church continues and fulfils the synagogue, and her service is, to a great extent, modelled after the Jewish, which was prescribed by God himself. The dress of the pontiff, when he celebrates the Holy Sacrifice, is less gorgeous than that of the Jewish high-priest. St. Peter's is larger than was Solomon's temple, but it is not more gorgeous; and the Catholic service, except in the infinite superiority of the victim immolated upon the altar, is not more splendid, grand, or imposing than was the divinely prescribed temple service of the Hebrews. The magazine appears to think with Judas Iscariot, that the costly ointment with which a woman that had been a sinner anointed the feet of Jesus, after she had washed them with her tears and wiped them with her hair, was a great waste, and might have been put to a better use. But our Lord did not think so, and Judas Iscariot did not become the prince of the apostles. We owe all we have to God, and it is but fitting that we should employ the best we have in his service.

Here we must close. We have not replied to all the misstatements, misrepresentations, perversions, and insinuations of the article in Harper's Magazine. We could not do it in a brief article like the present. It would require volumes to do it. We have touched only on a few salient points that struck us in glancing over it; but we have said enough to show its animus and to expose its untrustworthiness. Refuted it we have not, for there really is nothing in it to refute, It lays down no principles, states no premises, draws no conclusions. It leaves all that to be supplied by the ignorance and prejudices of its readers. It is a mere series of statements that require no answer but a flat denial. It is not strange that the magazine should calumniate the popes, and seek to pervert their history. Our Lord built his church on Peter, being himself the chief cornerstone; and nothing is more natural than that they who hate the church should strike their heads against the papacy. The popes have always been the chief object of attack, and have had to bear the brunt of the battle. Yet they have labored, suffered, been persecuted, imprisoned, exiled, and martyred for the salvation of mankind. What depth of meaning in the dying words of the exiled Gregory VII., "I have loved justice, and hated iniquity; therefore I die in exile." Alas! the world knows not its benefactors, and crucifies its redeemers!

March Omens.

[Footnote 44: From Irish Odes and other Poems, by Aubrey De Vere, just Issued by the Catholic Publication Society.]

  ON ivied stems and leafless sprays
    The sunshine lies in dream:
  Scarcely yon mirrored willow sways
    Within the watery gleam.

  In woods far off the dove is heard,
    And streams that feed the lake:
  All else is hushed save one small bird,
    That twitters in the brake.

  Yet something works through earth and air,
    A sound less heard than felt,
  Whispering of Nature's procreant care,
    While the last snow-flakes melt.

  The year anon her rose will don;
    But to-day this trance is best—
  This weaving of fibre and knitting of bone
    In Earth's maternal breast.

Translated From The German
By Richard Storrs Willis.

Emily Linder.

A Life-portrait.

The circle of those who were witness to the blossom-period of the city of Munich, that glorious epoch of twenty or thirty years which dawned upon the Bavarian capital when Louis I. ascended the throne, is gradually narrowing, and every year contracts it still further. The name of her to whom this sketch is dedicated belonged to this circle, and is closely associated with the best of those who aided in inaugurating this brilliant epoch, and rendering Munich a hearthstone of culture which attracted the gaze of the educated world. Sunny period of old Munich! They of that time speak of it with the same enthusiasm as of their own youth. Yet to a future generation will their testimony sound like some beautiful tradition.

To not a few, the name of Miss Emily Linder appeared for the first time, as the intelligence of her death passed through the public journals of February, 1857. Yet was her life no ordinary one; and though it never tended to publicity, she accomplished more in her great seclusion than many a noisy and feted celebrity. Hers was a quiet and unassuming nature; she belonged to those who speak little and accomplish much. It is therefore befitting, now that she has gone to her home, here to speak of her. Not so much to praise her, for she shrank from all earthly praise; but to keep her memory fresh among her friends and to present to a selfish, distracted age, poor in faith, the animating example of a pure, faith-inspired, and symmetrical character a life full of fidelity, unselfishness, and enthusiasm.

Swiss by birth and unchangeably devoted to her circumscribed home, Emily Linder little dreamed, probably, when in early life she wandered to Munich, that she would yet close a long life there. But over this life, swiftly as it glided along, there watched a special, directing Providence; and no one could more cheerfully have recognized this Providence than did she. What originally attracted her to Munich was Art: she probably contemplated, at first, only brief and transient visit there; but the metropolis of German art became a second home to her—even more than this.

Emily Linder belonged to a wealthy mercantile family of Basle, and was born at that place on the 11th of October, 1797. She received a careful religious education, (in the reformed faith of her parents,) and that varied instruction which rendered her unusually wakeful mind susceptible to topics of deeper import. She seemed to have inherited from her grandfather, who was a lover and collector of artistic objects, a fondness for fine art. Following this predilection, the gifted girl decided to seize the pallet and devote herself to painting as an occupation. Such was her entirely independent position as to fortune, that nothing but inward enthusiasm could have led her to this step, or have confined her from thenceforth to the easel.

The home of Holbein's genius offered her at first, doubtless, inspiration enough. But a new star had arisen in German art, and the youthful Swiss was drawn powerfully by its leading away from home—to Munich. The modest city on the verdant Iser began at that period to prove the goal of pilgrimage to every ambitious disciple of art. Miss Linder also heard of it, and, instead of going to Dresden, as she had intended, she turned for her further improvement to Munich. On her arrival in this city she had attained to an age of twenty-seven years; but her devotion to her chosen profession was so earnest, that she entered as a simple pupil the Academy of Fine Arts. In the catalogue of the academy, Emily Linder is inscribed as historical painter, on the 4th of November, 1824. But she frequented the studios only a few weeks. At that time it was customary to accept ladies as pupils; but she soon perceived that the position was hardly a becoming one, surrounded by so many young people of various characters, and all beginners like herself. She therefore had recourse to Professor Schlotthauer for private instruction. Under the guidance of this excellent master, "a veritable house-father in the painter's academy," as Brentano characteristically termed him, she pursued her studies in good earnest, and, according to the representation of her teacher, made rapid progress in the severer style of drawing, in which she had hitherto been less practised than in painting. She soon perfected herself to such an extent that she was enabled to complete her own compositions, and thus derived double satisfaction from her profession.

It was indeed a pleasure in those days, competing with so many enthusiastic young artists and with the newly-appearing works in constant view, to labor and strive onward with the rest. This was the time, too, when Cornelius assumed the directorship of the Munich Academy and inaugurated, in grand style, the new era of German art. A wondrous life dawned upon Munich art at that period. Cornelius himself, in his old age, recalled with emotion and enthusiasm this youthful period of new German art. At Rome, thirty years later, on the occasion of the Louis festival of German artists, 20th May 1855, while he was delivering an address so celebrated for its many piquant flashes, he thus painted the joyous industry of those days:

"But when King Louis ascended the throne of his fathers, then began the sport. Zounds! what moulding, building, drawing, and painting! With what eagerness, with what hilarity each went to his work! But it was an earnest hilarity: … nor was Munich at that time a mere hot-house of art. The warmth was a healthy and vital one, born of the flaming fire of inspiration, the evidence of which every work, whatever its defects, bore upon its very face. Those men who worked together in brotherly unity knew that there confronted them the art tribunal of posterity and of the German nation. It concerned them, now, that German genius should open a new pathway in art, as it had already so gloriously done in poetry, in music, in science."

In this glorious time of youthful aspiration, bold conception, and joyful industry, Miss Linder began her artistic career in Munich. Is it a wonder then that the city pleased her daily better, and imperceptibly gained a home-like power over her? Nor had she, by any means, a lack of intellectual incitement. Her independent position and rare culture secured to her the most agreeable social position. In the family of Herr von Ringseis, to which she had brought an introduction from Basle, and where gathered the nobility of the entire fatherland, she came into contact with the most eminent artists and scholars. {100} Chief among these was Cornelius, who welcomed her to his family circle. The old master of German art remained a life-long friend of hers and warmly attached to her. Among her more intimate companions, she numbered also the two Eberhards, Heinrich Hess, Franz von Baader. Somewhat later, by the transfer of the university to Munich, were added to these Schubert, Görres, Schelling, Lasaulx. Also the two Boiseree, who in the autumn of 1827 came to Munich with their art collection, which had been purchased by King Louis, were soon numbered among her nearer acquaintances.

Amid so choice a circle there unfolded itself for the young artist a spiritual and intense life, to which she abandoned herself with all the joyous simplicity and freshness of an artistic nature; a nature which was susceptible also to the beautiful and the grand in other things—in poetry, in music, and in science. The quiet, friendly lady-artist became everywhere a favorite.

But, amid all these manifold occupations, there was ever a certain earnestness, a striving out of the temporal into the eternal. Even art was not to her a mere amusement. Genuine art possesses an ennobling power, and she experienced what Michael Angelo once said to his friend Vittoria Colonna, "True painting is naturally religious and noble; for even the struggle toward perfection elevates the soul to devotion, draws it near to God and unites it with him." Attracted by the pure and lofty in art, Miss Linder gave preference to religious painting, a taste which was encouraged by her sterling master: and it caused her, though a Protestant, special gratification, while ever seeking the best studies, to paint or copy, whenever she could, devotional church pictures.

In order to become acquainted, through actual observation, with the principal works of Christian art, she determined on a journey to Italy. Her first visit she decided to confine to the cities of upper Italy, and in company with Professor Schlotthauer and his wife, this plan was carried out during the summer and autumn of 1825. Milan, Verona, Padua, Venice, Bologna, were visited, and, led by the hand of her intelligent master, they all passed under her examination. The goal of her travel was to be Florence. But the long-continued, fine autumn weather attracted the travellers further and further, and at length they came to Perugia, the middle point of the Umbrian school, and thence to the neighboring, picturesque-lying Assisi. At this place a little circumstance occurred which became of deep significance in the after life of the artist.

The vetturino, familiar with the land and the people, called the attention of the travellers to the fact that in Assisi there was a monastery of German Franciscan nuns. A colony of poor German women in the middle of Italian lands! That was enough to decide the party to visit the monastery and greet their pious countrywomen in the language of home. But they found the sisterhood in evident distress. As they stood before the lattice, the history of the monastery was briefly related to them by the superior. It owed its origin to the patrician family Nocker of Munich, and according to the terms of its establishment was intended only for Germans, and more particularly for Bavarian maidens. Under Napoleon I. it was suspended, and the nuns were cared for in private dwellings, where, hoping for better times, they still continued, as well as they could, the practice of their vocation. These better times came. After the fall of the Napoleonic dynasty, the purchasers of the monastery consented to relinquish it, and the poor Franciscans could at least reoccupy the building. {101} But it went so hard with them, that they were sometimes obliged to ring the distress-bell, and the number of inmates diminished. At the time of the arrival of our three travellers, they numbered but twelve. An increase of numbers under such circumstances was hardly to be hoped for, and the existence of the monastery seemed again endangered. Municipal abolishment was threatened, with the unavoidable prospect to the nuns of being distributed among the various Italian monasteries. Now to maintain themselves as a German order was everything to these Franciscans; and thus the superior represented it to her travelling country-people, with all simple-heartedness, closing her narration with the entreaty that, on their return to Munich, they would not forget the little German monastery in Assisi, but care for it as they might be able, and cause younger sisters to come to them from Bavaria, in order to save the establishment from utter extinction.

The three travellers took their leave filled with sympathy, and promising to bear in mind the petition of the superior. They commenced their homeward travel from Assisi, passed through Genoa and reached Munich again in November. Miss Linder vigorously recommenced her artistic occupations, filled with animation at her new experiences. But during the winter evenings the Italian trip often formed the topic of conversation in the Schlotthauer family, and generally closed with the question, How shall we manage to increase the number of candidates in the monastery at Assisi? But at that period this was not so easy. The secular spirit had spread itself broadly in German lands: the current of fresh, Catholic life flowed mostly in hidden courses. But with surprise they soon learned of its continued activity. Through one of those invisible channels which Providence avails itself of, in its own good time—in every-day life termed accident—the cry for help of the superior at Assisi penetrated to to a village where pious hearts were prepared for it. One day there came a letter for Professor Schlotthauer from Landshut, addressed to him by an unknown maiden of the humbler class named Therese Frish, stating that she had heard of the monastery at Assisi, and the request of the superior: in Landshut was a goodly number of young girls who had long cherished the desire in their hearts for convent life, and only waited for an opportunity to realize their wishes: several of them, some possessed of means, were ready at any moment to leave for Assisi. This was welcome intelligence, and the friends of the superior in Munich were not backward in performing their part. Thus in the spring they had the happiness of seeing a little band of candidates departing for Assisi. The monastery was rescued, and commenced from that time, through the ever-increasing sympathy in Germany, a new and beneficent career. From year to year, assisted by the people of Munich, there wandered true-hearted though indigent maidens to this quiet asylum of piety, to reach which, as Brentano wrote twelve years later, (1838,) was the dearest wish of these pious children.

Her art trip had thus recompensed the maiden of Basle in a manner little dreamed of or counted on. The impression which this peculiar experience made upon her susceptible nature could not well be a transient one. The little monastery at Assisi—what could be more natural?—from thenceforth lay very closely to her heart, and its memories became most dear to her. The personality of the superior herself, her simple worth and naturalness, gratefully appealed to her; and several years later, on making her second Italian trip, she gladly revisited Assisi. {102} A friendly relation resulted, which, fostered by a regular correspondence, became more intimate every year. She now began to understand the true meaning of a voluntary Christian poverty: the contemplation of which must naturally make a profound impression upon a nature like hers. She had frequent occasion, by active assistance, to prove herself a warm friend of the monastery. Particularly at the time of the great earthquake, (1831,) when this monastery of women was in great want and distress, she stood by the nuns most generously. Ever after, indeed, she remained a constant benefactress of the German daughters of the holy St. Francis; and there, in the birth-place of the saint, was she most assiduously prayed for. In Assisi lay the earliest germ of her quietly-ripening, late-maturing conversion.

In the year 1828, Miss Linder returned to her native city, Basle, in order to prepare for a more lengthened visit to Rome. Like every genuine artist-heart, a powerful influence attracted her to the ancient capital of art, to the eternal city. On her journey thither, she touched at Assisi, having the happiness to escort to the monastery of the Franciscans a new candidate from Munich and to find the nuns there in happiest tranquillity. Cornelius and Schlotthauer reported the same of them, when they passed through, a year and a half later. They received permission from the bishop to hold an interview with the German sisters in the claustral. The innocent joyousness and deep peace of the German nuns was very touching to them. The bishop gave the two artists the best testimony of them in his assurance that he constantly presented these pious Germans to their Italian sisters as an example for imitation.

Accompanied with the nuns' blessing Miss Linder hastened toward the eternal city, where a new world opened itself to her. Bright, blissful days did she pass in Rome, and so well did it please her, that she remained there nearly three years. Here again her associates were the brightest spirits of the German art circle, and their similarity of aim induced a friendly geniality which in many ways enhanced the pleasure of her stay. Scholars and artists of the German colony sought her society with equal delight. Here she met Overbeck—that St. John among the artists—whose friendship to her and to her subsequent life was of such significance. Neher and Eberle received from her commissions. With the painter Ahlborn she read Dante. The venerable Koch was charmed with the society of the genial Swiss, and passed many a winter's evening with her. Also Thorwaldsen, Bunsen, and Platen were among her intimate acquaintance in Italy.

From Rome Miss Linder made a trip to Naples and Sorrento. With a party of Germans, among whom was Platen, she passed there the summer of 1830. The wondrous poetry of the landscape and skies of Sorrento impressed with their fullest power the sensitive soul of the artist. All three arts, poetry, music, and painting, were brought into requisition to give adequate expression to her enchantment and delight. She became herself a poetess under the influence of all these glories, and described to her friends, who remained behind at Rome, with veritable southern warmth of coloring, her "captivating paradise." As in Rome she listened with the veneration of an intelligent musician to the ancient classic music of the Sistine chapel, so at the Bay of Naples she bestowed her attention upon the popular Italian ballads. Theirs was a genial company, and they sang much together; of their songs and melodies she made a collection, and took home with her. {103} Platen, in his subsequent letters, reminded her of those days, and, writing from Venice, requested of her the music of "triads and octaves," which they had sung together in Sorrento.

On her return to Rome, late in the autumn of the same year, she found Cornelius and his family there, and the friendly relations which subsisted in Munich were warmly renewed. The presence of the honored master created, in the Roman art world, an animated and exhilarating activity, and the rest of her stay was thus enlivened in the most agreeable manner. The following year, in company with Cornelius, she started for home. It was hard parting, as finally, in July, 1831, with a wealth of beautiful and deep impressions, she bade farewell to the Hesperian land which had become so dear to her, to return to Basle; and we must not censure the artist that she found it difficult, as her letters indicate, to forget the blue skies of Italy and accustom herself again to the gray hues of the German heaven. The sharpness of the contrast gradually softened, however, and the old home feeling asserted itself. But the life in Rome remained a bright spot in her memory, and even in later years, when the conversation turned upon it, the habitually quiet lady became warm and animated.

In Rome, on the other hand, the artists were equally loth to part with the aesthetic Swiss. The venerable Koch sent her word, through the the painter Eberle, how much he regretted that he could no longer pass his winter evenings with her. Overbeck and others held with her an animated correspondence. But she remained in hallowed remembrance with the German art-colony, from the assistance she rendered to youthful talent, and her encouragement by actual commissions. The historical painter Adam Eberle, particularly, a pupil of Cornelius, friend and countryman of Lasaulx—a highly gifted and lofty mind, but struggling in the deepest poverty—to him she proved a generous benefactress; and we can truly say, that through her goodness his last days—he died at Rome, 1832—were illumined with a final gleam of sunshine. The letters which she received from the youthful departed, partly during her stay in Rome, partly after her departure, give ample testimony of this, and indicate the manner, generally, of her benevolence in such cases. Immediately on their first meeting in Rome, and learning of his condition, she gave him a commission for an oil painting; with deep emotion he thanked the friendly lady "for the confidence she had thus reposed in a nameless painter." Subsequently she purchased also several drawings of Eberle, each, like the oil painting, of a religious nature; among others, one that she particularly prized, and afterward caused to be engraved, "Peter and Paul journeying to the Occident."

On forwarding this drawing to Basle, together with another, the subject of which was taken from the Old Testament, "as the product of his muse since her departure," Eberle thus writes:

"What chiefly attracts me to these Bible subjects is the healthy and unaffected language, which I endeavor to translate into my art. Regard this work of mine as a study which is necessary for my taste. That which is lacking in it, I know full well, without the power of supplying it. Accept it, therefore, as it is. Altogether bad it is not. At a very sad period was it undertaken, and many a tear has fallen upon it, which, like a vein of noble metal, seven times purified in its earthen crucible, glistens through it. I have, indeed, some assurance that I have not fruitlessly worked, in Overbeck's judgment upon it, whom you saw at Bunsen's: and this not a little cheers me."

Her generous watchfulness wearied not in rescuing him, at the times of his greatest need, and Eberle, with overflowing gratitude, testified to these constant proofs of her goodness, and, even more, to the great delicacy and the kindly words which accompanied every act.

Her personal intercourse at Rome seemed also to have exerted a favorable influence upon his religious sentiments. The taste for mystical writings which, encouraged by Baader, she was cultivating at that period, grew also upon him; and when, shortly after her departure, Lasaulx came to Rome, Eberle was very happy that he could continue with him this favorite and elevating study. He writes to her at Basle on the 25th of September, 1831:

"An old friend of my youth and countryman of mine, C. Lasaulx, is now my almost exclusive companion: he will probably remain the winter here and share my dwelling with me. He is, as you know, a zealous disciple of Schelling, is deeply versed in the new philosophy, and, what to me is of still more value, in the mysticism of the middle ages. I rejoice to have gained in him some compensation for the loss of your society; yet I cannot share the expectations which he bases upon the new philosophy. Although my acquaintance with him has divested me of many a former prejudice, I find myself, nevertheless, attracted only the more to the 'one thing needful,' assured that only at the fountain of living waters, Jesus Christ, can our thirst be quenched."

"Lasaulx has nevertheless a very substantial Christian basis, and if ever his Knowing goes hand in hand with his Willing, and his Willing with his Knowing, we may certainly expect something very sterling from him."

It was Lasaulx himself who communicated the news to their mutual friend, in Germany, of the sudden death of Eberle. Eberle's plan had been to pass yet a year in Rome, then return to Germany, and, seeking again the sheltering wing of his master, Cornelius, in Munich, there to close his art-wanderings. Thus he himself wrote in a letter of the 7th of March, 1832. But a month later he was no more. He succumbed to a disease of the stomach. Shortly before his death, Miss Linder had cheered the invalid by a remittance. On the 24th of April, 1832, Lasaulx thus wrote from Rome:

"Our friend Adam Eberle, at five o'clock in the afternoon of the 15th of April, after a hard death-struggle, recovered from the malady of this life. Good-Friday morning we bore him home. Three days before his death he had the great joy of receiving your last letter, and that which your love enclosed with it. He was one of the few whose souls are washed in the blood of the Lamb, offered from the beginning of the world. The Lamentations and the Miserere of the divine old masters Palestrini and Allrgri which you begged our friend to listen to for you, I have listened to for both of you."

Munich had now so grown upon the affections of the artiste that she again removed thither from Basle in 1832. After her life in Rome, a residence in the German art-metropolis could not but be a necessity to her, and the Bavarian capital was thenceforth her home. Her house became more and more the peaceful abode of the fine arts. Her fortune enabled her, by a succession of commissions, gradually to collect a wealth of pictures and drawings in which the Corypheans of Christian art were represented. Among these Overbeck took the foremost place with a series of subjects from the Evangelists, the choicest of drawings, which during a period of thirty years gradually came into her possession. A beautiful oil painting by Overbeck, which she esteemed most highly, "The death of St. Joseph," was also produced at this time, an elevated delineation of the death of the just. From Cornelius she secured three cartoons of the wall pictures in the Louis-church, ("The Creation,") in which this mighty intellect was worthily represented. {105} In like manner an altar-piece by Conrad Eberhard, one of the most thoughtful compositions of this admirable master, and intended originally for one of the new church edifices of King Louis, took its place among the gems of this house—just as the venerable master himself, in all his purity of soul and pious simplicity, took his place high in the friendship of the hostess.

Next to painting, the two sister arts, poetry and music, were specially cultivated in the home of the artist. She had a clear perception of the true and elevated in poetry, and kept pace, even to old age, with the literary productions of the new era. Her own poetic effusions were confined to the eye of her more intimate friends; but there were some poems upon which Brentano himself placed high value. Her library was a choice one, and her knowledge of languages kept her acquainted with the best productions of the modern cultivated nations. Her aesthetic and scientific acquirements became her well, inasmuch as the cultivation of the mind and of the heart with her kept even pace.

Miss Linder applied herself to music in full earnest. She not only practised several instruments—the aeolodicon and harp were always seen in her drawing-room—but she had herself instructed by Ett in thorough-bass and the history of music. She followed his instructions in harmony with practical exercises. In musical history it was the religious department again which most appealed to her: her researches went back to the earliest times, the development of the true church style, and for the unfolding of this subject she had found in Ett the right man. Moreover, she stood in friendly exchange of views with Proske of Regensburg, a profound student of ancient church music. Sometimes musical gatherings were held, to which Ett brought singing-boys from the choir of St. Michael's Church: ancient religious cantatas, the compositions of Orlando di Lasso, Handel, Abbé Vogler's hymns, and the like, were performed. Conrad Eberhard, an enthusiastic admirer of music and of the master Ett, who with Schlotthauer regularly attended the historical lectures on music, in his ninetieth year spoke with loving recollection of these ennobling evenings at Miss Linder's.

By this varied and earnest devotion to art, as well as artistic and scientific enterprises, to which she constantly brought willing and generous offerings, her life began to assume more and more an ideal significance, and to gain that expansiveness of horizon and completeness which secured for her a position in society as peculiar as it was agreeable. If we would ask what it was that identified this quiet spirit with so distinguished a circle and made her house a rendezvous for scholars and artists, in which the most brilliant and the most profound so gladly met, the explanation would be just this—it was the awakened intelligence which she brought to all intellectual topics, the simple-hearted abandonment to the views of great minds, the readiness with which she recognized and admired the true and the beautiful in all things. It was equally the unselfish, uncalculating enthusiasm, and the perfect purity of soul, which compelled the respect of all. An unvarying geniality blended with a quiet earnestness; a clear intelligence with a golden goodness; a profound view of life in all its phases, from the very heights of a sunny existence—herein resided the gentle attractiveness with which she drew to herself the sympathies of the noblest souls and held them fast.

A character of such a type is best reflected in its friends. Her life for the most part flowed on so quietly and evenly that it rose clearly to the view of only those who were nearest to her. It seems, therefore, befitting that from among her many friends we should select a few who, like her, are now at rest, and mention some of their salient characteristics.

The foremost place is due to the painter-prince of the new art-epoch himself, Cornelius—who was a friend from her very youth, and only a few months after her, even in these latter days, closed his earthly pilgrimage. The fame of the man and the sense of his loss, still so freshly felt, will justify us in dwelling somewhat more at length on him and his letters. It was, indeed, the opinion of Emily Linder, toward the close of her life, that the letters which she had received from Cornelius might some day be of use in his biography.

At the time Miss Linder started from Munich upon her journey to Switzerland and Italy, her relations with the family of the celebrated painter had already become so intimate, that it was continued in correspondence. Ordinarily it was an Italian-German or double letter, from Carolina and Peter Cornelius, which greeted her; they both recall, with friendly warmth, her residence in Munich, and the message, "We miss you!" was repeatedly wafted after her as she remained longer away. Frau Carolina Cornelius evinced for her a very tender attachment. The genial master himself honored her with confidences from time to time, as to his artistic plans and undertakings. Particularly was this the case when he was commissioned to prepare designs for the Louis-church in Munich, whereby he saw the early realization of a long-cherished and favorite idea of his; when the history of mankind in grand outline, the creation, the redemption, the sending of the Holy Ghost to the church, the last judgment, presented itself to his mind. Then he felt impelled to open his heart to his absent friend, and the postscript, which he appended to a letter of his wife, rises into a veritable dithyrambic. He writes on the 20th of January, 1829:

"I cannot better close this letter than by communicating a thing which transports me and in which you, my dear friend, will sympathize. Fancy my good fortune! After completing the Glyptothek, I am to paint a church. It is now sixteen years that I have been going about with the idea of a Christian epic in painting—a painted comoedia divina—and I have had hours, and longer periods, when it seemed I had a special mission for this. And now my heavenly love comes like a bride in all her beauty to me—what mortal after this can I envy? The universe opens itself before my eyes: I see heaven, earth, and hell; I see the past, the present, and the future; I stand on Sinai and gaze upon the new Jerusalem; I am inebriated and yet composed. All my friends must pray for me, and you, my dear Emily. With brotherly love greets you CORNELIUS."

The artistic heroism of this soul—this man whose ideas grasped the world—breathes in these lines with certainly wonderful freshness. In other letters of this happy period his natural humor gains the ascendant, and he indulges in sallies of mirth, afterward begging her indulgence and a friendly remembrance of "the crazy painter Peter Cornelius." Her replies were in a simpler and graver tone, but full of that refreshing independence, which appeared to a nature like his more than aught else. She allowed his geniality full play without compromising her sincerity, or her dignity. He is thus both "charmed and edified" by her letters, and once made the remark of them, "All that your personality led me to fancy of the beautiful and the good finds more artless, more forcible and vivid expression in your letters. {107} It becomes you uncommonly well, whenever you fairly assert yourself."

In the year 1831 the cholera threatened, for a time, to visit Munich. The preparations of the sanitary authorities to meet this uncomfortable guest were already completed. Miss Linder was in Basle, and sent thence a friendly invitation to Cornelius and his family to take refuge at her domestic hearth. The knightly response of the master, dated Munich, 15th of November 1831, is as follows:

"Your friendly suggestion from the shelter of your hospitable hearth to laugh at the cholera, and by the same opportunity, perhaps, to reproduce a Decameron, corresponding thereto, has an indescribable attraction for me, and I should have acted upon it had I not been afraid to be afraid. From sheer cowardice at the possible death of my honor, I must stand the cartridges of the cholera. From the spot where my king and so many admirable and honorable men stand their ground, must Cornelius never run away. You will take in good part the informality of this letter from your fanciful friend, yet he craves of you an indulgenza plenaria while he ends with the bold declaration that he indescribably loves and honors you.

At this period an idea seized Cornelius, which long occupied his attention, namely, to record the noteworthy incidents of his own eventful artist-life; a plan which certainly would have enriched literature by at least one original work and have proved of inestimable value to the history of modern art. Unfortunately, the plan was never carried out; but it affords a proof of his high esteem for his friend that Cornelius intended the memoirs to be written in the form of letters addressed to her, as will appear from the two following letters. They are written under the influence of the same exuberant spirits in which the grand conception of his "Christian epic" had placed him:

"Very Dear Friend: This is not meant as an answer to the welcome and beautiful letter which you sent me through H. Hauser; it is only a slight expression of my gratitude and my great delight at the kindliness and the loyal friendship which your dear letter breathes for me, unworthy. I have lately been asking myself why this letter-writing, which, as you and all the world knows, is a horror to me, since my correspondence with you has set me back into that happy period when one can write an entire library and yet not be satisfied. Had I more leisure, I would carry out an old project to write the history of my life in letter-form, after the manner of many French memoirs, and addressed to you. Although for the present this is not to be thought of, I by no means abandon the plan.

"Heroes and artists—in the most liberal way of viewing it—have their truest and clearest appreciation in the pure souls of women. Only Hebe might serve the nectar to Alcides; only Beatrice conducts the singer into Paradise; Tasso's delirium is a vague searching in a labyrinth where Ariadne's thread is broken; Michael Angelo would have been as great a painter as was Dante a poet had Beatrice opened heaven to him; Raphael's thousand-feathered Psyche bore a material maiden into the realm of the stars; her human blood enkindled his and slew him. When I write my memoirs, you will see how it has gone with me in this respect. In the mean time I allow you a peep through the keyhole of my private drawer—it is a poor poem of my youth, which as penance you must read, because you mockingly called me a poet. [Footnote 45]

[Footnote 45: It is truly a very youthful poem, addressed "To the Muse," commencing:
"Confided have I alone
in thee, O Muse," etc. ED.]

"I know not why I send these poor stanzas to you; it appears to me as though you exercised some charm over the spirits of my life, who must perforce appear before you. Perhaps one of these days this letter might serve for a dedication to the book in question, because, like an overture, it contains in itself the leading motive. Now farewell, and take no offence at this gay carnival-arabesque, The ladies of my family heartily greet you: we have good news from Rome. Heaven bless you, vouchsafe you cheerfulness and bliss, and bring you soon to us. Meantime, however, write soon, and often send tidings to your most devoted friend,

Four months later, he reverts to the same subject, on the occasion of sending to her, while at Basle, a sketch of his latest composition for the walls of the Louis-church, ("The Epiphany,") accompanying which he writes:

"Herewith you find a little sketch of a drawing just completed for a large cartoon (the corresponding piece to the Crucifixion,) and instead of interpreting it to you, I beg your own interpretation of it; it would have such a charm for me to read in your mind my own conceptions ennobled and beautified. What coquetry! I hear you laughingly say; and yet I hope to be pardoned. If it be true that artists have many feelings in common with women, those which prompt us to try to please those we love should meet with some indulgence.

"I occupy myself often, on my lonely walks, with the plan of my intended memoirs; the material begins to assume shape; but unless you apply to it the finishing touch, it will not be presentable. I never could bring myself to entrust it to other hands. In the retrospect of my life I find the material more abundant than I had supposed. Very difficult will be the shaping of much of it. How easily does many a tie and relation in this life lose its true coloring and significance by omissions; and yet must these very often occur, if the work is to appear during my lifetime. Before beginning to write, I shall communicate to you, orally, dearest friend, some portions of the memoirs, and we can then discuss them at leisure—a welcome plan to me, for thus will the undertaking fairly ripen. With inmost respect and love, your devoted

Finally, it may be allowable to make mention of a letter which he addresses to her from Rome, on the 12th of October, 1833, while he was working on his drawing of the Last Judgment. In this letter we recognize his playful, working humor—and does he not term these periods of creative activity his wedding time? In several remarks, however, we discern both sides of his nature.

"My Noble Friend: It is really too bad! has he not yet written? not even answered that charming letter from Salzburg? Well, I must say, I am curious to see how he will justify himself.

"Thus I hear Schlotthauer exclaim; even Schubert ominously shakes his head; but you are silent and thoughtful. I should be in despair for an excuse for myself, having already shot off my best arrows at you on similar occasions, exhausted my adroitest terms—my best rhetoric. I say I should be in despair, if that stupendous, that tremendous thing, 'The Last Judgment,' did not take me under its protecting wing. Never has a man, probably, with more sublimity asked pardon of a lady! And now, laying the universe at your feet, I await composedly my sentence. From this moment is my tongue loosed; and I can say to you that I am celebrating my blissfullest time—my wedding time—the harvest season of my holiest aspirations. How few mortals attain to such happiness! and how ill-calculated is this world to afford it!

"Gladly would I show you the work I am at present engaged upon. Yet for a nature so quiet as yours, you appear to me far too forcible and positive. Overbeck must love you a thousand fold more than I: with me you suffer indulgence to take the place of impartial justice. How I once fretted about such things!

"What a treasure is a deep, positively incurable pain! Better than the most unalloyed bliss which this poor world has to offer, it brings us near to the Holy One. It is more faithful, far less variable. It draws us into solitude, into ourselves.

"You surmise, doubtless, what I mean. Daily do I thank Heaven that through you such knowledge was to come to me. This is bitter medicine; administered, to a child, upon sweet fruit. But why do I entertain you with such trivialities? In all books of all nations we read the same thing; and yet when the poor human heart is pressed with its heavy burthen, it feels just as profoundly and acutely as in the very days of Troy itself; and the utterances of joy and of love, like those of pain, are ever new and their method inexhaustible; ever does one cast himself upon the breast of a loving, sympathetic soul.

"Accept for the moment this confused scribble and remain friendly and well-disposed toward me. Continue to peep through my fingers, and leave me just five of them. I claim to myself, however, the privilege of an unlimited love and veneration for you. My entire household and all your friends send heartfelt greeting; foremost of all, however, your

The correspondence was interrupted when Cornelius removed to Berlin; but not the friendship, which endured to the end. Nor did the exchange of letters cease entirely; so that the ink-shy master once asserted in Berlin, that he had written to no lady so often as to her.

Among the earliest acquaintances of Emily Linder, was Father Franz von Baader; as the nine letters indicate, which were addressed to her, and published in the complete works of Baader. The first of these was dated as early as the 25th of May, 1825, therefore at the commencement of her residence in Munich; and the contents indicate the immediate cause of their mutual attraction. This letter has somewhat the nature of a memorial, in which the philosopher draws a parallel between the art of painting and the God-like art of benevolence; closing with the following words:

"Herewith commends himself to Miss Emily Linder—she who rendered her memory so dear, so imperishable to him by an act kindness performed at his request to a poor family—

The tie between them therefore lay in the admirable activity of that quality by which Emily Linder quietly accomplished so much—a high-hearted love for her neighbor.

From that time forward Baader regularly sent her his pamphlets and works, and we can appreciate to what extent he tasked her intellect when he forwarded her a copy of his Speculative Dogma or, Social-Philosophic Treatise. He regarded it as a pleasant duty to acquaint her from time to time with his literary labors: and she spared herself to no trouble to follow even such grave and abstruse topics. He succeeded in specially interesting her in Jacob Böhme. Her intelligent remarks on Baader's article upon the doctrine of justification led him to remark that her letter afforded him a more satisfactory proof than many a criticism that he had succeeded in reaching both the head and the heart. In the year 1831, Baader dedicated to her a philosophic paper entitled Forty Propositions from a Religious Exotic," (Munich: Franz, 1831.) In the brief dedication of this "little work on great subjects" we read, "While you in ancient Rome are dedicating heart, soul, eye, and hand to art, it may not be unwelcome to you to hear over the stormy Alps a friendly voice, reminding you of that holy alliance of the three graces of a better and eternal life, Religion, Speculation, and Poetry, adding to these also, Painting." In the letter which accompanies this pamphlet he places before her the leading thoughts of the little work in a lucid manner:

"When the teachers of religion say that the whole Christian faith rests upon the knowledge and conviction that God is love; and that in this religion the love of God, of man, of nature, is made a duty; so that, in fact, a oneness of love and duty is announced, it would seem seasonable this unloving and duty-forgetful age so to present the identity of these two, love and duty, that mankind can discern the laws of religion in those of love, and those of love in religion; which, I trust, has been done in this pamphlet in a new, albeit rather a homoeopathic manner."

Next to Baader is to be named his intellectual son-in-law, Ernst von Lasaulx. He started, in the same year that Emily Linder left Rome, upon his long journey through Italy and Greece, to the Orient. They met in Florence, the 27th of July, 1831, and he promised the artist a description of his travels. {110} In conformity with this promise ensued a series of letters recording his experiences and impressions in Greece and the promised land, fresh and warm to a degree seldom found, and full of classic beauty. By whom could antiquity be better realized to this art-enthusiast than by Lasaulx, the zealous student of Grecian art-history, and equally a master of artistic prose! Poetic sensibility and literary clearness go refreshingly hand in hand in these letters; now in a description of his rides to that "eloquent rock-architecture" of Cyclopean edifices, the Titanic walls of the Acropolis of Tiryns and Mikene; or his solitary wanderings among the prostrate, ruined glories strewn from Corinth to Magara and Athens. At the first view of distant Athens, the Acropolis and the Parthenon, the temple of Theseus and the city behind the dark olive-woods he exclaims:

"Here is Greece, all of a departed glory worthy of the name, which the noiseless waste of time and the insane fury of man has left to the after-world. Never in my experience, and in no other city, have I known such emotions. It is as though my heart were turned into an AEolian harp, and the night winds were sighing through its broken strings."

Despite all his predilections, however, for the classic land, he did not suffer himself to be deceived as to a new Greece by the occasion of the 12th of April, 1833, when he was present at the formal surrender of the Acropolis to the Bavarian troops, when Osman Effendi withdrew the Turkish forces, and the Bavarian commander, Baligand, planted the Greek flag upon the northern rampart. He remarks, in this description:

"It was a remarkable spectacle; the noisy, confused crowd of Turks, Greeks, Bavarians and whatever other inquisitive Franks had collected in the dusky colonnades of the Parthenon. As I could not bring myself to any faith in the regeneration of Greece, the rampant irony of this insane funeral wake only added to my deep depression."

Glorious passages does the traveller indite to his distant friend over his pilgrimage through Palestine; profound melancholy at the present condition of the holy land; devout emotions amid holy places. On entering Jerusalem, Sunday, September 15. 1833, he says:

"Burning tears and a cold shudder of the heart were the first, God grant not the only, tributes which I offered for his love and that of his Son."

His delineations inspired his friend with a holy longing, and she entertained for some time afterward the idea of a journey to the holy land. She had, indeed, made preparations (1836) for a pilgrimage thither in company with Schubert, and only considerations of health compelled her at last to abandon the plan.

Subsequently, at the close of his life, Lasaulx crowned his friendship for Miss Linder with a special literary tribute. He dedicated to her his last great work, The Philosophy of the Fine Arts, Architecture, Sculpture, Painting, Music, Poetry, Prose, (Munich, 1860.) As though from a presentiment of his death, he felt impelled to bring his esthetic studies to a close, sensible as he was that here and there were still omissions to supply. But the book is the thoughtful labor of many years, and a masterwork of style. In the dedication, which serves as preface, and which was written in the Bavarian inn, at Castle Lebenberg, in the Tyrol, on the 25th of September, 1859, after speaking of the origin of the work, he refers, in the following words, to his friend:

"That I dedicate this work particularly to you will be found natural enough on a moment's self-examination. I met you, for the first time, thirty years ago, at Munich, in a delightful circle of friendly men and women, so many of whom are constantly departing from us, that those who are still left have to move nearer and nearer to each other at your hospitable table. A few years later, I saw you in Florence again, as you came from Rome and I went thither. The death of our early-maturing friend, Adam Eberle, resulted in an association with you as a correspondent, and since then you have proved to me, my wife and daughter, both in bright and gloomy days, so dear and true a friend, that it is now a necessity with me to express my gratitude to you, even with this very work, whose subjects are so akin to your own studies, and in writing which, at this fortress of Lebenberg, I have so often thought of you and our mutual friends, dead and living, chiefest among whom should to yourself this book be a tribute."

A year and a half later, the noble and true soul of Lasaulx had passed, and his grateful friend founded for him a memorial after her own peculiar taste, the pious memorial of a stated mass for his soul.

An early friend, also, and one true till death, was Gotthilf Heinrich von Schubert, who met Miss Linder shortly after he was called to the University of Munich. The amiable personality of this savant of child-like nature particularly appealed to her. His fundamental views of religion accorded with her own; and therefore, the elements of a spiritual harmony were already at hand. Miss Linder was associated with his family during the period of an entire human life, in the closest and purest friendship, which particularly one test safely withstood—that of her conversion. In his autobiography, Schubert alludes, in a few words, to this friend of his household; and the comparison he draws between her and the Princess Gallitzin shows how high a position he accorded her. Speaking of the circle of friends in which he chiefly moved, he mentions the names of Roth, Puchta, Schnorr, Cornelius, Ringseis, Schlotthauer, Boisseree, Schwanthaler, and then remarks:

"The gathering-point of many of these friends was the house of the noble Swiss, Emily. At all times and in all places, in larger as in smaller social circles, will each with pleasure thus recall that grand life-picture, which was similarly presented to a former generation at Münster, in the fair friend of Hamann, of Stolberg, of Claudius."

Emily Linder was certainly the first, in her deep humility, to deprecate such a comparison; but it is for both equally creditable that the venerable sage felt constrained to bear such testimony, even after her union with the Catholic Church.

Next to the testimony of scholars and artists, we will finally quote an opinion from a female writer, a literary lady of the higher walks of life. In the summer of 1841, came Emma von Niendorf to Munich. She was in friendly relation with Schubert and Brentano, and, several years later, recorded her reminiscences of those sunny days at Munich in a lively and imaginative little work. At Schubert's she formed the acquaintance of Emily Linder, and was attracted closely to her. She refers to her in glowing and expressive terms, depicting this art-loving woman in the repose of her home:

"A noble Swiss, and for this reason remarkable, that, fortified by exterior means and the most positive convictions, she presented to me an ideal existence in a ripe and unwedded old age, having achieved happiness. She lived only for science, for art, for all that is beautiful and good. But everything was illumined with the glory of a genuine Christian spirit. And how this spirit reflected itself in all her surroundings! {112} I shall never forget it; the sitting-room, with work-basket, books, flowers, harp, drawings by Overbeck; a drawing-room separating these from a little house-chapel, which a painting of Overbeck also embellished. And, where the organ awaited the skilful fingers, a Madonna of the school of Leonardo da Vinci smiled from the wall, while the little side-altar encased a drawing of Albrecht Dürer. I found, also, in the house of this lady a portrait of Maria Mori, in the Tyrol, admirably drawn by her friend, the well-known lady artist, Ellenrieder, somewhat idealized; a profile, with folded hands; long, brown, down-flowing hair; the large, dark eye full of devotion, full of sensibility, the stigmata in the hands not to be forgotten. … This lady is a Protestant. The deepest coloring of her soul is, perhaps, shading toward Catholicism; yet she doubtless finds satisfying harmonies in the Gospel. By one of those wonderful providences which life is so full of, this earnest soul was planted between two strongly pronounced natures—two opposite polarities of friendship, both deep and sincere—Clemens Brentano and Schubert, who were on equal terms of intimacy with her."

At the very time Emma von Niendorf put her work to press, she knew not that the lady to whom these lines referred had already attained that toward which "the deepest coloring of her soul seemed to be shading." Emily Linder had sought and found "satisfying harmonies" in the faith of the one, universal, apostolic church.

Xavier De Ravignan.

[Footnote 46: The Life of Father de Ravignan, of the Society of Jesus. By Father de Ponlevoy, of the same Society. Translated at St. Beuno's College, North Wales. 12mo, pp. 693. New York: The Catholic Publication Society. 1869.]

Father De Ponlevoy's life of his friend and colleague, the celebrated orator of Notre Dame, violates many of the canons of biographical composition, and is nevertheless an admirable book. As a narrative, it lacks clearness and symmetry; but as a picture of the interior of a great and beautiful soul, it is wonderfully vivid. It could only have been written by one who sympathized completely with the subject, and understood the interior illuminations and trials, and the complete detachment from the world, which distinguished the illustrious preacher whose fame at one time filled all Catholic Europe. Father de Ponlevoy has given us therefore a valuable work. He has looked at De Ravignan's life from the right point of view—the only point in fact from which it offers any important material to the biographer. In a worldly sense, the life was not an eventful one. He came of a noble yet hardly a distinguished family, who preserved their faith in the midst of the storm of revolution, and brought up their children to love the church. Gustave Xavier was born at Bayonne on the 1st of December, 1795. As a child he was remarkable for a gravity and intelligence far beyond his years, a warm affection for his parents, and a very pious disposition. After completing his school and college education in Paris, he resolved to devote himself to the law, and at the age of eighteen entered the office of M. Goujon, a jurist of some distinction at the capital. He had scarcely begun his studies, however, when France was thrown into confusion by the return of Napoleon from Elba. {113} The young man threw down his books, enlisted in a company of royalist volunteers, and after preparing himself for the campaign by receiving holy communion, marched with his command toward the Spanish frontier. His company belonged to that unlucky detachment under General Barbarin, which was surprised and cut to pieces at Hélette, in the Lower Pyrénées. General Barbarin fell, severely wounded, and would have fallen into the enemy's hands, when De Ravignan rushed forward through the fire and attempted to carry him off the field. It was a generous but desperate act, which would have led to the sacrifice of both. Barbarin saw the danger of the young hero, and, freeing one of his arms, shot himself through the head. Covered with the blood of his unfortunate commander, Gustave sought safety in flight, wandered afoot and alone through the Basque country, in the disguise of a peasant, and, after many hardships and escapes, rejoined the army on Spanish soil. He now received a commission as lieutenant of cavalry, and was attached to the staff of the Count de Damas, who sent him on a confidential mission to Bordeaux. Before he had any further opportunity of winning distinction, the war was over, and although tempting offers were made him to continue in the army, he determined to adhere to the law, and was soon hard at work again. The indomitable resolution, amounting even to sternness, which distinguished him in after life, was already one of his most remarkable characteristics. Whatever he did, was done with all his might. He studied with the most intense application, and, not satisfied with the reading necessary for his profession, applied himself closely to the German and English languages, and such lighter accomplishments as drawing and music. In due time he was appointed a conseiller auditeur in the royal court of Paris, then under the presidency of Séguier. The influence of the Duke d'Angoulême got him the appointment—not, however, without some difficulty—and his colleagues received him coldly. He awaited his time in patience, beginning each day by hearing Mass, and studying thoroughly, systematically, and indefatigably. At last, one day when the advocates happened to be out of court, a civil cause of a very tedious nature was unexpectedly called. The president turned, rather maliciously, to De Ravignan, and handed him the papers, saying, "Let us see for once what can be done by this young gentleman, whose acquaintance we have yet to make." On the appointed day the "young gentleman" presented a clear and logical report, and delivered it with a perfection of utterance which caused the whole court to listen with astonishment. His success at the bar was assured from that moment, and soon afterward he was appointed deputy procureur général.

His life at this time presents a curious and instructive study. He devoted a part of each day regularly to religious exercises; he was a zealous member of a Sodality of the Blessed Virgin; he had already in fact formed the idea of entering the priesthood, if not of joining the Society of Jesus. But while he remained in the world, he never neglected his professional pursuits, he mingled freely in society, and showed himself, in the true sense of the term, an accomplished gentleman. He was a great favorite in company. "In him," says Father de Ponlevoy, "interior and exterior were in perfect harmony. It would be impossible to imagine a more perfect type of a young man: the expression of his countenance was excellent, his forehead high and full of dignity, his features fine and characteristic, his eyes deep and blue, by turns animated and affectionate, his figure slight and graceful. {114} To this picture must be added scrupulous attention to person and dress, perfect politeness, and a nameless something, the reflection of a lofty mind, a great intellect, and a pure and affectionate heart." Many years afterward, when he visited London, to preach at the time of the World's Fair, one of the principal Protestant noblemen of England said of him, "He is the most finished gentleman I ever saw." His modesty, like many of his other virtues, leaned toward severity. At a great dinner-party one day, before he had embraced the religious life, he was placed next a young lady whose dress was rather too scanty. He sat stiff and silent until the unlucky girl ventured to ask, "M. de Ravignan, have you no appetite?" He replied in a half-whisper, "And you, Mdlle., have you no shame?"

He was twenty-six years of age when, after a retreat of eight days, he entered the Seminary of Saint Sulpice. The resolution had been gradually formed, yet it took everybody except his mother and his spiritual director by surprise. His professional friends and associates did all they could to draw him back to the world. They sought out his retreat, and went after him in crowds. "Ah!" he exclaimed, when he saw them, "I have made my escape from you."

De Ravignan remained only six months in the seminary, and then removed to the novitiate of the Society of Jesus, for which he had made no secret of his preference. The life of a novice offers little matter for the biographer. We are only told that his course here was distinguished by a devotion which approached heroism, a zeal that tended toward excess, and a strictness that was often too hard and stern. Throughout his life, severity toward himself, far more than toward others, was his principal defect; but as years went on, this rigidity of character, always more apparent than real, disappeared little by little in the sunshine of divine love. He never spared himself in anything. He surpassed all in his ambition for humiliation and suffering; the only trouble was, that he sometimes went too far in attempting to lead weaker brethren by the hard path he himself had trodden. A novice once asked somebody for advice, and was recommended to apply to Brother de Ravignan. "In that case," he rejoined, "I know beforehand what I must do: I have only to choose the most difficult course." In the scholasticate, he was known by the sobriquet of "Iron Bar." When the time came for his admission to holy orders, after nearly four years passed in the scholasticate at Paris and at Dôle, he was sent with five other candidates to the Diocesan Seminary at Orgelet, where the sacrament of ordination was to be administered. Before the party set out, Brother de Ravignan was appointed superior for the journey. His companions were seized with fear when they heard who had been placed in charge over them; but their alarm was groundless. "Nothing," said one of the company, "could exceed the kindness, the affability, the attentiveness to small wants, the simple joy of the young superior. He availed himself of his character only to claim the right of choosing the last place, and of making himself the servant of all." He was ordained priest on the 25th of July, 1828.

The war against the Jesuits in France was approaching its crisis, and the ordinance which deprived them of the liberty of teaching and shut up all their colleges was promulgated just about the time of Father de Ravignan's ordination. {115} Cut off from the privilege of secular instruction, the society resolved to devote itself more zealously than ever to the theological training of its own members. Father de Ravignan was assigned a chair of theology at Saint Acheul, near Amiens; for he was not only a thorough scholar, but he possessed a rare talent for teaching, and according to the testimony of his pupil, Father Rubillon, fully realized "the idea of a professor of theology such as is depicted by St. Ignatius." The poor fathers, however, were not to be left here in peace. In 1829, they received notice to suspend their classes; but Father de Ravignan hastened to Paris, saw the Minister of Public Instruction, and caused the order to be set aside. The next year came the revolution of July. Late in the evening of the 29th, a mob, led by an expelled pupil, attacked the college, burst in gates, and with cries for "The King and the Charter!" "The Emperor!" "Liberty!" and "Down with the priests!" and "Death to the Jesuits!" proceeded to sack the building. While some of the fathers took refuge in the chapel, and others, expecting death, were busy hearing one another's confessions, Father de Ravignan went upon a balcony, and tried to make himself heard by the rioters. He persisted until a stone struck him on the temple, and he was led away bleeding. To what lengths the fury of the mob would have gone it is impossible to say; but fortunately, in the course of their devastation they stumbled into the wine-cellar, and all got drunk. The arrival of a troop of cavalry dispersed the reeling crowd in the twinkling of an eye, and the Jesuits were left to mourn over the ruins. The next day it seemed certain that the attack would be renewed. The college was deserted, and its inmates scattered in different directions, Father de Ravignan being sent to Brigue in Switzerland to resume his courses of theological instruction.

It was not until the close of 1834 that he came back to France. Then we find him once more at Saint Acheul, where, since classes were prohibited, a house had been opened for fathers in their third year of probation. Three years later, he was appointed superior of a new house at Bordeaux. There he remained until 1842.

In the mean time he had entered, imperceptibly, so to speak, upon the great work of his life. He had preached many retreats at different times to his own brethren, and to other religious communities, but had rarely been heard in a public pulpit until, during the Lent of 1835, while he was living at Saint Acheul, he was selected to preach a series of conferences in the cathedral of Amiens. He was forty years of age when he began this apostleship, and he had been withdrawn from the world ever since he was twenty-seven; yet he had not been forgotten. There was a lively curiosity among his old friends to hear him; the members of the bar in particular were constant in their attendance; and the impression produced in Amiens was not only deep, but rich in spiritual fruit. In Advent, he was appointed to preach a similar course at the same place; and in Lent of the next year, we find him preaching in the church of St. Thomas Aquinas, in Paris. Nothing exactly like these conferences and courses of sermons, so common in France, has ever been known to our country, and some of our readers may find it difficult to appreciate the magnitude and importance of the labor in which Father de Ravignan was now engaged. {116} The audiences whom he had to address were not only poor, unlettered sinners, whose consciences needed arousing; to these of course he must speak, but with them came hundreds of the most cultivated and critical listeners, who studied the speaker's language and manner as they would a literary essay or an exercise in elocution. The court, the army, the learned professions, and the leaders of fashionable society crowded around the Lent and Advent pulpits. The appearance of a new preacher was the sensation of the metropolis. The newspapers criticised the performance as they would criticise a play at the theatre. To satisfy the exactions of such an audience as this, and yet to preserve that unction without which preaching is a waste of breath—to please the critical ear, and yet to move the callous heart, required qualifications which few men combined. The most famous of all the series of conferences had been those in the great cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris. Father Lacordaire had there roused an extraordinary enthusiasm, and at the height of his fame had abandoned the pulpit and gone to Rome for the purpose of restoring the Dominican order to France. He earnestly desired that Father de Ravignan should be his successor at Notre Dame, and it is interesting to know that it was partly through Lacordaire's agency, that the Jesuit was obliged in 1837 to begin that grand series of discourses, extending over ten years, by which he will be chiefly remembered. "No one could claim to be the apostle of such an assembly as met in Notre Dame," says Father de Ponlevoy,

"unless he were first of all a philosopher. The subject chosen for the first year was accordingly a kind of Catholic philosophy of history, depicting the broad outlines of the struggle between truth and error. This idea is analogous to that which inspired the City of God of St. Augustine; it was carried on in the station of 1838 by an explanation of fundamental doctrines, beginning with the personality and action of God, in opposition to the abstractions of the pantheists, the ill-defined forms of deism and fatalism; proceeding on to liberty, the immortality of the soul and the end of man, against materialism. For all this, it was necessary to go to first principles, to recall slumbering belief to life, and again to establish doctrines which had been corrupted by numberless errors. Some portion of the hearers were from this time forward led to embrace the last practical conclusions, and already F. de Ravignan had some consoling returns to the faith to report. At the end of the station of 1838, he wrote:

"'The attendance has been large and remarkable for the great number of distinguished persons, members of the present and former ministries, peers, deputies, academicians, well known Protestants, foreigners of rank, and a troop of young men.

"'There have been symptoms of approval, sometimes too freely manifested; conversions, a few, but not many. Moreover, no expressions of hostility, either in the newspapers or among the audience. God be praised!

"'I have been forced to have some intercourse with a great many people, and some of them persons of note. M. de Chateaubriand paid me a visit; two interviews were arranged for me with M. de Lamartine; several physicians and men of science have sought to see me; some have been to confession. How many great men there are ignorant of the faith, and sick in mind and heart.

"'God has supported me. I have felt his grace, his help to our society, and the benefit of the prayers offered for my work. I took care that none of the journals should employ short-hand writers, that my words might not be published in a distorted form.'"

From the very outset, Father de Ravignan had contemplated the establishment of an annual retreat by way of a complement to his conferences; but wishing to give his influence time to work before he carried out this plan, he waited until 1841, and then resolved to begin in the small church of the Abbaye-aux-Bois, which with great crowding holds no more than 1000 or 1200 people. {117} Should the attendance be too large for this church, it was arranged that he should remove to St. Eustache. He describes the result of his experiment as follows:

"I gave notice of a retreat for men during Holy Week, only on Palm-Sunday at Notre Dame before the conference; an instruction every evening at eight o'clock till Holy Saturday inclusively. On the Monday evening I went to the Abbaye-aux-Bois about half-past seven. I found an extraordinary crowd, and difficulty in getting places; and there was not a single woman. I had kept them all out. For nearly two hours the whole church had been full, and already a hundred people had gone away unable to get in. I wanted to cross the bottom of the church, but I could not get along. I was recognized, and with great earnestness, but without uproar, I was asked to adjourn elsewhere. I promised to do so. From the pulpit I was struck by this throng of men, almost all young, who filled the doorways, the altars and no disturbance. After having warmly congratulated them, I appointed Saint-Eustache for the next day. Then I bade them all rise for prayer. They all rose like one man. We recited the Veni Creator, and the instruction followed on these words: Venite seorsum et requiescite pusillum—Come aside, and rest a little. I advised them all to remain for benediction. All remained.

"Next day Saint-Eustache was filled five hours before the service, and the following days they came even earlier.

"My heart is full of gratitude to God. His help has been plain. I do not know that such a churchful of men was ever seen. The iron gates at the doors, the bases of the pillars, the rails, everything, was covered with people hanging on; the nave and aisles filled and crowded beyond conception, and the deepest, most religious silence—not one disturbance, no police—3000 or 4000 men's voices singing the Miserere, the Stabat Mater. The sight affected me deeply.

"I at once adopted perfect apostolic freedom of language, and, without preface, began to speak of sin, of hell, of confession, etc. I delivered my address, and appointed six hours every day which I would devote to men who might wish to see me. They have come in shoals. I have been hearing confessions all the week, six or seven hours a day, of men of all ages and positions in life—all very much behindhand. God has given me consolation. The prayers offered on all sides for this work have had a visible effect. There has been a marked movement in Paris. More Easter Communions everywhere. Our fathers have received many more confessions of men. I have not declined a single one, and I am still busy in finishing them.

"A good many came to tell me of their difficulties, and I said to them, 'Well, believe me, there is but one way; take your place there;' and all, with a single exception, made their confessions.

"On Good-Friday the Passion sermon exhausted my strength; the following day I had no voice left. I was unable to give the closing instruction of the retreat on Holy Saturday. I wrote a scrap of a note to inform the Curé of Saint-Eustache, and he bethought him of reading it from the pulpit. All went off quietly; the people waited for benediction and went home."

Lacordaire was a far more brilliant and poetical preacher than De Ravignan, but the styles of the two men were so entirely different that there can be no comparison between them. The conferences of the Jesuit orator, studied in the cold light of print, lack color and imagination; but they can only be judged fairly by those who heard them delivered. The principal characteristic of his delivery we should judge must have been force—a force which amounted to majesty. He spoke with a commanding air of authority, as one whose convictions were as fixed as the everlasting hills. His power of assertion was tremendous; with all this he was animated and impassioned, although he generally commenced with a slow and measured cadence. His style was a little rough, but nervous and striking. He did not captivate, but he conquered. His gestures were dignified and impressive; his attitude was modest but commanding; his personal presence was noble. When he entered the pulpit, he remained a long time motionless, with eyes cast down, waiting until the assemblage became perfectly still. Then he made the sign of the cross with a pomp and stateliness which became famous. {118} A Protestant minister who witnessed this solemn exordium exclaimed, "He has preached without speaking a word!" It used to be said, "When Father de Ravignan shows himself in the pulpit, no one can tell whether he has just ascended from earth or come down from heaven." One day he had been describing the wilful misery of the unbeliever—his doubts, fears, melancholy, repinings, and despair; the picture was drawn with a terrible force; the audience sat as if paralyzed. Suddenly, want of breath compelled the orator to pause. He folded his arms, and with inimitable emphasis brought the climax to an end with these words: "And we— we are believers!" The effect was overpowering. The people forgot themselves, and a signal of applause ran through the church. The priest was indignant. With glowing countenance and arm raised in air, he cried, "Silence!" in a voice of awful reproof, and the assembly was instantly hushed.

Still more effective, though less celebrated than the conferences, were Father de Ravignan's retreats. In these he was unapproached. He followed strictly the exercises of St. Ignatius, to which he gave such unremitting study that he might well be called a man of one book. His conferences were prepared with great elaboration, but the retreats were improvisations. As years went on, he devoted himself more and more closely to these latter exercises, until they became at last his proper work in the ministry; and when sickness, and the loss of his voice had compelled him to abandon formal preaching, he continued to conduct the retreats at Notre Dame, while Lacordaire resumed his place in the pulpit.

It must not be supposed that the success of the Jesuit's oratory was any indication of a growing favor for the society in France. The opposition to its existence was still active, and the government refused to acknowledge that as a society it had any existence in the kingdom at all. The wildest stories about it were published and believed. One day, in the midst of a distinguished party assembled at the Tuileries to celebrate the king's birthday, a person of influence disclosed a horrible plot: the Jesuits had arms stored in the cellars of Saint Sulpice, and only the day before, Father de Ravignan had been there concerting measures with his accomplices. "Oh! yes," interrupted a lady of the court, "I was at that meeting. We were drawing a raffle for the poor. There were two or three hundred families so lucky as to be set up with a coffee-pot or a sauce-pan." As a general thing, however, whatever might be said of the society, Father de Ravignan was treated with respect. Guizot made no secret of his esteem for him, and Royer-Collard used to say, "Father de Ravignan is artless enough to imagine himself a Jesuit." In the little book which De Ravignan accordingly wrote about this time—On the Existence and the Institute of the Jesuits—there was a double purpose to be gained. He wished to identify himself as thoroughly and as publicly as he could with the society to which he had given his heart, and he wished to share in the gallant battle which Lacordaire was fighting for the right of the religious orders to exist in France under the protection of the laws. The opposition in the legislative chambers had been insisting that they ought not to exist; the ministry replied that they did not exist; and right in the midst of the dispute appears Father de Ravignan, like the poor prisoner who called a lawyer to get him out of jail. {119} "But this is preposterous," said the counsel; "you can't be arrested on such a charge as that!" "I don't know," said the prisoner, "but I am arrested." "Why, I tell you, you can't be: it is not legal; they have no right to put you in jail." "Well, I only know that I am in jail, and I want you get me out." Father de Ravignan showed clearly enough that they did exist, and had a right to legal protection. If they were to be driven out of the kingdom, the government must face the responsibility, and do it openly. A few days after the appearance of the book, Lacordaire, being present at a meeting of the Catholic Club under the presidency of the Archbishop of Paris, exclaimed, "If we were in England, I should propose three cheers for Father de Ravignan." The cheers were given with a will.

We have no space to follow Father de Ravignan in the varied occupations of the next ten years. His health, always precarious, broke down completely in 1847, and for the rest of his life he was condemned to alternations of intense suffering, and of forced inaction which was worse to him than pain. He was tormented with chronic neuralgia, with dropsy on the chest, and a severe affection of the larynx, that for long periods deprived him entirely of the power of preaching. During these ten years of suffering, he wrote his history of "Clement XIII. and Clement XIV," a book which under the guise of an apology for the course of the latter pontiff in the suppression of the Jesuits was in reality an apology for the society, and a reply to the recently published work of Father Theiner on the same subject. He founded the sodality known as the Children of Mary, assisted in the establishment of the Congregation of the Oratory, and was zealously and constantly employed in the direction of souls and the guidance of converts—gathering up, as Father de Ponlevoy well expresses it, the fruit of his ten years' preaching. There is hardly a distinguished name in the history of France at that day which does not appear in connection with his. Madame Swetchine was one of his co-laborers. Madame de la Ferronnays, whose charming life has recently been told under the title of A Sister's Story, was his devoted friend. Chateaubriand, Count Molé, Walckenaër, Camper the celebrated navigator, Marshal St. Arnaud, General Cavaignac, Prince Demidoff, Montalembert, De Falloux, and Bishop Dupanloup—these are some of the illustrious names which occur most frequently in his correspondence. A celebrity of a very different sort with whom he had some intercourse is thus alluded to in Father de Ponlevoy's Life:

"We cannot conclude this chapter without making some mention of that well-known American Medium, who possessed the unfortunate talent of turning other things besides tables, and of calling up the dead for the amusement of the living. Much has been said, even in the newspapers, about his close and pious intimacy with F. de Ravignan; and it seems that an attempt has been made to use an honored name as a passport to introduce into France, and establish there, these wonderful discoveries of the new world.

"The facts, in all their simplicity, are as follows: It is quite true that, after the young foreigner had been converted in Italy, he was furnished at Rome with an introduction to F. de Ravignan; but by this time he had given up his magic at the same time that he gave up his Protestantism, and he was received with the interest which is due from a priest to every soul ransomed with the blood of Jesus Christ, and especially, perhaps, to a soul which is converted and brought back to the bosom of the church. On his arrival in Paris, he was again absolutely forbidden to return in any way to his old practices. F. de Ravignan, agreeably to the principles of the faith which proscribe all superstition, prohibited, under the severest penalties he could inflict, all participation in or presence at these dangerous and sometimes guilty proceedings. {120} Once the unhappy Medium, beset by I know not what man or devil, was unfaithful to his promise; he was received with a severity which prostrated him; I chanced at the time to come into the room, and I saw him rolling on the ground, and writhing like a worm at the feet of the priest, so righteously indignant. The father was touched by a repentance which led to such bodily agony, raised him up, and pardoned him; but, before dismissing him, exacted a written promise confirmed by an oath. But a notorious relapse soon took place, and the servant of God, breaking off all connection with this slave of the spirits, sent him word never again to appear in his presence."

We shall not undertake, in the brief space that remains, to describe the beauty of Father de Ravignan's character—his touching humility, his rare sweetness of soul, his complete detachment from earth, his patience, his charity, and his unflagging zeal. He was once asked how he had attained such mastery over himself. "There were two of us," he replied; "I threw one out of the window, so that only I remained where I was." Father de Ponlevoy applies to him the description which St. Francis Xavier gave of St. Ignatius: "His character is made up of three elements; a humility of mind which we can scarcely understand, a force of soul superior to all opposition, and an incomparable kindness of heart."

In the spring of 1857, a severe attack of sickness obliged him to remove to Saint Acheul. He came back to Paris in the autumn, apparently restored to as good health as he had experienced of recent years, but he was already far gone in consumption. On the 3d of December, he passed a long time at the Convent of the Sacred Heart, conversing with a poor person who wanted to enter the church. Then he went into the confessional, and remained there until physically exhausted. One of his penitents on that occasion remarked that he spoke more than ever like a man who no longer belonged to this world. He got home with great difficulty. This was the last of his ministry. On the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, he celebrated mass for the last time; but it was not until the 26th of February that he passed to that blessed rest for which he had yearned so long with an eagerness that he used to call "homesickness." The account of his last days is too beautiful to be abridged. With the awe inspired by the sublime narrative, we prefer to drop our pen at the opening of this final chapter, wherein the gates of heaven seem to stand ajar, and our eyes are dazzled by the awful light which streams from the divine presence.

The Educational Question.

The articles upon popular education which have heretofore appeared in this journal seem to have produced the effects which were anticipated by the writer. The public interest has been unusually excited by the discussion; and two classes of antagonists have ventured to make an issue with the advocates of a just distribution of the school fund. The first in order, but much the least important in all other respects, is that confessed fossil, the "no-popery" party, which ever and anon intrudes itself upon the unwilling attention of our republican society, braying itself hoarse with rage because it can neither command the confidence of enlightened and liberal Protestants nor escape the galling ridicule of six millions of its Catholic fellow-citizens. This class is well represented in an elaborate tract lately issued from the office of the American and Foreign Christian Union, 27 Bible House, New York City, and purporting to be a review of the article in the January number of The Educational Monthly, presenting The Roman Catholic View of Education in the United States. It requires no great amount of logical acumen to enable the least intelligent of men to see that this tract affords the most apt illustration of one of the principal arguments we have advanced in support of the Catholic claim. We have remained silent for the last three months, resting satisfied that it would be impossible for "the stereotyped class of saints and philosophers" to rush to the rescue of a cherished injustice, without forthwith exposing its odious features in their struggle to carry it victoriously through the battle-field of a public controversy. The veil of Mokanna has fallen even before the false prophet had time to secure a victim! or, to speak more in accordance with scriptural analogies, the cloven foot has discovered itself under the clerical robe and the wickedness of the heart has burst out from the tongue. Quare fremuerunt gentes! Why, indeed, shall they rage and devise vain things? Have they not fulfilled this prophecy of the royal David for three hundred years; and have they not suffered the derision threatened in the fourth verse of the second Psalm? Where shall we find a more convincing proof than this very tract of what the enemies of the Catholic faith and people design to accomplish by a school system which they insincerely profess to advocate on account of its intrinsic merits, in the face of the historical fact that, wherever and whenever they have had the power to control the state—as the early days of all New England and of several of the other American States—they never failed to use the school-room as an ante-chamber to the conventicle! After they had been stripped of this power by such men as Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, and the liberal founders of American institutions, they still struggled for many years to accomplish by indirect means the injustice and iniquity which could not be openly maintained under the constitutions and the laws of the federal government and the several States. We all well remember how the poor Catholic boys and girls of the free schools were harassed by colporteurs and proselytizers, who carried baskets filled, not with bread for the hungry children of poverty, but with oleaginous tracts, cunningly devised to destroy in those little pupils of the state the faith of their fathers and the religious practices of their devout mothers. {122} Teachers were selected with especial regard to their bitter hatred of the Catholic Church and their zeal for "Evangelical" propagandism. When this failed to make any very perceptible impression upon the numerical strength of the Catholic people, then commenced the wholesale child-stealing, under the pious pretext of cleaning out the moral sewers of society; and tens of thousands of little children, stolen or forcibly wrested from the arms of Catholic parents—too poor and friendless to protect the natural and legal rights of themselves and their offspring—were hurried off to the far West, their names changed, and their temporal and eternal hopes committed to the zealous charge of pious and vigorous haters of the popish anti-Christ! In spite of all this, the Catholic population of the United States continued steadily to rise like a flood tide, not only through foreign immigration, but by reason of virtuous wedlock and the watchful and severe faith and discipline of a church which forbids and effectually prevents child-murder! The reader will find this matter discussed in an article elsewhere in this number, entitled, "Comparative Morality of Catholic and Protestant Countries."

The writer of the tract issued from 27 Bible House is annoyed by the comparison which the author of the article in The Educational Monthly instituted between the violent crimes of our ancestors and the stupendous sins which have supplanted them in modern times. The comparison was close-fitting as the shirt of Nessus, and quite as uncomfortable. The Bible House replies to this with a contrast between the intellectual, material, moral, and religious advancement of the masses in England, the United States, and every other Protestant country, in the nineteenth century, and the debasement of the people of Spain, Italy, Mexico, and South America. In the first place, we reply that our present controversy concerns popular education in the United States now and for a hopeful future, and not the past nor the present of European or South American nations. In the next place, we say that this is but another evidence of the malignant spirit to which we are required to intrust the training of our Catholic youth. They are to be taught that the church of their fathers is the nursery of ignorance and vice; and that all the knowledge, civilization, and virtue which the world enjoys are the offspring of the so-called Reformation. They are to learn nothing of the true history of Spain, Portugal, France, Italy, Belgium, Switzerland, Austria, Bavaria, and the Catholic principalities of Continental Europe. They are never to hear of the vast libraries of Catholic learning; the rich endowments of Catholic education all over the world for ages; the innumerable universities, colleges, academies, and free schools established by their church, or by governments under her auspices, throughout Christendom. They are not to be told how Oxford and Cambridge were founded by their Catholic forefathers and plundered from their lawful possession. The Bible House tractarian would not willingly read to them from the Notes of a Traveller by that eminent Scotch Presbyterian, Samuel Laing, such passages as these:

"The comparative education of the Scotch clergy of the present generation, that is to say, their education compared to that of the Scotch people, is unquestionably lower than that of the Popish clergy compared to the education of their people. This is usually ascribed to the Popish clergy seeking to maintain their influence and superiority by keeping the people in gross ignorance. {123} But this opinion of our churchmen seems more orthodox than charitable or correct. The Popish clergy have in reality less to lose by the progress of education than our own Scotch clergy; because their pastoral influence and their church services being founded on ceremonial ordinances, come into no competition or comparison whatsoever in the public mind with anything similar that literature or education produces; and are not connected with the imperfect mode of conveying instruction which, as education advances, becomes obsolete and falls into disuse, and almost into contempt, although essential in our Scotch church. In Catholic Germany, in France, Italy, and even Spain the education of the common people in reading, writing, arithmetic, music, manners, and morals is at least as generally diffused, and as faithfully promoted by the clerical body, as in Scotland. It is by their own advance and not by keeping back the advance of the people, that the Popish priesthood of the present day seek to keep ahead of the intellectual progress of the community in Catholic lands; and they might, perhaps, retort on our Presbyterian clergy, and ask if they, too, are in their countries at the head of the intellectual movement of the age? Education is in reality not only not repressed but is encouraged by the Popish Church, and is a mighty instrument in its hands and ably used. In every street in Rome, for instance, there are at short distances public primary schools for the education of the children of the lower and middle classes in the neighborhood Rome, with a population of 158,678 souls, has 372 public primary schools with 482 teachers; and 14,099 children attending them. Has Edinburgh so many public schools for the instruction of those classes? I doubt it. Berlin, with a population about double that of Rome, has only 264 schools. Rome has also her university with an average attendance of 660 students; and the Papal States with a population of 2,500,000 (in 1846) contain seven universities. Prussia with a population of 14,000,000 has but seven."

Neither would our Bible House tractarian teach his Catholic pupils to discriminate between times, circumstances, opportunities, characteristics of race, influences of climate, ancient traditional habits, and the complicated causes which affect the life and development of each nation; so as to contrast Protestant England with Protestant Denmark, and Catholic France with Catholic Portugal; or, again, to compare each of these with itself at different epochs of its own history. They are not to be told that Spain was never as powerful, covering the seas with her commerce and the earth with her conquests, and lighting up Europe by her genius, as at the time when she was the most thoroughly Catholic and the least tainted with that revolutionary infidelity which was born of Calvin and has grown to be a giant destroyer under Mazzini and Garibaldi. They are to be told, however, that the glory of a Christian nation is to be measured by its national debt, its fleets and armies, its opium trade, its Coolie traffic, its bankrupt laws, its work-houses, its prodigious fortunes mocking squalid poverty, its twenty millions of people who own no foot of land and its vicious nobles and gentry who firmly grasp it all, its telegraphic wires and cables, its huge ships and thundering factories, its luxurious merchants who toil not, and its starving able-bodied paupers who can find no work to do, its grotesque mixture of the beautiful and the vile, of the grand and the infamous, of the light of the skies and the darkness of the obscene coal-pits, of the pride of science and the ignorance of barbarism, of the perfume of fashionable churches and the stench of gin-shops, of the industrial slavery of great towns and the rotting idleness of vast lazar-houses, which make up the boasted civilization of haughty England, and extort from the Bible House the prayerful cry, "Thank God, we are not like unto these Romish Publicans!" Happy Pharisees! we certainly do not desire to disturb their self-complacency; but we wish to teach our Catholic children that the simple habits, the earnest piety, the manly truth and courage of the little Catholic Republic of San Marino, which has preserved its liberties and independence for over eight hundred years without losing its religion, are for the citizens of this great democratic empire a more profitable study than the doctrines of Malthus or the history of cotton-gins. {124} As we have said in our former articles, we already have here quite enough of the material, and a superabundance of animal spirits and vigor; and that what we stand in need of is a well-defined faith, moral duties clearly understood, and habits of practical virtue firmly fixed in the daily life of all the people, Without that, even temporal prosperity must be evanescent; as it was with all heathen nations that have successively ruled the world and perished. Without that, temporal prosperity is a curse, and not a blessing; for what will it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul? Men make nations; and nationalities are of no value before God, except only in so far as they conduce to the end of each individual man's creation. The Indian who goes to heaven from his wigwam in the forest attains his end. The philosopher who goes to hell from his palace in London or Paris has wofully miscalculated the worth of all human philosophy, statesmanship, and national grandeur, as the idols of his worship. The pagans measured human life and society by the standard of the Bible House, No. 27, if we are to judge it by this tract!

So also, according to this tract, our Catholic children should be taught in the schools that Voltaire became an infidel because he had been a Catholic and was trained at a Jesuit college. It will nowhere appear in the lesson that he became an infidel because he rebelled against the teachings of his church, and renounced the maxims of his Jesuit tutors. When he so zealously defended his thesis in vindication of Julian the Apostate, his own apostasy was foretold by his master. His death was the answer to his life. In his agony he called for a priest; but three-score years of blasphemy had won to him the avenging disciples who then encircled his bed like a wall of fire; and no priest could reach the dying enemy of Christ!

This tract would also teach our children in the schools that it was the teachings of the "Romish Church" which drove revolutionary France from the altars of God. It would not be explained to them how that revolutionary rage was but the outburst of a volcano of passion which had smouldered during ages of long suffering under the rule of kings and nobles; and that the instincts of the people remained so true, that in the very same generation they returned, like the people of Israel, to the worship of God; and rushed to the altars of their fathers with tears of repentance and joy. They did not become Protestants! How has it been with the descendants of the godly men of Plymouth Rock? Quietly and with exquisite decorum they have settled down into deists, pantheists, freethinkers, free-lovers, spiritualists, and philosophers! Will they go back to Puritanism?

The tract tells our children that Gibbon left the Protestant Church for the Catholic, and finally landed in infidelity. Why did he not go back to Protestantism?

The tract also tells our children that this is a Protestant country; which means that all its glories are Protestant, and that the Catholic, with Italy and Spain before his eyes, should be thankful that he is tolerated here. Are our children to learn this lesson at the schools? {125} Now, in the first place, if Bishop Coxe and other Protestant witnesses are reliable,[Footnote 47] our Bible House friends may as well begin to prepare their nerves to see our great country become Catholic, at least as much of it as will remain Christian at all. Perhaps they will then value the wisdom and liberality of that admonitory sentence in the article of The Educational Monthly which reads thus:

"We are quite sure that if the Catholics were the majority in the United States, and were to attempt such an injustice," (as that involved in this school question.) "our Protestant brethren would cry out against it, and appeal to the wise and liberal examples of Prussia and England, France and Austria! Now, is it not always as unwise as it is unjust to make a minority taste the bitterness of oppression? Men governed by the law of divine charity will bear it meekly and seek to return good for evil; but all men are not docile; and majorities change rapidly and often, in this fleeting world! Is it not wiser and more politic, even in mere regard to social interests, that all institutions intended for the welfare of the people should be firmly based upon exact and equal justice? This would place them under the protection of fixed habit, which in a nation is as strong as nature; and it would save them from the mutations of society. The strong of one generation may be the weak of the next; and we see this occurring with political parties within the brief spaces of presidential terms. Hence we wisely inculcate moderation and of retribution."

In the next place, although the present majority of the American people are non-Catholic, we deny that they are Protestants, as a nation, in a political sense. The institutions of the country are neither Catholic nor Protestant. They recognize no one faith more than another. Christian morality is accepted as the basis of public and private duties by common consent; that is all. Religious liberty was not born of the theocracy of New England. Hancock and Adams, under the lead of Jefferson, departed very far from the instincts of Calvinism and the traditions of Plymouth Rock when they laid the foundations of this government; and this is one of the things which we certainly intend to have our children taught. We do not intend that they shall be "poor boys at the feast," humbly thankful for such crumbs as our Bible House friends may magnanimously bestow upon the "Romish aliens;" but they shall be told to hold up their heads, with the full consciousness that they are American citizens, the peers of all others, and in no way disqualified, by the doctrines or morals of their church, to perform every duty as faithfully and as ably as any other men of any other creed. They shall not be terrified with the "raw head and bloody bones" of "degraded Italy," "besotted Spain," and the other terrible examples of the destroying influence of their old mother church. We shall teach them not to trust any morality which does not rest upon a clear faith; and we shall show them how that faith commands obedience to lawful authority, purity of motive in all public acts, and universal charity for all men.

Some of our readers may be surprised that we have devoted so much space to this tract. Our motive should be apparent. We said, in the beginning of this article, that this tract sounds like the voice of one of the two classes of opponents who are arrayed against us on this question; and that in itself it affords a perfect illustration of our main argument, which is this, clearly stated in the following paragraph from the article in The Educational Monthly:

"And more than this, Catholics know by painful experience that history cannot be compiled, travels written, poetry, oratory, or romance inflicted upon a credulous public, without the stereotyped assaults upon the doctrines, discipline, and historical life of their church. {126} From Walter Scott to Peter Parley, and from Hume, Gibbon, and Macaulay to the mechanical compilers of cheap school literature, it is the same story told a thousand times oftener than it is refuted; so that the English language, for the last two centuries, may be said without exaggeration to have waged war against the Catholic Church. Indeed, so far as European history is considered, the difficulty must always be insurmountable; since it would always be impossible for the Catholic and Protestant to accept the same history of the Reformation or of the Papal See, or the political, social, and moral events resulting from or in any degree connected with those two great centres and controlling causes. Who could write a political history of Christendom for the last three hundred years and omit all mention of Luther and the pope? And how is any school compendium of such history to be devised for the use of the Catholic and Protestant child alike?"

Now, it is very well understood that, with all their doctrinal differences and sectarian antipathies, all the Protestant sects can nevertheless, as a general rule, accept any Protestant history of the so-called Reformation, and of the wars, diplomacies, public events, and moral results springing from or connected with that episode in the religious annals of our race; but can Catholics accept such? Will you compel Catholic parents to accept for their children histories written in the spirit of this Bible House tract, which tells us (p. 3.) that the Catholic faith "taught the people that a Romish priest is to them in the place of God; that a Romish priest can create his Creator!"

The very encyclopedia, quoted by our tractarian is another Roundhead trooper armed against the papal anti-Christ! And so, the bright Catholic boy will be amused with the antics of the feasting and fighting monk in Ivanhoe; whilst graver calumnies will convince him that the church of his fathers, and of the great-grandfathers of her modern revilers, is truly a den of thieves and a house of abominations.

It may as well be distinctly understood, once and for all, that we cannot consent that our children shall receive secular education without religious training; and that we understand very well that such religious knowledge as we desire them to possess cannot be imparted by those who are hostile to us. We intend also to teach them to respect and uphold all the rights, social, political, and religious, of their fellow-citizens, upon the plain injunction of the Scriptures that they shall do unto others precisely as they would have others do unto themselves. At the same time we will teach them to love and revere their ancient mother church, as the custodian for fifteen hundred years of that Bible which she is falsely accused by this tract of "fearing;" as the munificent patroness of every art and the mistress of every science; as the friend and supporter of liberty when united to order and justice; as the enemy of pride, license, and disobedience to lawful authority; as the guardian of the sanctity of marriage against the pagan concupiscence of the divorce courts; as the sword of vengeance uplifted over the heads of the child-murdering destroyers of populations; in fine, as the hope and future salvation of this republic and all its precious endowments of personal manhood, honor, virtue, and faith, and all its national institutions of self-governing popular sovereignty, equal rights, and faithful citizenship, based, not upon infidel revolutionary "fraternity," but upon a noble Christian brotherhood. Certainly, even if we were mistaken in our estimate of the fruitfulness and power of the Catholic faith, it would be no less an evidence of our sincere patriotism, that we are anxious to impress upon the children of the church the conviction that in faithfully serving their country they are only obeying the commands of their religion.

As we do not intend that our children shall be either untaught or mistaught in regard to this sublime knowledge and duty, we shall insist on educating them ourselves, with or without receiving our just share of the public taxes, to which we do contribute very largely, the declaration of the Bible House tract to the contrary notwithstanding.

We have devoted more space to this first, class of objectors than they could claim from our courtesy, because we believe that they nominally represent many honest men who will cheerfully admit the truth when they see it.

There is another and a far different class of persons who take issue with us upon this question, and for whom we entertain a perfect respect—first, because they treat the subject with evident fairness and commendable civility; and secondly, because from their stand-point, there would appear to be much good reason in their objections to our claim. It gives us very great pleasure to use all our honest endeavors to remove their difficulties. This class is represented by the editorial articles which appeared in The Chicago Advance, The Troy Daily Press, and several other papers, criticising the article of The Educational Monthly. The objections may be summed up as follows:

First, (and the most important.) That denominational education would prevent the complete amalgamation or "unification" of American citizenship, and tend to increase sectarian bitterness, to the prejudice of republican institutions.

Secondly. That it would destroy the harmony and efficiency of the general school system.

Thirdly. That the Catholic people are richer in the jewels of the Roman matron, their children, than they are in the images of Caesar, the coin of the country! and that therefore they would draw from the common fund an amount much in excess of the taxes paid by them; which would not be just.

We shall candidly consider these objections in the order in which we have stated them.

As to the first: It would be fortunate, in a temporal point of view, if all the people were of one mind in religion, especially if they happen to have the true faith; inasmuch as nothing so conduces to the general harmony and good will as the total absence of all religious strife. But we see that such a state of things cannot be hoped for here. Not only is the community divided into Protestants, Catholics, and a large body of citizens professing no faith at all, but the Protestant community itself is subdivided into innumerable conflicting sects. In defiance of any system of public education, these various religious organizations will always be widely separated from each other, and from the Catholic Church, on questions of doctrinal belief. The issue then remains nakedly before us, Shall public education be entirely divorced from revealed religion, and shall we commit the morals of our children to the saving influences of a little "reading, writing, and arithmetic;" or, shall we have them educated in some form or another of practical Christianity? The arguments on this point have been so fully elaborated in our articles heretofore published, that it would be superfluous to repeat them now. We may, however, recall to mind the conclusive evidence afforded us of the correctness of our theory by the actual experience of such governments as those of England, France, Prussia, and Austria; under which, as we have shown in those articles, the denominational system is carried out to the fullest extent, producing harmony, instead of discord, in populations composed, as here, of numerous religious bodies. It is an old adage that one fact is worth a dozen arguments.

We find that, after long years of earnest study of this difficult question, and after exhausting every half-way expedient, the statesmen of the countries we have named adopted with singular unanimity the views which we are presenting for the serious and candid consideration of the American public. We shall quote briefly from a few of those statesmen who are well-known leaders of opinion in the European Protestant world.

Lord Derby: "Public education should be considered as inseparable from religion;" the contrary system is declared by him to be "the realization of a foolish and dangerous idea."

Mr. Gladstone: "Every system which places religious education in the background is pernicious."

Lord John Russell insisted that in the normal schools, which he proposed to have established, "religion should regulate the entire system of discipline."

M. de Raumer: "They have acquired in Prussia a conviction, which becomes daily more settled, that the fitness of the primary school depends on its intimate union with the church." In 1854, he writes that "education should repose upon the basis of Christianity, the true support of the family, of the commune, and of the state."

M. Guizot, the former very eminent Protestant prime minister of France, deserves to be specially quoted, although we are but repeating the extracts which we gave in another article. His words should be written in letters of gold. Let the enemies of religious education, if they can, present a satisfactory answer to this superb declaration:

"In order to make popular education truly good and socially useful, it must be fundamentally religious. I do not simply mean by this, that religious instruction should hold its place in popular education, and that the practices of religion should enter into it; for a nation is not religiously educated by such petty and mechanical devices. It is necessary that national education should be given and received in the midst of a religious atmosphere, and that religious impressions and religious observances should penetrate into all its parts. Religion is not a study or an exercise to be restricted to a certain place, and a certain hour; it is a faith and a law, which ought to be felt everywhere, and which after this manner alone can exercise all its beneficial influence upon our minds and our lives."

The first Napoleon, the restorer of order and religion in France, influenced, at the time, merely by human considerations, and speaking only as a wise lawgiver, and not as a practical Christian, insisted upon the necessity of making the precepts of religion the basis of education in the university, whose halls had echoed the blasphemous unbelief of the disciples of Voltaire.

At our very door, we have likewise the judgment and example of our Canadian neighbors, demonstrating the feasibility of connecting secular education with the most thorough instruction in the doctrines and practices of the different churches. Such opinions and facts should have some weight with our friends here who are fearful of the proposed experiment.

We know, by our own personal experience, that young men educated at the exclusively Catholic College of Mt. St. Mary's, in Maryland, and other young men, graduates of Yale and Princeton, where Catholics are rarely if ever seen, meet afterward in the world of business or politics, and immediately learn to value each other according to intrinsic personal worth, and to exchange all the mutual courtesies and discharge all the reciprocal duties of social life. It is the same with Catholics and Protestants educated together at the many Catholic colleges in the United States, where the Catholic pupils are nevertheless invariably instructed, with the utmost exactness, in all the doctrines and practices of their church. There are thousands of such living witnesses throughout the country, ready to attest the correctness of our statement. It proves this, (what we know to be true without the proof,) that the education received by Catholics at their own schools, whilst rigidly doctrinal, uniformly inculcates charity, urbanity, and every duty of good citizenship. There is not, therefore, and never can be any difficulty, on the part of Catholics, to meet their Protestant fellow-citizens in all the relations of life, private and public, with the utmost frankness, fraternity, and confidence, provided that they are not repelled by harshness or chilled by distrust. Their religion teaches them that such is their duty. Certainly, if such happy results are realized even in England, Prussia, and Austria, where all barriers, whether social or religious, are traditionally more difficult to surmount, how can it be that we must expect animosities to be engendered under the free action and the liberal intercourse of our republican society?

We must, therefore, consider the fear expressed by this first objection as wholly groundless. But even were it otherwise, what then? Should we, therefore, sacrifice to such an apprehension the far more momentous considerations that our republican, self-governing community can never safely trust itself in the great work of perpetuating the liberties of a Christian nation without planting itself upon the morality of the Gospel; that the revealed doctrines of Christ are the foundation of his moral code, and that to practise the one faithfully the people must be taught to believe the other firmly; and that religion so taught, as M. Guizot admirably expresses it, "is not a study or an exercise, to be restricted to a certain place and a certain hour; it is a faith and a law which ought to be felt everywhere;" and that "national education should be given and received in the midst of a religious atmosphere!"

What would the advantage of a more perfect amalgamation or unification of citizenship avail us, if, to obtain it, we were to strike from under our institutions the only solid basis upon which they can rest with any hope whatever of being able to withstand the rude shocks of time, to which all mortal works are subject, and which destroyed the grandest structures of pagan power, solely because they rested upon human wisdom and human virtue, unaided by revealed religion and supernatural grace? We cannot, therefore, admit any force in the first objection.

As to the second: How can the harmony or efficiency of the school system be disturbed by permitting a school to be organized for Catholic children in any district or locality where the requisite number may be found to render it practicable, in accordance with the general policy of the law? It is presumed that the law contemplates the education of all these children, and we cannot see that the harmony of the system consists in putting them into any one school-room rather than another. It is not proposed to withdraw them from the general supervision of the state, or to deny to the state the authority to regulate the standard of education, and to see that its requirements are complied with. This is done in every one of the countries of which we have spoken. {130} No one is so unreasonable as to expect that separate schools shall be organized where the number of pupils may be below a reasonable uniform standard; as it is not proposed to increase the expense of the system. On the contrary, as far as concerns the education of our Catholic children in the city of New York, we propose to reduce the cost considerably, as we shall explain before we close this article. It is said that the several Protestant denominations may demand the same privilege. Suppose that they do. If they have a sufficient number of children in any particular locality for the proper organization of a separate school under the law, and are willing to fulfil its requirements, how can the general system be impaired by allowing them to do so? This is the condition annexed to the privilege in all those countries which have adopted this liberal policy. The proposition seems too plain for argument. When a college contains five hundred boys, two hundred may be classed in the higher division, three hundred in the lower, and each may have separate playgrounds and recitation halls. So, if a district contains two hundred of one faith, and three hundred of another, or of several other creeds, surely the two hundred may be organized into one school and the three hundred into another, or into several others, according to the standard of numbers, as may be required by the law. The whole question, therefore, is purely one of distribution, not at all above the capacity of a drill-sergeant! The same number of children would be educated, probably in the same number of schools, and at the same cost, as now. The course of secular education prescribed by the state could be rigidly enforced in all such schools without assailing the conscience of any one, because we suppose that the state would not object that Catholics should learn English history from Lingard, whilst others might prefer Hume and Macaulay. We presume that there would be no disagreement in regard to reading, writing, arithmetic, mathematics, natural philosophy, and those things which constitute the general studies of primary and high schools. It is only with such that the state has any right to intermeddle, and it is only such that the state professes to secure to its pupils. The state may say, "The public welfare requires that the citizens of a self-governing nation shall receive sufficient intellectual culture to enable them to discharge their duties understandingly;" but the state has no right to say that its pupils shall take their knowledge and form their opinions of the great moral events of history from D'Aubigné or from Cardinal Bellarmin. It was this that troubled the great Catholic and Protestant governments of Europe, until experience discovered to them the simple solution of the difficulty which we are so earnestly endeavoring to commend to the acceptance of the American people. Have we not at least a right to expect that our motives will not be misrepresented; and that we shall be believed when we say that we are not hostile to the public schools, but, on the contrary, most earnestly anxious to secure for them the widest usefulness and the greatest efficiency. We know that that cannot be if religion be excluded; and that it must be excluded where so many conflicting creeds confront each other.

As to the third: If it were true that the Catholic people contributed almost nothing to the school fund, as is no doubt sincerely believed by some who are not disposed to do us injustice, a very serious question would, nevertheless, be suggested by such a statement as this, which we copy from the article in The Chicago Advance already referred to: {131} "Our American population is principally Protestant, partly Romish, slightly Jewish, and increasingly rationalistic or infidel." Now, it is unquestionably true that the infidels in this country can count but very few amongst their number who ever knelt at a Catholic altar. Still, it is the theory of our opponents that ignorance is, in itself, the source of all evil, and the parent of impiety. It would certainly, therefore, be a terrible calamity for the country if the children of six millions of Catholics were deprived of education because their fathers paid no taxes! To educate them would be unanimously regarded as a public necessity; just as our police authorities remove contagion at the public expense. If this view of public economy be true, (and we need not dispute it in this argument,) then it follows that the question of educating the Catholics is altogether independent of what they do or do not contribute to the treasury. Educated they must be; but suppose that they steadily refuse to receive the knowledge offered, except upon the condition that their consciences shall not be violated, and their parental responsibilities disregarded, by subjecting their children to a training inconsistent with the spirit of their religion; how then? Will you consign the six millions to what you call the moral death of ignorance, and suffer their carcasses to putrefy upon the highway of your republican progress, poisoning the fountains of your national life? Or will you prefer, in the spirit of your institutions, to respect their conscientious opinions, and to enable them, in the manner we have already indicated, to coöperate with you in the full development of your great and noble policy of universal popular education?

But, is it true that the Catholic people have no substantial claim as tax-payers? Such might have been the case twenty-five years ago; but every well-informed man knows that it is not so now. Wealth, amongst the Catholic population, may perhaps be less perceptible, because it is more diffused than it is amongst some other bodies of our citizens; but no man who is familiar with the cities of New York, Brooklyn, Baltimore, St. Louis, Chicago, Milwaukee, and all others, from the sources of the Mississippi to the Gulf, and from the Atlantic to the Pacific, or with the Catholic farm-settlements of the Western States, can shut his eyes to the fact that our Catholic people are thrifty and well-to-do in the world; and that very many of them possess large wealth. A member of the British Parliament, in a recent work upon the Irish in America, has demonstrated this by undeniable statistics. The same is true of Catholics here of all other nationalities. We have not the time nor space, neither is it necessary, to go into the details of this question. We suppose our readers to be intelligent and well-informed, and that they can readily recall to their minds the facts which substantiate the truth of our assertion.

Are there those, sharp at a bargain, who will say, "Well! the Catholics have the resources to educate themselves, and are doing so now; let them continue the good work without calling upon the state for any portion of the public funds, to which they contribute by their taxes"? The dishonesty of such a proposition is shown in the simple statement of it. It is true, as we have said over and over again, that the Catholic people, after paying their taxes to the state, have, with a generous self-sacrifice amounting to heroism, established all over this country more universities, colleges, academies, free schools, and orphan asylums than have ever been founded by all the rest of the nation through private contributions. {132} A people capable of such great deeds in the cause of civilization and religion are not to be despised, can never be repressed, and certainly should not be denied justice, when they ask no more!

We hope that we have satisfactorily answered the objections of those honest adversaries, with whom we will always be happy to interchange opinions in a spirit of candor and sincere respect.

In order that our readers may obtain some idea of what the Catholic people, unaided by the state, have done and are doing for popular education in this country, we shall now present a brief summary or synopsis from Sadlier's Catholic Directory for 1868-9.

In the archdiocese of Baltimore, there are ten literary institutions for young men, twelve female academies, and nine orphan asylums. We shall include the latter, in all instances, because they invariably have schools attached for the instruction of the orphans. There are in the same archdiocese about fifty parish and free schools, the average attendance at which, male and female, exceeds ten thousand.

In the archdiocese of Cincinnati, comprising a part of the State of Ohio, there are three colleges, nine literary institutes for females, two orphan asylums, and seventy-six parochial schools, at which the average attendance is about twenty thousand.

In the archdiocese of New Orleans, there are twenty academies and parochial schools for females, and ten academies and free schools for males; attended by seven thousand five hundred scholars; and one thousand four hundred orphans in the asylums.

The archdiocese of New York comprises the city and county of New York, and the counties of Westchester, Putnam, Dutchess, Ulster, Sullivan, Orange, Rockland, and Richmond. We have lately examined a carefully prepared list of schools, more complete than that given in the directory, by which it appears that there are forty-nine, with a daily attendance of upward of twenty-three thousand children. Of these schools, twenty-six are in the city and county of New York, and have a daily attendance of over nineteen thousand pupils. We shall have occasion to speak more particularly of New York City at the close of this article.

In the archdiocese of San Francisco, there are three colleges, three academies, thirty-two select and parochial schools, and two orphan asylums, providing for nearly seven thousand children, of whom about four hundred are orphans in the asylums, and upward of three thousand are free scholars.

In the archdiocese of St. Louis, there are three literary institutions for males, nine for females, and twenty parochial or free schools, with seven thousand five hundred pupils in daily attendance, besides nine hundred orphans in four asylums.

In the diocese of Albany, comprising that part of the State of New York north of the forty-second degree and east of the eastern line of Cayuga, Tompkins, and Tioga counties, there are six academies for males, and six for females, seven orphan asylums, ten select schools, and fifty-eight parochial schools, with an average attendance of between ten and eleven thousand.

The diocese of Alton, comprising a portion of the state of Illinois, has two colleges for males and six academies for females, one orphan asylum, and fifty-six parochial schools, with an attendance of about seven thousand five hundred scholars.

The diocese of Boston comprises the State of Massachusetts, and has two colleges, three female academies, thirteen parochial or free schools, five thousand eight hundred scholars, and five hundred and fifty orphans in the asylums.

The diocese of Brooklyn comprises Long Island, and has one college in course of erection, eight female academies, nineteen parish schools, attended by over ten thousand scholars, and three asylums, and one industrial school, containing seven hundred orphans.

The diocese of Buffalo comprises twelve counties of the State of New York, and has five literary institutions for males, sixteen for females, three orphan asylums, and twenty-four parochial schools, the attendance on which is specifically set down at something over eight thousand; but it is stated (page 137) that between eighteen and twenty thousand children attend the Catholic schools of that diocese.

The diocese of Chicago comprises a portion of the State of Illinois, and has eight academies for females, seven colleges and academies for males, two orphan asylums, and forty-four parochial schools, attended by over twelve thousand children.

The diocese of Cleveland, comprising a part of Ohio, contains one academy for males and six for females, four asylums sheltering four hundred orphans, and twenty free schools educating six thousand scholars.

The diocese of Columbus, comprising a part of Ohio, has one female academy, twenty-three parochial schools, with over three thousand pupils; the exact number is not given.

The diocese of Dubuque comprises the State of Iowa, and contains twelve academies and select schools, and parochial schools at nearly all the churches of the diocese, educating ten thousand children.

The diocese of Fort Wayne comprises a part of Indiana, and has one college, one orphan asylum, eleven literary institutions, and thirty-eight parish schools.

The diocese of Hartford comprises Rhode Island and Connecticut, and contains three literary institutions for males and six for females, twenty-one male and twenty-three female free schools, the former attended by forty-two hundred, and the latter by fifty-one hundred scholars, besides four hundred orphans in four asylums.

The diocese of Milwaukee has two male and four female academies, and thirty-five free schools, attended by between six and seven thousand children, and four orphan asylums, containing over two hundred orphans.

The diocese of Philadelphia contains eight academies and parochial schools, under the charge of the Christian Brothers, with twenty-five hundred scholars; forty-two other parochial schools, attended by ten thousand pupils; twenty-four academies and select schools for females; three colleges for males; and five asylums, now containing seven hundred and seventy-three male and female orphans.

The above statement embraces but nineteen of the fifty-two dioceses and archdioceses in the United States, as it would extend this article to an unreasonable length were we to undertake to give the statistics of each; which, in regard to many of them, are not sufficiently full in the Directory to enable us to present satisfactory results. {134} Although in many of them the Catholic population is small and sparse, our readers would nevertheless be surprised, no doubt, to see how each one has struggled to supply itself with schools and charitable institutions; and how amazingly they have succeeded, when we consider the comparative scantiness of their resources. We have, however, given enough to afford some idea to our Protestant brethren of the vast interest which their Catholic fellow-citizens have in this question of the public-school fund, and of the great claim to the sympathy and good-will of the country which they have established by their unparalleled efforts in the cause of popular education.

As we have shown above, the Catholics of the archdiocese of New York are educating twenty-three thousand of their children, nineteen thousand within the city limits. The value of their school property is placed at eleven hundred and fifty thousand dollars. For the education of these twenty-three thousand, it is estimated that their annual expense does not exceed one hundred and thirty thousand dollars. The actual cost of the Catholic free schools in New York City is put down at $104,430 for nineteen thousand four hundred and twenty-eight scholars; which is about five dollars and a half for each. We have before us the Report of the Board of Education for 1867, from which it appears that "the cost per head for educating the children in the public schools under the control of the Board of Education for the year ending 1867, based upon the cost for teachers' salaries, fuel and gas, was $19.75 on the average attendance, or $8.50 on the whole number taught." Adding the cost of books and stationery, each pupil cost $21.76 on the average attendance, or $9.40 on the whole number taught. The basis of the above calculation is: Teachers' salaries, $1,497,180.88; fuel, (estimated in a gross amount of expenses,) $163,315.12, and gas, $13,998.96, making a total of $1,674,496.96. But in fact the actual expenditures for 1867 were $2,973,877.41; which cover items that enter equally into the estimate we have given of the Catholic expenditures for school purposes. In that year New York City paid to the state as its proportion of school tax $455,088.27; out of which it received back by apportionment $242,280.04, a little more than one half, the rest being its contribution to the counties; at the same time the city raised for its own schools nearly $2,500,000; being the ten-dollar tax for each scholar taught, and the one twentieth of one per cent of the valuation of the real and personal property of the city. From this our readers will gather some idea of what popular education can cost, even with the best management.

It is well known that the Catholic people, through their church organizations, and by the unpaid assistance of their religious orders, such as the Christian Brothers, possess peculiar advantages, which enable them to conduct the largest and best-arranged schools at the smallest possible cost. Why will not the state permit us to do it? Or, rather, why will not the state do us the justice to reimburse the actual expenses which we make in doing it? For it is a thing which we have already accomplished to a great extent. Suppose that the city of New York was now educating the nineteen thousand children who attend our schools; at $19.75 each, it would cost $375,250; or at $8.50 each it would cost $161,500, this last sum being sixty thousand dollars more than we pay for the same! {135} We have shown, however, that this calculation cannot be made to rest upon the basis given by the board, when you come to institute a comparison between the expenditures for the public schools and for ours. We are willing, nevertheless, to rest our claim even upon such a contrast as those figures show; and we ask the tax-payers of New York whether they are willing to follow the lead of our adversaries and add a few hundred thousand dollars extra to the annual taxes, for the satisfaction of doing us injustice?

It is universally conceded that the school-rooms of New York are dangerously over-crowded; and the Board of Education finds it almost impossible to meet the growing necessities of the city. There are still thousands of Catholics and Protestants unprovided for. Give us the means, and we will speedily see that there is no Catholic child in New York left without the opportunity of education. We will do this upon the strictest terms of accountability to the state. We will conduct our schools up to the highest standard that our legislators may think proper to adopt for the regulation of the public school system. We shall never shrink from the most rigid official scrutiny and inspection. We shall only ask that, whilst we literally follow the requirements of the state as to the course of secular education, we shall not be required to place in the hands of our children books that are hostile to their faith, or to omit giving to their young souls that spiritual food which we deem to be essential for eternal life.

In all sincerity and truth we must say, that we have not yet heard an argument which could shake our faith in the justice of our cause; and that it will ultimately prevail, by the blessing of Providence, we cannot possibly doubt; for, we have an abiding confidence in the integrity and generosity of the American people.

The Omnibus Two Hundred Years Ago.

"I allays thought till to-day," remarked elegant John Thomas to Jeames, as they were clinging to the back of their mistress's carriage during a shopping drive in Bond street, London, "that them 'air nuisances the 'busses was inwented in this 'ear nineteen centry."

"Not a bit," resumed John Thomas, "them air celebrated people the Romans, the same as talked Lat'n, you know, 'ad plenty of 'em.

"I seed it this blessed morning in one o' master's Lat'n books. I was a tryin' what I could make out of Lat'n, and I seed that word 'omnibus' ever so many times; and that's the correc' name for 'bus—' bus is the wulgar happerlation."

"'Ow true it is, as King David singed to 'is 'arp, there's nothing new under the sun!" exclaimed John Thomas enthusiastically.

The carriage stopped at this moment and the interesting conversation was interrupted.

But although people who understand more Latin than John Thomas have not yet discovered that the Romans were acquainted with that cheap and convenient mode of conveyance, they may have believed, like him, that omnibuses were a modern invention, and may be surprised to learn that, more than two hundred years ago, in the reign of Louis the Fourteenth, Paris possessed for a time a regular line of these now indispensable vehicles.

Nicolas Sauvage, at the sign of St. Fiacre, in the Rue St. Martin, had been accustomed for many years to let out carriages by the hour or day; but his prices were too high for any but the rich; and so in the year 1657, a certain De Givry obtained permission to "establish in the crossways and public places of the city and suburbs of Paris such a number of two-horse coaches and caleches as he should consider necessary; to be exposed there from seven in the morning until seven in the evening, at the hire of all who needed them, whether by the hour, the half-hour, day, or otherwise, at the pleasure of those who wished to make use of them to be carried from one place to another, wherever their affairs called them, either in the city and suburbs of Paris, or as far as four or five leagues in the environs," etc., etc.

This was a decided step in advance; but the prices of these hackney coaches were still too high for the public generally, and they consequently did not meet with the success anticipated. At length, in 1662, appeared the really cheap and popular conveyance—the omnibus—under the patronage of the Duke of Roanès the Marquis of Sourches, and the Marquis of Crenan. These noblemen solicited and obtained letters patent for a great speculation—carriages to contain eight persons, at five sous the seat, and running at fixed hours on specified routes.

"On the 18th of March, 1662," says Sauval, in his Antiquities of Paris, "seven coaches were driven for the first time through the streets that lead from the Porte St. Martin to the palace of the Luxembourg; they were assailed with stones and hisses by the populace."

This last assertion is much to be doubted; more especially as Madame Perier, the sister of the great Pascal, has described in an interesting letter to Arnauld de Pomponne, the general joy and satisfaction that the appearance of these cheap conveyances gave rise to in the people; a state of feeling which seems far more probable than that which stones and hisses would manifest.

"PARIS, March 21, 1662.
"As every one has been appointed to some special office in this affair of the coaches, I have solicited with eagerness and have been so fortunate as to obtain that of announcing its success; therefore, sir, each time that you see my writing, be assured of receiving good news.

"The establishment commenced last Saturday morning, at seven o'clock, with wonderful pomp and splendor. The seven carriages provided for this route were first distributed. Three were sent to the Porte St. Martin, and four were placed before the Luxembourg, where at the same time were stationed two commissaries of the Chatelet in their robes, four guards of the high provost, ten or twelve of the city archers, and as many men on horseback. When everything was ready, the commissaries proclaimed the establishment, explained its usefulness, exhorted the citizens to uphold it, and declared to the lower classes that the slightest insult would be punished with the utmost severity; and all this was delivered in the king's name. {137} Afterward they gave the coachmen their coats, which are blue—the king's color as well as the city's color—with the arms of the king and of the city embroidered on the bosom; and then they gave the order to start.

"One of the coaches immediately went off, carrying inside one of the high provost's guards. Half a quarter of an hour after, another coach set off, and then the two others at the same intervals of time, each carrying a guard who was to remain therein all day. At the same time the city archers and the men on horseback dispersed themselves on the route.

"At the Porte Saint Martin the same ceremonies were observed, at the same hour, with the three coaches that had been sent there, and there were the same arrangements respecting the guards, the archers and the men on horseback. In short, the affair was so well conducted that not the slightest confusion took place, and those coaches were started as peaceably as the others.

"The thing indeed has succeeded perfectly; the very first morning the coaches were filled, and several women even were among the passengers; but in the afternoon the crowd was so great that one could not get near them; and every day since it has been the same, so that we find by experience that the greatest inconvenience is the one you apprehended; people wait in the street for the arrival of one of these coaches, in order to get in. When it comes, it is full; this is vexatious; but there is a consolation; for it is known that another will arrive in half a quarter of an hour; this other arrives, and it also is full; and after this has been repeated several times, the aspirant is at length obliged to continue his way on foot. That you may not think that I exaggerate I will tell you what happened to myself. I was waiting at the door of St. Mary's Church, in the Rue de la Verrerie, feeling a great desire to return home in a coach; for it is pretty far from my brother's house. But I had the vexation of seeing five coaches pass without being able to get a seat; all were full: and during the whole time that I was waiting, I heard blessings bestowed on the originators of an establishment so advantageous to the public. As every one spoke his thoughts, some said the affair was very well invented, but that it was a great fault to have put only seven coaches on the route; that they were not sufficient for half the people who had need of them, and that there ought to have been at least twenty. I listened to all this, and I was in such a bad temper from having missed five coaches that at the moment I was quite of their opinion. In short, the applause is universal, and it may be said that nothing was ever better begun.

"The first and second days, there was a crowd on the Pont-Neuf and in all the streets to watch the coaches pass; and it was very amusing to see the workmen cease their labor to look at them, so that no more work was done all Saturday throughout the whole route than if it had been a holiday. Smiling faces were seen everywhere, not smiles of ridicule, but of content and joy; and this convenience is found so great that every one desires it for his own quarter.

"The shopkeepers of the Rue St. Denis demanded a route with so much importunity that they even spoke of presenting a petition. Preparations were being made to give them one next week; but yesterday morning M. de Roanès, M. de Crenan, and M. the High Provost (M. de Sourches) being all three at the Louvre, the king talked very pleasantly about the novelty, and addressing those gentlemen, said,' And our route, will you not soon establish it?' {138} These words oblige them to think of the Rue St. Honoré, and to defer for some days the Rue St. Denis. Besides this, the king, speaking on the same subject, said that he desired that all those who were guilty of the slightest insolence should be severely punished, and that he would not permit this establishment to be molested.

"This is the present position of the undertaking. I am sure you will not be less surprised than we are at its great success; it has far surpassed all our hopes. I shall not fail to send you exact word of every pleasant thing that happens, according to the office conferred on me, and to supply the place of my brother, who would be happy to undertake the duty if he could write.

"I wish with all my heart that I may have matter to write to you every week, both for your satisfaction and for other reasons that you can well guess. I am your obedient servant,

Postscript in the handwriting of Pascal, and very probably the last lines he ever traced: he died in August of the same year:

"I will add to the above, that the day before yesterday, at the king's petit coucher, a dangerous assault was made against us by two courtiers distinguished by their rank and wit, which would have ruined us by turning us into ridicule, and would have given rise to all sorts of attacks, had not the king answered so obligingly and so dryly with respect to the excellence of the undertaking, so that they speedily put up their weapons. I have no more paper. Adieu—entirely yours."

Sauval affirms that Pascal was the inventor of this cheap coach, and Madame de Sévigné seems to allude to the enterprise in a passage of one of her letters which commences "apropos of Pascal." It is certain that he and his sister were pecuniarily interested in the speculation, and it is more than probable that it was he who induced his rich friend the Duke of Roanès, to take so prominent a part in the undertaking. But we must not consider Pascal in the light of a vulgar speculator—earthly interests affected him but little personally—deeds of charity, the many ills and pains of premature old age, and the sad task of watching over a life always on the brink of extinction, almost wholly engrossed his thoughts during his last years. He saw in this affair an advantage to the public in general, and if any pecuniary profits resulted, his share was intended for the benefit of the poor, as is very evident by the following extract from the little work Madame Perier dedicated to the memory of her brother.

"As soon as the affair of the coaches was settled, he told me he wished to ask the farmers for an advance of a thousand francs to send to the poor at Blois. When I told him that the success of the enterprise was not sufficiently assured for him to make this request, he replied that he saw no inconvenience in it, because, if the affair did not prosper, he would repay the money from his estate, and he did not like to wait until the end of the year, because the necessities of the poor were too urgent to defer charity. As no arrangement could be made with the farmers, he could not gratify his desire. On this occasion we perceived the truth of what he had so often told me, that he wished for riches only that he might be able to help the poor; for the moment God gave him the hope of possessing wealth, even before he was assured of it, he began to distribute it."

In the ninth volume of the Ordonnances de Louis XIV., we find, concerning the establishment of coaches in the city of Paris, that these cheap conveyances are permitted "for the convenience of a great number of persons ill-accommodated, such as pleaders, infirm people, and others, who, not having the means of hiring chairs or carriages because they cost a pistole or two crowns at least the day, can thus be carried for a moderate price by means of this establishment of coaches, which are always to make the same journeys in Paris from one quarter to another, the longest at five sous the seat, and the others less; the suburbs in proportion; and which are always to start at fixed hours, however small the number of persons then assembled, and even empty, if no person should present himself, without obliging those who make use of this convenience to pay more for their places," etc.

These regulations are similar to those of our modern omnibus; but the quality of the passengers was more arbitrary; for in the tenth volume of this same Register, we find it enacted that "Soldiers, Pages, Lacqueys and other gentry in Livery, also Mechanics and Workmen shall not be able to enter the said coaches," etc., etc.

The first route was opened on the 18th of March; the second on the 11th of April, running from the Rue Saint Antoine to the Rue Saint Honoré, as high as St. Roch's church. On this second opening, a placard announced to the citizens that the directors "had received advice of some inconveniences that might annoy persons desirous of making use of their conveyances, such, for instance, when the coachman refuses to stop to take them up on the route, even though there are empty places, and other similar occurrences; this is to give notice that all the coaches have been numbered, and that the number is placed at the top of the moutons, on each side of the coachman's box, together with the fleur de lis—one, two, three, etc., according to the number of coaches on each route. And so those who have any reason to complain of the coachman, are prayed to remember the number of the coach, and to give advice of it to the clerk of one of the offices, so that order may be established."

The third route, which ran from the Rue Montmartre and the Rue Neuve Saint Eustache to the Luxembourg Palace, was opened on the 22d of May of the same year. The placard which conveys the announcement to the public, gives notice also, "that to prevent the delay of money-changing, which always consumes much time, no gold will be received."

Every arrangement having thus been made to render these cheap coaches useful and agreeable, they very soon became the fashion; a three act comedy in verse, entitled, "The intrigue of the coaches at five sous," written by an actor named Chevalier, was even represented in 1662 at the Theatre of the Marais. An extract from this play is given in the history of the French Theatre, by the Brothers Parfaict.

But the ingenious and useful innovation on the old hackney-coach system, though so well conducted and so well administered, so highly protected, and so warmly welcomed, was not destined to live long. After a very few years, the undertaking failed, and the omnibus was forgotten for nearly two centuries! Sauval tells us that Pascal's death was the cause of this misfortune; but the coaches continued to prosper for three or four years after that event.

"Every one," says Sauval, in a curious page of his Antiquities, "during two years found these coaches so convenient that auditors and masters of comptes, counsellors of the Chatelet and of the court, made no scruple to use them to go to the Chatelet or to the palace, and this caused the price to be raised one sou; even the Duke of Enghien [Footnote 48] has travelled in them. But what do I say? The king, when passing the summer at Saint-Germain, whither he had consented that these coaches should come, went in one of them, for his amusement, from the old castle, where he was staying, to the new one to visit the queen-mother. Notwithstanding this great fashion, these coaches were so despised three or four years after their establishment that no one would make use of them, and their ill success was attributed to the death of Pascal, the celebrated mathematician; it is said that he was the inventor of them, as well as the leader of the enterprise; it is moreover assured that he had made their horoscope and given them to the publicunder a certain constellation whose bad influences he knew how to turn aside."

We can give no description of this ancient omnibus; no drawing or engraving of it is believed to exist; but it is probable that it resembled the coaches represented in the paintings of Van der Meulan and Martin.

It is impossible to attribute to any other cause than that of the arbitrary choice of passengers, the failure of an undertaking which appeared to possess every element of success. The people who needed the cheap coach were debarred from the use of it; the tired artisan returning from his hard day's work; the jaded soldier hurrying to his barrack before the beat of the tattoo that recalled him had ceased; the pale seamstress with her bundle; each was refused the five sous lift, and had to foot the weary way; while the aristocracy and rich middle class enjoyed the ride, not as a social want, but as a fashionable diversion, and tired of it after a time, as fashionable people even now tire of everything fashionable. It was reserved for the marvellous nineteenth century, so fruitful in good works, to endow us with the true omnibus, that is, a carriage for the use of every one indiscriminately, in which the gentleman and the laborer, the rich man and the poor man can ride side by side. This really popular conveyance has now become in all highly civilized communities so veritable a necessity and habit that it can never again fall and be forgotten like its faulty forerunner, or the omnibus of two hundred years ago.

New Publications.

Travels In The East-indian Archipelago.
By Albert S. Brickmose, M.A.
With Illustrations. 1 vol. 8vo, pp. 553.
New York: D. Appleton & Co. 1869.

This elegantly got up volume of travel the author tells us, in his preface, is taken from his journal, "kept day by day," while on a visit to the islands described, the object of which visit was to re-collect the shells figured in Rumphen's Pariteit Kamer. The author travelled from Batavia, in Java, along the north coast of that island to Samarang and Surabaya; thence to Macassar, the capital of Celebes; thence south through Sapi Strait, between Sumbawa and Floris, and eastward to the southern end of Timur, (near the northwestern extremity of Australia;) thence along the west coast of Timur to Dilli, and north to the Banda Islands and Amboina. {141} Having passed several months in the Moluccas, or Spice Islands, he revisited the Bandas, and ascended their active volcano. Returning to Amboina, he travelled in Ceram and Buru, and continued northward to Gilolo. Thence he crossed the Molucca Passage to the Minahassa, or northern end of the Island of Celebes, probably the most beautiful spot on the surface of our globe.

Returning to Batavia, he proceeded to Padang, and thence made a long journey through the interior of the island to the land of the cannibals. Having succeeded in making his way for a hundred miles through that dangerous people, he came down to the coast and returned to Padang. Again he went up into the interior, and examined all the coffee-lands. From Padang he came down to Bencoolen, and succeeded in making his way over the mountains and down the rivers to the Island of Banca, and was thence carried to Singapore. This work opens a new field, hitherto but little known, to the reader of books of travel and adventure. His descriptions, if not always very vivid, are told in a clear, unaffected manner, without that egotism so often found in books of travel.

The Instruments Of The Passion Of Our Lord Jesus Christ.
By the Rev. Dr. J. E. Veith,
Preacher at the Cathedral of Vienna.
Translated by Rev. Theodore Noethen,
Pastor of the Church of the Holy Cross. Albany, N. Y.
Boston: Patrick Donahoe.

Dr. Veith, a convert from Judaism, is one of the most distinguished writers and preachers of Vienna. The present work is rich in thought and original in style. It is one of a series which the translator proposes to bring out in an English dress, if he receives encouragement, as we hope he may. F. Noethen, although a German, writes English remarkably well, and deserves great credit for his zeal and assiduity in translating so many excellent and practical works of piety. In point of excellence in typography and mechanical execution, this book deserves to be classed with the best which have been issued by the Catholic press.

The Life And Works Of St. AEngussius Hagiographus, or Saint AEngus the Culdee, Bishop and Abbot at Clonenagh and Dysartenos, Queens County.
By the Rev. John O'Hanlon.
Dublin: John F. Fowler,
3 Crow street. 1868.
For sale by the Catholic Publication Society, New York.

This tract is a treatise on the life and writings of an humble and laborious monk of the early ages in Ireland, who published, if we may use the expression, his Felire, Fessology, or Calendar of Irish saints, as long ago as 804. From the biographical and historical value of this poetical work, St. AEngus ranks among the very earliest of the historical writers of modern Europe. In this view, no less than to draw attention to one whose holy life induced the Irish church to ascribe his name on the dyptics, it is well that the present generation should be asked to pause and look upon this life, so humble, laborious, and holy, and which so strongly commended him to the veneration of succeeding ages. The Rev. Mr. O'Hanlon treats his subject systematically, displaying great research and sound criticism, and it is to be hoped that his treatise will induce some of the publishing societies in Ireland to issue an edition of the works of this venerated father of the Irish church.

The Felire of St. AEngus consists of three distinct parts: the first, the Invocation, containing five stanzas, implores the grace of Christ on the work; the second, comprising 220 stanzas, is a preface and conclusion to the main poem; the third part contains 365 stanzas, one for each day of the year. They comprise not only the saints peculiar to Ireland, but others drawn from early martyrologies. This poem was regarded in the early Irish church with great veneration, and the copies that have descended to us have a running gloss or commentary on each verse, making it a short biography of the saint briefly mentioned in the poem. {142} In this form its value has long been known to scholars, whose frequent use of it shows the light it frequently helps to throw on Irish history and topography. We trust that the work of the Rev. Mr. O'Hanlon will not be fruitless.

Essays And Lectures on,
1. The Early History of Maryland;
2. Mexico and Mexican Affairs;
3. A Mexican Campaign;
4. Homoeopathy;
5. Elements of Hygiene;
6. Health and Happiness.
By Richard McSherry, M.D., Professor of Principles and Practice of Medicine, University of Maryland.
Baltimore: Kelly, Piet & Co. 1869. Pp. 125.

The sketch of colonial Maryland is drawn with a masterly hand, showing, in the first place, the author's thorough knowledge of its history; and, secondly, the poetic language in which his ideas are couched tell plainly how completely his heart is imbued with love for his native Terra Mariae.

Dr. McSherry is right when he calls his State "the brightest gem in the American cluster." To the Catholics of this broad land it is surely so; and the names of Sir George Calvert and his noble sons, the founders of this "Land of the Sanctuary," should be enshrined with love and reverence in the hearts of all who profess the old faith and appreciate our religious liberty.

The article on "Mexico and Mexican Affairs" was written at the suggestion of the editor of The Southern Review, and is a synopsis of the political history of Mexico from the time of the conquest to the tragical end of the ill-fated Prince Maximilian.

As a colonial possession of Spain, Mexico enjoyed a more quiet existence and a more stable government than either before or since that period of its history. "Churches, schools, and hospitals were distributed over the land; good roads were made, and, without going into detail, industrial pursuits were generally in honor, and were rewarded with success."

Political revolution again agitated the country in the commencement of this century, followed by the establishment of an empire under Iturbide; this in turn gave place to a republican form of government in 1824.

No stronger proof of the belief of our order-loving and law-abiding neighbors in the republican doctrine of rotation in office can be given than the fact that during the forty years of the Republican government "the record shows forty-six changes in the presidential chair." The accounts of revolution and counter-revolution among the dominant spirits of that time beggar description, and leave us to conclude that a frightful condition of strife, desolation, and misery reigned throughout the entire period. "The rulers of Mexico kept no faith with their own people; none with foreigners or foreign nations. They gave abundant cause for the declaration of war made against them by England, France, and Spain, and for the provocation of the war by France, when the other powers withdrew." The author describes the inducements held out by the assembly of notables to Maximilian, after the French occupation, to accept the throne; and how at last he unfortunately acceded to the request, and sailed for Vera Cruz in May, 1864. The subsequent career of this nobleman, who had thus linked his fate with that of Mexico is feelingly depicted. It was but a short period of three years from his "splendid reception at Guadalupe, when about entering his capital, to his fall by Mexican treachery, and subsequent murder on the 19th of June, 1867." The author blames ex-Secretary Seward for not preventing this tragical end of the amiable and highly cultivated prince, and thinks that as the Indian Juarez had been enabled to prosecute his illegal claim to the presidency by the support and comfort derived from the United States, he would not have dared refuse a claim for this boon, made in a proper spirit, by Mr. Seward.

The names of Maximilian and his devoted, beautiful Carlotta will always bring moisture to the eyes of those who can sympathize with the afflictions and sufferings of their fellow-beings.

Mexico has commenced a new chapter of her history. True, the preface so far is not encouraging; but let us hope her experience in the past may cause a better record for the future. {143}

This is an interesting account of the author's travels, as surgeon, with the army which, in 1847, under General Scott, fought its way through the historical battles of Contreras, Churubusco, Molino del Rey, to Chapultepec: and the final entrance, on the 14th of September, to the Mexican capital. The description of the appearance of the valley of Mexico, as the army descended the mountain side, is very beautiful. The author says, "The valley or basin of Mexico lay spread out like a panorama of fairy land; opening, closing, and shifting, according to the changing positions of the observers. At times nothing would be visible but dark recesses in the mountain, or the grim forest that shaded the road; when in a moment a sudden turn would unfold, as if by magic, a scene that looked too lovely to be real. It was an enchantment in nature; for, knowing as we did that we beheld bona fide lakes and mountains, plains and villages, chapels and hamlets, all so bright, so clear, and so beautiful, it still seemed an illusion of the senses, a dream, or a perfection of art—nay, in the mountain circle we could see the very picture-frame."

How long the mixed races of this beautiful country are to continue their tragical and at times ludicrous efforts at self-government is a problem to be solved in the future.

The doctor's logical arguments in this article we would recommend to the perusal of our friends who prefer the more palatable medicine of that school,

These lectures contain many sound practical hints for the general reader whereby he may avoid many causes of disease, and prolong his life to a natural limit. We give the doctor's testimony on two interesting points. He says:

"Excesses at table are disastrous enough, and in this they are worse than over devotion to Bacchus; namely, that they undermine more slowly and more insidiously; but otherwise, strong drinks are vastly worse. There are persons who think wines and liquors essential to health; but as the rule, they are useless at best; and at worst, destructive to soul, and body, and mind. Strict total abstinence is generally, I might say universally safe; while even temperate indulgence is rarely safe or salutary." (P. 119.)

"Tobacco deserves the next place. It is most marvellous how this nauseous weed has taken hold upon the affections of man. It surely is of no benefit to health, but I dare not say it conduces nothing to happiness. When I see an old friend take his pipe, or cigar, after the labors of the day, and the evening meal; when his good honest face beams beneath the fragrant smoke which rises like incense, making a wreath around his gray hairs; when his heart expands, and he becomes genially social and confidential, I can hardly ask Hygeia to rob him of his simple pleasure. A good cigar is almost akin to the 'cup that cheers, yet not inebriates.' But honestly, tobacco is pernicious in all its forms; not like whiskey, indeed, but still pernicious." (P. 121.)

As an entirety, the doctor's book presents a charming diversity of subjects, each in itself of sufficient interest to chain the earnest attention of the reader, and well repay him for its perusal.

John M. Costello; Or, The Beauty Of Virtue Exemplified In An American Youth.
Baltimore: John Murphy & Co. 1869.

This neat little volume contains a well-written memoir of a young aspirant to the priesthood who died a few years ago at the preparatory seminary of St. Charles.

There is a peculiar charm about the life of a pious Catholic boy whose heart has always yearned after the realization of the highest type of Christian virtue. Such a life presents a picture of simple beauty, in which the smallest details present points of more than common interest. One sees here how truly the supernatural life of grace illumines and adorns the commonest actions of the Christian, and clothes them with a merit that purely human virtue would never gather from them. There is nothing in the life of a St. Aloysius or a St. Stanislaus, however insignificant or commonplace in the eyes of the world, that can be deemed trivial or unworthy of record. {144} Whatever they do is a saintly act. Their words are the words of a saint. This is the secret of the wonderful influence which the history of these pure souls has exerted on the minds and hearts of the thousands and tens of thousands to whom it has become known. This thought was constantly before us while perusing the present beautiful tribute to the memory of young Costello. It is impossible to read the description of the most ordinary events of the life of this holy child of God without emotion. What in others of his age and general character might justly be unworthy of note in him becomes worthy to be written in letters of gold. We would say to all Catholic parents, among the hundreds of volumes standing on the bookseller's shelves inviting purchase by their gay bindings and prettily illustrated pages, and almost forcing themselves into your hands as birthday or holiday presents to your darling children, choose this one, and teach them, by the winning example of such virtue as they will here see presented to them, to emulate, not the daring exploits of some lion-killer or wild adventurer, or, it may be, the imaginary success of some fortunate youth in the pursuit of riches, but rather the heroism, the piety, the humility, the chastity, the self-renunciation of the Christian saint. All who love God and have the spiritual interests of our Catholic youth at heart will feel deeply grateful to the reverend author for having given to the world his knowledge of a life so well calculated to edify and inspire its readers with admiration of what is, after all, the highest and best within the sphere of human aim, to lead a holy life, and die, though it be in the flower of youth, the death of a saint. Let us have more books like this one, that, with God's blessing on the lessons they impart, we may have more such lives.

P. F. Cunningham, Philadelphia, is about to publish The Montarges Legacy, and The Life of St. Stanislaus.

New editions of the following books:

Practical Piety set forth by St. Francis de Sales,
Bishop and Prince of Geneva.
1 vol. 12mo, pp. 360, $1.

A Spiritual Retreat of Eight Days.
By the Right Rev. John M. David, D.D.,
1 vol. 12mo. $1.

Kyriale; or, Ordinary of Mass: a Complete Liturgical Manual, with Gregorian Chants, etc.; in round or square notes, each $1.25.

The Holy Week: containing the Offices of Holy Week, from the Roman Breviary and Missal, with the chants in modern notation. $1.25.

Roman Vesperal: containing the complete Vespers for the whole year, with Gregorian Chants in modern notation. $1.50.

The Catholic Church in America. A Lecture delivered before the Historical and AEsthetical Society in the Catholic University of Ireland.
By Thaddeus J. Butler, D.D., Chicago. For sale by the Catholic Publication Society, 126 Nassau street. 25 cents.

The Wreath of Eglantine, and other Poems:
Edited and in part composed by Daniel Bedinger Lucas.
1 vol. 12mo, $1.50.

Eudoxia; a Picture of the Fifth Century. Translated from the German of Ida, Countess Hahn Hahn. 1 vol. 12mo, $1.50.

St. Dominic's Manual; or, Tertiary's Guide.
By two Fathers of the Order.
1 vol. 18mo, pp. 533.

St. Patrick's Manual, for the use of Young People, prepared by the Christian Brothers.
1 vol. 24mo, pp. 648.

The Fisher Maiden: a Norwegian Tale.
By Bjornstjerne Bjornson.
From the author's German edition, by M. E. Niles.
12mo, pp. 217, $1.25.

The Gain of a Loss: a Novel.
By the author of The Last of the Cavaliers.
1 vol. 12mo, pp. 439, $1.75.

A Manual of General History: being an Outline History of the World from the Creation to the Present Time. Fully illustrated with maps. For the use of academies, high-schools, and families.
By John J. Anderson, A.M.
Pp. 400.

Dictionary of the English Language, Explanatory, Pronouncing, Etymological, and Synonymous. Counting-House Edition.
With an appendix containing various useful tables. Mainly abridged from the latest edition of the Qutarto Dictionary of Noah Webster, LL. D.
By William G. Webster and William A. Wheeler.
Illustrated with more than three hundred engravings on wood.
Pp. 630.

The Formation of Christendom. Part II.
By T. W. Allies.
1 vol. 8vo, pp. 495.
The Catholic Publication Society having made arrangements with Mr. Allies to supply his book in America, will soon have this volume for sale. Price, $6.

The Life and Writings of the Rev. Arthur O'Leary.
By the Rev. M. B. Buckley.
1 vol. 12mo, pp. 410.

The Poetical Works of Charles G. Halpine.
With a Biographical Sketch and Explanatory Notes.
Edited by Robert B. Roosevelt.
1 vol. pp. 352.

The Catholic World.

Vol. IX., No. 50.—May, 1869.

The Woman Question.

[Footnote 49: 1. The Revolution: New York. Weekly. Vol. III.
2. Equal Rights for Women. A Speech by George William Curtis, in the Constitutional Convention at Albany, July 19, 1868.
3. Ought Women to learn the Alphabet? By Thomas Wentworth Higginson.]

The Woman Question, though not yet an all-engrossing question in our own or in any other country, is exciting so much attention, and is so vigorously agitated, that no periodical can very well refuse to consider it. As yet, though entering into politics, it has not become a party question, and we think we may discuss it without overstepping the line we have marked out for ourselves—that of studiously avoiding all party politics; not because we have not the courage to discuss them, but because we have aims and purposes which appeal to all parties alike, and which can best be effected by letting party politics alone.

In what follows we shall take up the question seriously, and treat it candidly, without indulging in any sneers, jeers, or ridicule. A certain number of women have become, in some way or other, very thoroughly convinced that women are deeply wronged, deprived of their just rights by men, and especially in not being allowed political suffrage and eligibility. They claim to be in all things man's equal, and in many things his superior, and contend that society should make no distinction of sex in any of its civil and political arrangements. It will not, indeed, be easy for us to forget this distinction so long as we honor our mothers, and love our wives and daughters; but we will endeavor in this discussion to forget it—so far, at least, as to treat the question on its merits, and make no allowance for any real or supposed difference of intellect between men and women. We shall neither roughen nor soften our tones because our opponents are women, or men who encourage them. The women in question claim for women all the prerogatives of men; we shall, therefore, take the liberty to disregard their privileges as women. They may expect from us civility, not gallantry.

We say frankly in the outset that we are decidedly opposed to female suffrage and eligibility. The woman's rights women demand them both as a right, and complain that men, in refusing to concede them, withhold a natural right, and violate the equal rights on which the American republic professes to be based. We deny that women have a natural right to suffrage and eligibility; for neither is a natural right at all, for either men or women. Either is a trust from civil society, not a natural and indefeasible right; and civil society confers either on whom it judges trustworthy, and on such conditions as it deems it expedient to annex. As the trust has never been conferred by civil society with us on women, they are deprived of no right by not being enfranchised.

We know that the theory has been broached latterly, and defended by several political journals, and even by representatives and senators in Congress, as well as by The Revolution, the organ of the woman's rights movement, that suffrage and eligibility are not trusts conferred by civil society on whom it will, but natural and indefeasible rights, held directly from God or nature, and which civil society is bound by its very constitution to recognize, protect, and defend for all men and women, and which they can be deprived of only by crimes which forfeit one's natural life or liberty. It is on this ground that many have defended the extension of the elective franchise and eligibility to negroes and the colored races in the United States, and hold that Congress, under that clause of the Constitution authorizing it to guarantee to the several States a republican form of government, is bound to enfranchise them. It may or may not be wise and expedient to extend suffrage and eligibility to negroes and the colored races hitherto, in most of the States, excluded from the sovereign people of the country; on that question we express no opinion, one way or the other; but we deny that the negroes and colored men can claim admission on the ground either of natural right or of American republicanism; for white men themselves cannot claim it on that ground.

Indeed, the assumption that either suffrage or eligibility is a natural right is anti-republican. The fundamental principle, the very essence of republicanism is, that power is a trust to be exercised for the public good or common weal, and is forfeited when not so exercised, or when exercised for private and personal ends. Suffrage and eligibility confer power to govern, which, if a natural right, would imply that power is the natural and indefeasible right of the governors—the essential principle of all absolutism, whether autocratic, aristocratic, monarchical, or democratic. It would imply that the American government is a pure, centralized, absolute, unmitigated democracy, which may be regarded either as tantamount to no government, or as the absolute despotism of the majority for the time, or its right to govern as it pleases in all things whatsoever, spiritual as well as secular, regardless of vested rights or constitutional limitations. This certainly is not American republicanism, which has always aimed to restrain the absolute power of majorities, and to protect minorities by constitutional provisions. It has never recognized suffrage as a personal right which a man carries with him whithersoever he goes, but has always made it a territorial right, which a man can exercise only in his own State, his own county, his own town or city, and his own ward or precinct. If American republicanism recognized suffrage as a right, not as simply a trust, why does it place restrictions on its exercise, or treat bribery as a crime? If suffrage is my natural right, my vote is my property, and I may do what I please with it; dispose of it in the market for the highest price I can get for it, as I may of any other species of property.

Suffrage and eligibility are not natural, indefeasible rights, but franchises or trusts conferred by civil society; and it is for civil society to determine in its wisdom whom it will or will not enfranchise; on whom it will or will not confer the trust. Both are social or political rights, derived from political society, and subject to its will, which may extend or abridge them as it judges best for the common good. Ask you who constitute political society? They, be they more or fewer, who, by the actual constitution of the state, are the sovereign people. These, and these alone, have the right to determine who may or may not vote or be voted for. In the United States, the sovereign people has hitherto been, save in a few localities, adult males of the white race, and these have the right to say whether they will or will not extend suffrage to the black and colored races, and to women and children.

Women, then, have not, for men have not, any natural right to admission into the ranks of the sovereign people. This disposes of the question of right, and shows that no injustice or wrong is done to women by their exclusion, and that no violence is done to the equal rights on which the American republic is founded. It may or it may not be wise and expedient to admit women into political, as they are now admitted into civil, society; but they cannot claim admission as a right. They can claim it only on the ground of expediency, or that it is necessary for the common good. For our part, we have all our life listened to the arguments and declamations of the woman's rights party on the subject; have read Mary Wollstonecraft, heard Fanny Wright, and looked into The Revolution, conducted by some of our old friends and acquaintances, and of whom we think better than many of their countrymen do; but we remain decidedly of the opinion that harm instead of good, to both men and women, would result from the admission. We say not this because we think lightly of the intellectual or moral capacity of women. We ask not if women are equal, inferior, or superior to men; for the two sexes are different, and between things different in kind there is no relation of equality or of inequality. Of course, we hold that the woman was made for the man, not the man for the woman, and that the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church, not the wife of the husband; but it suffices here to say that we do not object to the political enfranchisement of women on the ground of their feebleness, either of intellect or of body, or of any real incompetency to vote or to hold office. We are Catholics, and the church has always held in high honor chaste, modest, and worthy women as matrons, widows, or virgins. Her calendar has a full proportion of female saints, whose names she proposes to the honor and veneration of all the faithful. She bids the wife obey her husband in the Lord; but asserts her moral independence of him, leaves her conscience free, and holds her accountable for her own deeds.

Women have shown great executive or administrative ability. Few men have shown more ability on a throne than Isabella, the Catholic, of Spain; or, in the affairs of government, though otherwise faulty enough, than Elizabeth of England, and Catharine II. of Russia. The present queen of the British Isles has had a most successful reign; but she owes it less to her own abilities than to the wise counsels of her husbands Prince Albert, and her domestic virtues as a wife and a mother, by which she has won the affections of the English people. {148} Others have shown rare administrative capacity in governing religious houses, often no less difficult than to govern a kingdom or an empire. Women have a keener insight into the characters of men than have men themselves, and the success of female sovereigns has, in great measure, been due to their ability to discover and call around them the best men in the state, and to put them in the places they are best fitted for.

What women would be as legislators remains to be seen; they have had little experience in that line; but it would go hard, but they would prove themselves not much inferior to the average of the men we send to our State legislatures or to our national Congress.

Women have also distinguished themselves in the arts as painters and sculptors, though none of them have ever risen to the front rank. St. Catharine of Egypt cultivated philosophy with success. Several holy women have shown great proficiency in mystic theology, and have written works of great value. In lighter literature, especially in the present age, women have taken a leading part. They almost monopolize the modern novel or romance, and give to contemporary popular literature its tone and character; yet it must be conceded that no woman has written a first-class romance. The influence of her writings, speaking generally, has not tended to purify or exalt the age, but rather to enfeeble and abase it. The tendency is to substitute sentiment for thought, morbid passion for strength, and to produce a weak and unhealthy moral tone. For ourselves, we own, though there are some women whose works we read, and even re-read with pleasure, we do not, in general, admire the popular female literature of the day; and we do not think that literature is that in which woman is best fitted to excel, or through which she exerts her most purifying and elevating influences. Her writings do not do much to awaken in man's heart the long dormant chivalric love so rife in the romantic ages, or to render the age healthy, natural, and manly. We say awaken; for chivalry, in its true and disinterested sense, is not dead in the coldest man's heart; it only sleepeth. It is woman's own fault, more than man's, that it sleeps, and wakes not to life and energy.

Nor do we object to the political enfranchisement of women in the special interest of the male sex. Men and women have no separate interests. What elevates the one elevates the other; what degrades the one degrades the other. Men cannot depress women, place them in a false position, make them toys or drudges, without doing an equal injury to themselves; and one ground of our dislike to the so-called woman's rights movement is, that it proceeds on the supposition that there is no inter-dependence between men and women, and seeks to render them mutually independent of each other, with entirely distinct and separate interests. There is a truth in the old Greek fable, related by Plato in the Banquet, that Jupiter united originally both sexes in one and the same person, and afterward separated them, and that now they are but two halves of one whole. "God made man after his own image and likeness; male and female made he them." Each, in this world, is the complement of the other, and the more closely identified are their interests, the better is it for both. We, in opposing the political enfranchisement of women, seek the interest of men no more than we do the interest of women themselves.

Women, no doubt, undergo many wrongs, and are obliged to suffer many hardships, but seldom they alone. It is a world of trial, a world in which there are wrongs of all sorts, and sufferings of all kinds. We have lost paradise, and cannot regain it in this world. We must go through the valley of the shadow of death before re-entering it. You cannot make earth heaven, and there is no use in trying; and least of all can you do it by political means. It is hard for the poor wife to have to maintain a lazy, idle, drunken vagabond of a husband, and three or four children into the bargain; it is hard for the wife delicately reared, accomplished, fitted to adorn the most intellectual, graceful, and polished society, accustomed to every luxury that wealth can procure, to find herself a widow reduced to poverty, and a family of young children to support, and unable to obtain any employment for which she is fitted as the means of supporting them. But men suffer too. It is no less hard for the poor, industrious, hardworking man to find what he earns wasted by an idle, extravagant, incompetent, and heedless wife, who prefers gadding and gossiping to taking care of her household. And how much easier is it for the man who is reduced from affluence to poverty, a widower with three or four motherless children to provide for? The reduction from affluence to poverty is sometimes the fault of the wife as well as of the husband. It is usually their joint fault. Women have wrongs, so have men; but a woman has as much power to make a man miserable as a man has to make a woman miserable; and she tyrannizes over him as often as he does over her. If he has more power of attack, nature has given her more power of defence. Her tongue is as formidable a weapon as his fists, and she knows well how, by her seeming meekness, gentleness, and apparent martyrdom, to work on his feelings, to enlist the sympathy of the neighborhood on her side and against him. Women are neither so wronged nor so helpless as The Revolution pretends. Men can be brutal, and women can tease and provoke.

But let the evils be as great as they may, and women as greatly wronged as is pretended, what can female suffrage and eligibility do by way of relieving them? All modern methods of reform are very much like dram-drinking. The dram needs to be constantly increased in frequency and quantity, while the prostration grows greater and greater, till the drinker gets the delirium tremens, becomes comatose, and dies. The extension of suffrage in modern times has cured or lessened no social or moral evil; and under it, as under any other political system, the rich grow richer and the poor poorer. Double the dram, enfranchise the women, give them the political right to vote and be voted for; what single moral or social evil will it prevent or cure? Will it make the drunken husband temperate, the lazy and idle industrious and diligent? Will it prevent the ups and downs of life, the fall from affluence to poverty, keep death out of the house, and prevent widowhood and orphanage? These things are beyond the reach of politics. You cannot legislate men or women into virtue, into sobriety, industry, providence. The doubled dram would only introduce a double poison into the system, a new element of discord into the family, and through the family into society, and hasten the moment of dissolution. When a false principle of reform is adopted, the evil sought to be cured is only aggravated. The reformers started wrong. {150} They would reform the church by placing her under human control. Their successors have in each generation found they did not go far enough, and have, each in its turn, struggled to push it farther and farther, till they find themselves without any church life, without faith, without religion, and beginning to doubt if there be even a God. So, in politics, we have pushed the false principle that all individual, domestic, and social evils are due to bad government, and are to be cured by political reforms and changes, till we have nearly reformed away all government, at least, in theory; have well-nigh abolished the family, which is the social unit; and find that the evils we sought to cure, and the wrongs we sought to redress, continue undiminished. We cry out in our delirium for another and a larger dram. When you proceed on a true principle, the more logically and completely you carry it out the better; but when you start with a false principle, the more logical you are, and the farther you push it, the worse. Your consistency increases instead of diminishing the evils you would cure.

The conclusive objection to the political enfranchisement of women is, that it would weaken and finally break up and destroy the Christian family. The social unit is the family, not the individual; and the greatest danger to American society is, that we are rapidly becoming a nation of isolated individuals, without family ties or affections. The family has already been much weakened, and is fast disappearing. We have broken away from the old homestead, have lost the restraining and purifying associations that gathered round it, and live away from home in hotels and boarding-houses. We are daily losing the faith, the virtues, the habits, and the manners without which the family cannot be sustained; and when the family goes, the nation goes too, or ceases to be worth preserving. God made the family the type and basis of society; "male and female made he them." A large and influential class of women not only neglect but disdain the retired and simple domestic virtues, and scorn to be tied down to the modest but essential duties—the drudgery, they call it—of wives and mothers. This, coupled with the separate pecuniary interests of husband and wife secured, and the facility of divorce a vinculo matrirmonii allowed by the laws of most of the States of the Union, make the family, to a fearful extent, the mere shadow of what it was and of what it should be.

Extend now to women suffrage and eligibility; give them the political right to vote and to be voted for; render it feasible for them to enter the arena of political strife, to become canvassers in elections and candidates for office, and what remains of family union will soon be dissolved. The wife may espouse one political party, and the husband another, and it may well happen that the husband and wife may be rival candidates for the same office, and one or the other doomed to the mortification of defeat. Will the husband like to see his wife enter the lists against him, and triumph over him? Will the wife, fired with political ambition for place or power, be pleased to see her own husband enter the lists against her, and succeed at her expense? Will political rivalry and the passions it never fails to engender increase the mutual affection of husband and wife for each other, and promote domestic union and peace, or will it not carry into the bosom of the family all the strife, discord, anger, and division of the political canvass?

Then, when the wife and mother is engrossed in the political canvass, or in discharging her duties as a representative or senator in Congress, a member of the cabinet, or a major-general in the field, what is to become of the children? The mother will have little leisure, perhaps less inclination, to attend to them. A stranger, or even the father, cannot supply her place. Children need a mother's care; her tender nursing, her sleepless vigilance, and her mild and loving but unfailing discipline. This she cannot devolve on the father, or turn over to strangers. Nobody can supply the place of a mother. Children, then, must be neglected; nay, they will be in the way, and be looked upon as an encumbrance. Mothers will repress their maternal instincts; and the horrible crime of infanticide before birth, now becoming so fearfully prevalent, and actually causing a decrease in the native population of several of the States of the Union as well as in more than one European country, will become more prevalent still, and the human race be threatened with extinction. Women in easy circumstances, and placing pleasure before duty, grow weary of the cares of maternity, and they would only become more weary still if the political arena were opened to their ambition.

Woman was created to be a wife and a mother; that is her destiny. To that destiny all her instincts point, and for it nature has specially qualified her. Her proper sphere is home, and her proper function is the care of the household, to manage a family, to take care of children, and attend to their early training. For this she is endowed with patience, endurance, passive courage, quick sensibilities, a sympathetic nature, and great executive and administrative ability. She was born to be a queen in her own household, and to make home cheerful, bright, and happy. Surely those women who are wives and mothers should stay at home and discharge its duties; and the woman's rights party, by seeking to draw her away from the domestic sphere, where she is really great, noble, almost divine, and to throw her into the turmoil of political life, would rob her of her true dignity and worth, and place her in a position where all her special qualifications and peculiar excellences would count for nothing. She cannot be spared from home for that.

It is pretended that woman's generous sympathies, her nice sense of justice, and her indomitable perseverance in what she conceives to be right are needed to elevate our politics above the low, grovelling and sordid tastes of men; but while we admit that women will make almost any sacrifice to obtain their own will, and make less than men do of obstacles or consequences, we are not aware that they have a nicer or a truer sense of justice, or are more disinterested in their aims than men. All history proves that the corruptest epochs in a nation's life are precisely those in which women have mingled most in political affairs, and have had the most influence in their management. If they go into the political world, they will, if the distinction of sex is lost sight of, have no special advantage over men, nor be more influential for good or for evil. If they go as women, using all the blandishments, seductions, arts, and intrigues of their sex, their influence will tend more to corrupt and debase than to purify and elevate. Women usually will stick at nothing to carry their points; and when unable to carry them by appeals to the strength of the other sex, they will appeal to its weakness. When once they have thrown off their native modesty, and entered a public arena with men, they will go to lengths that men will not. {152} Lady Macbeth looks with steady nerves and unblanched cheek on a crime from which her husband shrinks with horror, and upbraids him with his cowardice for letting "I dare not wait upon I would." It was not she who saw Banquo's ghost.

We have heard it argued that, if women were to take part in our elections, they would be quietly and decorously conducted; that her presence would do more than a whole army of police officials to maintain order, to banish all fighting, drinking, profane swearing, venality, and corruption. This would undoubtedly be, to some extent, the case, if, under the new régime, men should retain the same chivalric respect for women that they now have. Men now regard women as placed in some sort under their protection, or the safeguard of their honor. But when she insists that the distinction of sex shall be disregarded, and tells us that she asks no favors, regards all offers of protection to her as a woman as an insult, and that she holds herself competent to take care of herself, and to compete with men on their own ground, and in what has hitherto been held to be their own work, she may be sure that she will be taken at her word, that she will miss that deference now shown her, and which she has been accustomed to claim as her right, and be treated with all the indifference men show to one another. She cannot have the advantages of both sexes at once. When she forgets that she is a woman, and insists on being treated as a man, men will forget that she is a woman, and allow her no advantage on account of her sex. When she seeks to make herself a man, she will lose her influence as a woman, and be treated as a man.

Women are not needed as men; they are needed as women, to do, not what men can do as well as they, but what men cannot do. There is nothing which more grieves the wise and good, or makes them tremble for the future of the country, than the growing neglect or laxity of family discipline; than the insubordination, the lawlessness, and precocious depravity of Young America. There is, with the children of this generation, almost a total lack of filial reverence and obedience. And whose fault is it? It is chiefly the fault of the mothers, who fail to govern their households, and to bring up their children in a Christian manner. Exceptions there happily are; but the number of children that grow up without any proper training or discipline at home is fearfully large, and their evil example corrupts not a few of those who are well brought up. The country is no better than the town. Wives forget what they owe to their husbands, are capricious and vain, often light and frivolous, extravagant and foolish, bent on having their own way, though ruinous to the family, and generally contriving, by coaxings, blandishments, or poutings, to get it. They set an ill example to their children, who soon lose all respect for the authority of the mother, who, as a wife, forgets to honor and obey her husband, and who, seeing her have her own way with him, insist on having their own way with her, and usually succeed. As a rule, children are no longer subjected to a steady and firm, but mild and judicious discipline, or trained to habits of filial obedience. Hence, our daughters, when they become wives and mothers, have none of the habits or character necessary to govern their household and to train their children. Those habits and that character are acquired only in a school of obedience, made pleasant and cheerful by a mother's playful smile and a mother's love. {153} We know we have not in this the sympathy of the women whose organ is The Revolution. They hold obedience in horror, and seek only to govern, not their own husbands only, not children, but men, but the state, but the nation, and to be relieved of household cares, especially of child-bearing, and of the duty of bringing up children. We should be sorry to do or say anything which these, in their present mood, could sympathize with. It is that which is a woman's special duty in the order of providence, and which constitutes her peculiar glory, that they regard as their great wrong.

The duty we insist on is especially necessary in a country like ours, where there is so little respect for authority, and government is but the echo of public opinion. Wives and mothers, by neglecting their domestic duties and the proper family discipline, fail to offer the necessary resistance to growing lawlessness and crime, aggravated, if not generated, by the false notions of freedom and equality so widely entertained. It is only by home discipline, and the early habits of reverence and obedience to which our children are trained, that the license the government tolerates, and the courts hardly dare attempt to restrain, can be counteracted, and the community made a law-loving and a law-abiding community. The very bases of society have been sapped, and the conditions of good government despised, or denounced under the name of despotism. Social and political life is poisoned in its source, and the blood of the nation corrupted, and chiefly because wives and mothers have failed in their domestic duties, and the discipline of their families. How, then, can the community, the nation itself, subsist, if we call them away from home, and render its duties still more irksome to them, instead of laboring to fit them for a more faithful discharge of their duties?

We have said the evils complained of are chiefly due to the women, and we have said so because it grows chiefly out of their neglect of their families. The care and management of children during their early years belong specially to the mother. It is her special function to plant and develop in their young and impressible minds the seeds of virtue, love, reverence, and obedience, and to train her daughters, by precept and example, not to be looking out for an eligible parti, nor to catch husbands that will give them splendid establishments, but to be, in due time, modest and affectionate wives, tender and judicious mothers, and prudent and careful housekeepers. This the father cannot do; and his interference, except by wise counsel, and to honor and sustain the mother, will generally be worse than nothing. The task devolves specially on the mother; for it demands the sympathy with children which is peculiar to the female heart, the strong maternal instinct implanted by nature, and directed by a judicious education, that blending of love and authority, sentiment and reason, sweetness and power, so characteristic of the noble and true-hearted woman, and which so admirably fit her to be loved and honored, only less than adored, in her own household. When she neglects this duty, and devotes her time to pleasure or amusement, wasting her life in luxurious ease, in reading sentimental or sensational novels, or in following the caprices of fashion, the household goes to ruin, the children grow up wild, without discipline, and the honest earnings of the husband become speedily insufficient for the family expenses, and he is sorely tempted to provide for them by rash speculation or by fraud, which, though it may be carried on for a while without detection, is sure to end in disgrace and ruin at last. {154} Concede now to women suffrage and eligibility, throw them into the whirlpool of politics, set them to scrambling for office, and you aggravate the evil a hundred fold. Children, if suffered to be born, which is hardly to be expected, will be still more neglected; family discipline still more relaxed, or rendered still more capricious or inefficient; our daughters will grow up more generally still without any adequate training to be wives and mothers, and our sons still more destitute of those habits of filial reverence and obedience, love of order and discipline, without which they can hardly be sober, prudent, and worthy heads of families, or honest citizens.

We have thus far spoken of women only as wives and mothers; but we are told that there are thousands of women who are not and cannot be wives and mothers. In the older and more densely settled States of the Union there is an excess of females over males, and all cannot get husbands if they would. Yet, we repeat, woman was created to be a wife and a mother, and the woman that is not fails of her special destiny. We hold in high honor spinsters and widows, and do not believe their case anywhere need be or is utterly hopeless. There is a mystery in Christianity which the true and enlightened Christian recognizes and venerates—that of the Virgin-Mother. Those women who cannot be wives and mothers in the natural order, may be both in the spiritual order, if they will. They can be wedded to the Holy Spirit, and be the mothers of minds and hearts. The holy virgins and devout widows who consecrate themselves to God in or out of religious orders, are both, and fulfil in the spiritual order their proper destiny. They are married to a celestial Spouse, and become mothers to the motherless, to the poor, the destitute, the homeless. They instruct the ignorant, nurse the sick, help the helpless, tend the aged, catch the last breath of the dying, pray for the unbelieving and the cold hearted, and elevate the moral tone of society, and shed a cheering radiance along the pathway of life. They are dear to God, dear to the church, and dear to Christian society. They are to be envied, not pitied. It is only because you have lost faith in Christ, faith in the holy Catholic Church, and have become gross in your minds, of "the earth, earthy," that you deplore the lot of the women who cannot, in the natural order, find husbands. The church provides better for them than you can do, even should you secure female suffrage and eligibility.

We do not, therefore, make an exception from our general remarks in favor of those who have and can get no earthly husbands, and who have no children born of their flesh to care for. There are spiritual relations which they can contract, and purely feminine duties, more than they can perform, await them, to the poor and ignorant, the aged and infirm, the helpless and the motherless, or, worse than motherless, the neglected. Under proper direction, they can lavish on these the wealth of their affections, the tenderness of their hearts, and the ardor of their charity, and find true joy and happiness in so doing, and ample scope for woman's noblest ambition. They have no need to be idle or useless. In a world of so much sin and sorrow, sickness and suffering, there is always work enough for them to do, and there are always chances enough to acquire merit in the sight of Heaven, and true glory, that will shine brighter and brighter for ever.

We know men often wrong women and cause them great suffering by their selfishness, tyranny, and brutality; whether more than women, by their follies and caprices, cause men, we shall not undertake to determine. Man, except in fiction, is not always a devil, nor woman an angel. Since the woman's rights people claim that in intellect woman is man's equal, and in firmness of will far his superior, it ill becomes them to charge to him alone what is wrong or painful in her condition, and they must recognize her as equally responsible with him for whatever is wrong in the common lot of men and women. There is much wrong on both sides; much suffering, and much needless suffering, in life. Both men and women might be, and ought to be, better than they are. But it is sheer folly or madness to suppose that either can be made better or happier by political suffrage and eligibility; for the evil to be cured is one that cannot be reached by any possible political or legislative action.

That the remedy, to a great extent, must be supplied by woman's action and influence we concede, but not by her action and influence in politics. It can only be by her action and influence as woman, as wife, and mother; in sustaining with her affection the resolutions and just aspirations of her husband or her sons, and forming her children to early habits of filial love and reverence, of obedience to law, and respect for authority. That she may do this, she needs not her political enfranchisement or her entire independence of the other sex, but a better and more thorough system of education for daughters—an education that specially adapts them to the destiny of their sex, and prepares them to find their happiness in their homes, and the satisfaction of their highest ambition in discharging its manifold duties, so much higher, nobler, and more essential to the virtue and well-being of the community, the nation, society, and to the life and progress of the human race, than any which devolve on king or kaiser, magistrate or legislator. We would not have their generous instincts repressed, their quick sensibilities blunted? or their warm, sympathetic nature chilled, nor even the lighter graces and accomplishments neglected; but we would have them all directed and harmonized by solid intellectual instruction, and moral and religious culture. We would have them, whether rich or poor, trained to find the centre of their affections in their home; their chief ambition in making it cheerful, bright, radiant, and happy. Whether destined to grace a magnificent palace, or to adorn the humble cottage of poverty, this should be the ideal aimed at in their education. They should be trained to love home, and to find their pleasure in sharing its cares and performing its duties, however arduous or painful.

There are comparatively few mothers qualified to give their daughters such an education, especially in our own country; for comparatively few have received such an education themselves, or are able fully to appreciate its importance. They can find little help in the fashionable boarding-schools for finishing young ladies; and in general these schools only aggravate the evil to be cured. The best and the only respectable schools for daughters that we have in the country are the conventual schools taught by women consecrated to God, and specially devoted to the work of education. These schools, indeed, are not always all that might be wished. {156} The good religious sometimes follow educational traditions perhaps better suited to the social arrangements of other countries than of our own, and sometimes underrate the value of intellectual culture. They do not always give as solid an intellectual education as the American woman needs, and devote a disproportionate share of their attention to the cultivation of the affections and sentiments, and to exterior graces and accomplishments. The defects we hint at are not, however, wholly, nor chiefly, their fault; they are obliged to consult, in some measure, the tastes and wishes of parents and guardians, whose views for their daughters and wards are not always very profound, very wise, very just, or very Christian. The religious cannot, certainly, supply the place of the mother in giving their pupils that practical home training so necessary, and which can be given only by mothers who have themselves been properly educated; but they go as far as is possible in remedying the defects of the present generation of mothers, and in counteracting their follies and vain ambitions. With all the faults that can be alleged against any of them, the conventual schools, even as they are, it must be conceded, are infinitely the best schools for daughters in the land, and, upon the whole, worthy of the high praise and liberal patronage their devotedness and disinterestedness secure them. We have seldom found their graduates weak and sickly sentimentalists. They develop in their pupils a cheerful and healthy tone, and a high sense of duty; give them solid moral and religious instruction; cultivate successfully their moral and religious affections; refine their manners, purify their tastes, and send them out feeling that life is serious, life is earnest, and resolved always to act under a deep sense of their personal responsibilities, and meet whatever may be their lot with brave hearts and without murmuring or repining.

We do not disguise the fact that our hopes for the future, in great measure, rest on these conventual schools. As they are multiplied, and the number of their graduates increase, and enter upon the serious duties of life, the ideal of female education will be come higher and broader; a nobler class of wives and mothers will exert a healthy and purifying influence; religion will become a real power in the republic; the moral tone of the community and the standard of private and public morality will be elevated; and thus may gradually be acquired the virtues that will enable us as a people to escape the dangers that now threaten us, and to save the republic as well as our own souls. Sectarians, indeed, declaim against these schools, and denounce them as a subtle device of Satan to make their daughters "Romanists;" but Satan probably dislikes "Romanism" even more than sectarians do, and is much more in earnest to suppress or ruin our conventual schools, in which he is not held in much honor, than he is to sustain and encourage them. At any rate, our countrymen who have such a horror of the religion it is our glory to profess that they cannot call it by its true name, would do well, before denouncing these schools, to establish better schools for daughters of their own.

Now, we dare tell these women who are wasting so much time, energy, philanthropy, and brilliant eloquence in agitating for female suffrage and eligibility, which, if conceded, would only make matters worse, that, if they have the real interest of their sex or of the community at heart, they should turn their attention to the education of daughters for their special functions, not as men, but as women who are one day to be wives and mothers—woman's true destiny. {157} These modest, retiring sisters and nuns, who have no new theories or schemes of social reform, and upon whom you look down with haughty contempt, as weak, spiritless, and narrow-minded, have chosen the better part, and are doing infinitely more to raise woman to her true dignity, and for the political and social as well as for the moral and religious progress of the country, than you with all your grand conventions, brilliant speeches, stirring lectures, and spirited journals.

For poor working-women and poor working-men, obliged to subsist by their labor, and who can find no employment, we feel a deep sympathy, and would favor any feasible method of relieving them with our best efforts. But why cannot American girls find employment as well as Irish and German girls, who are employed almost as soon as they touch our shores, and at liberal wages? There is always work enough to be done if women are qualified to do it, and are not above doing it. But be that as it may, the remedy is not political, and must be found, if found at all, elsewhere than in suffrage and eligibility.

Daybreak.

Chapter III.

Chez Lui.

Miss Hamilton did not go down to dinner the first day; but when she heard Mr. Granger come in, sent a line to him, excusing herself till evening, on the plea that she needed rest. The truth was, however, that she shrank from first meeting the family at table, a place which allows so little escape from embarrassment.

Her door had been left ajar; and in a few minutes she heard a silken rustling on the stairs, then a faint tap; and at her summons there entered a small, lily-faced woman who looked like something that might have grown out of the pallid March evening. The silver-gray of her trailing dress, the uncertain tints of her hair, deepening from flaxen to pale brown, even the cobwebby Mechlin laces she wore, so thin as to have no color of their own—all were like light, cool shadows. This lady entered with a dainty timidity which by no means excluded the most perfect self-possession, but rather indicated an extreme solicitude for the person she visited.

"Do I intrude?" she asked in a soft, hesitating way. "Mr. Granger thought I might come up. We feared that you were ill."

Margaret was annoyed to feel herself blushing. There was something keen in this lady's beautiful violet eyes, underneath their superficial expression of anxious kindness.

"I am not ill, only tired," she replied. "I meant to go down awhile after dinner."

"I am Mrs. Lewis," the stranger announced, seating herself by the bedside. "My husband and I, and my husband's niece, Aurelia Lewis, live here. We don't call it boarding, you know. I hope that you will like us."

This wish was expressed in a manner so naïve and earnest that Margaret could but smile in making answer that she was quite prepared to be pleased with everything, and that her only fear was lest she might disturb the harmony of their circle—not by being disagreeable in herself, but simply in being one more.

With a gesture at once graceful and kind, Mrs. Lewis touched Margaret's hand with her slight, chilly fingers. "You are the one more whom we want," she said; "we have been rejoicing over the prospect of having you with us. You do not break, you complete the circle."

Her quick ear had caught a lingering tone of pain; and she had already found something pathetic in that thin face and those languid eyes. Miss Hamilton did not appear to be a person likely to disturb the empire which this lady prided herself on exercising over their household.

"I know very little about the family," Margaret remarked. "Mr. Granger mentioned some names. I am not sure if they were all. And men never think of the many trifles we like to be told."

Her visitor sighed resignedly. "Certainly not—the sublime creatures! It is the difference between fresco and miniature, you know. Let me enlighten you a little. Besides those of us whom you have seen, there are only Mr. Southard, my husband, and Aurelia. We consider ourselves a very happy family. Of course, being human, we have occasional jars; but there is always the understanding that our real friendship is unimpaired by them. And we defend each other like Trojans from any outside attack. We try to manage so as to have but one angry at a time, the others acting as peacemakers. The only one who may trouble you is my husband. I am anxious concerning him and you."

With her head a little on one side, the lady contemplated her companion with a look of pretty distress.

"Why, you see," her visitor said confidentially, "Mr. Lewis is one of those provoking beings who take a mischievous delight in misrepresenting themselves, not for the better, but the worse. If they see a person leaning very much in one way, they are sure to lean very much the other way. Mr. Southard calls my husband an infidel, whatever that is. There certainly are a great many things which he does not believe. But one half of his scepticism is a mere pretence to tease the minister. I hope you won't be vexed with him. You won't when you come to know him. Sometimes I don't altogether blame him. Of course we all admire Mr. Southard in the most fatiguing manner; but it cannot be denied that he does interpret and perform his duties in the preraphaelite style, With a pitiless adherence to chapter and verse. Still, I often think that much of his apparent severity may be in those chiselled features of his. One is occasionally surprised by some sign of indulgence in him, some touch of grace or tenderness. But even while you look, the charm, without disappearing, freezes before your eyes, like spray in winter. I don't know just what to think of him; but I suspect that he has missed his vocation, that he was made for a monk or a Jesuit. It would never do to breathe such a thought to him, though. He thinks that the Pope is Antichrist."

Mrs. Lewis put up her hand to refasten a bunch of honey-sweet tuberoses that were slipping from the glossy coils of her hair, and by the gesture concealed a momentary amused twinkle of her eyes.

"Oh! I dare say!" she replied lightly. "But such a dear, benignant old antichrist as he is! Ages ago, when we were in Rome, I was in the crowd before St. Peter's when the pope gave the Easter benediction. Involuntarily I knelt with the rest; and really, Miss Hamilton, that seemed to me the only benediction I ever received. I did not understand my own emotion. It was quite unexpected. Perhaps it was something in that intoxicating atmosphere which is only half air; the other half is soul."

Margaret was silent. She had no wish to express any displeasure; but she was shocked to hear the mystical Babylon spoken of with toleration, and that by a descendant of the puritans.

Mrs. Lewis sat a moment with downcast eyes, aware of, and quietly submitting to the scrutiny of the other—by no means afraid of it, quite confident, probably, that the result would be agreeable.

This lady was about forty years of age, delicate rather than beautiful, with a frosty sparkle about her. Her manner was gentleness itself; but one soon perceived something fine and sharp beneath; a blue arrowy glance that carried home a phrase otherwise light as a feather, a slight emphasis that made the more obvious meaning of a word glance aside, an unnecessary suavity of expression that led to suspicion of some pungent hidden meaning. But with all her airy malice there was much of genuine honesty and kind feeling. She was like a faceted gem, showing her little glittering shield at every turn; but still a gem.

"Aurelia is quite impatient to welcome you," she resumed softly. "You cannot fail to like her, when you happen to think of it. She is sweet and beautiful all through.

"Now I will leave you to take your rest, and read the note of which Mr. Granger made me the bearer. I hope to see you this evening."

Margaret looked after the little lady as she glided away, glancing back from the door with a friendly smile and nod, then disappeared, soundless save for the rustling of her dress. She listened to that faint silken whisper on the stairs, then to the soft shutting of the parlor door, two pushes before it latched. Then she read her note. It was but a line. "Rest as long as you wish to. But when you are able to come down, we all want to see you."

She went down to the parlor after dinner, and found the whole family there. There was yet so much of daylight that one gentleman, sitting in a western window, was reading the evening paper by it; but the stream of gaslight that came in from some room at the end of the long suite made a red-golden path across the darkened back-parlor, and caught brightly here and there on the carving of a picture, a curve of bronze or marble, or the gilding of a book-cover, and glimmered unsteadily over a winged Mercury that leaned out of the vague dusk and sparkle, tiptoe, at point of flight, with lifted face and glinting eyes.

Mr. Granger stood near the door by which Margaret entered, evidently on the watch for her; and at sight of him that slight nervous embarrassment inseparable from her circumstances, and from the unstrung condition of her mind and body, instantly died away. To her he was strength, courage, and protection. Shielded by his friendship, she feared nothing.

Mrs. Lewis and Dora met her like old friends; that florid gentleman with English side-whiskers she guessed to be Mr. Lewis; and she recognized that fine profile clear against the opaline west.

"A granddaughter of the Rev. Doctor Hamilton?" he said with emphasis. "I am happy to see you."

Miss Hamilton received tranquilly his cordial salutation, and mentally consigned it to the manes of her grandfather.

Mr. Lewis got up out of his armchair, and bowed lowly. "Madam," he said with great deliberation, "I do not in the least care who your grandfather was. I am glad to see you."

The gentleman settled rather heavily into his chair again. He was one of those who would rather sit than stand. Margaret turned to meet his niece, who was offering her hand, and murmuring some word of welcome. She looked at Aurelia Lewis with delight, perceiving then what Mrs. Lewis had meant in saying that her husband's niece was sweet and beautiful all through. The girl radiated loveliness. She was a blonde, with deep ambers and browns in her hair and eyes, looking like some translucent creature shone through by rich sunset lights too soft for brilliancy. She was large, suave, a trifle sirupy, perhaps, but sweet to the core, had no salient points in her disposition, but a charmingly liquid way of adapting herself to the angles of others. If the looks and manners of Mrs. Lewis were faceted, those of her husband's niece were what jewelers' call en cabochon. What Aurelia said was nothing. She was not a reportable person. What she was was delicious.

"I remember Doctor Hamilton very well," Mr. Lewis said when the ladies had finished their compliments. "He was one of those men who make religion respectable. He held some pretty hard doctrines; but he believed every one of 'em, and held 'em with a grip. The last time I saw him was seven or eight years ago, just before his death. They had up their everlasting petition before the legislature here, for the abolition of capital punishment; and a committee was appointed to attend to the matter. I went up to one of their hearings. There were Phillips, Pierpont, Andrew, Spear, and a lot of other smooth-tongued, soft-hearted fellows who didn't want the poor, dear murderers to be hanged; and on the other side were Doctor Hamilton with his eyes and his cane, common sense, Moses and the decalogue. They had rather a rough time of it. Andrew called your grandfather an old fogy, over some one else's shoulders; and Phillips tilted over Moses, tables and all, with that sharp lance of his. But Doctor Hamilton stood there as firm as a rock, and beat them all out. He had the glance of an eagle, and a way of swinging his arm about, when he was in earnest, that looked as if it wouldn't take much provocation to make him hit straight out. Phillips said something that he didn't like, and the doctor stamped at him. Well, the upshot of the matter was, that capital punishment was not abolished that year, thanks to one tough, intrepid old man."

"Yes," answered Mr. Lewis, "he would have made a prime soldier, if he hadn't made the mistake of being a doctor of divinity."

"The church needed his authoritative speech," said Mr. Southard, with decision. "To the minister of God belongs the voice of denunciation as well as the voice of prayer."

Mr. Granger seized the first opportunity to speak aside to Margaret. "You like these people? You are contented?" he asked hastily.

"You think that you will feel at home when you have become better acquainted with them?" he pursued.

"It seems to me that I have always lived here," she answered, smiling. "There is not the least strangeness. Indeed, surprising things, if they are pleasant, never surprise me. I am always expecting miracles. It is only painful or trivial events which find me incredulous and ill at ease."

The chandeliers were lighted, and the windows closed; but, according to their pleasant occasional custom, the curtains were not drawn for a while yet. If any person in the street took pleasure in seeing this family gathering, they were welcome.

Mrs. Lewis broke a few sprays from a musk-vine over-starred with yellow blossoms, and twined them into a wreath as she slowly approached the two who were standing near a book-case. "Vive le roi!" she said, lifting the wreath to the marble brows of a Shakespeare that stood on the lower shelf.

Margaret glanced along a row of blue and brown covers, and exclaimed, "My Brownings! all hail! there they are!"

"You also!" said Mrs. Lewis, with a grimace. "Own, now, that they jolt horribly—that the Browning Pegasus is a racker, and that the Browning road up Parnassus is macadamized with—well, diamonds, if you will, but diamonds in the rough. True, the hoofs do make dents; they do dash over the ground with a four-footed trampling; but—" a shrug and a shiver completed the sentence.

"Mrs. Browning needs a lapidary," Mr. Granger said; "but her husband's constipated style is a necessity. His books are books of quintessences. At first I thought him suggestive; but soon perceived that he was stimulating instead. He seems to have brushed a subject. Look again, and you will see that he has exhausted it."

Margaret read the titles of the books, and in them read, also, something of the minds of her new associates. There were a few shining names from each of the great nations, and a good selection of English and American authors, the patriarchs in their places. She had a word for each, but thought, "I wonder why I like Lowell, almost in silence, yet like him best."

Near this was another case of books, all Oriental, or relating to the Orient. There were the Talmud and the Koran; there were hideous mythologies full of propitiatory prayers to the devil. There were Vathek, The Arabian Nights, Ferdousi, and a hundred others. Over this case hung an oval water-color of sea and sky with a rising sun blazing at the horizon, lighting with flickering gold a path across the blue, liquid expanse, and flooding with light the ethereal spaces. On a scroll beneath this was inscribed, "Ex Oriente Lux."

"Light and hasheesh," said Mr. Southard laughingly. "Don't linger there too long."

Mr. Granger called Dora to him. "What has my little girl been learning to-day?" he asked.

The little one's eyes flashed with a sudden, glorious recollection. "O papa! I can spell cup."

The child raised her eyebrows, and played the coquette with her erudition. "You spell it," she said tauntingly.

Mr. Granger leaned back in his chair, and knitted his brows in intense study. "T-a-s-s-e, cup."

"How blue it sounds," said Margaret. "Like a Canterbury bell with a handle to it."

A tray was brought in with coffee, which was Dora's signal to go to bed. She took an affectionate leave of all, but hid her face in Margaret's neck in saying good night.

Her father always accompanied her to the foot of the stairs; and the two went out together, Dora clinging to his hand, which she held against her cheek, and he looking down upon her with a fond smile.

Margaret shrank with a momentary spasm of pain and terror, as she looked after them. How fearful is that clinging love which human beings have for each other! how terrible, since, sooner or later, they must part; since, at any instant, the hand of fate may be outstretched to snatch them asunder!

Margaret started, and recollected herself with an effort; then smiled without an effort; for the door opened, and Mr. Granger came in again, glancing first at her, then coming to sit near her.

"I have found out the origin of coffee," Mrs. Lewis said. "It is, or is capable of being, a Mohammedan legend. I will tell you. When Mother Eve, to whom be peace! fell, after her sin, from the seventh heaven, and was precipitated to earth, as she slipped over the verge of Paradise, she instinctively flung out her arm, and caught at a shrub with milk-white blossoms that grew there. It broke in her hand. She fell into Arabia, near Mocha. The branch that fell with her took root and grew, and had blossoms with five petals, as white as the beautiful Mother's five fingers. And that's the history of coffee. Aura, give me a cup without delay. That story was salt."

"Why should we not have sentiments with so wonderful a draught?" Mr. Granger said. "Propose anything. Shall I begin? I have been reading the European news. Victor Emmanuel is dawning like a sun over Italy. I propose Rome, the dead lion, with honey for Samson."

Mr. Lewis pushed out his underlip. He always scouted at republicans, red or black.

"I follow you," he said immediately, with a sly glance at Mr. Southard. "Rome, the rock that does not crack, though all the bores blast it."

There was a momentary pause, during which the eyes of the minister scintillated. Then he exclaimed, "Luther, the Moses at the stroke of whose rod the rock was rent, and the gospel waters loosed."

"Ah! Luther!" endorsed Mr. Lewis with an affectation of enthusiasm. "Greater than Nimrod, he built a Babel which babbles to the ends of the earth."

Mr. Southard flashed out, "Yes; and every tongue can spell the word Bible, sir!"

"And deny its plainest teachings," was the retort; "and vilify the hand that preserved it!"

"Now, Charles," interposed Mrs. Lewis, touching her husband's arm, "why will you say what you do not mean, just for the sake of being disagreeable? You know, Mr. Southard, that he cares no more for Rome than he does for Pekin, and knows no more about it, indeed. The fact is, he has the greatest respect for our church—may I say militant?"

"Sweet peacemaker!" exclaimed Mr. Lewis, delighted with the neat little sting at the end of his wife's speech.

"'Here's a health to all those that we love. Here's a health to all them that love us. Here's a health to all those that love them that love those that love them that love those that love us.'"

"I protest I never had a worse opinion of myself than I have tonight," he said. "There I had promised Louis and my wife to let religion alone, and not get up a skirmish with the minister for at least a week after you came; and I meant to keep my promise. But you see what my resolutions are worth. I am sincerely sorry if I have vexed you."

He looked so sorry, and spoke so frankly, that Margaret could not help giving him a pleasant answer, though she had been displeased.

"The fact is," he went on, lowering his voice, "I have seen so much cant, and hypocrisy, and inconsistency in religion that it has disgusted me with the whole business. I may go too far. I don't doubt that there are honest men and women in the churches; but to my mind they are few and far between. I've nothing to say against Mr. Southard, and I don't want any one else to speak against him. I say uglier things to his face than I would say behind his back. He's a good man, according to his light; but you must permit me to say that it is a Bengal-light to my eyes. I can't stand it. It turns me blue all through."

"Perhaps you do not understand him," Margaret suggested. "May be you haven't given him a chance to explain."

"I tried to be fair," was the reply. "Now Southard," said I, "tell me what you want me to believe, and I'll believe if I can." Well, the first thing he told me was, that I must give up my reason. 'By George, I won't!' said I, and there was an end to the catechism. Of course, if I set my reason aside, I might be made to believe that chalk is cheese. Perhaps I am stubborn and material, as he says; but I am what God made me; and I won't pretend to be anything else. I believe that there is somewhere a way for us all—a way that we shall know is right, when once we get into it. These fishers of men ought to remember that whales are not caught with trout-hooks, and that it isn't the whale's fault if there's a good deal of blubber to get through before you reach the inside of him. St. Paul let fly some pretty sharp harpoons. I can't get 'em out of me for my life. And, for another kind of man, I like Beecher. His bait isn't painted flies, but fish, a piece of yourself. But the trouble with him is, there's no barb on his catch. You slip off as easily as you get on."

Margaret was glad when the others interposed and put an end to this talk. To her surprise, she had nothing to reply to Mr. Lewis's objections. And not only that, but, while he spoke, she perceived in her own mind a faint echo to his dissatisfaction. Of course it must be wrong, and she was glad to have the conversation put an end to.

They had music, Aurelia playing with a good deal of taste some perfectly harmless pieces. While she listened, Miss Hamilton's glance wandered about the rooms, finding them quite to her taste. The first impertinent gloss of everything had worn off, and each article had mellowed into its place, like the colors of an old picture. There was none of that look we sometimes see, of everything having been dipped into the same paint-pot. The furniture was rich in material and beautiful in shape; the upholstery a heavy silk and wool, the colors deep and harmonious, nothing too fine for use. The dull amber of the walls was nearly covered with pictures, book-cases, cabinets, and brackets; there was every sort of table, from the two large central ones with black marble tops, piled with late books and periodicals, to the tiny teapoys that could be lifted on a finger, marvels of gold, and japanning, and ingenious Chinese perspective. On the black marble mantel-piece near her were a pair of silver candelebra, heirlooms in the family, and china vases of glowing colors, purple, and rose, and gold. There was more bronze than parian; there were curtains wherever curtains could be; and withal, there was plentiful space to get about, and for the ladies to display their trains.

All this her first glance took in with a sense of pleasure. Then she looked deeper, and perceived friendship, ease, security, all that make the soul of home. Deeper yet, then, to the vague longing for a love, a security, a rest exceeding the earthly. One who has suffered much can never again feel quite secure, but shrinks from delight almost as much as from pain.

She turned to Mr. Southard, who sat beside her. "I am thinking how miserably we are the creatures of circumstance," she said, in her earnestness forgetting how abrupt she might seem. "When we are troubled, everything is dark; when we are happy, everything that approaches casts its shadow behind, and shows a sunny front."

He regarded her kindly, pleased with her almost confidential manner. "There is but one escape from such slavery," he said. "When we set the sun of righteousness in the zenith of our lives, then shadows are annihilated, not hidden, but annihilated."

When Margaret went up-stairs that night, she knelt before her open window, and leaned out, feeling, rather than seeing, the brooding, starless sky, soft and shadowy, like wings over a nest. Her soul uplifted itself blindly, almost painfully, beating against its ignorance. There was something out of sight and reach, which she wanted to see and to touch. There was one hidden whom she longed to thank and adore.

"O brooding wings!" she whispered, stretching out her hands. "O father and mother-bird over the nest where the little ones lie in the sweet, sweet dark!"

Words failed. She knew not what to say. "I wish that I could pray!" she thought, tears overflowing her eyes.

Chapter IV.

Just Before Light.

The days were well arranged in the Granger mansion. Breakfast was a movable feast, and silent for the most part. The members of the family broke their fast when and as they liked, often with a book or paper for company.

Most persons feel disinclined to talk in the morning, and are social only from necessity. This household recognized and respected the instinct. One could always hold one's tongue there. If they did not follow the old Persian rule never to speak till one had something to say worth hearing, they at least kept silence when they felt so inclined.

Luncheon was never honored by the presence of the gentlemen, except that on rare occasions Mr. Southard came out of his study to join the ladies, who by this time had found their tongues. They preferred his usual custom of taking a scholarly cup of tea in the midst of his books.

To the natural woman an occasional gossip is a necessity; and if ever these three ladies indulged in that pardonable weakness, it was over their luncheon. At six o'clock all met at dinner, and passed the evening together. This disposition of time left the greater part of the day free, for each one to spend as he chose, and brought them together again at the close of the day, more or lest tired, always glad to meet, often with something to say.

Margaret found herself fully and pleasantly occupied. Besides translating, she had again set up her easel, and spent an hour or two daily at her former pretty employment. The value of her services increased, she found, in proportion as she grew indifferent to rendering them; and she could now select her own work, and dictate terms. But her most delightful occupation was the teaching her three little pupils.

There are two ways of teaching children. One is to seek to impose on them our own individuality, to dogmatize, in utter unconsciousness that they are the most merciless of critics, frequently the keenest of observers, and that they do not so much lack ideas, as the power of expression. Such teachers climb on to a pedestal, and talk complacently downward at pupils who, perhaps, do not in the least consider them classical personages. We cannot impose on children unless we can dazzle them, sometimes not even then.

The other mode is to stand on their own platform, and talk up, not logically, according to Kant or Hamilton, but in that circuitous and inconsequent manner which is often the most effectual logic with children. We all know that the greatest precision of aim is attained through a spiral bore; and perhaps these young minds oftener reach the mark in that indirect manner, than they would by any more formal process.

This was Miss Hamilton's mode of teaching and influencing children, and it was as fascinating to her as to them. She treated them with respect, never laughed at their crude ideas, did not require of them a self-control difficult for an adult to practice, and never forgot that some ugly duck might turn out to be a swan. But where she did assert authority, she was absolute; and she was merciless to insolence and disobedience.

Mrs. James fired didactic platitudes at the child, Aurelia coaxed, and Mrs. Lewis preached hygiene. Miss Hamilton knew better than either. She sketched a bright word-picture of waving wheat-fields over-buzzed by bees, over-fluttered by birds, starred through and through with little intrusive flowers that had no business whatever there, but were let stay; of the shaking mill where the wheat was ground, and the gay stream that laughed, and set its shining shoulder to the great wheel, and pushed, and ran away, blind with foam; of the yeasty sponge, a pile of milky bubbles. {166} She told of sweet clover-heads, red and white, and the cow and the bees seeing who should get them first. 'I want them for my honey,' says the bee. 'And I want them for my cream,' says Mooly. And they both made a snatch, and Mooly got the clover, and perhaps a purple violet with it, and the cream got the sweetness of them, and then it was churned, and there was the butter! She described the clean, cool dairy, full of a ceaseless flicker of light and shade from the hop-vines that swung outside the window, and waved the humming-birds away, of pans and pans of yellow cream, smooth and delicious, of fresh butter just out of the churn, glowing like gold through its bath of water, of pink and white petals of apple-blossoms drifting in on the soft breeze, and settling—"who knows but a pink, crimped-up-at-the-edges petal may have settled on this very piece of butter? Try, now, if it doesn't taste apple-blossomy."

Nonsense, of course, when viewed from a dignified altitude; but when looked up at from a point about two feet from the ground, it was the most excellent sense imaginable. To these three little girls, Dora, Agnes, and Violet, Miss Hamilton was a goddess.

Margaret did not neglect her own mind in those happy days. Mr. Southard marked out for her a course of reading in which, it is true, poetry and fiction, with a few shining exceptions, were tabooed; but metaphysics was permitted; and history enjoined tome upon tome, striking octaves up the centuries, and dying away in tinkling mythologies. She read conscientiously, sometimes with pleasure, sometimes with a half-acknowledged weariness.

Mr. Southard was a severe Mentor. As he did not spare himself, so he did not spare others, still less Margaret. She failed to perceive, what was plain to the others, that, by virtue of her descent, he considered her his especial charge, and was trying to form her after his notions. She acquiesced in all his requirements, half from indifference, half from a desire to please everybody, since she was herself so well pleased; and then forgot all about him. It was out of his power to trouble her save for a moment.

"You yield too much to that man," Mrs. Lewis said to her one day. "He is one of those positive persons who cannot help being tyrannical."

"Yes," the lady acknowledged in a pettish tone. "But if he would send a few pulses up to irrigate his brain, it would be an improvement."

Of course Mr. Southard spoke of religion to his pupil, and urged on her the duty of being united with the church.

"I cannot be religious, as the church requires," she said uneasily, dreading lest he might overcome her will without convincing her reason. "I think that it is something cabalistic."

"Your grandfather, and your father and mother did not find it so," the minister said reprovingly.

Margaret caught her breath with pain, and lifted her hand in a quick, silencing gesture. "I never bury my dead!" she said; and after a moment added, "It may be wrong, but this religion seems to me like a strait-jacket. I like to read of David dancing before the ark, of dervishes whirling, of Shakers clapping their hands, of Methodists singing at the tops of their voices 'Glory Hallelujah!' or falling into trances. Religion is not fervent enough for me. It does not express my feelings. I hardly know what I need. Perhaps I am all wrong."

But even as the drops started, they brightened; for, just in season to save her from still more pressing exhortation, Mr. Granger sauntered across the room, and put some careless question to the minister.

Mr. Southard recollected that he had to lecture that evening, and left the room to prepare himself.

"I am so glad you came!" Margaret said, "I was on the point of being bound, and gagged, and blindfolded."

Mr. Granger took the chair that the minister had vacated, and drew up to him a little stand on which he leaned his arms, "I perceived that I was needed," he said. "There was no mistaking your besieged expression; and I saw, too, that look in Mr. Southard's face which tells that he is about to pile up an insurmountable argument. I do not think that you will be any better for having religious discussions with him. You will only be fretted and uneasy. Mr. Southard is an excellent man, and a sincere Christian; but he is in danger of mistaking his own temperament for a dogma."

"If I thought that, then I shouldn't mind so much," Margaret said. "But I have been taking for granted that he is right and I wrong, and trying to let him think for me. The result is, that instead of being convinced, I have only been irritated. I must think for myself, whether I wish to or not. Now he circumscribes my reading so. It is miscellaneous, I know; but I am curious about everything in the universe. I don't like closed doors. He thinks my curiosity trivial and dangerous, and reminds me that a rolling stone gathers no moss."

"And I would ask, with the canny Scotchman,'what good does the moss do the stone?'" Mr. Granger replied. "The fact is, you've got to do just as I did with him. He and I fought that battle out long ago, and now he lets me alone, and we are good friends. Be as curious as you like. I heard him speak with disapproval of your going to the Jewish synagogue last week, and I dare say you resolved not to go again. Go, if you wish; and don't ask his permission. He frowned on the Greek anthology, and you laid it aside. Take it up again if you like. Even pagan flowers catch the dews of heaven. Your own good taste and delicacy will be a sufficient censor in matters of reading."

"Now I breathe!" Margaret said joyfully. "Some people can bear to be so hemmed in; but I cannot. It does me harm. If I am denied a drop of water, which, given, would satisfy me, at once I thirst for the ocean. I cannot help it. It is my way."

"Don't try to help it," Mr. Granger replied decisively; "or, above all, don't allow any one else to try to help it for you. I have no patience with such impositions. It is an insult to humanity, and an insult to Him who created humanity, for any one person to attempt to think for another. Obedience and humility are good only when they are voluntary, and are practised at the mandate of reason. There are people who never go out of a certain round, never want to. They are born, they live, and they die, in the mental and moral domicil of their forefathers. They have no orbit, but only an axis. Stick a precedent through them, and give them a twirl, and they will hum on contentedly to the end of the chapter. I've nothing against them, as long as they let others alone, and don't insist that to stay in one place and buzz is the end of humanity. {168} Other people there are who grow, they are insatiably curious, they dive to the heart of things, they take nothing without a question. They are not quite satisfied with truth itself till they have compared it with all that claims to be truth. Let them look, I say. It's a poor truth that won't bear any test that man can put to it. The first are, as Coleridge says, 'very positive, but not quite certain' that they are right; to the last a conviction once won is perfect and indestructible. Rest with them is not vegetation, but rapture.

"Fly abroad, my wild bird! don't be afraid. Use your wings. That is what they were made for."

Margaret forgot to answer in listening and looking at the speaker's animated face. When Mr. Granger was in earnest, he had an impetuous way that carried all before it. At the end, his shining eyes dropped on her and seemed to cover her with light; the impatient ring in his voice softened to an indulgent tenderness. Margaret felt as a flower may feel that has its fill of sun and dew, and has nothing to do but bloom, and then fade away. She had no fear of this man, no sense of humiliation with regard to the past. Her gratitude toward him was boundless. To him she owed life and all that made life tolerable, and any devotion which he could require of her she was ready to render. Her friendship was perfect, deep, frank, and full of a silent delight. She did not deify him, but was satisfied to find him human. He could speak a cross word if his beef was over-done, his coffee too weak, or his paper out of the way when he wanted it. He could criticise people occasionally, and laugh at their weakness, even when his kind heart reproached him for doing it. He liked to lounge on a sofa and read, when he had better be about his business. He needed rousing, she thought; was too much of a Sybarite to live in a world full of over-worked people. Perhaps he was rusting. But how kind and thoughtful he was; how full of sympathy when sympathy was needed; how generously he blamed himself when he was wrong, and how readily forgot the faults of others. How impossible it was for him to be mean or selfish! His rich, sweet, slow nature reminded her of a rose; but she felt intuitively that under that silence was hidden a heroic strength.

Mr. Southard's lecture was on the Jesuits; and all the family were to go and hear him.

"Terribly hot weather for such a subject," Mr. Lewis grumbled. "But it wouldn't be respectful not to go. Don't forget to take your smelling-salts, girls. There will be a strong odor of brimstone in the entertainment.

Margaret went to the lecture with a feeling that was almost fear. To her the name of Jesuit was a terror. The day of those powerful, guileful men was passed, surely; and yet, what if, in the strange vicissitudes of life, they should revive again? She was glad that the minister was going to raise his warning voice; yet still, she dreaded to hear him. The subject was too exciting.

The lecture was what might be expected. Beginning with Ignatius of Loyola, the speaker traced the progress of that unique and powerful society through its wonderful increase, and its downfall, to the present time, when as he said, the bruised serpent was again raising its head.

Mr. Southard did full justice to their learning, their sagacity, and their zeal. He told with a sort of shrinking admiration how men possessed of tastes and accomplishments which fitted them to shine in the most cultivated society, buried themselves in distant and heathen lands, far removed from all human sympathy, hardened their scholarly hands with toil, encountered danger, suffered death—for what? That their society might prosper! The subject seemed to have for the speaker a painful fascination. He lingered while describing the unparalleled devotion, the pernicious enthusiasm of these men. He acknowledged that they proclaimed the name of Christ where it had never been heard before; he lamented that ministers of the gospel had not emulated their heroism; but there the picture was over-clouded, was vailed in blackness. It needed so much brightness in order that the darkness which followed might have its full effect.

We all know what pigments are used in that Plutonian shading—mental reservation, probableism, and the doctrine that the end justifies the means; the latter a fiction, the two former scrupulously misrepresented.

Here Mr. Southard was at home. Here he could denounce with fiery indignation, point with lofty scorn. The close of the lecture left the characters of the Jesuits as black as their robes. They had been lifter only to be cast down.

Miss Hamilton walked home with Mr. Granger, scarcely uttering a word the whole way.

"You do not speak of the lecture," he said when they were at the house steps. "Has it terrified you so much that you dare not? Shall you start up from sleep to-night fancying that a great black Jesuit has come to carry you off?"

"Do you know, Mr. Granger," she said slowly, "those men seem to me very much like the apostles; in their devotion, I mean? I would like to read about them. They are interesting."

"Oh! they have, doubtless, books which will tell you all you want to know," he replied.

"They!" repeated Margaret. "But I want to know the truth." Mr. Granger laughed. "Then I advise you to read nothing, and hear nothing."

"Descend into the depth of your consciousness, as the German did when he wanted to make a correct drawing of an elephant."

"No," she replied remembering the story, "I will imitate the Frenchman; I will go to the elephant's country, and draw from life."

"That is not difficult," Mr. Granger said, amused at the idea of Miss Hamilton studying the Jesuits. "These elephants have jungles the world over. In this city you may find one on Endicott street, another on Suffolk street, and a third on Harrison avenue."

"You do not think this a foolish curiosity?" she asked wistfully. "You see no harm in my wishing to know something more about them?"

Mr. Granger was leaving his hat and gloves on the table. He turned immediately, surprised at the serious manner in which the question was put.

"No," she replied hesitatingly, "I don't think that is it. But I have all my life had such a horror of Catholics, and especially of Jesuits, that to resolve even to look at them deliberately, seems almost as momentous a step as Caesar crossing the Rubicon."

Chapter V.

The Sword Of The Lord And Of Gideon.

Boston, at the beginning of the war, was not a place to go to sleep in. Massachusetts politics, so long eminent in the senate, had at last taken the field; and that city, which is the brain of the State, effervesced with enthusiasm. Men the least heroic, apparently, showed themselves capable of heroism; and dreamers over the great deeds of others looked up to find that they might themselves be "the hymn the Brahmin sings."

Eager crowds surrounded the bulletin, put out by newspaper offices, or ran to gaze at mustering or departing regiments. Windows filled at the sound of a fife and drum; and it seemed that the air was fit to be breathed only when it was full of the flutter of flags.

Ceremony was set aside. Strangers and foes spoke to each other; and the most disdainful lady would smile upon the roughest uniform. From the Protestant pulpit came no more the exhortation to brotherly love, but the trumpet-call to arms; and under the wing of the Old South meeting-house rose a recruiting office, and a rostrum, with the motto, "The sword of the Lord and of Gideon."

The Lord of that time was he at the touch of whose rod the flesh and the loaves were consumed with fire; who sent for a sign a drench of dew on the fleece; at the command of whose servant all Ephraim shouted and took the waters before the flying Midianites, with the heads of Oreb and of Zeb on their spears.

Of course there was a good deal of froth; but underneath glowed the pure wine. It is true that many went because the savage instinct hidden in human nature rose from its unseen lair, and fiercely shook itself awake at the scent of blood. But others came from an honest sense of duty, and offered their lives knowing what they did; and women who loved them said amen. It was a stirring time.

It is not to be supposed that our friends were indifferent to these events. It was a doubtful point with them, indeed, whether they could be content to leave the city that summer. Mr. Southard was decidedly for remaining in town; and Mr. Granger, though less excited, was inclined to second him. But Mr. Lewis had, early in the spring, engaged a cottage at the seaside, with the understanding that the whole family were to accompany him there, and he utterly refused to release them from their promise. As if to help his arguments, the weather became intensely hot in June. Finally they consented to go.

"We owe you thanks for your persistence," Mr. Granger said, as they sat together the last evening of their stay in town. "I couldn't stand two months of this."

Mr. Lewis was past answering. Dressed in a complete suit of linen, seated in a wide Fayal chair, with a palm-leaf fan in one hand and a handkerchief in the other, he presented what his wife called an ill-tempered dissolving view. At that moment, the only desire of his heart was that one of Sydney Smith's, that he could take off his flesh and sit in his bones.

Aurelia and Margaret sat near by, flushed, smiling, and languid, trying to look cool in their crisp, white dresses.

Miss Hamilton would scarcely be recognized by one who had seen her only three months before. Happiness had done its work, and she was beautiful. Her face had recovered its smooth curves and bloomy whiteness, and her lips were constantly brightening with the smile that was ever ready to come.

Mr. Granger contemplated the two young ladies with a patriarchal admiration. He liked to have beautiful objects in his sight; and surely, he thought, no other man in the city could boast of having in his family two such girls as those who now sat opposite him. Besides, what was best, they were friends of his, and regarded him with confidence and affection.

Mrs. Lewis glanced from them to him, and back to them, and pouted her lip a little. "He is enough to try the patience of a saint!" she was thinking. "Why doesn't he marry one of those girls like a sensible man? To be sure, it is their fault. They are too friendly and frank with him, the simpletons! There they sit and beam on him with affectionate tranquillity, as if he were their grandfather. I'd like to give 'em a shaking."

Mr. Southard was walking slowly to and fro from the back-parlor to the front, and he, too, glanced frequently at the sofa where sat the two unconscious beauties. But no smile softened his pale face. It seemed, indeed, sterner than usual. The war was stirring the minister to the depths.

Mr. Lewis opened a blind near him. A beam of dusty gold came in from the west; he snapped the blind in its face.

"Seems to me it takes the sun a long time to get down," he said crossly. "I hope that none of your mighty Joshuas has commanded it to stand still."

No one answered. They sat in the sultry gloaming, and listened dreamily to the mingled city noises that came from near and far; the softened roll of a private carriage, like the touch of a gloved hand, after the knuckled grasp of drays and carts; the irritating wheeze of an inexorable hand-organ; and, through all, the shrill cry of the news-boy, the cicada of the city.

The good-breeding of the company was shown by the perfect composure of their silence, and the perfect quiescence of their minds, by the fact that their thoughts all drifted in the same direction, each one after its own mode.

Mrs. Lewis was thinking: "Those poor horses! I wish they knew enough to organize a strike, and all run away into the green, shady country."

The husband was saying relentingly to himself, "I declare I do pity the poor fellows who have to work during this infernal weather."

The others were still more in harmony with Mr. Granger when he spoke lowly, half to himself:

"If that beautiful idyl of Ruskin's could be realized; that country and government where the king should be the father of his people; where all alike should go to him for help and comfort; where he should find his glory, not in enlarging his dominion, but in making it more happy and peaceful! Will such a kingdom ever be, I wonder? Will such a golden age ever come?"

Margaret glanced with a swift smile toward Mr. Southard, and saw the twin of her thought in his face. He came and stood with his hand on the arm of her sofa.

"Both you and Mr. Ruskin are unconsciously thinking of the same thing," he said, with some new sweetness in his voice, and brightness in his face. "What you mean can only be the kingdom of God; and it will come! it will come!"

Looking up smilingly at him, Margaret caught a smile in return; and then, for the first time, she thought that Mr. Southard was beautiful. The cold purity of his face was lighted momentarily by that glow which it needed in order to be attractive.

Aurelia rose, and crossing the room, flung the blinds open. The sun had set, and a slight coolness was creeping up.

"This butchery going on at the South looks as if the kingdom of God were coming with a vengeance," said Mr. Lewis, fanning himself.

"It is coming with a vengeance!" exclaimed Mr. Southard. "God does not work in sunshine alone. Job saw him in the whirlwind. Massachusetts soldiers have gone out with the Bible as well as the bayonet."

Mr. Lewis contemplated the speaker with an expression of wondering admiration that was a little overdone.

"I was surprised to hear, Mr. Granger, that your cousin Sinclair had joined a New York regiment," Mrs. Lewis said hastily. "Only the day before the steamer sailed in which he had engaged passage, some quixotic whim seized him, and he volunteered. I cannot conceive what induced him."

"She has acted like a fool!" Mr. Lewis broke in angrily. "It was her fault that Sinclair went off. She thorned him perpetually with her exactions. She forgot that lovers are only common folks in a state of evaporation, and that it is in the nature of things that they should get condensed after a time. She wanted him to be for ever picking up her pocket-handkerchief, and writing acrostics on her name. A man can't stand that kind of folderol when he's got to be fifty years old. We begin to develop a taste for common sense when we reach that age."

"He showed no confidence in her," Mrs. Lewis said, with downcast eyes, "He often deceived her, and therefore she always suspected him."

"I think that a man should have no concealments from his wife," said Mr. Southard emphatically.

"That's just what Samson's wife thought when her husband proposed his little conundrum to the Philistines," commented Mr. Lewis.

"I am very sorry for Cousin Caroline," said Mr. Granger, in his stateliest manner, rising, also, and putting an end to the discussion.

"He is always sorry for any one who can contrive to appear abused," Mr. Lewis said to Margaret. "If you want to interest him, you must be as unfortunate as you can."

Margaret looked at her friend with eyes to which the quick tears started, and blessed him in her heart.

He was passing at the moment, and, catching the remark, feared lest she might be hurt or embarrassed.

"Don't you want to come out on to the veranda?" he asked, glancing back as he stepped from the long window.

The words were nothing; but they were so steeped in the kindness of the look and tone accompanying them that they seemed to be words of tenderness.

She followed him out into the twilight; the others came too, and they sat looking into the street, saying little, but enjoying the refreshing coolness. Other people were at their windows, or on their steps; and occasionally an acquaintance passing stopped for a word. After a while G——, the liberator, came along, and leaned on the fence a moment—a man with a ridge over the top of his bald head, that looked as if his backbone didn't mean to stop till it had reached his forehead, as probably it didn't; a soft-voiced, gently-speaking lion; but Margaret had heard him roar.

"Mr. G——," said Mr. Granger, "here is a lady with two dactyls for a name, Miss Margaret Hamilton. She will add another, and be Miriam, when your people come out through the Red Sea we are making."

"Have your cymbals ready, young prophetess," said the liberator. "The waters are lifting on the right hand and on the left."

The next day they went to the seaside, the ladies going in the morning to set things in order; the gentlemen not permitted to make their appearance till evening.

After a pleasant ride of an hour in the cars, they stepped out at a little way-station, where a carriage was awaiting them. About half a mile from this station, on a point of land hidden from it by a strip of thick woods, was their cottage.

The place was quite solitary; not a house in sight landward, though summer cottages nestled all about among the hills, hidden in wild green nooks. But across the water, towns were visible in all directions.

They drove with soundless wheels over a moist, brown road that wound and coiled through the woods. There had been a shower in the night that left everything washed, and the sky cloudless. It was yet scarcely ten o'clock; and the air, though warm, was fresh and still. The morning sunshine lay across the road, motionless between the motionless dense tree-shadows; both light and shade so still, so intense, they looked like a pavement of solid gold and amber. If, at intervals, a slight motion woke the woods, less like a breeze than a deep and gentle respiration of nature, and that leaf-and-flower-wrought pavement stirred through each glowing abaciscus, it was as though the solid earth were stirred.

A faint sultry odor began to rise from the pine-tops, and from clumps of sweet-fern that stood in sunny spots; but the rank, long-stemmed flowers and trailing vines that grew under the trees were yet glistening with the undried shower; the shaded grass at the roadside was beaded, every blade, with minute sparkles of water; and here and there a pine-bough was thickly hung with drops that trembled with fulness at the points of its clustered emerald needles, and at a touch came clashing down in a shower that was distinctly heard through the silence.

The birds were taking their forenoon rest; but, as the carriage rolled lightly past, a fanatical bobolink, who did not seem to have much common sense, but to be brimming over with the most glorious nonsense, swung himself down from some hidden perch, alighted in an utterly impossible manner on a spire of grass, and poured forth such a long-drawn, liquid, impetuous song, that it was a wonder there was anything of him left when it was over.

Three pairs of hands were stretched to arrest the driver's arm; three smiling, breathless faces listened till the last note, and watched the ecstatic little warbler swim away with an undulating motion, as if he floated on the bubbling waves of his own song.

In a few minutes a turn of the road brought them in sight of the blue, salt water spread out boundlessly, sparkling, and sail-flecked; and presently they drove up at the cottage door.

This was a long, low building, all wings, like a moth; colored, like fungi, of mottled browns and yellows; overtrailed by woodbines and honeysuckles, through which you sometimes only guessed at the windows by the white curtains blowing out.

"Why, it is something that has grown out of the earth!" exclaimed Margaret. "See! the ground is all uneven about the walls as it is about the boles of trees."

This rural domicil faced the east and the sea; and an unfenced lawn sloped down to the beach where the tide was now creeping up with bright ripples chasing each other.

The house was pleasant enough, large and airy; and, after a few hours' work, they had everything in order. Then, tired, happy, and hungry, they sat down to luncheon.

"Isn't it delightful to get rid of men a little while, when you know that they are soon to come again?" drawled Aurelia, sitting with both elbows on the table, and her rich hair a little tumbled.

Margaret glanced at her with a smile of approval. "That sweet creature!" she thought. And said aloud, "You know perfectly well, Aura, that all the time they are gone we are thinking of them and doing something for them. Whom have we been working for to-day but the gentlemen, pray?"

To her surprise, Aurelia's brown eyes dropped, and her beautiful face turned a sudden pink.

"I never could carve a fowl," said Mrs. Lewis plaintively. "But there must be a beginning in learning anything. I wish I knew where the beginning of this duck is. Aura, will you go look in that Audubon, and see how this creature is put together? We are likely to be worse off than Mr. Secretary Pepys, when the venison pasty turned out to be 'palpable mutton.' We shall have nothing."

Margaret started up. "Infirm of purpose, give me the carver!" she cried; and seizing the knife, in a moment of inspiration, triumphantly carved the mysterious duck, and betrayed its hidden articulations.

Mrs. Lewis contemplated her with great respect. "My dear," she said, "I have done you injustice. I have believed that though you could succeed admirably in the ornamental and the extraordinary, you had no faculty for common things. I acknowledge my error.'Nemesis favors genius,' as Disraeli says of Burke."

After luncheon and a siesta, they dressed and went out onto the lawn to watch for the gentlemen, who presently appeared.

Mr. Granger presented Margaret with a spike of beautiful pink arethusa set in a ring of feathery ferns. "It came from a swamp miles away," he said. "I wanted to bring you something bright the first day."

Problems Of The Age, And Its Critics.

The article from The Independent of August 20th, which we quote in full below, has been sent to us by the writer of it, with an accompanying note, requesting us to take notice of its observations. Our remarks will, therefore, be chiefly confined to this particular criticism on the Problems of the Age, although we shall embrace the opportunity to notice also some other criticisms which have been made in various periodicals.

"The pastor of the Broadway Tabernacle, many years ago, taking a hint from Archbishop Whately,'traced the errors of Romanism to their origin,' not 'in human nature,' but in Old School theology. The ultra-Calvinist doctrine of original sin, he argued, necessitated the dogma of baptismal regeneration; and the doctrine of physical inability brought in the notion of sacramental grace. Mr. Hewit is a living example, and his book is documentary proof, of the justice of this theory. His early training was under the severest of schoolmasters, in the oldest of schools. The problems on which his mind has been exercised from his birth are such as this: How men can be 'born depraved, with an irresistible propensity to sin, and under the doom of eternal misery.' With admirable infelicity, a treatise on questions like this—the freshest of which are as old as Christian theology, and the others as old, if not older, than the fall of man—has been entitled Problems of the Age, on the ground (as we are informed in the preface) that they are 'subjects of much interest and inquiry in our own time.' From his hereditary embarrassments on these subjects, the writer makes his way out to a new theodicy, which on the subject of the existence of sin is Taylorism, word for word; on the subject of natural depravity is something like Pelagianism; and on the subject of original sin is a curious notion, which he strives mightily to represent as the sentiment of Augustine. The whole series of ideas is labelled 'Catholic Theology,' and represented as the antagonist of Protestant opinion.

"The volume deserves no small praise as a specimen of lucid, consecutive argument on difficult questions, conducted in pure English. The only serious blemish upon the author's style is his habit, when he has said a thing once in good English, of saying it over again immediately in bad Latin. But this, we suppose, is less the fault of his taste than of his position. The logic of the book, also, has not more faults than are commonly incident to such discussions; it is strong for pulling down, feeble in building up. It reduces to absurdity the statements of some of his antagonists, with wonderfully complacent unconsciousness that a smart antagonist could get exactly the same hitch about the neck of its statement, and drag it to the same destruction.

"The plan of the work is curious. It begins with the primary cognitions of the mind, and goes forward with an à priori argument for the existence of God: that if God exists, he must necessarily exist in Trinity; must create just such a universe; must be incarnate in the Second Person; must redeem a fallen race; must institute the Roman Catholic Church, its sacraments and ritual. The second part is devoted to finding in Augustine the ideas of the former part—ideas some of which, unless that lucid author has been hitherto read with a veil upon the heart,

"Besides the limits of space, which are imperative, two reasons suffice to excuse us from examining in detail the course of this ingenious and protracted argument:

"First. It is a matter of comparatively little interest to scrutinize severely the processes of a reasoner to whom one half of his conclusions are prescribed beforehand, under peril of excommunication and eternal damnation, while he holds the other half under a vow to repudiate them at a moment's notice from the proper authority.

"Second. It is profoundly unsatisfactory to argue against any such book, whatever its origin or pretensions, as representative of the Roman Catholic theology. From page to page the author challenges our respect and deference for his views as being the teachings of the church.'This is Catholic truth; this is Catholic theology.' {176} But, once let us give chase to one of his propositions, and hunt it down into the corner of an absurdity, and we are sure to hear some of the author's confederates trying to call off the dogs with the assurance,'Oh! that is only a notion of Hewit's;' or, 'only a private opinion of theologians;' or, 'only the declaration of an individual pope;' or, 'only a decree of council which never was generally received: the church is not responsible for such things as these.' So slippery a thing is 'Catholic doctrine'! So unrestful is the 'repose' offered to inquiring minds by that church, which divides all subjects of religious thought into two classes: one, on which it is forbidden to make impartial inquiry; the other, on which it is forbidden to come to settled conclusions."

We confess that it appears to us a very puzzling "problem" to find out how to answer the foregoing criticism, or the others from non-catholic periodicals which it has been our hap to fall in with. Not one of them has seriously controverted the main thesis of the book they profess to criticise, or to make any well-motived adjudication of the several portions of the argument by which the thesis is sustained. Some, like the one before us, attempt to set aside the whole question; others content themselves with a round assertion that the arguments are inconclusive; and the residue confine themselves to generalities; or, at most, to the criticism of some minor details. We should not think it worth while to trouble ourselves or our readers with a formal replication to such superficial critics, were it not for the opportunity which is afforded us of bringing into clearer light the total lack of all deep philosophy or theology in the non-catholic world, and the value of the Catholic philosophy which we are striving to bring before the minds of intelligent and sincere inquirers after truth.

The criticisms begin with the title of the work. The critic of The Independent objects to our calling old questions problems of the age. The Southern Review coincides with him, and suggests that they should rather have been called "problems of all ages;" while another critic, in The Evening Post, gives his verdict that they are all to be classed as "problems of a bygone age." This last criticism is the only one founded upon a reason; and is, at the same time, a full justification of the appropriateness of the title before all those who still profess to believe in the revelation of God. The different classes of protesters against the teaching of the church have wearied themselves in vain in searching for a satisfactory solution of the problems of man's condition and destiny; either in some new rendering of divine revelation, or in some system of purely rational philosophy. The despair produced by their utter failure vents itself in the denial that these problems are real ones, capable of any solution at all, and in the attempt to relegate them finally into the region of the unknowable. This is a vain effort. They have forced themselves upon the attention of the human mind ever since the creation, and they will continue to do so, in spite of all efforts to exorcise them. The relations of man to his Creator, the reason of moral and physical evil, the bearing of the present life on the future, the significance of Christianity, and such like topics, can be regarded as obsolete questions only by a most unpardonable levity. The so-called Liberal Christian and the rationalist may in deed proffer the opinion that the solutions we have given are already antiquated. But, with all the hardihood which persons of this class possess in so remarkable a degree in claiming for themselves all the light, all the intelligence, all the spiritual vitality existing in the world, we must persist in thinking that their triumphant tone is some what prematurely assumed. {177} We insist that the problems of bygone ages are the problems of the present ages, and that the solutions of bygone ages are the only real ones, as true and as necessary at the present moment as they have ever been. The restless mind of the non-Catholic world, having broken away from its intellectual centre to wander aimlessly in the infinite void, has plunged itself anew into all the puzzle and bewilderment from which Christianity with its divine philosophy had once delivered it, and, wearied with its wanderings, longs and yet delays to return to its proper orbit. Hence the great problems of past ages have become emphatically the problems of the present, and must be answered anew, by the same principles and the same truths which past ages found sufficient, yet presented in part in modified language, in a new dress, and with special application to new phases of error. The title Problems of the Age is therefore fully justified as the most felicitous and appropriate which could have been chosen for a treatise intended to meet the wants of those who are seeking for help in their doubts and difficulties respecting both natural and revealed religion. Any believer in the Christian revelation who cannot recognize this, and heartily sympathize in any well-meant effort to present the Christian mysteries in an aspect which may attract honest and candid doubters or unbelievers, shows that he has mistaken his side, and has more intellectual sympathy with unbelief than he would willingly acknowledge, even to himself.

Another anonymous critic sets aside with one sentence the entire argument of the book; because, forsooth, it begins with the assumption that the Catholic doctrine is the only true one, and demands a preliminary submission of the reader's mind to the authority of the Catholic Church. Nothing could be more superficial and incorrect than this statement of the thesis proposed by the author. The whole course of the argument supposes that an unbeliever or inquirer after the true religion begins with the first, self-evident principles of reason; proceeds, by way of demonstration, to the truths of natural theology, and by the way of evidence and the motives of credibility advances to the belief of Christianity and the divine authority of the Catholic Church. The thesis proposed or the special topic to be discussed by the author is, Supposing the authority of the Catholic Church sufficiently established by extrinsic evidence, is there any insurmountable obstacle, on the side of reason, to accept her dogmas as intrinsically credible? The implicit or even explicit affirmation that Catholic philosophy is the true and only philosophy, that it alone can satisfy the demands of reason, is no begging of the question; for it is not stated as the datum or logical premiss from which the logical conclusions are drawn. It is stated as being, so far as the mind of the sceptical reader is concerned, only an hypothesis to be proved, an enunciation of the judgment which is made by the mind of a Catholic, the motives of which the non-catholic reader is invited to examine and consider by the light of the principles of reason, or of those revealed truths of which he is already convinced.

A most sapient critic in the London Athenaeum, venturing entirely out of his depth, makes an observation on the statement that absolute beauty is identical with the divine essence, which we notice merely for the amusement of our theological readers. The statement of the author is, that beauty is to be identified with the divine essence, by virtue of its definition as the splendor of truth, and because truth, being identical with the divine essence, its splendor must be also. {178} This consummate philosopher argues that beauty must be identified, not with the divine essence, but with its splendor, because it is the splendor of truth. The splendor of God is, then, something distinct from God; and he is not most pure act and most simple being! We cannot wish for a more apposite illustration of the total loss of the first and most fundamental conceptions of philosophy and natural theology out of the English mind—a natural result of that movement which began with Luther, when he publicly burned the Summa of St. Thomas.

The Mercersburg Review denies the demonstrative force of the evidences of natural religion and positive revelation; referring us to conscience, or the moral sense, as the ground of belief in God and in Jesus Christ. This is another proof of the truth of our judgment, that the radical intellectual disease which Protestantism has produced requires treatment by a thorough dosing with sound philosophy. The corruption of theology has brought on a corruption of philosophy, and heresy has produced scepticism, so that we can hardly find a sound spot to begin with as a point d'appui for the reconstruction of rational and orthodox belief. We do not despise the argument from conscience and the moral sense, or deny its validity. We did not specially draw it out, because we were not writing a complete treatise on natural theology; but it is contained in the metaphysical argument establishing the first and final cause. Apart from that, it has no conclusive force. What is conscience? Nothing but a practical judgment respecting that which ought to be done or left undone. What is the moral sense, but an intimate apprehension of the relation of the voluntary acts of an intelligent and free agent to a final cause? It is only intellect which can take cognizance of a rule or principle directing a certain act to be done or omitted, or of the intrinsic necessity of directing all acts toward a final cause or ultimate end. The intellect cannot do this, or deduce an argument from conscience and the moral sense for the existence of God, unless it has certain infallible principles given it in its creation; and with these principles, the existence of God and all natural theology can be proved by a metaphysical demonstration, proceeding from which, as a basis, we prove Christianity and the Catholic Church by a moral demonstration which is reducible to principles of metaphysical certitude. Deny this, and conscience, or the moral sense, is a mere feeling, a sensible emotion, a habit induced by education, a subjective state, which is just as available in support of Buddhism or Mohammedanism as of Christianity. The Mercersburg Review is trying to sustain itself midway down the declivity of a slippery hill, afraid to descend where the mangled remains of Feuerbach lie bleaching in the sun, and unwilling to catch the rope which the Catholic Church throws to it, and ascend to the height from whence Luther, in his pride and folly, slid. Kant's miserable expedient of practical reason may suit those who are content with such an insecure position; but it will never satisfy those who look for true science, and certain, infallible faith.

The Round Table, in a notice which is, on the whole, very favorable and appreciative, complains that we have accused Calvinism of being a dualistic or Manichaean doctrine. We have not only affirmed, but proved that it is so. By Calvinism, however, we mean the strict, logical Calvinism of the rigid adherents of the system. {179} The moderated, modified system, which approaches more nearly to the doctrine of the most rigorous Catholic school, we do not wish to censure too severely. Neither do we charge formal dualism, or a formal denial of the pure, unmixed goodness of God even upon the strictest Calvinists. What we affirm is, that, together with their doctrine respecting God, which is orthodox, they hold another doctrine respecting the acts of God toward his creatures, which is logically incompatible with the former, and logically demands the affirmation of an evil and malignant principle equally self-existent, necessary, and eternal with the principle of good, and thus leads to the doctrine of dualism in being. Many orthodox Protestants have spoken against Calvinism much more severely than we have done; and, in fact, while we cannot too strongly reprobate its logical consequences, we always intend to distinguish between them and the true, interior belief which exists in the minds of many Calvinists, excellent persons, and really nearer to the church, in their doctrine, as practically apprehended, than they are aware of.

Our Independent critic is displeased with the Latin quotations from scholastic theology which we have somewhat freely employed, and compliments us, as he apparently supposes, by suggesting that this violation of good taste is to be ascribed, not to any lack of judgment on our part, but to the fault of our position. It is somewhat amusing to notice the patronizing air which this well-meaning gentleman assumes, and the evident complacency with which, from the height of his little, recently constructed eminence, he looks down with a smile of pitying forbearance upon our unfortunate "position." We will consent to waive, once for all, all claims of a personal nature to any consideration which is not derived from our position as a Catholic and a humble disciple of the scholastic theology. That theology is the glory and the boast of Christendom and of the human intellect. We are firmly convinced that there is no true wisdom, science, illumination, or progress to be found, except in following the broad path which scholastic theology has explored and beaten. Although our nice critic—who seems to have more admiration for the effeminate classicism of Bembo and the age of Leo X. than the masculine verve of St. Thomas—may call the scientific terminology of the schoolmen "bad Latin," we shall venture to retain a totally different opinion. It is unequalled and unapproachable for precision, clearness, and vigor. We have employed it because our own judgment and taste have dictated to us the propriety of doing so. We have not been led by servile adhesion to custom, or the affectation of making a display, but by the desire of making our meaning more clear and evident to theological readers, especially those whose native language is not English, and of introducing into our English theological literature those definite and precise modes of reasoning which belong to these great schoolmen. We can easily understand the aversion of our opponents to the schoolmen, in which they are only following after their predecessor, Martin Bucer, who said, albeit in Latin, Tolle Thomam et delebo Ecclesiam Romanam, "Take away Thomas, and I will destroy the Roman Church." To the personal remarks of the critic in regard to the author and the history of his religious opinions we give a simple transeat, and pass to what semblance of argument there is in rejoinder to the thesis defended in the Problems of the Age.

The critic says that the same process of logic which the author employs against his opponents would destroy his own statements. This is a mere assertion, without a shadow of proof, and we meet it with a simple denial. It is, moreover, a piece of triviality with which we have no patience. It is the language of the most wretched and shallow scepticism, conceived in the very spirit of the question of Pontius Pilate to our Lord, "What is truth?" We have been engaged for thirty years in the study of philosophy and theology, and have carefully examined and weighed the matters we have undertaken to discuss. The substance of the doctrine we have presented is that in which the greatest minds of all ages have been agreed; and it has been proved and defended against every assault in a manner so triumphant that its antagonists have nothing to say, but to deny the first principles of logic, the possibility of science, the certainty of faith. There are, undoubtedly, certain minor points which are open to question and difference of opinion. But, as to our main thesis, that the Catholic dogmas are not contradictory to anything which is known or demonstrable by human science, we defy all opponents to refute it.

By another subterfuge, equally miserable, our critic shakes off all responsibility of even noticing the serious, calm, and well-motived statements which we have made respecting Catholic doctrines. We hold, he says, one half of our doctrines as prescribed by authority, under pain of excommunication and damnation; and the other half, under an obligation to renounce them at a moment's warning, from the same authority; therefore, no attention is to be paid to our arguments. This is one of the most remarkable and most discreditable statements we remember ever to have come across in a writer professing himself an orthodox Christian. Does this inconsiderate writer see to what a dilemma he has reduced himself? Either he must admit that Jesus Christ, the apostles, the Bible, teach him with authority, and plainly and unequivocally, certain doctrines which he is bound to believe, under penalty of being cast out from the communion of true believers, and incurring eternal damnation; or he must deny it. In the first case, he must retract his words, or give the full benefit of them to the rationalist and the infidel, against himself. In the second case, he must lay aside his mask, and step forth with the discovered lineaments of an open unbeliever. We receive the dogmas of faith proposed by the church because they are revealed by Jesus Christ through his Holy Spirit, who is indwelling in the body of the church. We cannot revoke these dogmas into an examination or discussion of doubt, any more than we can doubt our own existence, or the first principle of reasoning. Nevertheless, as we can argue against a person who doubts these first principles, or give proofs and evidences to an ignorant man of facts or truths whose certainty is known to us; so we can give proofs of dogmas of faith which we are not permitted to doubt for an instant to one who does not believe these dogmas, or understand the motives upon which their credibility is established. It is unlawful to doubt the being and perfections of God, the immortality of the soul, the truth of revelation. Yet we may examine thoroughly all these topics to find new and confirmatory proof and answers to objections. One who is in doubt or ignorance may examine and weigh evidences in order to ascertain the truth, and does not sin by keeping his judgment in suspense until it obtains the data sufficient to make a decision reasonable and obligatory. {181} In arguing with such a person, it is necessary to descend to his level, and reason from the premises which his intellect admits. In like manner, when it is a question of the Trinity, the Incarnation, the divinity of Jesus Christ, the canonicity and inspiration of the Scriptures, and all other Catholic dogmas; although a Catholic may not doubt any one of these, and would act unreasonably if he did, since he has the same certainty of their truth that he has of his own existence or the being of God; yet he may examine the evidences which are confirmatory of his faith for his own satisfaction, and reason with an unbeliever in order to convince him of the truth. The subterfuge by which our critic and some other writers, especially one in The Churchman, attempt to evade the inevitable deductions of Catholic logic, which they cannot meet and refute—namely, that we cannot, with consistency, argue about doctrines defined by infallible authority—is the shallowest of all the artifices of sophistry. When the Son of God appeared on the earth in human nature, and in form and fashion as a man, claiming infallible authority, and demanding unreserved obedience, it was necessary for him to give evidence of his divine mission. A Jew, a Mohammedan, or a Buddhist cannot, in reason or conscience, believe in Jesus Christ until this evidence has been proposed to him. When it is sufficiently proposed, he is bound to believe; and, once becoming aware that Jesus is the Son of God, he is bound to believe all that he has revealed, simply upon his word. But, supposing he has been erroneously informed that the teaching of Jesus Christ contains certain doctrines or statements of fact which are in contradiction to what seems to him to be right reason or certain knowledge, it is unquestionably both prudent and charitable to correct his mistakes upon this point, and thus remove the obstacles to belief from his mind. Precisely so in regard to the Catholic Church. The demand which she makes of submission to her infallible authority, as the witness and teacher established by Jesus Christ, is accompanied by evidence. It is upon this evidence we lay the greatest stress; and in virtue of this it is that we present the Catholic doctrines as certain truths which every one is bound to believe. Undoubtedly, the infallibility of the church once established, it is the duty of every one to believe the doctrines she proposes, putting aside all difficulties and objections which may exist in his own imperfect, limited understanding. Yet, if these difficulties and objections do not lie in the very mysteriousness, vastness, and elevation of the object of faith itself, but in merely subjective misapprehensions, it is right to attempt to remove them, and to make the exercise of faith easier to the inquirer. Moreover, although it is sufficient to prove the infallibility of the church, and then, from this infallibility, to deduce, as a necessary consequence, the truth of all Catholic teaching; it does not follow that each separate portion of this teaching cannot be proved by other and independent lines of argument. The divine legation of Moses is sufficiently proved by the authority of Christ; but it can be proved apart from that authority. So, the Trinity, the real presence, baptismal regeneration, or purgatory, are sufficiently and infallibly proved from the judgment of the church; but they may be also proved from Scripture, from tradition, and, in a negative way, from reason. In the Problems of the Age our principal intention has been to clear away difficulties and misapprehensions from the object of faith, in order that candid inquirers might not be obliged to assume any greater burden upon their minds than the weight of that yoke of faith which the Lord himself imposes. {182} In doing this, we have endeavored not only to clear the dogmas of faith from the perversions of heretical doctrines, but also to distinguish them from theological opinions, which rest only on human authority, and are open to discussion. We have also thought it best, not merely to mark off doctrines of faith, and leave them in their naked simplicity, free from that theological envelope which is sometimes confounded with their substance; but also to give them that dress which, in our opinion, is best fitted to set off their native grace and beauty. We have not simply expressed the definitions of the church, discriminating from them the opinion of this and that school, and thus barely indicating what must be, and what need not be believed, in order to be a Catholic. We know the wants of the class of minds we are dealing with. They feel the need of some general view which shall give them a coup a'oeil of the theological landscape, and enable them to embrace the details and single objects contained in it in one harmonious whole. They have had so much sophistical reasoning and false philosophy, as well as bad and repulsive theology, dinned into their ears and minds that they cannot be satisfied without some better system as a substitute. We were obliged, therefore, not only to point out that certain opinions—generally repugnant to those who have been sickened by imbibing the Calvinistic and Lutheran poison—are not obligatory on the conscience of any Catholic, but also to present the opinions of another school more remote from Protestant orthodoxy, and less repugnant to those who are called liberal Christians. Our critic seems to imagine that, in doing this, we are merely playing an adroit game in which all kinds of theological or philosophical opinions are used as counters, without reference to truth, and merely with the view of winning as many converts as possible, by any show of plausible argument. At any moment, he says, we are ready to throw away the whole, if commanded to do so by authority. Once caught, those who have been drawn into the church by an artifice will have their minds tutored in a far different way, and be obliged to keep themselves ready to accept the very contrary of that which we assured them was sound, orthodox doctrine, at the arbitrary will of the ecclesiastical authority. Until that authority defines precisely what the sound Catholic doctrine is, we can have no settled, well-grounded opinion; but only conjecture and hypothesis. Let the absurdity of any of these hypotheses be shown by some Protestant controversialist, and the plea is ready that the church is not responsible for private opinions. Yet we have been artful and audacious enough to put forth a network of such hypotheses as Catholic doctrine when they are not Catholic doctrine, and are directly controverted by other Catholic writers. In an article which appeared lately in Putnam's Monthly, publicly ascribed to the same gentleman who is the avowed author of the criticism we are noticing, there is a general charge made upon "Americo-Roman preachers," of presenting a "plausible pseudo-Catholicity" quite different from the genuine Italian and Irish article. The Churchman, not long ago, made a similar statement which, if not mendacious, is supremely foolish and ignorant, respecting F. Hyacinthe, and certain other devoted Catholics in France.

The whole is a tissue of cobwebs, which a stroke of the pen can sweep away. The Holy See is not accustomed to condemn suddenly and by the wholesale the probable opinions of grave and learned theologians, much less the doctrines of great and long-established schools. In the Problems of the Age, we have been careful to follow in the wake of theologians of established repute, and not to lay down propositions whose tenability is doubtful or suspected. It is possible that some definitions or decrees may be made hereafter which may require us to modify some of our opinions in theology or philosophy, and we shall undoubtedly submit at once to any such decisions. But there is no probability that we shall ever be called upon to change radically and essentially that system of theology which we have derived from the best and most esteemed Catholic authors. There is certainly no reason to think that the tenets distinguishing the Dominican from the Augustinian school will ever be condemned in a mass. Those which distinguish the Jesuit school from either or both of these have been through a severe ordeal of accusation and trial long ago, and have come out unscathed. The same is true of the doctrines of Cardinal Sfondrati. Suarez, St. Alphonsus, Perrone, and Archbishop Kenrick are certainly respectable authority, and a good guarantee of the orthodoxy of opinions sustained by their judgment. Perrone, whom we have followed more closely than any other author in treating of the most delicate and difficult questions, has taught and published his theology at Rome. It has passed through thirty seven editions, and is more popular as a text-book than any other. He is a consultor of the Sacred Congregations of the Council and the Index, Prefect of Studies in the Roman College, and, together with Fathers Schrader and Franzlin, eminent theologians of the same Jesuit school, a member of the Commission of Dogmatic Theology, which is preparing the points for decision in the coming Council of the Vatican. The doctrines advanced in the Problems of the Age in opposition to Calvinism, in accordance with the theological exposition of Perrone, cannot, therefore, be qualified as peculiar or curious opinions of the author, as pseudo-Catholic or Americo-Roman theories, or as liable to any theological censure of unsoundness.

Nevertheless, we have not, as the critic asserts, set forth these or other opinions indiscriminately, and in so far as they vary from the opinions of other approved Catholic authors, as being exclusively the Catholic doctrine. We have used extreme care and conscientiousness in this respect, although our critic is incapable of appreciating it, from his lack of all thorough knowledge of the controversy he has unadvisedly meddled with. We do not qualify as Catholic doctrine, in a strict sense, anything which is not de fide obligante, or admitted by the generality of theologians, without opposition from any respectable authority, as morally certain. We censure no really probable opinion as contrary to Catholic doctrine, and are disposed to allow the utmost latitude of movement to every individual mind competent to reason on theological subjects, between the opposite extremes condemned by the church. It does not follow from this, however, that our doctrine is mere hypothesis, and that we are forbidden or unable to come to any positive conclusions beyond the formal definitions of the church. The substance and essential constituents of the doctrine are certainly Catholic, and common to all schools. {184} The Council of Trent condemned the heresies of Calvin and Luther, and the Holy See, the whole church concurring, has condemned the heresies of Jansenius and Baius. We know, also, what was the theology of the men who framed and enacted the decrees condemning those errors, or affirming the opposite truths, what was the spirit animating the church at that time, and continuing in it until the present; and we have in the episcopate, but especially in the Holy See, the living, authentic teacher and interpreter of the doctrine contained in the written decrees. There is, therefore, a solid and common basis upon which all Catholics stand, and upon which it is possible and allowable to construct theological theories or systems. Learning, logic, the intuitive power of genius, and the special gifts imparted by the Holy Spirit to certain favored men, have their full scope in carrying on this work. Through their activity, conclusions, deductions, expositions, elucidations, may be attained, which have a value varying all the way from plausible conjecture and hypothesis up through the different degrees of probability, to moral certainty. For ourselves, we have always studied to find in the most approved authors those opinions which approach as nearly as possible to moral certainty; or, in default of such, those which are admitted to be probable, and to our mind appear intrinsically more probable than their opposites. We write and speak, therefore, not with an economy, or as presenting opinions likely to captivate our readers, but with an interior conviction, in accordance with that which we believe to be really the revealed and rational truth; or else we indicate that we are speaking under a reserve of doubt and suspended judgment. As for the insinuation that we are concerned in any artful scheme for palming off a plausible pseudo-Catholicity in lieu of the Catholicity of the Pope, the Roman Church, and of the faithful people of Ireland, we repudiate it as false, groundless, and injurious. We hold unreservedly to the Pope and all his doctrinal decisions; to the genuine, thorough, uncompromising Catholicity of Rome and the universal church; to the faith for which the martyred people of Ireland have dared and suffered all. Nothing could be more opposed to that astuteness for which Catholic ecclesiastics generally obtain extensive credit, than to attempt such a foolish scheme in this country and age of the world as some persons attribute to us for the purpose of nullifying the effect of our influence and arguments upon the minds of candid inquirers after truth. For what purpose or end could we desire to propagate the Catholic religion in this country, unless we are convinced that it is the only true religion established by Jesus Christ, and necessary to the salvation of the human race? With this conviction, it would be the most supreme folly to preach any other doctrine but that genuine and sound Catholic doctrine which is sanctioned by the supreme authority in the church, and which we desire to propagate. Individuals may, no doubt, err, even with good intentions, in the attempt to discriminate between the permanent and the variable, the essential and the accidental, the universal and the local elements in Catholicity; and in the effort to adjust the relations between the doctrine and institutions of the church and new conditions of human science, or political and social order. But it is impossible for any individual or clique either to master or resist the general Catholic sentiment, and thus to cause the acceptance of any form of pseudo or neo-Catholicism as genuine Catholicity. {185} Moreover, there is the vigilant eye and strong arm of ecclesiastical authority ready every moment to detect and restrain the aberrations of private judgment, and to condemn all opinions or schemes which cannot be tolerated without endangering either doctrine or discipline. The voice of the Holy Father is heard throughout the world, and the voice of the whole Catholic Church will reverberate to the uttermost parts of the earth from the approaching Ecumenical Council. All intelligent persons, more especially all inquisitive, shrewd, and cool-headed Americans, have the means of knowing what genuine Catholic doctrine is. Whoever should attempt to set forth a dilution of Catholicity with Grecism, Anglicanism, rationalism, or any other kind of individualism, as a lure to non-catholics, would, therefore, simply gain nothing, unless a little unenviable notoriety should seem to his vanity a gain worth purchasing by the betrayal of his trust. The people of this country want the genuine Catholicity, or nothing. They will not be deluded a second time by a counterfeit, and become followers of a man, a party, or a sect. Nor do we wish to deceive them. We desire to set before them the doctrine and law of the Catholic Church in their purity and integrity, that they may have the opportunity of embracing them for their temporal and eternal salvation. We have had this end in view in writing and publishing the Problems of the Age; and, knowing well the delicacy and difficulty of the task, we have spared no pains to study the decisions of councils and the Holy See, to compare and weigh the statements of the most approved theologians, and to make no explanations which we were not satisfied are tenable, according to the received criterion of orthodoxy. We do not desire, however, or exact that any of our statements should be taken upon trust by any one. We have written for thinking and educated persons, who have need of light upon certain dark points of Christian doctrine; who are in earnest, and willing to take the time and trouble necessary for learning the truth. Such persons, if they read only English, will find all that is requisite, in addition to the citations made in the Problems of the Age, in Möhler's Symbolism. Scholars and theologians may satisfy themselves more fully by the aid of the collection of dogmatic and doctrinal decrees contained in Denziger's Enchiridion, and of the theologies of Billuart, Perrone, and Kenrick, the first of whom is a strict Thomist, the second a Jesuit, and the third of no particular school. In the exposition of the more antique and technically Augustinian tenets, the works of Berti, Estius, Antoine, Cardinal Noris, and Cardinal Gotti can be consulted. There are many other books relating to the Jansenist controversy, in Latin, French, and English, from which the fullest information can be obtained in regard to the history of the desperate struggle which that pseudo-Augustinian heresy—so nearly allied to the more moderate Calvinism and to one form of Anglicanism—made to gain a foothold in the church, and its thorough and complete discomfiture by the learning and logic of the great Thomist and Jesuit theologians, and the authority of the Holy See.

There remains but one more point to be noticed, closely connected with the topic just now discussed, the charge of Pelagianism made by our critic against our own doctrines, and of semi-Pelagianism made by The Mercersburg Review, against the same, which the latter does not distinguish from the doctrine of the Roman Church. {186} The learned Professor Emerson, of Andover, long since called the attention of his co-religionists to the fact that the designation of Pelagian is used in this country very much at random, and by persons who have no accurate notion of the tenets of Pelagius. Calvinism, Jansenism, and Baianism are heresies on one side of the line; Pelagianism and semi-Pelagianism on the opposite. The Catholic doctrine is the truth which they all deny or pervert, exaggerate or diminish, by their false perspective. Therefore, each of them accuses the Catholic doctrine of the error opposite to its own error. This is no new thing, but was long ago complained of by St. Athanasius and St. Hilary. The Arians accused the Catholics of being Sabellians, and the Sabellians accused them of being Arians or Arianizers. We uphold both nature and grace, against Calvinists and Pelagians, therefore we are by turns accused of denying both. In the present instance, we are accused of denying or diminishing grace. The accusation is foolish, and shows a very slight knowledge of theology in those who make it. The Pelagian heresy asserts that human nature is capable of attaining the beatitude which the holy angels and saints possess with Jesus Christ in God, by its own intrinsic power, and is in the same state now as that in which Adam was originally constituted. The contrary doctrine is so clearly stated and so fully developed in the Problems of the Age, that it suffices to refer the reader to its pages. The semi-Pelagian heresy asserts that human nature is capable of the beginning of faith by its own efforts, and also of meriting grace by a merit of congruity. This heresy is unequivocally condemned by the church, and rejected by every school and every theologian. There is not a trace of it in a single line we have written.

This leads us to notice a misapprehension into which the editor of The Religious Magazine of Boston has fallen. This Unitarian periodical is one which we esteem very much, on account of its excellent and truly devout spirit; and its contributors belong to a class of liberal Christians whose tendencies inspire us with much hope. It is with pleasure, therefore, that we recognize the candid and amicable tone of the notice which it has given of that which we have written especially for those whose intellectual direction is in the line which it follows. Our Unitarian critic has, however, made the great mistake of supposing that we use an orthodox phraseology, without any ideas behind it different from those of liberal Christians or rationalists. He says, "Setting aside what we cannot help calling theological technicalities, his account of man's moral being accords almost entirely with that which our liberal Christianity would give." "Perhaps the criticism upon our author must be, that he only retains in word and form much which he has abandoned in fact." The writer of this has been so accustomed to associate certain Catholic formulas and words with Calvinistic ideas, that they seem to him to mean nothing when dissociated from them. With him, the logical alternative of Calvinism is Unitarianism; and whoever agrees with him in rejecting the former, must substantially agree with him in holding the latter, however his language may vary from that which he himself uses. The reason of this is, that he fails to apprehend the Catholic idea of the supernatural order; that is, of the elevation of the rational creature to the immediate intuition of the divine essence in the beatific vision. We fear that in the last analysis it will be found that Unitarians have lost the distinct conception of the personality of God, and retain only a vague, confused notion of him as abstract being, and therefore not an object of direct vision. {187} Hence, they conceive of the highest contemplation and beatitude of man in the future life as a mere evolution and extension of our natural intelligence and spontaneity. Or, if they do conceive of heaven as a state in which the soul attains to a direct, personal fellowship and converse with God as a friend, a father, a supreme, intelligent, living, and loving Spirit, with whom the human spirit comes into immediate relations, like those of man with man on earth, they still believe that we are capable of attaining to this by the mere development of our natural powers, and by purely natural acts. There is, therefore, a great chasm between the Unitarian and the Catholic doctrine. The latter teaches, in the mystery of the Trinity, the only real and possible conception of personal subsistence in the divine essence, and sets forth the concrete, living, active, impersonated God, in whom is infinite, self-sufficing beatitude, without any necessity to create for the sake of completing the reason, and relations, and end of his being. This infinite beatitude consisting in the contemplation and love of his own essence which is actuated in the Trinity, presents the idea of a beatitude infinitely superior to and distinct from any felicity to which we have any natural aptitude or impulse. Its cause and object is the divine essence, directly and immediately beheld by an intellectual vision, of which our corporeal vision of material objects is but a faint shadow. The Catholic doctrine teaches that human nature must be elevated by a supernatural gratuitous grace in order to attain to this vision of God; that in Christ it is so elevated, even to a hypostatic union with the second person of the Trinity; that in Adam it was elevated to a lesser or adoptive filiation; that the angelic nature is also elevated to a similar state; and that men, under the present dispensation; are subjects of the same grace. The church teaches, moreover, that this grace is granted to men, since the fall, only through the merits of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ upon the cross; that without divine grace they cannot even begin a supernatural life; that no merely natural virtue deserves this grace; and that it is by faith, which is the gift of God; by the sacraments, and by good works done in the state of grace, in the communion of the Catholic Church, that we can alone obtain everlasting life with Christ. There is as much difference between this doctrine and any form of Unitarianism as there is between the sun and the earth; the star-studded sky and a neat, well-kept flower-garden. Catholics may differ from each other in regard to certain questions concerning the state of human nature when destitute of grace; but we are all agreed in regard to the need of grace for attaining the end we are bound to strive after, the conditions of obtaining this grace, and the obligation of complying with them, as well as in regard to the insufficiency of all media for bringing the human race even to its acme of temporal progress and felicity, except the institutions and teaching of the Catholic Church.

Heremore-Brandon;
Or, The Fortunes Of A Newsboy.

Chapter IX.

When they arrived at the Wiltshire depot, Dick and Mary were still undecided what step to take next; for neither of them favored the idea of asking at once for Dr. Heremore, feeling certain that the probabilities of his being alive would vanish the moment that such an inquiry was proposed.

It was a nice enough town, with fine breezes from the sea blowing through its streets, and a quaint look about the houses that made Dick, at least, feel as if they were in a foreign land. Dick and Mary stood on the depot platform together, undecided still.

All that they found at first were a few lumber-wagons, a market-wagon, and now and then a group of boys playing; but finally they came upon a store, at the door of which several long-limbed countrymen were talking and chewing tobacco. I should have said "chewing and talking;" for the chewing was much more vigorously prosecuted than the talking. The presence of the strangers, one a lady in a plain but very stylish dress, attracted some attention; the men surveyed them in a leisurely, undazzled way, hardly making room for them to pass; for, having seen the sign POST-OFFICE in the window of this store, Dick and Mary concluded to enter and make inquiries. The afternoon sun streamed in upon the floor; the flies buzzed at the windows; and a man, with his hat on and his chair tilted back, was at the back of the store. He made no sign of changing his position when he first saw the strangers, not because Mr. Wilkes was any less well disposed toward "the ladies" than a city merchant would be, but because country people fancy it is more dignified to show indifference than politeness. In time, however, he tilted down his chair, freed his great mouth from its load of tobacco, and lounged up to the counter where Mary and Dick were standing.

"I want to ask you a question," Dick answered to the storekleeper's look; "I suppose you know this town pretty well?" Dick was so afraid of the answer that he did not know how to put a direct question in regard to Dr. Heremore.

"I wasn't here in them days," for Mr. Wilkes was a young man who did not care to be old.

"I did not suppose you did know, of your own knowledge; I thought you might have heard."

"From New York," answered Dick; "can you tell us who is likely to give us information?"

"We came to get information, not to give it," Dick replied in a quiet tone but inwardly vexed.

"Well," answered the storekeeper, not in the least abashed by this rebuke, "there's an old fellow lives up yonder, who knows pretty much everything's been done here for the last forty years; you'd better go to him; if any one knows, he does. Better not be too techy with him, I can tell you, if you want to find out anything; people as wants to take must give too, you know. That there road will take you straight to the house; white house, first on the left after you come to the meeting house."

"Well, folks usually calls him 'The Governor' round here; you, being strangers, can call him what you please."

"Thank you!" Mary and Dick replied and turned away. "Ben Wilkes," who, during this conversation, had seated himself on the counter, the better to show his ease in the strangers' society, which—Mary's especially—secretly impressed him very much, looked leisurely after them as they passed out of the store; then took out some fresh tobacco, and returned to his chair.

"I am afraid it is," answered Dick; "but, after all, what can happen that we need mind? If it is a gentleman to whom he has sent us, no matter how angry he is, he will see that you are a lady, and you will know how to explain it; if he has sent us to one who is not, I guess I shall be able to reply to him."

Their walk was a very long one, but the meeting-house at last came in sight, and next it, though there was a goodly space between, was a large white house, irregular and rambling, with very nicely kept shrubbery around.

Dick opened the gate with a hand that was a little nervous; but Mary whispered as their feet crunched the neatly bordered gravel walk to the low porch, "It is all right, I am sure; there is an old gentleman by the window."

Mary nodded, and as the path was narrow and they could not well walk side by side, she was in front, so that naturally she would be the first to meet the old gentleman. A very fine old gentleman he was; a large man with a fine head, and, as his first words proved, a remarkably full, sweet voice. Seeing a lady coming toward him, he rose at once from his arm-chair, closed his book and advanced a step or two to greet her. Mary was one of those women toward whom courteous men are most courteous from the first glance; and this old gentleman, who moved toward her with all the grace and ease of a vigorous young man, was one of those men to whom gentle women are gentler, from the first, than to others.

"Good-evening," he said, as Mary looked up to him with a smile at at once pleasant and deferential. "Good-evening," and as she did not say more than these words, the gentleman continued, "I will not say, 'Come in,' for it is too pleasant out of doors for that; but let me give you chairs."

"Certainly not," he answered. "It is a great pleasure for me to receive my old friends, and a pleasure to me to make new ones; and strangers, even if they remain strangers, bring with them great interest to the quiet lives of us old people." This he said in a tone not in the least formal, or as if "making a speech," and still looking more at Mary than at her brother. They were not yet seated, and no expression but that of kindly courtesy crossed his face while looking into the sweet, gravely smiling one before him; his tones were hardly altered when he added, "I have waited for you these many long years, Mary; but I never doubted you would come at last. You must not play tricks upon my old heart; it has suffered too much to be able to sustain its part as it did in old times."

Mary drew back a step, at this strange address, but she could not withdraw her eyes from his, as in tender, gentle tones he spoke the last words. Dick stood closer to her, but said nothing.

"Indeed, you mistake," Mary said, with great earnestness; "I have told you the truth, I am really a stranger, although you have called me by my name, Mary. I am Mary Brandon, and this—"

"Is your husband. Well, Mary, are you not my daughter? If you were changed, why come to see me? I heard you were changed. I spent four years in Paris and Rome, following up the trace given me in New York, and then I came back disappointed but not despairing. 'Mary will not die without sending for me or coming to me,' I said; and I have taken care always to be ready for you. I never thought you could come to me with coldness or indifference. I was prepared for almost anything—to see you poor and broken-hearted; no shame, no sin, no sorrow that would part us. I did not think to see you come back beautiful, happy, rich," a glance at her dress, "and without a word of greeting."

"Dr. Heremore?" said Dick, not because he believed or thought it, but because the words came forced by some inward power greater than his knowledge.

"Well, Charles," answered the old gentleman, sadly but composedly, turning at this name, "can you explain it?"

And then Mary understood it all. The years were nothing to him who had waited for his child's return, She was in his arms before Dick had recovered from his first bewilderment, now, by this act of hers, trebly increased.

"Ah my child! if I spoke severely, it was only because I could not bear the waiting. I knew your jokes of old, darling; but when one has waited so long for the dear face one loves, the last moments seem longer than all the years. I will ask no questions. I see you two are together, and it is all right. You can tell me all at your leisure. Now, Mary, I must kill the fatted calf. Even though you and Charles have not returned as prodigals," he added as if he would not, even in play, risk hurting them.

"Not yet, please," said Mary. "Let us have it all to ourselves for a few minutes." And they seated themselves on the sunny porch, the old gentleman's delight now beginning to show itself in the nervous way he moved his hands, and his disjointed sentences. {191} Mary took off her hat at once, and threw it, with rather more of gayety than was quite natural to her, upon one of the short branches, looking like pegs, which had been left in the pillars of the porch.

"You haven't forgotten the old ways—eh, Mary?" Dr. Heremore asked, as he saw the movement. "I remember well how proud you were the day you first found you could reach that very peg, and you are as much a child as you were that day, is she not, Charles?"

"Pretty nearly," answered Dick, who could not fulfil his part with Mary's readiness.

"You should have seen it in June. I never saw the roses thicker. O pet, how I did wish for you, then! The time of roses was always your time."

"And I love them as much as ever!" exclaimed Mary, telling the truth of herself. "Next year, if I am alive, I will be here with them; we will have jolly times looking after them. I have learned a great deal about flowers lately, but I shall never love roses like yours." This indeed, Mary felt to be true.

"Flora has had to be replaced," said her grandfather observing her eyes resting on a statue in the garden in front. "I will show you the alterations I have made, and a few are improvements. But you must have something to eat now. I cannot let you go a minute longer. You came up by the boat, I presume?"

"Yes, and had a hearty dinner," Mary answered, having a dread of a servant's entering, and getting things all wrong again, "To eat now will only spoil our appetite for tea, and I want you to see what an appetite I have."

"I am afraid it will not interest you much, Charles," the old gentleman said to Dick. "You never did care much about the little place."

"Oh! I assure you, I would be delighted to see it all," Dick answered, eagerly; but Mary had noticed the constraint in her grandfather's voice whenever he addressed the supposed Charles, and said quickly:

"Oh! we don't want you, you don't know a rose from a sunflower; pick up a book and read till we come back."

"This way, dear; have you forgotten?" Dr. Heremore said, looking at her in a perplexed manner as naturally enough she turned away from the house. "This way, dear, you lose the whole effect if you go around. Come through the house. There, dear old Mary," he added, smilingly handing her a glass of wine which he poured out from a decanter on the sideboard in the dining room. "Drink to 'The Elms' and no more jokes upon old hearts."

"To our happy meeting and no more parting," added Mary, drinking her wine with him. He poured out a glass for Dick, or Charles, as he thought him, and, rather formally, carried it to him It was very clear that "Charles" was no favorite.

All through the trim garden, and then through the whole house, Mary followed her grandfather, her heart, as it may be believed, full of love for the tender father of her lost mother. She stood in the room which that mother had occupied, and could not speak a word as she gazed reverently around. It was a thorough New England bedroom—a high mahogany bedstead, a long narrow looking-glass with a landscape painted on the upper part, in a gilt frame, a great chintz-covered arm-chair by the bed, a round mahogany table, with a red cover and a Bible, a stiff, long-legged washstand in the corner, a prim chest of drawers under the looking-glass between the windows, composed the furniture of the room; a badly painted picture of a young girl in the dress of a shepherdess, and a pair of vases on the mantel, were the only ornaments; a crimson carpet and white window-curtains were plainly of a later date than the furniture.

"I have had to alter some things," said Dr. Heremore, as they came out of the room, "but I got them as much like the old ones as I could, that you might feel at home here. Your baggage should be here by this time, should it not? How did you send it?" "We left it at the station," answered Mary. "You know we were not sure—not certain sure that we should find you."

"I suppose not, I suppose not. These have been long years, Mary, but they have not changed us, after all. But I must send for your trunks. I suppose Charles has the checks."

"We brought but very little with us," Mary said, considerably embarrassed, and, seeing the change in his countenance, she hastened to add, "But now that it is all right and we have found the way, we will stay with you until you turn us out; at least, I will."

"Then you will send for more things, and how about the children?" with the same perplexed look at her. Mary knew not what to say. Was it not better to tell him the real truth at once? How could she go on with this deception, as innocent as any deception can be, and yet how break down his joy in its very midst? Silently she stood beside him, at a hall window, looking upon the prospect he had pointed out to her, considering what answer to make him. He, too, was silent; for a long time the two stood there, and then it was the doctor who spoke first.

"Mary, your children must be men and women now. I had forgotten how long it was; but I remember you were here last the year the meeting-house over there was put up, and I just was thinking that was over twenty years ago. Richard was a few months old, then. Mary, don't deceive me. Tell me the truth."

It was a great blow to him, but something had been hovering confusedly before his mind ever since they came out together, and now it was clear. He turned abruptly away from her at the first shock, then came to her more kindly than ever. "Forgive me, dear," he apologized with mournful courtesy; "I did not mean to be rude, but it is a great shock. You are very like her, very like her, but I should have known at once that those years could not have left her a girl like you. I will not ask more—your mother—"

"My father is living," Mary said, with tears streaming down her face, as he stopped, "and that is my brother down-stairs."

"We are your only grandchildren," she answered; and he understood that his child was dead, and another woman had filled her place.

"You are a noble girl," he said, with lingering tenderness in every word. "We will go down now. I will greet Richard, and then, dear, you will let me be alone for a little while. I shall have to send for your things, you know."

They went down, and he greeted Richard, then went away slowly, still begging them to excuse him for the inattention to them. Soon after, a barefooted boy of twelve or fourteen or so went whistling down the road past the house, staring at them as he went by; an hour after, the same boy returned with their bags; these were taken up-stairs by a thin, severe-looking, very neatly-dressed woman, who quickly and with only a word or two showed them their rooms, and told them that, as soon as they were dressed, tea would be ready.

Mary dressed in her mother's room with a sense of that mother's spirit around her. She fortunately had brought a dress with her, so that she was able to make a slight change. Then slowly and with great reverence she went down the stairs, meeting Dick in the hall, to whom she whispered, "O Dick! how I love him; but I am afraid it will kill him; the purpose for which he has lived these twenty years is taken from him. Can we give him another?"

"It may be that you can," Dick replied, looking tenderly into her sweet face, all aglow with the bright soul-life which had been kindled so actively in the last hours. "If you can, Mary, try it; do not think of anything else; stay with him, do anything you think right and good for him; he deserves more from us than—" Dick hesitated, not willing to speak unkindly of Mr. Brandon, who certainly had been a father to Mary—"than any other."

"I will try," Mary answered speaking quickly and in a low voice. "If it seems best that I should stay a little while, you will explain to papa? But perhaps, after all, it will be you who will be able to replace her best."

"We shall see," Dick said, and then Dr. Heremore was seen coming toward them, with less lightness in his step than they had noticed before; otherwise there was but little change, except that his voice was more mournfully tender than at first.

"It is a long time since I saw that place filled," he said, arranging a chair for Mary before the tea-urn. "And it is very sweet to me to see your bright young face before me; a long time since I have had so strong an arm to help me," he added, as Dick eagerly offered him some little assistance, "and I am very grateful for it."

There were no explanations that night; he talked to Dick and Mary as to very dear and honored guests, of everything likely to interest them, and was won by their eager attention to tell them many little things about his house and grounds, which were his evident pride and pleasure, all in the same subdued, courteous way that had attracted them from the first. There seemed, in the beginning, a far greater sympathy between Mary and him than he had with Dick, which was the reason, undoubtedly, why he devoted his attention more especially to his grandson, whose modest replies, given with a heightened color and an evident desire to please, were very winningly made.

"I have two noble grandchildren," he said to them as they stood up to say good-night. "My daughter, short as her life was, did not come into the world for a small purpose; she did not live for little good; she has sent me two to love and esteem, and to win some love from them, I trust—yes, I believe."

The next day, he set apart a time and then there were full explanations from both sides. Dick's story we know already. Dr. Heremore's can be told in a few words. His daughter married, when very young and on a short acquaintance, a gentleman who was spending his summer holidays in the vicinity of Wiltshire, and, immediately upon her marriage, had gone to N—— to reside; they remained there until Richard was a month old, when his daughter made him a long—her last—visit; from there to New York, whence a letter or two was all that came for some little time; then one written evidently in great depression of spirits. Dr. Heremore, on receipt of this, went at once to New York to see her, only to hear that she had gone with her husband to Europe. A little further inquiry proved to his satisfaction that Mr. Brandon was in the South, and that his wife was not with him; his letters were unanswered, and his alarm was every day greater and more painful. At last, he followed a lady—described to be somewhat of his daughter's appearance, bearing the same name, who had joined a theatrical company, though of this last he was not aware for a long time—to Europe. As he had said before, he came back disappointed but not despairing, to hear of Mr. Brandon's death—the same false report, perhaps intentionally circulated, which his daughter had heard. Her letters to him, of which she spoke in her letter to Dick, were lost while he was away searching for her. He had not been rich, then; but coming home, he had resumed his practice, and lived patiently awaiting news of her, energetically laboring to secure a small fortune for her should she ever come to claim it. This little fortune he would divide at once, he said, between her two children; for "what," he argued with them, "what is the use of hoarding it to give to you later when, I trust, you will not need it half as much? A few hundreds in early youth are often worth as many thousands in after-years."

"That will do for Dick," Mary conceded, "because it would be a great thing for him to have a little start just now; and besides, there's Somebody Else for him to think of; but I will take my share in staying here. You will not drive me away?"

"Papa would—it's a shabby thing to say—be very willing to have me away, in his present circumstances. He has been wishing and wishing for Fred and Joe constantly ever since they went; but for me—he thinks girls are a sort of nuisance, I know he does; and will be very grateful to you if you divide the burden with him."

"But if—just as I got used to loving you, there should be another Somebody Else besides Dick's? How about this out of civilization place, then?"

Mary grew very red indeed, but answered readily, "Oh! that's a long way off; and besides, he may not think this out of civilization, you know."

So it was settled. One of the clerks who had been from early boyhood in Ames and Narden's store had been long intending to start out on his own account, and Dick was very sure that they could fulfill their olden dream of partnership, now that Dr. Heremore was willing to give them a start. Dick went down to New York the day after this conversation, and there was a long talk between the members of the firm, and the two clerks, which culminated in a dinner and the agreement that all was to go on as it had been going, until the first of May, when there would be a new bookseller's firm in the New York Directory, to wit, BARNES AND HEREMORE.

After a brief conversation with Mr. Brandon, Dick hurried to Carlton, and was not long making his way to the shadowy lane. To her honor and glory be it said, Trot was the first to see him; and without waiting for a greeting, not even for the expected "dear 'ittle Titten," ran with all speed into the house, crying, "Thishter! Thishter! Mr. Dit ith toming!" at the top of her voice; and Rose, all blushing at being caught "just as she was," had no time to utter a word before "Mr. Dit," was beside her. There was great rejoicing over Dick; the children pulled him in every direction, to show him some new thing he had not yet seen, until he began to tell the story of his adventures, when they stood around in perfect silence. Mrs. Alaine and Mrs. Stoffs wiped their eyes between their smiles and their exclamations of delight; old Carl once held his pipe in one hand and forgot to fill it for nearly a minute, so absorbed was he; but Rose alone did not say a word of congratulation when Dick's good fortune and his brightened future were announced. I even think she had a good cry about it, after a little talk with Dick by herself, that evening, so hard it is to leave one's home.

"There's not a thing to wait for now," Dick had said, with beaming eyes; and poor Rose's ideas of "youth," and "time to get ready," and all that sort of remark, were put aside without the least consideration. "We will have a little house of our own," Dick continued, "we will not go to boarding, as some people do; you are too good a housekeeper for that, I am sure; and as New York has no houses for young people of moderate means, we will have a home of our own near the city. Shall we not, Rose?"

Dick was a very busy young man for a couple of months after this. One thing Dr. Heremore did that seemed hard, but not so very unnatural, and of which no one who has never felt a wrong to some one dearly loved should judge. He begged that he might never see Mr. Brandon, nor be asked to hold any communication with him. He gave Mary a certain sum of money, which he wished her to use for her father and step-brothers; but beyond that, he left Mr. Brandon to help himself.

After attending to all his grandfather's requests and suggestions, Dick, as he had been invited to do, returned to Wiltshire to give an account of his management, and to take up some things for Mary's use. He was on his way to the boat when he suddenly started and exclaimed, "Mr. Irving!" for no less a person than his "Sir Launcelot" was standing beside him. Mr. Irving, not recognizing him, bowed slightly and passed on, and Dick began to be relieved that Mary was so far away; perhaps, after all, it was a great deal better.

But another surprise was in store for Dick, who—an inexperienced traveller even yet, and always in advance of time—had gone on and waited long before the boat prepared to leave; for at the last moment a carriage drove rapidly to the pier, and a gentleman sprang from it in time to catch the boat. It was "Sir Launcelot."

"Mr. Heremore, I believe," he said to Dick, when they met somewhat later on the boat. "I called on Mr. Brandon to-day, just after you met me, to pay my respects to him on my return from Europe. I found him in a different business from that in which I had left him, and very reserved. I asked after the ladies of his family, who, he told me, were at your grandfather's and his father-in-law's, in Maine, adding that there was a long story, which I had better come to you to hear, if you had not already left. I have business in Maine, so followed you up."

So they made acquaintance; and the new-found relationship with Mary was explained, as also the reverses Mr. Brandon had met with.

"His wife dead, too, you tell me! How shocked he must have been at my questions of her! How like him not to give me a hint!" exclaimed Mr. Irving.

The new friendship progressed well, as it often will between two gentlemen, one of whom is in love with the other's sister, although there was a wide difference between their characters. Mr. Irving was many years older than Dick, as his finished manners and his manly presence attested, without the aid of a few gray hairs on his temples, not visible, and half a dozen or so in his heavy moustache, very visible and adding much to his good looks, in the eyes of most of the ladies who saw him. It seemed as natural to Dick that this travelled man, so polished, so princely as he was, should be just the one to please his high-bred sister, and he captivated by her, as that he himself should belong to Rose and she to him. Consequently he did not put on any of the airs in which brothers, especially when they are very young, delight to appear before their sister's admirers.

Dick had even tact enough, when they reached Dr. Heremore's house —for, of course, Mr. Irving's "business in Maine" did not interfere with his accompanying Dick to Wiltshire—to be, very busy with the carriage and trunks, while Mr. Irving opened the little gate, and announced himself to the young lady on the porch. When Dick, a few minutes after, greeted his sister, he had no need, though Mary's color did not come as readily as Rose's, to say with Sir Lavaine:

  "For fear our people call you lily maid,
   In earnest, let me bring your color back."

I think that Dr. Heremore, though the very soul of courtesy, looked rather sadly upon Mr. Irving; but he was not long left in any uncertainty in regard to that gentleman's wishes; for the very next day his story was told; how he had known and loved Mary from her very earliest girlhood, but that he was afraid of his greater age, and, anxious that she should not be influenced by their long acquaintance and the advantages his ripened years had given him over admirers more suited to her in age, he had gone to Europe, but lacked the courage to remain half the time he had allotted, and now was back, and—"

"And, ah! yes, I understand; I am to lose her," said her grandfather sadly. "I knew I could not keep her."

"Giving her to me will not be losing her. We talked about it last night, and we are both delighted with this place; and as I am bound to no especial spot, (Mr. Irving was an author,) and she loves none half so much as this, we can well pitch our tent here."

But when further acquaintance had enabled the man of "riper years" to take a place in Dr. Heremore's life which neither Mary nor Dick could fill, it was settled that the old house was large enough for the three; and as Mr. Irving was wealthy, healthy, and wise, the sun of Mary's happiness shone very brightly.

There's nothing more for me to say except that Dick went down to Carlton still once again, and that in its church there is a little altar of the Blessed Virgin, whereon Rose had the unspeakable delight—so precious to every pious heart—of laying a beautiful veil—Mary's gift to her "sweet little sister"—which Trot looks critically at every Sunday, and may be a little oftener, and puzzles her small head wondering if its delicate texture—the veil's—will stand the wear and tear of the years that must pass before she can replace it with hers; which always makes uncle Carl laugh. And Rose has persuaded Mary to dedicate her own in the same way, and Mary has laughingly complied, a little shame-faced, too, at her own secret pleasure in doing it, at the same time half wondering "what will come of it." Rose does not wonder; she thinks she knows.

As for Dick, there is every reason to believe that this coming Christmas there will be two or three glad hearts travelling around in company with two or three rough, ragged, shaggy boys; that he will carve his own Christmas turkey at his own, own table; and that there will be a couleur de Rose over all his future life.

Our Lady's Easter.

                   I.

  She knelt, expectant, through the night:
    For He had promised. In her face
    The pure soul beaming, full of grace,
  But sorrow-tranced—a frozen light.

  But, ere her eastward lattice caught
    The glimmer of the breaking day,
    No more in that sweet garden lay
  The buried picture of her thought.

  The sealed stone shut a void, and lo!
    The Mother and the Son had met!
    For her a day should never set
  Had burst upon the night of woe.

  In sudden glory stood He there,
    And gently raised her to his breast:
    And on his heart, in perfect rest,
  She poured her own—a voiceless prayer.

  Enough for her that he has died,
    And lives, to die again no more:
    The foe despoiled, the combat o'er,
  The Victor crowned and glorified.

{198}
                   II.

  What song of seraphim shall tell
    My joy to-day, my blissful queen?
    Yet truly not in vain, I ween,
  Our earthly alleluias swell.

  It is but just that we should thus
    Our Jesus' triumph share with thee.
    For us he died, to set us free.
  Thou owest him risen, then, to us.

  But thou, sweet Mother, grant us more
    Than here to join the festive strain:
    To hymn, but never know, our gain
  Were ten times loss for once before.

  Thy faithful children let us be.
    Entreat thy Son, that he may give
    The wisdom to our hearts to live
  In his, the risen life, with thee.

  For so, amid the onward years,
    This feast shall bring us strength renewed;
    To pass secure, o'er self subdued,
  To Easter in the sinless spheres.

Two Months In Spain During The Late Revolution.

To-day, while they are yet celebrating the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin, we enter Spain, that mysterious world behind the Pyrenees, so different from all others, and of which we know so little! To-day is also the anniversary of my birthday into the Catholic Church, and now it is my birthday into Catholic Spain! "La tierra de Maria Santisima."

Leaving Perpignan (in the Pyrénées Orientales) by diligence, we pass through a most tropical looking country, amidst hedges of aloe, and oleander, and pomegranates, (reminding one of Texas in the character of the soil, the productions, and even the houses;) we soon begin the ascent of the mountains; and, before it is quite dark, we are across the Pyrenees. By the light of a beautiful sunset we have some grand mountain views, and encounter a group of Spanish gypsies, dark, ragged, and dirty, but highly picturesque. All along these mountains are cork-trees of prodigious size, with black, twisted trunks, from which the bark has been stripped—their fantastic shapes taking the form of nuns or monks—great ghosts in the dim light. Perthus, on the other side the mountains, is the last French town; high above which towers the fortress of Bellegarde, built by Louis XIV. in 1679. Just outside this town we pass a granite pyramid, on which is written "Gallia." A fellow-passenger tells us we are on Spanish soil. All cry, "Viva España!" and we look out upon a solemn-looking soldier, who stands by a cantonnier, above which floats the red and yellow flag of Spain. La Junguera is the first Spanish town; and here is a rival fort to the towering French one so lately seen. Here our luggage is visited, and we have our first experience of Spanish courtesy. The gentlemen passengers all come to ask, "Will the ladies have fruit?" "Will they have wine?" And one of our party, wishing to give alms to a blind beggar, and asking change for a franc, one of the gentlemen gives her the money in coppers, and refuses to take the franc; which, it seems, is the Spanish custom.

At Figueras we eat our first Spanish supper; no inconsiderable meal, if we may judge by this one. First came the inevitable soup, (puchero;) then, boiled beef; next in course, cabbage and turnips, eaten with oil and vinegar, and the yellow sweet-pepper which is the accompaniment to everything, or may be eaten alone, as salad. The third course was stewed beef; next, fried fish, (fish, in Spain, never comes before the third course;) and now, stewed mushrooms; but, as they are stewed in oil, (and that none of the sweetest,) we pass them by. After this, lobster; then cold chicken and partridge; and now the delicious fruits of the country, and the toasted almonds which are universal at every meal, and cheese. Coffee and chocolate terminate this repast, for which we pay three and a half francs, and after which one might reasonably be expected to travel all night.

Gerona appeared with the early dawn; a curious old town of 14,000 inhabitants, on the river Oña, and looking not unlike Rome with its yellow river, its tall houses, and balconies. Both this town and Figueras have made themselves memorable in wars and sieges. Indeed, what Spanish town has not its tale of heroism and brave defence during the French invasion of 1809-11? These towns were both starved into capitulation, after sieges which lasted seven or eight months, the women loading and serving the guns during the siege, and taking the places of their fallen husbands or lovers, like the "Maid of Saragossa." We were glad to leave the diligence for the railway which runs by the lovely Mediterranean coast, passing many pretty towns with ruins of old Moorish fortresses and castles on the hills beyond. In one of these towns, Avengo de Mar, the dock-yards are very famous, and a naval school was here established by Charles III.

Mataro, a place of 16,000 people, seemed very busy and thriving. This, too, has its tale of siege and slaughter. The French have left behind them in Spain a legacy of hate. Of the ruins of a monastery near one of these towns a pretty story is told. Two Catalonian students passing by this beautiful site, one exclaimed, "What a charming situation this would be for a convent! When I am pope, I will build one here." "Then," said the other, "I will be a monk, and live in it." Years after, when the latter had become a monk, he was sent for to Rome, and being presented to the pope, (Nicholas V.,) recognized in him his old friend and companion, when in the act of receiving his blessing. The pope embraced him; reminded the monk of his promise; built the convent, in which, we presume, the latter lived and died. The beautiful convent was utterly destroyed in the civil wars of 1835, when the monks were all driven from Spain.

  "The sacred taper-lights are gone,
   Gray moss hath clad the altar stone,
   The holy image is o'erthrown,
     The bell hath ceased to toll.

  "The long-ribbed aisles are burnt and shrunk,
   The holy shrine to ruin sunk,
   Departed is the pious monk;
     God's blessing on his soul!"

How charming looks this gay, busy city, with its shady streets, beautiful gardens and fountains, the sea before it, the mountains behind, fortifications on every side, seemingly impregnable. Our hotel is on the "Rambla," a wide boulevard, like those of Paris, upon which most of the fine buildings are situated, and which is the principal promenade. In the evening, we go to one of the theatres, and hear a French opera beautifully sung.

The books tell us that Barcelona was founded by Hamilcar, the Carthaginian, B.C. 237. Cesar Augustus raised it to a Roman colony. Ataulfo, the first king of the Goths, chose it for his court. In 713, it fell into the hands of the Moors, who were expelled by Charlemagne in 801. From this time, it belonged to the Duchy of Aquitaine, and was governed by counts, until Charles the Bold made it an independent kingdom, to reward Count Wilfred el Velloso, who had aided him against the Normans. Count Raymond Berenguer IV. united Catalonia with Arragon, by marrying the heiress of that kingdom, from which time it was the rival of Genoa and Venice. It has always been the centre of revolutionary movement, restlessly endeavoring to regain its independence. The Catalans are industrious, bold, and enterprising. {201} Indeed, so much do they surpass the people of other parts of Spain in activity and enterprise, that they are called the Spanish Yankees, and Barcelona is termed the Manchester of Spain. Manufactories of cotton and silk; the most famous laces of Spain; a most flourishing trade, as well as fine schools and public libraries, are to be found here. They boast that the first experiment with steam for navigation purposes was made in Barcelona, the inventor having displayed his steamboat before Charles V. and Philip II., in 1543. Charles, being occupied in foreign conquests, took little notice of this, and, through fear of explosion, the discovery was abandoned, and the secret died with the inventor.

Barcelona has a very large French population. In the Calle Fernando, we see shops handsome as those of Paris. Already we find most tempting Spanish fans for a mere trifle; and at every turn the delicious chocolate is being made into cakes by machinery. There are many fine churches. The cathedral is a grand specimen of the Gothic Catalan of the thirteenth century—one of the most imposing churches we have seen in Europe. "Sober, elegant, harmonious, and simple," as some traveller describes it. The Moors converted the old cathedral of their Gothic predecessors into a mosque. James II., "el conquistador," one of the greatest of the Catalan heroes, commenced this in 1293. The cloisters are very interesting; have a pretty court, with orange-trees and flowers, and a curious old fountain of a knight on horseback; the water flowing from the knight's head, his toes, and from the tail and mouth of the horse. In the crypt is the body of St. Eulalia, the patron saint of Barcelona; removed from St. Maria del Mar, where it had been kept since the year 878. Before this shrine Francis I. heard mass, when a prisoner in Spain, after the battle of Pavia. In the choir, over each finely sculptured stall, is painted the shield of each of the knights of the Golden Fleece. Here was held a "chapter," or general assembly, presided over by Charles V., March 5th, 1519. Charles, then only king of Spain, occupied a throne on one side hung with damask and gold; opposite was the empty throne of Maximilian, first emperor of Germany, (his grandfather,) hung in black. Around the king were assembled Christian, King of Denmark; Sigismund, King of Poland; the Prince of Orange, the Dukes of Alba, Friaz, Cruz, and the flower of the nobility of Spain and Flanders.

There are some curious old monuments in the church, and a crucifix called "Cristo de Lepanto," which was carried on the prow of the flagship of Don John, of Austria, in the battle of Lepanto. The figure—of life size—is all inclined to one side; and the faithful of that day assure us that the sacred image turned itself aside, to avoid the Moslem bullets which were aimed at it. Certain, it was never struck.

While in the church, we see a funeral mass, which is peculiar in some of its ceremonies, and very solemn in the dim religious cathedral light, where every kneeling figure, with its black mantilla, seems to be a mourner. After the credo, little tapers are distributed, and, at a certain part of the mass, are lighted. The priest comes to the foot of the altar. Each person, bearing a lighted taper, goes forward in procession, the men on one side, the women on the other. Each one kisses the cross upon the stole of the priest, as if in submission to the will of God. The candles are extinguished, and deposited in a plate.

Walking on the Rambla this evening, we hear a drum, and, following the crowd, witness the performance of a Spanish mountebank, whose sayings must have been very witty, to judge by the plaudits of the crowd. He had a learned dog, which so far surpassed all the dogs we had ever seen that I am persuaded he was cleverer than his master.

A rainy day. But we take a long walk through the crooked, narrow streets; going into the Calle de la Plateria (the street of the jewellers) to see the curious long filagree earrings worn by the peasants. We are as much objects of curiosity to these people, as they are to us, (bonnets and parasols being rarely seen in Spain.) An old man, touched my blue veil, yesterday, asking, "Queste paese?" and when I told him we were "Americanos," he rejoined, "Me speak England; me like Americanos." Even the poorest people here are courteous and respectful; and their language seems to have borrowed so much that is flowery and poetic from their Arab progenitors, that it would seem exaggerated and insincere, were it not accompanied by a grave and earnest manner as well as gesticulation. We ask a beggar the way to a certain street. He accompanies us all the way, declines any remuneration, and at parting says, "Go, and may God go with you!" A policeman, seeing us endeavor to enter the Plaza Real, to look at the monument to the king, opens the gate, though the public are not admitted. We thank him for making an exception in our favor; and upon going out, he bids us "Adios," adding,' "May your beauty never be less." At the table d'hote, every Spaniard bows as we enter, and all rise when we leave the table. In the centre of the table is a pyramid of cigars and matches most fantastically arranged; and it is the custom for gentlemen to smoke at every meal! We visit St. Maria del Mar, a church considered by many to be superior to the cathedral, architecturally. It was built in 1329, on the site of a former church, erected to contain the body of St. Eulalia. The arched roof is of immense height; the main altar of black and yellow marble. The church is hung with many pictures by Spanish artists, and has the usual amount of stucco and gilding for which Spanish churches have been remarkable since the days of Columbus, when gold was so plentiful with them.

We hear mass in the little Gothic church of St. Monica, hard by, and go afterward to the cathedral, which is even more impressive upon a second view. Several baptisms are going on, and the very babies are dressed in mantillas—the white mantillas worn by the lower classes, which are very pretty. White silk, trimmed with white lace, or of the lace alone; the silk, which is a long strip, is pinned to the hair on top of the head, and the lace falls over the face, or is folded back. Young ladies wear them of black lace, in the street or for visits; silk, for the churches; and these with the never-failing accompaniment of the fan, belong to all alike; rich and poor, old and young. The fan serves as parasol, and strange to say, that, with this alone to shelter them from the sun, these women should be so beautifully fair; and in Valencia they are famed for their white complexions! Surely the sun in Spain is kinder than in America, for freckles and sun-burn are never seen.

The men wear a red or purple cap, which they call "gorro;" a sort of bag which hangs down behind, or at the side, or is more generally folded flat across the forehead; a red or purple sash, (faja;) a short jacket; sandals (espardinya) of hemp or straw, tied with strings. We drive through the streets, and find most of the shops closed, (Sunday;) and see through the open doors that every house, even the very poorest, looks nice and clean.

In the evening, we drive upon the Prado del Gracia, which terminates in the little town of Gracia, where are pretty villas, and stop at a convent for the evening service. It is of this very convent that they tell how, in the Moorish invasion of Al Mansour, when his soldiers were recruiting for the harems of the Balearic Islands, (Minorca and Majorca,) the poor nuns, thinking to avoid so horrible a fate, heroically cut off their noses to disfigure themselves; but it did not avail to save them; for history records that they were carried off, in spite of their noses, or, rather, in spite of the want of them.

Barceloneta is a suburb where live the fishermen, and where we find docks crowded with shipping. From this we have a fine view of the Fort Montuich, built upon a high rock. There is also a citadel near the sea, and a beautiful promenade upon the walls, (Muralea del Mar.) And amongst the public buildings is a university, said to be the finest in Spain; many hospitals and charitable institutions, and a theatre (the Lycée) which they claim to be larger than San Carlo, in Naples, the Scala, in Milan, or even the new-opera house in Paris. Barcelona is the birthplace of Balmes, the author of that great work, Protestantism and Catholicity compared in their Influence upon Civilization.

Yesterday, at six in the morning, we leave Barcelona for "the City of the Cid," arriving at ten o'clock at night; a long, fatiguing, but interesting day. The railway runs by the blue Mediterranean, with stern, bleak mountains close on the other side; or through vineyards, and fig and olive groves, with which are mingled peaches, apples, and quinces, showing that all varieties of fruits meet together in this favored clime. In passing Martorell, the third or fourth station from Barcelona, we have a fine view of Montserrat; a picturesque, jagged mountain 1000 feet high, where is a monastery, one of the most celebrated pilgrimages in Spain. On the opposite side is a famous old Roman bridge (over the Llobregat river) called "del Diablo," built in 531 B.C., by Hannibal, in honor of Hamilcar. At one end is a triumphal arch. Here the views are particularly fine.

Villafranca comes next, the earliest Carthaginian colony in Catalonia, founded by Hamilcar. Next we see Terragona, an ancient city, on a steep and craggy eminence, founded by the Scipios. It was long the seat of the Roman government in Spain; now famous for its fine wines.

Here the costume of the peasants begins to look more eastern. The full, short linen pantaloons, (on each leg a petticoat;) a red handkerchief, worn as a turban; sometimes leather leggings, but more frequently legs red from the wine-press, where they have been treading out the grape-juice. The peasants are simple and friendly, and, seeing few strangers, look upon them as guests, and seem never disposed to speculate upon our ignorance of the prices of things. One of our party offered to pay for a tempting bunch of grapes which we saw in a man's basket, who pressed to look at us in one of the stations. With difficulty he was prevailed upon to take a real, (five cents.) He then offered more, which we in turn declined. {204} Waiting till the train moved off, he sprang forward, and dropped into my lap a bunch which must have weighed several pounds, and I looked back to see him smiling most triumphantly. At another station (a poor place in the mountains) a modest, clean-looking woman came forward with glasses of water. No one paid anything for drinking it. But when she came to our carriage, one of the party gave her two reals, (ten cents in silver.) The poor thing shook her head sadly, saying, "No tengo cambia." (But I have no change.) When she was made to comprehend that she was to keep it all, her face glowed with delighted surprise; and as we moved off, we saw her showing the money to all around her. No doubt she took my friend for the queen herself!

At Tortosa, on the Ebro, we begin to see the palm-trees. And here we enter the province of Valencia, the brightest jewel in the crown of Spain. The Moors placed here their paradise, and under their rule it became the garden of Spain. From them the Cid rescued it in 1094, and here he governed like a king, and died here in 1099. It was then annexed to Castile and Arragon. It is a fortified town, about three miles from the sea; and with its narrow streets, tall houses, balconies, with curtains and blinds hanging outside into the street, looks perennially southern and Spanish. We come up from the station in a "tartana," a vehicle peculiar to Valencia, a sort of omnibus on two wheels, made to hold six persons; without springs, and with one horse. The driver sits on the shaft, with his legs dangling down, or supported by a strap. This vehicle jolts horribly, but is very cheap and convenient.

To-day we first see the museum, in which are many pictures of Spanish artists, both ancient and modern—two of Spagnoletto, and several of Ribalta and Juanes—two Valencian artists of whom they are very proud. The last is especially famed for his beautiful pictures of our Lord. We saw here the ancient altar used by James the Conqueror, "Don Jaime," as he is called—the great hero of Catalonia, son of Pedro I. He was one of the first sovereigns who established standing armies in Europe. Amongst other wise institutions, the municipal body of Barcelona was his work. He died in Valencia, 1276, on his way to the monastery of Poblet to become a monk, confiding his goodly sword, "La Tizona," to his son Don Pedro, in whose favor he had abdicated that year.

In this museum are many remains of the ancient Saguntum, (now called Murviedro,) which is but a few miles from Valencia, and a model of its old Roman theatre. In the court of the building are some palm-trees three hundred years old.

We next visit an ancient church of the Jesuits to see one of Murillo's "Immaculate Conceptions," which is very beautiful. Then the "Audiencia," an ancient building of the sixteenth century, where are the courts of justice and other courts. Here is some wonderful old carving, and curious portraits of Inquisitors; civil, on one side, ecclesiastical on the other. We were glad to see that the former greatly outnumbered the latter. After this, we go to one of the finest hospitals in the world; with marble floors, and pillars supporting a lofty ceiling; the great windows opening into gardens of orange, and myrtle, and jessamine; all clean, fresh, and cool; with an altar so placed in the centre, under a lofty dome, that every patient could see and hear the divine office. The whole building was alike well arranged; the kitchen large and convenient, and the dispensary grand. {205} Certainly, in all our experience—and we have visited hospitals everywhere—we have seen nothing so inviting, so really elegant, as this. Here we meet the two loveliest women we have seen in Spain; both sisters of charity; one having charge of the dispensary, and the other of the foundling institution connected with the hospital. Such white complexions; lovely color; such eyes, and eyelashes, and teeth! Specimens of the beauty of Valencia. And such charming groups of children as we saw amongst these unhappy disowned ones! Unconscious of their fate, they played merrily in the cool court, till, seeing strangers, many ran to hide their beautiful eyes behind the sister's apron. The school-room would have done honor to the most "enlightened nation," which might here take a lesson from "benighted Spain." Great placards hold the "A B C." Slates hang in order by the little benches against the wall; pictures of beasts and birds, for natural history; maps, for geography; drawings, for mathematics; balls strung on wires, for counting; large books filled with colored engravings of Bible history, from the birth of Adam to the end of the Apocalypse. And such neatness and order! There is one department for the little ones whose mothers leave them each morning, when they go out to work, returning for them at night. Their tiny baskets hung in a row. Some, who were quite babies, were being greatly petted, because it was their first day away from the mother.

While in the school-room, one of the party began examining a large map of Spain with reference to our projected route. The sister seeing this, lowered the map by a cord, and calling a little fellow of five years, he pointed out the oceans by which Spain is surrounded, named the rivers and mountains, the provinces of Spain, and the principal towns; never once making a blunder, though he often paused to recollect himself.

We drive to see the queen's garden, where is every tropical tree and flower. This, with other gardens, borders upon the Alameda, a broad, shady promenade extending three miles to the sea. There is another promenade called the "Glorieta," where the band plays every morning from nine to eleven. We see, also, the Plaza de Toros, (the arena for the bull-fights,) one of the finest in Spain, capable of holding twenty thousand people; built so exactly like a Roman amphitheatre that we feel as if we looked upon the Colosseum in the days of its glory. It is evident that these people inherit the love of this their national pastime from their Roman ancestors. Happily, the fashion is dying out. In Valencia, the bull-fights occur but once or twice a year. They are now making preparations for a three days' "funcion," to begin on the 24th. We saw the poor horses doomed to death. Forty a day is the average number. The men are rarely killed, but often badly hurt.

This morning we go to the markets to see the wonderful display of fruits for which Valencia is so famous. Never were such grapes and peaches, melons and figs, oranges and lemons, apples and pears, the last as fine as could be seen in all New England; the nuts and vegetables equally good. Potatoes, and tomatoes, and peppers, of mammoth size, and even the Indian corn and rice as good as those of America. But even the Spanish gravity is here upset at sight of our round hats, short veils, and parasols. {206} The women hold their their sides with laughter, and we are driven to resolve upon wearing mantillas and fans, which fashion we soon after, in self-defence, adopt. We go to the shops to buy fans, which are a specialty of Valencia, as are also the beautiful striped blankets, (mantas,) which are as indispensable to a Valencian as the fan is to the Valencienne; and is at once his cloak, his bag, his bed, his coverlet, and his towel. They say of a Valencian, that he has two uses for a watermelon—to eat his dinner, and make his toilette. After eating the melon, he washes his face with the rind, and wipes upon his manta. They wear it slung gracefully over the left shoulder, or over both shoulders, the ends falling behind; and over the head-handkerchief is often worn the pointed hat of Philip II.'s time, with wide, turned-up brim.

To-day we visit the cathedral and San Juanes. Like most of the great churches of Spain, the cathedral occupies the site of a Roman temple. This, made into a church by the Goths, was changed to a mosque by the Arabs, and now (since 1240) it is again a Christian church. Some of the doors, and many of the ornaments, are Moorish. The gratings—of brass—are very handsome; as are the altars and screen, of marble and alabaster. This last is most abundant in Spain. A palace opposite to our hotel (that of the Marquis de los Aguas) is beautifully adorned on the outside with statues, and vases, and flowers of alabaster in relievo.

All these Spanish churches are much ornamented with stucco and gilding, according to the taste of the time in which they were built. The cathedral has some good pictures in the sacristy; and within the sanctuary hang the spurs of Don Jaime upon his shield. His body is in one of the chapels.

In an old chapter-house we were shown some great chains taken from the Moors, and a series of portraits of all the archbishops of Valencia; and so much is it the habit to gesticulate in this country, that even these dignitaries, instead of being painted in ecclesiastical attitudes, have their fingers in every imaginable position. One must know their expressive language to read what each of these worthies may be saying.

After some shopping, we go to call upon the present archbishop, a graceful and dignified person, who received us most kindly, and presented us each a chapelette and scapular. He has a grand old palace, very plainly furnished; a pretty chapel; and, in a fine old hall, with groined roof, were portraits of his predecessors from the sixth century to the present day.

We have a visit from the English consul, to whom we brought letters. He is very kind and friendly, and full of offers of service. The Spanish sun seems to have warmed the English heart, which seldom gives out so much, save in its own foggy island. He sends us some fine wine, which, with some iced orgeat, secures us a merry evening.

This morning we hear mass in the Church of the Patriarch, into which no woman may enter without being veiled. Then we visit the house in which St. Vincent Ferrer, the patron of Valencia, was born, and where is a fountain greatly esteemed for its miraculous powers.

While at breakfast, a young man enters, whom we take for a Spaniard, but who proves to be an American, and from Maine! He has lived in Cuba, however, and it turns out that his father is a friend of the Spanish ladies with whom we are travelling. {207} He gives a pleasant account of his travels in the north of Spain; tells of the wonders of Burgos; of the railway between that and Miranda, which shows such extraordinary engineering skill; and of the fine scenery through which he has passed. Yesterday, on the mountains, he saw three sunsets; or rather, saw the sun set three times, in descending from range to range.

It is delightful to meet an American who, instead of complaining of the discomforts of travelling in Spain, as most of our people do, sees only what is pleasant. For ourselves, we have been most fortunate; good hotels, most obliging people, and, so far from being extortionate, (as we were told to expect,) we find Spanish hotels cheaper than those of any other part of Europe. To-day we eat the "pollo con arroz," one of the national dishes, (rice with chicken and saffron,) and find it very good.

"Connected with Valencia, are several of the old Spanish romances about the Cid—he who in all his battles, and on occasions when he was misjudged, remained true to his God, his people, and himself; he who, in his own time, took rank with the monarchs of Spain, and down to our own time is the pride of the country which he was mainly instrumental in rescuing from the infidels. As a conqueror he entered Valencia, and here lived with his noble and heroic wife, Zimena, and his daughters, Doña Sol and Doña Elvira; and here he died in 1099. Here stood around his bed of death all who were dear to him. Even his very warhorse, Babieca, was ordered to be called thither. In song, it is said that the horse stood like a lamb, and gazed with his large eyes upon his master, who could no more speak than the poor horse himself. … Through the streets of Valencia passed at night the extraordinary cavalcade to San Peder de Cordoña, which the departed chief had desired should be his burial-place. The victorious colors of the Cid were carried in front. Four hundred knights protected them. Then came the corpse. Upright upon his war-horse sat the dead; arrayed in his armor with his shield and his helmet, his long white beard flowing down to his breast.

"Gil Diaz and Bishop Jeronymo escorted the body on either side; then followed Doña Zimena with three hundred noblemen. The gate of Valencia toward Castile was opened, and the procession passed silently and slowly out into the open fields, where the Moorish army was encamped. A dark Moorish woman shot at them a poisoned arrow, but she and a hundred of her sisters paid the forfeit of their lives for that deed. Thirty-six Moorish princes were in the camp; but terror seized upon them when they beheld the dead hero on his white charger.

    'And to their vessels they took flight,
     And many   sprang into the waves.
     Two thousand, certainly, that night
     Amid the billows found their graves.'

"And the Cid Campeador thus won, after he was dead, good tents, gold and silver; and the poorest in Valencia became rich. So says the old 'Song of the Cid in Valencia.'

After a long night journey, (by rail,) we reach a hotel rivalling the cleanness and comfort of the genuine Swiss hotel, and find ourselves in the ancient capital of the Moorish empire, and in that lovely, bright Andalusia, so famed throughout the world.

From the time we leave Valencia until we reach Jativa, (about fifty miles,) we pass over the "Huerta" (the "garden") of Valencia, one continuous plain of verdure; pastures which are cut from twelve to seventeen times a year. Golden oranges, and other fruits hang above these green fields; and dates, and figs, and peaches, and pears, and quinces, pomegranates, plums, apples, melons, and grapes, and olives, with Indian corn, rice, and every vegetable in equal perfection. Well might the Moors term this plain (with Andalusia) "the Paradise of the East." For centuries after their expulsion, their poets still sang verses expressive of their grief for its loss, and it is said they still mention it in their evening prayers, and supplicate Heaven to restore it to them.

And this fertility is all their work. Every stream has been turned from its channel into numberless little canals, which water this luxurious soil; and these are arranged with such skill and care that crop after crop has its share of irrigation, and in its just proportion. From Jativa the country becomes more mountainous. We pass the ruins of an old chateau on a high hill, (Montesa,) seat of an ancient order of chivalry which existed after the suppression of the Templars. We next pass Almanzar, Chinchilla, Albacete, where they sell the famous "Toledo blades," now hardly so famous. Here we are in La Mancha, and when we stop in Alcazar at midnight, we are near the village of Troboso, which Cervantes makes the dwelling of Don Quixote's Dulcinea. Alcazar is claimed as the birth-place of Cervantes.

Here we leave our road for the grand route between Madrid and Cordova; and here we are crowded into carriages with other ladies, a fate from which we have hitherto been defended; each conductor treating us as if we had been especially committed to his care, and sparing us all annoyance. Fortunately, at Manzanares two of these ladies leave us, and we make acquaintance with the third, who is very kind and polite; offers us a share of her luncheon, and gives us much information of people and things in Spain. She is a Portuguese, and tells us how much larger and finer are the olive-trees in her country than in Spain; she remembers one tree which eight men could not clasp. From her we hear much of the queen as from an unprejudiced source, and learn, what we gathered afterward from many credible sources, that this poor queen is a good woman, a very pious woman, full of talents and accomplishments, generous to a fault, with strong feelings and affections, which induce her to reward to excess those whom she loves or who have served her; and this has given rise to the injurious reports which have found their way to every foreign newspaper, but which no good people in Spain believe.

From Andujar the country is very uninteresting, more of a grazing country, where we see immense herds of cattle, sheep, horses, and goats, with picturesque shepherds minding them. The men wear short trousers, opened several inches at the ankle, showing the untanned leathern buskin, (as is seen in the old pictures of Philip II.'s time,) a red sash, and the black hat turned up all around. Presently we come upon the Guadalquivir, upon which Cordova is situated, and which is crossed here by a bridge of black marble. We drive up the cool, shady streets, catching glimpses, through open doors and curtains, of the little paradise within—the marble courts, with fountain, and orange-trees, and flowers, and vines—a vestige of the old Moorish time. In fact, everything here so preserves its Arabic character that one is transported six centuries back, into the palmy days of the Kalifs, when this city was said to have contained half a million of inhabitants, 200,000 houses, 60,000 palaces, 700 mosques, 900 baths, 50 hospitals, and a public library of 600,000 volumes. Of all these glories only the mosque remains to show by its magnificence that these accounts cannot be exaggerated.

We hasten to see the mosque, (the cathedral now,) and, entering a low door-way in the wall which surrounds it, you find yourself in a beautiful oriental court, with fountains, and rows of tall palms, and ancient orange trees and cypress. This is called "the court of ranges." Open colonnades surround the court on all sides save one, from which twenty doors once opened into the mosque; only one of these is now open. Enter this, and you find yourself in a forest of pillars—a thousand are yet left—of every hue and shade, no two alike, of jasper, and verde antique, and porphyry, and alabaster, and every colored marble, fluted, and spiral; and over these, rises arch upon arch overlapping each other. These divide the mosque into twenty-nine aisles from north to south, and nineteen from west to east; intersecting each other in the most harmonious and beautiful manner. The Moors brought these pillars from the ancient temples of Rome, and Nismes, and Carthage. The mosque was built in the eighth century, by Abd El Rahman, who aimed to make it rival those of Damascus and Bagdad. It is said he worked upon it an hour every day with his own hand, and it is certain that it ranked in sanctity with the "Caaba" of Mecca, and the great mosque of Jerusalem. Ten thousand lamps illuminated it at the hour of prayer; the roof was made of arbor vitae, which is considered imperishable, and was burnished with gold. The chapel, where is the holy of holies—where was kept the Koran—gives one an idea of what the ornaments of the whole must have been. Here the carvings are of the most exquisite fineness, like patterns of lace; the gold enamel, the beautiful mosaics, are as bright as if made yesterday. In the holy of holies—a recess in this chapel—the roof is of one block of marble, carved in the form of a shell, supported by pillars of various-colored marble. Around this wall a path is worn in the marble pavement, by the knees of the faithful making the mystic "seven rounds;" and our guide tells us that, when a few years ago, the brother of the king of Morocco came here, he went round this holy of holies upon his knees, seven times, crying bitterly all the while. The chapel of the Kalifs is also remarkable, from the floor to the ceiling, the marble being carved in these beautiful and delicate patterns.

From the cathedral, we go to visit the old Roman bridge of sixteen arches, which spans the Guadalquivir. This looks upon some ruins of Moorish mills, and the orange-gardens of the Alcazar, (now in ruins,) once the palace of Roderick, the last of the Goths. As we pass the modern Alcazar, (used as a prison,) an old cavalry officer comes out of the government stables, and invites us to look at the horses—the silky-coated Andalusians of which we have heard so much, and the fleet-footed, graceful Arabians. Each horse had his name and pedigree on a shield over his stall. Returning to our hotel for breakfast, we go out again to see the markets and the shops; visit some churches, and the lovely promenade by the Guadalquivir. Our costumes excite great remark; one woman says to another, "They are masqueraders;" another lifts her hands and exclaims "Ave Maria;" and but for the intervention of our guide, who reproves their curiosity, we should be followed by a troop of children.

Coming to breakfast, we are charmed to find our young American friend whom we had left in Valencia; and, in spite of a pouring rain, we all set out to hear high mass in the cathedral. The mosque was consecrated, and made the cathedral, when the city was captured by St. Ferdinand in 1236. {210} Several chapels and altars were then added, and in 1521, the transept and choir were begun, to make room for which, eighty pillars were sacrificed. Charles V., who gave permission for this act of vandalism, was deeply mortified when he saw what had been done, and reproved the canons of the church, saying, they had destroyed what was unique in the world, to raise that which could be found anywhere.

While we are at mass, our young American arrives with the guide, to tell us that a revolution has broken out, and entreats us to return to the hotel. Some of the ladies are much alarmed; but my friend and myself, remembering that revolutions are chronic in Spanish countries, and are generally bloodless, we maintain our ground, too old soldiers to be driven from the field before a gun is fired; and the result justifies our faith.

Nobody quits the church. We have a solemn procession of the Blessed Sacrament after mass, winding through these beautiful aisles, accompanied by a band of wind instruments, the whole congregation following. We reach home to find our fellow-travellers very much frightened and annoyed at the prospect of a long detention; but we are assured that the worst which can befall us is a delay of a few days, to which we can well submit in this comfortable inn. Making acquaintance with our fellow-prisoners, we grow jolly over our misfortunes. The railways are all cut; General Prim and his colleagues (the exiled generals) are besieging Cadiz; and the queen has fled to Biarritz, to claim the intervention of the Emperor Napoleon. These are some of the rumors which are rife during the day. Hosts of red umbrellas parade the town—the most formidable weapon which we encounter; a few voices faintly cry "Libertad!" and "Viva!" some damp-looking soldiers pass by, with lances from which depend little red flags, looking limp and hopeless in the heavy rain. These troops declare for the people. We ask one of these what they want; the answer is, "Liberty." (Of course.) "And what is that?" "We want a King. We will not be governed by a woman." Inflammatory hand-bills are distributed amongst the crowd, very vague in their demands, "an empty throne" being the first requisite on the list.

One man is killed, (a fine young officer of the queen's troops mercilessly shot down,) and another man is wounded. In the evening, we hear that the revolution is accomplished in Cordova; the insurrectionists have the city!

All is peaceful in appearance, and we go out to shop, to find some of the filagree jewelry for which Cordova is remarkable—an art retained from the time of the Moors. The rain drives us in, and we spend the day with music, books, and in conversation with our new friends—a Spanish lady of rank, who has come to Cordova about a lawsuit, and who shakes with fright, and goes about with a glass of water and a cup of vinegar to quiet her nerves; the poor lady neither eats nor sleeps. The others are of different calibre; a sturdy Scotch lady, and her companion, a sweet and charming German girl. "Who's afeard!"

We are roused by the sound of military music, and find that 5000 of the queen's troops are entering the city. Such. splendid-looking fellows! Such handsome officers! It is plain the city is taken in earnest now! The inconstant populace clamor and shout; all is enthusiasm; the report is, that the insurrectionists are fled to Seville; the roads are repaired, but we are not allowed to leave the city. {211} Still prisoners of war! Later in the day, we hear that the troops we saw this morning are those which had joined the insurgents at Seville. The queen's troops, commanded by the Marquis de Novaliches, are outside the town, fearing to be too few for those within, and waiting the turn of events. It is supposed there will be some compromise entered into; a convention patched up; and no fighting. The prime minister, Gonzales Bravo, has fled from Madrid, where all is anarchy. This man, who has been the author of all the oppressive measures, and all the banishments which have made the queen's government unpopular, now, in her hour of need leaves her to her fate, after cruelly deceiving her. When she feared the danger of revolution, he assured her she might leave the country without any anxiety; and she went to Biarritz in ignorance of the truth; thus giving her enemies the very opportunity they desired. Even now, (they say,) were she to return, and throw herself upon the generosity of the people, she would be received kindly; such is the loyalty of Spaniards to their monarchs. The influence of Bravo banished the Montpensiers, (the queen's sister and her husband, the son of Louis Philippe,) who were naturally her best friends, and to whom she had showed every kindness. He sent away many of her most popular generals; and now they return, with men and arms, and British and Prussian gold; the people sympathize with them, the troops join them; we hear from Cadiz, that there was a perfect ovation upon their landing.

To-day, we have a fine walk in a beautiful park, on one side of the city, from whence we have a charming view of the mountains; on one side, so grand and bold, with olive groves, and white country houses sparkling in the sunshine; on the other side, the hills are low, and their graceful, wavy outlines have the peculiar purple hue belonging to Spain, and form a striking contrast to the others. Between the two, lies the city, and the fertile plains about it. We lose our way in the tortuous streets, and spend the morning peeping into the beautiful patios, (courts,) which open to the heavens, or have sometimes a linen awning over them; with marble pavements, over which the cool fountains play; with orange-trees, and flowers, amongst which sofas, and chairs, and pictures are disposed; and around which often runs a marble corridor, with pillars and curtains, communicating with the other apartments. Here the family sit, and here take place the "tirtulias," the meetings for talk and music. A picture of one of these patios is thus charmingly translated from one of Fernan Caballero's beautiful tales by a late English traveller; and which any one who has been in Spain will recognize:

"The house was spacious, and scrupulously clean: on each side the door was a bench of stone. In the porch hung a little lamp before the image of our Lord in a niche over the entrance, according to the Catholic custom of putting all things under holy protection. In the middle was the 'patio,' a necessity to the Andalusian. And in the centre of this spacious court an enormous orange-tree raised its leafy head from its robust trunk. For an infinity of generations had this beautiful tree been a source of delight to the family. The women made tonic decoctions from its leaves; the daughters adorned themselves with its flowers; the boys cooled their blood with its fruits; the birds made their home in its boughs. The rooms opened out of the 'patio,' and borrowed their light from thence. {212} This 'patio' was the centre of all the 'home;' the place of gathering when the day's work was over. The orange-tree loaded the air with its heavy perfume, and the waters of the fountain fell in soft showers on the marble basin, fringed with the delicate maiden-hair fern. And the father, leaning against the tree, smoked his 'cigarro de papel;' and the mother sat at her work, while the little ones played at her feet, the eldest resting his head on a big dog, which lay stretched at full length on the cool marble slabs. All was still, and peaceful, and beautiful."

We close the day with a farewell visit to the cathedral. Surely it is the most wonderful building in the world. Even St. Peter's hardly fills one with greater astonishment. This is altogether unique; and its grace, and elegance, and harmony win one to love it. We lingered by the chapel of the holy of holies, finding beauties which we had not before seen, and bade farewell to it with deep regret; then wandered to the bridge over the Guadalquivir, and gazed upon the truly eastern prospect it reveals.

To-day, a great robber from the mountains, upon whose head a price had been fixed by the late government, comes boldly into town. The people cry, "Viva Pacheco!" In half an hour after, we hear he has been shot—the victim of private revenge.

Cordova is the birthplace of Lucan, the author of the Pharsalia; of the two Senecas; of many eminent Moslem poets and authors, and of the famous Gonzales de Cordova, "El Gran Capitan."

Pope Or People.

[Footnote 50: The Congregationalist and Boston Recorder, Boston, March 4th, 1869.]

We confess to having read with no little surprise an elaborate article in the Congregationalist and Boston Recorder entitled Pope or People. Had we met the article in a professedly Unitarian journal or periodical we should have thought little of it; but meeting it in the recognized organ of the so-called orthodox Congregationalists of Massachusetts, we have read it with no ordinary interest. It shows that the Protestant, especially the old Puritan mind of the country, is profoundly agitated with the church question under one of its most important aspects. He who reads with any attention the leading American sectarian journals can hardly fail to perceive that there is a growing distrust in the Protestant world of the Protestant rule of faith, and a growing conviction that the only alternative, as the journal before us expresses it, is either pope or people. Of course the journal in question has no clear apprehension of either of the alternatives it suggests, but it does see and feel the need of certainty in matters of religious belief, and is in pursuit of it. It says:

"One of our great men once declared that the thing most to be desired in this world, by an intelligent mind, is an unfaltering religious belief. In the sense in which he meant it, his remark is unquestionably true; and it explains the philosophy of much of the success of the Romish Church. Men do crave certainty in their conviction; such certainty demands infallibility on which to found itself, and the papal system offers the promise of just that infallibility. And thousands upon thousands of minds rest in that; and being able to receive it, it meets that innate and inextinguishable craving of the soul for stability under its feet, and gives them a great—though it be a fallacious—peace.

"But multitudes, and some even among the nominal adherents of the papacy, are not able so to receive that doctrine, and are consequently driven to seek for some other rock on which to found the house of their faith; too often with the result of building it on the sand, with its seductive security for fair weather, and its terrible and irremediable fall when the tempestuous night-time of death shall come. But for those who reject the pope and that certitude of conviction which he offers, what solid ground is there on which to stand secure?"

If the writer knew the Catholic religion better, he would know that the peace we find in believing is not "fallacious," for "we know in whom we believe and are certain;" but he does see that to an unfaltering religious belief infallibility of some sort is absolutely indispensable, and that the Catholic Church promises it; yet, unable or unwilling to accept the pope or the church, he looks around to see if he cannot find elsewhere some infallible authority in which one may confide, an immovable rock or some solid ground on which one may stand and feel that his footing is sure. Does he succeed? We think not. He finds an alternative indeed, but not an infallible authority, and he has proved very conclusively that outside of the church there is and can be no such authority for faith. He says:

"As we look at it, only two alternatives are possible in this matter of an infallible faith; either the conditions of it exist outside of the soul in some constituted and certified authority, or within the soul in the purest and loftiest exercise of its reason—and we use this word as including conscience—under the enlightenment of God's Spirit through his Word. If outside of the soul, in any central and constituted authority, then in the pope; for it may as well be in him as anybody, nobody else claims it, and he does. If inside the soul, then any pope is an impossibility and an insult, and God remits every man to those conditions of secure decision which he has established in his breast, and holds him responsible for a judgment and a life founded upon them. And this latter, precisely, is God's way with men. He never commands them to hang their faith on the pope or the bishop; but rather inquires—in that tone of asking which is equivalent to the highest form of injunction—'Why, (aph' heauton,) out of your own selves, do ye not judge what is right?' Even in that precept which many will be swift to quote against us in this connection,'Obey them that have the rule over you, and submit yourselves,' it is first true that these 'rulers,' as the context proves, are mere (hëgoumenön) leaders, and men of example who were already dead, with no flavor of potentiality therefore about them; whose 'faith' is to be imitated rather than whose commands are to be submitted to; and true, in the second place, that the entire appeal of the apostle is to the tribunal of the Hebrews' reason as the court of ultimate decision, inasmuch as he declares that for them to fail thus to follow the good example of the illustrious and holy dead who had walked before them in the heavenly way, would be 'unprofitable' for them; leaving the necessary inference that men are bound to do what is for their highest profit, and therefore bound to decide, in all solemnity, what will be for that profit, and, so deciding, by inevitable necessity, to assume in the last analysis the function of positive masterhood over themselves and their destiny."

The alternative here presented is not pope or people, but pope or no external authority for faith. But why, supposing the internal or subjective authority to be all that is here alleged, is the pope an impossibility or an insult? Why may there not be two witnesses, the one internal, the other external? Is the revelation of God less credible because confirmed by two witnesses, each worthy of credit? {214} The external and the internal do not necessarily exclude, and, if both are infallible, cannot exclude each other, or stand opposed one to the other. I do not deny or diminish the need or worth of reason by asserting the infallibility of the church, nor the importance and necessity of the infallible church by asserting the full power and freedom of reason. The Catholic asserts both, and has all the internal light and authority of reason that our Puritan doctor can pretend to, and has the infallible church in addition.

We may say the same when is added to "the purest and loftiest exercise of reason" the enlightenment of God's Spirit through his Word. This word, on the hypothesis, must be spoken inside of the soul, or else it is an authority outside of the soul, which the writer cannot admit. His rule of faith is reason and the interior illumination of the Holy Ghost. The Catholic rule by no means excludes this; it includes it, and adds to it the external word and the infallible authority of the church. Catholics assert the interior illumination and inspiration of the Holy Spirit as fully and as strenuously as the Puritan does or can. The authority inside the soul, be it more or be it less, does not exclude the external authority of the church, nor does the external authority of the church exclude the internal authority of reason and the Spirit. Catholicity asserts both, and interprets each by the authority of the other. Catholics have all the reason and all the interior "enlightenment of God's Spirit" that Protestants have, and lay as much stress on each, to say the least, as Protestants do or can.

The great mistake of non-catholics is in the supposition that the assertion of an external infallible authority necessarily excludes, or at least supersedes, reason and the interior illumination of the Spirit. This is false in logic, and, as every one who understands Catholic theology knows, is equally false in fact. There is a maxim accepted and insisted on by all Catholic theologians, that settles, in principle, the whole controversy; namely, gratia supponit naturam. Grace supposes nature, revelation supposes reason, and the external supposes the internal; and hence no Catholic holds that faith is or can be produced by the external authority of the church alone, though infallible, or without the grace of God, that illuminates the understanding and inspires the will. Hence our Lord says, "No man cometh to me, unless the Father draws him." In our controversies with Protestants we necessarily insist on the external authority, because that is what they deny; hence is produced an impression in many minds that we deny the internal, or make no account of it. Nothing can be more untrue or unjust, as any one may know who will make himself at all familiar with the writings of Catholic ascetics, or with the Catholic direction of souls.

But while we assert the internal we do not concede that it is alone sufficient. "Dearly beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits, whether they be of God," (I John iv. i.) Saints may mistake their own imaginations or enthusiasm for the inspirations of the Spirit, and even in their case it is necessary to try the spirit, and, in the very nature of the case, the trial must be by an external test or authority. The test of the internal by the internal is simply no test at all. {215} The beloved apostle in this same chapter of his first epistle gives two tests, the one doctrinal and the other apostolical: "By this is the Spirit of God known: every spirit that confesseth Jesus Christ to have come in the flesh is of God, and every spirit that dissolveth Jesus (by denying either his humanity or his divinity) is not of God." "We are of God. He that knoweth God heareth us; he that is not of God heareth us not; by this we know the spirit of truth, and the spirit of error." The internal, then, must be brought to the test of apostolic doctrine and of the apostolic communion or the apostolic authority, both of which are external, or outside of the soul. The assertion of the external does not supersede the internal, nor does the assertion of the internal supersede the necessity of the external infallible authority. The error of our Puritan journalist is in supposing that if the one is taken the other must be rejected; he should know that no one is obliged to choose between them, and that both, each in its proper place and function, may be and must be accepted. It is true, neither reason nor the inspiration of the Spirit can deceive or mislead, us; but we may be deceived as to what reason really dictates, and as to whether the internal phenomena really are interior inspirations of the Spirit; and therefore to the safety and certainty of our faith, even subjectively considered, the external infallible authority of the pope or church is indispensable.

This is evident enough of itself, and still more so from the article before us. The insufficiency of reason and the spiritual light, either in the writer or in us, appears in his understanding of the text of St. Paul, Hebrews xiii., which, as he cites it, reads, "Obey them that have rule over you, and submit yourselves;" but as we read it, "Obey your prelates and submit to them." Which of us has the true version of the words of the apostle? The Puritan interpreter says these prelates, or "these rulers," were mere leaders, and men of example, who were already dead, with no flavor of potentiality, (sic,) therefore, about them; and whose "faith" is to be imitated, rather than whose commands are to be submitted to. We are disposed to believe that they were not dead men, but living rulers placed by the Holy Ghost over the faithful, to whom the apostle commands them to submit; and we are confirmed in this view by the reason which the apostle assigns for his command: "For they watch as having to give an account of your souls, that they may do this with joy, not with grief." Which of us is right? The journalist tells us, moreover, that "the entire appeal of the apostle is to the tribunal of the Hebrews' reason as the court of ultimate decision." We hold that the apostle, from beginning to end, appeals to the revelation held by the Hebrews, and argues from that and the character of their sacrifices and the levitical priesthood, that both were types and figures of the real and everlasting priesthood of Christ and his one all-sufficient sacrifice. Christ having come in the end of the world, and offered himself once for all, the types and figures must give way to the reality they prefigured and announced. Therefore the Hebrews should accept Christ as the fulfilment of their law. He undoubtedly reasons, and reasons powerfully, but from revealed premises. Here we and the journalist are at odds; we cannot both be right: who shall decide between us? While we thus differ, supposing us equally able, learned, and honest, how can either find his cravings for certainty satisfied?

It is a very common prejudice among Protestants and rationalists that Catholics eschew reason, and assert only an external authority which operates only on the will. It seems to be forgotten that it was the reformers who denied reason, and set up the authority of the written Word against it. No one, as far as our knowledge extends, ever spoke more contemptuously of reason than did Doctor Martin Luther; and the old Puritan and Presbyterian ministers to whose preaching we listened in our boyhood were continually warning us to beware of the false and deceitful light of reason, which "dazzles but to blind." This was in accordance with the doctrine of total depravity with which the reformers started; man being clean gone in sin and totally corrupt in his nature, his reason, as well as his will, must be corrupt, turned against God and truth, and therefore worthy of no confidence. No doubt, Protestants have softened the harshness of many of the doctrines of the reformers, and in several respects have drawn nearer to what has always been the teaching of the church; but it is hardly fair in them to charge the errors of their ancestors, which they have outgrown or abandoned, upon the church which has always condemned them. The Bishop of Avranches, Pascal, the Traditionalists, and some others, commonly regarded as Catholics, yet for the most part tinctured with Jansenism, have indeed seemed to depreciate reason in order the better to defend faith; but the church has expressly or virtually condemned them, and vindicated the rights of reason. Whoever knows Catholic theology, knows that the church never opposes faith or authority to reason, but asserts both with equal earnestness and emphasis, and denies that there is or can be any antagonism between them.

The reformers did not assume that no external infallible authority is necessary to faith. They denied the infallible authority of popes and councils, but asserted that of the written Word, interpreted by private judgment, or rather, by the private illumination of the Spirit, called by some in our day the Christian conscience, or consciousness. Our Puritan journalist, though he rejects not the Scriptures, very ably refutes this theory of the reformers:

"There lies before us a recent number of a religious quarterly containing an elaborate article entitled 'An Infallible Church or an infallible Book—which?' the great object of which is to dethrone the Pope and enthrone the Bible, as the subject of indubitable faith, with that religious certitude with which it may logically comfort the soul. To quote its own language, it would make the Bible 'the supreme and only arbiter in things spiritual.' And this, it thinks, would cause' divisions to cease among us for ever.' But this forgets that the Bible is always at the mercy of its interpreters, and that its unity becomes continual diversity—being all things to all men, as they compel it, by the manner in which they receive it. This is not true merely in the extreme cases of those who are—and who know that they are—'handling the Word of God deceitfully;' it is true, as well, of those who mean to treat it with extremest reverence and humility or receptive faith. Here, for example, are two meek and lowly, yet wonderfully clear-headed disciples, like Francis Wayland and Bela Bates Edwards; both able scholars and patient students of the Word; both, so far as human eye can judge, eminently seeking and securing the habitual guidance of the Holy Spirit: and yet, as a matter of fact, reaching, upon certain points which both feel to be of serious importance, conclusions as to what is taught in the Bible, diametrically opposite, and beyond possibility of reconciliation. And who can deny that the one—seeming to himself to find them in the Bible—was as sacredly bound to hold, practise, and teach Baptist, as the other, Pedobaptist views."

We need add nothing to this refutation. Protestants have had from the first all the Bible, all the private judgment, or private illumination, they now have or can hope to have; and yet they have never been able to agree among themselves on a single dogma of faith. The only point on which they have been unanimous is their hostility to the Catholic Church. {217} They have no standard by which to try the spirit; and the Bible, not a few among them are accustomed to say, profanely, "is a fiddle on which a skilful player may play any tune he pleases." Protestants may go to the Bible to prove the doctrines they have been taught by their parents or ministers, or held from Protestant tradition; but they never, or rarely ever, obtain their doctrines from the study of the Holy Scriptures. Hence, sects the most divergent appeal alike to the Bible; and each seems to find texts in its favor. How can any thinking Protestant, who knows this, not be perplexed and uncertain as to what he should believe? The writer admits the difficulty, and asks:

"Are we to understand, then, that Christ is divided? Is there no such thing as absolute truth? This cannot be admitted, and we avoid the admission of it by the claim that God's absolute truth is a truth of love and life, through dogma yet not of dogma; so that it may be reached and realized by approaches not only from different but sometimes from opposite directions."

But this does not, as far as we can see, help the matter. Concede that charity or love is the fulfilling of the law, and that nothing more is required of any one than perfect charity, yet the love here asserted is, though not of dogma, "through dogma." Unless, then, we are sure of the absolute truth of the dogma, how can we be sure of the truth of the love and life, since there are many sorts of love? The dogma, according to the Puritan writer, is not the principle, indeed, but it is the medium of the love and life. Will a false medium be as effectual in relation to the end as a true medium? Can a falsehood be, in the nature of things, any medium at all? If we say the absolute truth is a truth of love and life through dogma, it seems to us absolutely necessary that the dogma should be absolutely true; but, whether the dogma is absolutely true or not, the writer concedes that those who reject the infallibility of the church have no certain means of determining. If it be said that the true love and life are practicable with contradictory dogmas, as is said in the last extract made, then dogmas are indifferent; and whether we believe the truth or falsehood of God or Christ; of the human soul; of the origin and end of man; of man's duties, and the means of discharging them,—can make no difference as to the truth of our love and life. The truth of love and life is not, then, an intellectual truth; a truth apprehended by the mind; but must be a mere affection of the heart, or, rather, a mere feeling, dependent on no operation of the understanding, but on some internal or external affection of the sensibility. The love will not be a rational affection, but a simple sentiment, sensitive affection, or sensible emotion, and as far removed from charity as is the sensuous appetite for food or drink.

The Congregationalist and Recorder seems aware that it has not yet found a solid ground to stand on, and fairly abandons its pretension to be able to arrive at absolute truth at all without the pope. It says:

"It is, then, both the privilege and the duty of every man to be a law unto himself; and out of his own reason and conscience, enlightened from all knowledge that can be made available by his own researches and those of his fellows, and more especially by the patient and docile study of the Bible—all in the most profound, uninterrupted, and prayerful dependence upon the Holy Spirit—to judge what is right. From the decision which he thus reaches there can be, for him, no appeal. Whether it is anybody's else duty to follow the course prescribed therein, or not, it is his duty to do so. He has plead his cause before his infallible tribunal, and its decision over him is necessarily supreme and inexorable. {218} Not to obey it, would be to be false equally to God and to himself. If it be not absolute right which he has reached, it stands in the place of absolute right for him; and only along its road, however thorny, and steep, and high, can he climb up toward heaven. Practically, then, we insist upon it, there is no infallibility possible to man, but that which is resident in his own soul."

The conclusion is that to which all who seek their rule of faith in private judgment and private illumination, or inside the soul, must come at last; namely, the man is a law unto himself; that is, is his own law, and, therefore, his own truth. Out of his own reason and conscience, enlightened by the best study he can make, he is to judge supremely what is right. This, we need not say, is pure rationalism. It is man's duty to abide by the conclusion at which he arrives; for although it may not be the absolute right, yet it is the absolute right for him. This makes truth and duty relative; what each one, for himself, thinks them to be. What infallibility is here to oppose to the infallibility of the church? Suppose it is announced to a man that God has established a church which he by his presence renders infallible, to teach all men and nations; will it not be the duty of that man to listen to the announcement, and to investigate to the best of his ability, and with all diligence, whether it be so or not? If, through prejudice, indifference, or any other cause, he fails to do so, will his conviction against such church be excusable, and absolute truth or right, even for him? The article continues:

"And, in the matter of systems, we submit that there is no logical pause possible between the two extremes to which we referred, near the beginning of this article—that each man's own conscientious reason be his umpire, or that that reason be implicitly surrendered to some sole arbiter without. It must be pope or people; the absolutism of the papacy or the democracy of Congregationalism. There is no intermediate stand-point on which the aristocracy of Presbyterianism, or the limited monarchy of Methodism, or Episcopacy, can solidly build itself. And this is, in point of fact, the unintended confession of actions that are louder than words, in all these systems; inasmuch as an appeal to the people in their individuality is their quick, sharp sword which cuts every knot that draws hard and cannot be untied."

But we do not see how this follows. The writer, if he has proved anything, has proved, not that Congregationalism is a ground on which one can stand, but that the individual is. He places the infallible tribunal in the inside of the individual soul; Congregationalism places it, if anywhere, in the congregation or brotherhood. He should have said, therefore, that it is either pope or individualism. We readily agree that there is no solid ground between the pope and the people, taken individually, on which any third or middle party can stand; but is individualism, or the individual soul, a solid ground on which any one can stand, without danger of its giving way under him? We have seen that it is not, because an external standard is needed by which to try the internal; and the writer himself concedes it, if he understands the force of the terms he uses. He confesses that a man, after due investigation, with all the helps he can derive from the Holy Scriptures and the Spirit, cannot be certain of arriving at absolute truth—that is, at truth at all; he can only arrive at what is true and right for him, though it may not be so for any one else. At best, then, he attains only to the relative, and no man can stand on the relative, for the relative itself cannot stand except in the absolute. {219} His whole doctrine amounts simply to this: What I honestly and conscientiously think is true and right, is true and right for me; that is, I may follow what I think is true and right with a safe conscience: but whether I think right or wrong; in accordance with the objective reality or not, I do not and cannot know. What is this but saying that infallibility is both impossible and unnecessary? Relying on what is inside of the soul, then, without any authority outside of it, we cannot attain to that certainty the writer began by affirming to be necessary, and craved by the soul; and which he proposed to show us could be had without the pope. All the writer does, is to show us that without the infallibility of the pope or church, we cannot have infallible faith; and to attempt to prove that we do not need it, and can do very well without it. What does he establish, then, but what Catholics have always told him, that there is no alternative but pope or no infallibility? He says:

"We are even prepared to go so far as to claim that, as human nature has been divinely constituted, it is a psychological impossibility for any man to waive this prerogative of being the supreme authority over himself in regard to his religion; for if he decides to accept the pope and his dictum as conveying to him the sure will of God, that infallibility can only be received as such by an express volition of his own thus to receive it; that is, the man infallible stands behind the pope infallible, and decrees that he shall become to him an infallible pope; so that all the infallibility which the pope can have is just only what the man had before, and gives to him by his volition."

In this it is not only conceded that the internal, as we have seen, does not give infallibility, but asserted that man is so constituted that he is incapable of having an infallible faith. Consequently, there can be no infallible teaching. It goes farther, and denies the supreme authority of God in matters of religion; and, like all error, puts man in the place of God. It says: "It is a psychological impossibility for any man to waive his prerogative of being the supreme authority over himself in regard to his religion." This is the necessary conclusion from the writer's assumption in the outset, that the infallible authority is inside the soul, not outside of it; therefore, purely subjective and human. Consequently, man is his own law, his own sovereign; therefore independent of God, and the author and finisher of his own faith. This is pretty well for a Calvinist, and the organ of New England Puritanism! But we charitably trust that the writer hardly understands the reach of what he says. He confounds the action or office of reason in receiving the faith, or the internal act of believing, with the authority on which one believes, or on which the faith is received. The act is the act of the rational subject, and therefore internal. The authority on which the act is elicited is accredited to the subject, and therefore necessarily objective or external. I believe on testimony which comes to me from without, or a fact or an event duly accredited to me. I believe the messenger from God duly accredited to me as his messenger, although he announces to me things far above my own personal knowledge, and even mysteries which my reason is utterly unable to comprehend. Hence, Christians believe the mysteries recorded in the Holy Scriptures, because recorded by men duly instructed and authorized by God himself to teach in his name.

The Puritan writer will hardly deny that St. Peter was a duly accredited apostle of our Lord, and therefore, that what he declares to be the Word of God is the Word of God, and therefore true, since God is truth itself. {220} Suppose, then, the pope to be duly accredited to us as the divinely authorized and divinely assisted teacher and interpreter of the teaching of our Lord, whether in person or by the mouth of the apostles, would reason find any greater difficulty in believing him than in believing St. Peter himself? Of course not. Now, Catholics look upon the pope as the successor or the continuator of Peter, and therefore as teaching with precisely the same apostolic authority with which Peter himself would teach if he were personally present. It is not more difficult to prove that the pope succeeds to Peter than it is to prove that Peter was an apostle of our Lord, and taught by his divine authority. The same kind of evidence that suffices to prove the one suffices to prove the other. Suppose it proved, should we not then have an infallible authority for faith other than that which is inside the soul? Should we not be bound by reason itself to believe whatever, in the case supposed, the pope should declare to be "the faith once delivered to the saints"?

Our Puritan psychologist, and Protestants very generally, contend that, since the authority of the pope is accredited to reason, and we by reason judge of the credentials, therefore we have in the pope only the authority of our own reason. This is a mistake. We might as well argue that an ambassador accredited to a foreign court can speak only by authority of the court to which he is accredited, since it judges of the sufficiency of the credentials he presents, and not at all by the authority of the court that sends him. This would be simply absurd. The ambassador represents the sovereign that sends him, not the sovereign to whom he is sent or accredited. The credentials of the pope are presented to our judgment, but what the pope, the accredited ambassador from God, announces as the will of his sovereign and ours, must be taken not on the authority of our own judgment, but on the authority of the ambassador. The pope is not, indeed, commissioned to reveal the truth, for the revelation is already made by our Lord and his apostles, and deposited with the church. The pope simply teaches what is the faith so revealed and deposited, and settles controversies respecting it. Our own reason, operating on the facts of the case, judges the credentials of the pope or the evidences of his divine commission, but not of the revelation to which he bears witness. The fact that God has revealed and deposited with the church what the pope declares God has so revealed and deposited, we take on his authority. It is a mistake, then, to say that there can be no authority in faith or religion but the authority which every man has even of himself. To deny it is simply to deny the ability of God to make us a revelation through inspired messengers, or otherwise than through our natural reason.

It is equally a mistake to suppose that belief or an external infallible authority is simply a volition or an act of the will, without any intellectual assent. We might as well argue that the credit a jury yields to the testimony of a competent and credible witness is simply a volition without any conviction of the understanding. Infallible authority convinces the understanding as well as moves the will. We do not believe the revealed truth on the authority of the pope; we believe it on the word of God, who can neither deceive nor be deceived; but we believe on the authority of the pope or church the fact that God has revealed it. The church or the pope is not authority for the truth of what is revealed—for God's word suffices for that; and we believe it on his veracity—but is the infallible witness of the fact that God has revealed or said it. {221} If God has made a revelation of supernatural truth, as all Christians hold, the fact that he has made it, since it confessedly is not made to us individually, must be received by us, if at all, on the testimony of a witness. This is what is meant by believing on authority. If we believe the fact at all, we must believe it either on some authority or on no authority. If on no authority, we have no reason for believing it, and our belief is groundless. If on some authority, then either on a fallible or an infallible authority. A fallible authority is no authority for faith. Then an infallible authority, and as the authority must be duly accredited to us—therefore, be itself outside of us—it must be an infallible external authority. The Puritan journal should therefore have headed its article, not Pope or People, but, Pope or no Faith. Without the infallible authority or witness, we may have opinions, conjectures, guesses, more or less probable, but not faith, which excludes doubt, and is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen. The Puritan is able, but has not mastered his subject. There are many things for him yet to learn.

We have called attention to the article we have reviewed, as one of the signs of what is going on in the Protestant evangelical world. It is beginning to learn that there is no resting in the infallible Book without an infallible interpreter. It begins to see that it has therefore no authority for dogmas, and it is gradually giving them the go-by. Dogmas discarded, Christianity, as a revelation of mysteries or of truth for the intellect, goes with them, and Christianity becomes a truth only for the heart and conscience. Then it is resolved into love, and love without understanding, therefore a sentimental love, and, with the more advanced party, purely sensual love. This is whither Protestantism is undeniably tending, and well may Dr. Ewer say that, as a system of religion, it has proved a failure. It has lost the church, lost practically the Bible, lost faith, lost doctrine, lost charity, lost spirituality, fallen into a sickly sentimentalism, and is plunging into gross sensuality. Here endeth the "glorious reformation."

Translated From The German
By Richard Storrs Willis.

Emily Linder.

II.—Her Conversion.

We are now arrived at the most important period of her life. Miss Linder often referred with thankful heart to God's guiding providence; and in the steady progress of her spiritual life thus far is this not to be mistaken. Naturally religious, and inspired with an unaffected yearning for the entire truth, she was happily conducted into a circle of friends where her dawning faith received both impulse and guidance. Exterior incidents strengthened a certain interior magnetic bias. Since the day which rendered Assisi so dear to her, an invisible power had drawn her toward the visible church, and her leaning to Catholicity was imperceptibly strengthened. {222} Her activity in art deepened her sympathies with a church in which art finds its true place and consecration. An intellectual intercourse of many years with friendly Catholic men and families could not fail to remove many a prejudice. Thus had an unexpected but powerful combination of circumstances conspired to lead a mind ingenuously seeking the truth to Catholicity. It would be quite a mistake, however, to suppose, as has been thought by some, that the personal influence of any friend whatever had worked decisively upon her determination to take the final step. No one could do this; not even Brentano, strong as was his interest in her spiritual life.

Clemens Brentano had come to Munich in October, 1833, and made his domestic arrangements in his usual characteristic style at Professor Schlotthauer's, "in one of the most pious and genial of Noah's arks," as he facetiously describes it. His associations led him into the same social circle in which Miss Linder moved, and soon after his arrival he made her acquaintance. Her pious earnestness, her cultivated, artistic nature, her charming and judicious benevolence, enchained his interest; and he believed, as is stated in his biography, to have found in her just the nature for the Catholic faith. One knows with what strength and zeal Brentano devoted himself (and in increasing ratio with increasing years) to such friends as were dear to him in the matter, particularly, of their acquaintance with the faith of his own church, and their participation in her blessings. His animated desire to instruct, which was ever without affectation or concealment, expressed itself in just such cases with the utmost freedom and frankness. Whoever reads that clever letter, "To a Lady Friend," written during these years at Munich, can tolerably well judge of the tone and style with which he brought home to a pious Protestant the warmth and depth of his religious convictions.

Certain is it that Miss Linder gained, through Brentano, a deep insight into the inner life of the church and the hidden graces and forces which stream through her. He had the power, as she said, "of making some things intelligible which might otherwise remain for ever closed to one." The life and the visions of Katharina Emmerich, which he read aloud on her weekly reading-evenings, made a profound impression upon her. As though in confirmation of what she heard, she saw with her own eyes at Kaldern a similar phenomenon in Maria von Mörl, that astounding living wonder, and was penetrated with the atmosphere of truth with which, as Gorres expresses it, Maria von Mörl seemed enveloped. She caused a portrait of this phenomenon to be executed by her lady friend, Ellenrieder; and always gladly gave her visitors (as is stated by Emma Niendorf) a full description of the stigimated, just as Brentano was wont to do in his letters. In this, as in other ways, was her intercourse with Brentano of service to her. To many an outwork of knowledge did he build a bridge, a pontifex maximus, as he once jestingly applied the term to himself. Finally, his own Christian death made a profound and lasting impression upon her.

Any other influence than mild, patient instruction was, once for all, excluded by her. Even the holiest zeal, if it sought, in any way, to crowd in upon her, could only force a nature like hers into antagonism, and check everything like quiet development. {223} With all her humility, this lady possessed the self-reliance and genuine independence of a Swiss. She sought the way of truth with such deep longing that she willingly accepted guidance; but with such severe scrutiny, that she was not to be confused, and was inaccessible to every kind of coaxing from any side. For, from the quarter of her old theological standpoint there was no lack of friendly advice, or of opinions bringing great weight with them,—supposing that mere human opinions could ever have decided such a question. Even raillery was not lacking. Platen gave his particular attention to this kind of weapon, and put himself to no little trouble to ridicule her out of her Catholic proclivities. The theological tendency she had taken since the days passed at Sorrento had become to the poet of the Abassiden altogether "too romantic," and he hoped to cool her religious zeal with a cold irony. Thus, he once satirically addressed himself to her from Florence, (February 24th, 1835,) "Might one be so bold as to enquire what progress you have made in your conversion to the only saving church; or is this a secret? In case of a change of religion, I trust you will follow the advice of a friend, and turn, rather, to the Greek Church. For, if you prize Catholicism on account of its antiquity, the Greek Church is doubtless older. And is it the ceremonial which particularly attracts you; then here, too, is the Greek service far more aesthetic and imposing." Count Platen doubtless felt that in a theological controversy he was no match for his well-informed friend; and therefore, in his letters he appealed to her as an artiste. True, the barrenness of Protestantism in art he quietly admitted; but all the better success he promised himself in an attempt to belittle the merit of the church in the field of art by certain cunning sophistries. In several of his letters he stumbled upon the neither very bright nor novel idea of presenting the church as at an obsolete standpoint. "Certainly," he admonishes the artist, "Catholicity, as a thing of a former age, is highly to be esteemed, but not for the present. Her time is past, even for art. Perhaps by and by an artera may dawn upon her, but this will be of a purely aesthetic nature; for a blending of art with religion is no longer among the possibilities," etc. The thought that his friend, after all, might take some such fatal step evidently gave the poet much uneasiness; for even in his last letter to her, written but two weeks before his death, he makes another attempt at the same style of argument. It is contained in a description of Palermo, written at Naples, September 7th, 1835: "I received your welcome letter shortly after my return from Calabria. I know not how my mother could write you that Palermo did not please me; or, if so, to what extent this was the case. I simply remember saying that the location of Palermo bore no comparison with that of Naples. There are certainly lacking the islands, Vesuvius, and the coast of Sorrento; although the mountain background of Palermo is very beautiful. The Rogers chapel, there, is something that would please you—a church of the twelfth century, in perfect preservation; its style that of the old Venetian and Roman churches; and although of smaller dimensions, yet the finest of them all. It is the more interesting to attend a service there, because one sees that Catholic culture was calculated solely for the Byzantine style of architecture; for with such surroundings, only, could it be effective. Thus does Catholicity, even as to architecture, prove itself a thing of the past."

Enough of this. Such platitudes as these were not calculated to entangle a nature far too deep for them, or check the development of a work so earnestly undertaken. Emily Linder well knew that the church has already outlived many just such "obsolete standpoints," and many such prophets of evil, who have mistaken their wishes for reality, and phrases for axioms. How dignified and how welcome, in comparison with this sophistry from Naples, must have seemed to her the greeting of an old friend and art companion addressed to her from Rome, in the spring of 1833: "Be assured that I often fervently remember you to our Lord. Do you the same by me. May a holy unrest and impatience fill us to take 'by violence' the kingdom of heaven!"

This holy unrest had indeed for some time possessed her, and on many an occasion broke forth in expressions of touching and yearning expectancy. While viewing the cathedral of Cologne, in the year 1835, she ardently exclaims, "Ah! of a certainty an age whose lofty inspirations (and of no transient kind) could produce such monuments as this, deserved neither the epithet of rude nor dark. There resided in it a light which we, with our (gas!) illumination, could never produce." Again, as to the interior of the grand cathedral—"I know not why, but I cannot repress my tears. An irrepressible melancholy and yearning seizes me here." The same year, after viewing with Schubert the minster at Ulm, she makes this noteworthy observation in her journal, "It almost pained me that the old cathedral is no longer used for Catholic service, and that the choir and sanctuary are now so desolate." Already had she adopted many Catholic views. At an early period she believed in an active sympathy between this and the other world, and a purification of the soul in that world. The church's benediction was highly prized by her; for which reason, even as Protestant, she was in the habit of bearing about with her on her travels a little flask of holy water. Many of her views were as yet very undecided; but strong and irrepressible was her longing for that truth which should bring her peace. This clung by her in all her wanderings, and often drew from her a deep cry of the heart. The notes which she made during a trip to Holland, in company with Schubert, in the year 1835, closed with the following words, "These lonely days of travel have left me much time for meditation. To-day a crowd of thoughts and emotions fairly thronged upon me. I said to myself, To what purpose all this? Whither is this invisible power impelling us? Are we really advanced by it, or made the happier? Often this affluence of emotion rises to a kind of transport; then, again, it turns to pain, for I know not the why nor the whither. Is there a connectedness in all this? Is it enduring? Once more, then, why? During this journey of mine I have often prayed, O Lord, let me know thy will. Let me follow the path which is pleasing to thee. Lead me but to thyself, and in any way thou mayst choose. Let it become clear what thou really desirest of me. By this means I experienced great relief, and also the certainty that He, who with such signal fidelity had thus far led me, would clearly make known to me his will, would guide me into his paths."

As the interior movement increased, she was impelled to confer with intelligent friends in the distance concerning this most momentous interest of her life. Especially with Overbeck there ensued a correspondence which, continuing for years, was of great assistance in attaining to religious clearness. Overbeck took kindest interest in her doubts and scruples. He had formerly gone over the same ground, and could therefore confer with her about such matters "as a brother." His letters grew into a connected vindication of Catholic doctrine, and the truth and beauty of the church, expressed in the mild, clear, fervent, and touching language of one equally worthy of respect as man and artist. With a nature like Overbeck's, where the man and the artist are not two distinct individualities, but are united in a higher form —Christianity—words have a more elevated significance; and a correspondence with him must have necessarily possessed an import more than usually edifying. Emily Linder deeply felt this. We take her own testimony when we say that Overbeck's letters contributed largely toward her religious development; and, by the overwhelming conviction of his words, no less than by his own deep spirituality, she attained to a knowledge of very vital truths. She viewed the assistance he rendered her in the light of a perpetual obligation; and in later years, long after she became a Catholic, she breathed, in her letters to the admirable master, a "God reward you for it."

Meantime, however, she had to pass through many a severe struggle. The wrestling and testing which her conscientiousness imposed upon her was of long continuance. The dread of a hasty step which might afterward plunge her into the deepest unrest, caused her to advance but cautiously. Her mental vacillation continued for quite a period, during which she was filled with unsatisfied spiritual yearnings. She stood just on the portal of the church, afraid to enter. Many a prayer, far and near, ascended in her behalf to heaven. Brentano lived not to witness the conversion he so longed for. But the hope which gladdened his last days attained a realization the year after his death.

In 1842, she wrote to an artist friend in Frankfort, "I am fully satisfied that I entertain no prejudices, and honestly wish to know God's will. He has already cleared away many a spiritual obstacle, and transformed much within me. When it is his holy will to lead me into the church, I am confident that he will remove every remaining hinderance to my conviction." She thought, however, that the church did not give Protestants a very easy time. Their acceptance of the Tridentine confession of faith was a hard matter. Still, her mind had already attained to such clearness that she now desired the instruction of some competent priest. Through the instrumentality of Diepenbrock, a theological teacher was brought to her, who gained her confidence. She earnestly began her task, zealously and perseveringly devoting to it several hours a week for an entire year. The structure of Catholic faith began to open itself to her now with all its interior consistency and harmony. One scruple after another vanished, including those which finally troubled her; as, for instance, the expression, "Mother of God;" the alleged mutilation of the holy sacrament, by withdrawal of the cup from the laity, etc. In the words of her spiritual guide, she learned to distinguish that which is divine, and essential, and immutable in the church, from that which is human, and incidental, and mutable; and what had hitherto proved an insurmountable obstacle, the seemingly mechanical, and often rude devotions of the common people, as also the worldly splendor of the hierarchy—this ceased to trouble her more.

In the autumn of 1843, Miss Linder made another tour to the Tyrol and Upper Italy, and few could surmise that she was so near to the decisive step. She writes from Munich, on the 16th of October, "I have just made with the Schuberts a somewhat fatiguing trip as far as Verona, where, by the way, I had almost come to a standstill, to copy a picture there. We then remained for a couple of weeks in Botzen, where all was so quiet, and reposeful, and secluded, that it was right grateful to me." Amid this stillness and seclusion to which she abandoned herself, still more than in Munich, was finally brought to maturity "the great work of redemption."

Toward the end of November, 1843, on the approach of Advent, there burst upon her spiritual life a new era, and her long suspense and yearning resolved itself into the cry, "I will enter the church!" The final word of decision was immediately winged to heaven on a prayer. Upon the threshold of that expectant season, when the church sings, "Drop down dew, ye heavens, from above, and let the clouds rain the just," she participated, one morning, with the most ardent devotion, in a low mass celebrated in conformity with her intention. This was the decisive hour. She left the chapel with the joyous and unalterable resolve to enter into fellowship with the Catholic Church. All was overcome, aided and enlightened by the grace of God. Standing before her little house altar, she rehearsed, for the first time, the Catholic creed.

The first to whom the glad intelligence flew was a noble pair, Apollonia Diepenbrock and her brother, the latter of whom was subsequently the celebrated cardinal and bishop of Breslau, but at that time, the vicar-general of Regensburg. Both were associated with the pious artiste in a friendship of many years, and had been long familiar with the course of her religious development. Melchior von Diepenbrock, during just this last period, had been a faithful and intelligent adviser to her. The disciple of Sailers responded to the joyous intelligence with a peace-greeting befitting a shepherd of the church. He wrote on the 29th of November, 1843:

"Hindered by very unwelcome business, I was unable, either yesterday or the day before, to express my heartfelt sympathy and delight over the surprising intelligence of your note of Saturday. Surprising, because I had not anticipated so sudden a loosening of the fruit, ripe as it was. But the wind 'which bloweth where it listeth,' stirred the tree, and the ripe, mellow fruit fell into the lap of the true mother, where it will now be well cared for, growing mellower and sweeter until the coming of the Bridegroom. My hope and prayer for you now is, that peace and rest may be yours after a suspense and unrest which has thus loosed itself in the simple and welcome words,'I will enter the church.' But you have every reason to be at rest; for a church which has given birth to a Wittman, a Sailer, a Fénélon, a Vincent de Paul, a Tauler, a Suso, a Thérèse, a Bernard, an Augustine, an Athanasius, a Polycarp, and so on, up to the apostles themselves, and which has nursed them on her breast with the self-same heavenly doctrine; from whose mouth and from whose life, in turn, this same identical doctrine has been breathed down like a fragrant aroma, through a course of eighteen hundred years; in such a church is there safe and good travelling companionship for heaven. Following their guidance, you need not fear going astray. I therefore, from my very soul, bid you welcome to this noble company to which you have long since, through your intense yearning, and by anticipation, belonged, but now have identified yourself with openly, by a grasp of the hand and a kiss of reconciliation; with whom you will soon fully and finally be incorporated by that most sacred seal and covenant, that highest consecration of love, the holy Eucharist. You have had a rough and thorny path to travel, and passed through long years of struggle, doubt, and conflict, to arrive at this goal. {227} Bind, now, the olive wreath of peace coolingly around your heated temples. Let all labor of the brain, all strain of the intellect, now subside. Live a life of tranquillity. Open your heart to a reception of the holy gifts which the church, as you enter, proffers you. And above all, banish all anxiety and doubt, for therewith you gain nothing, and spoil all. Let your barque, wafted by the breath of God, glide peacefully down the broad stream of the church's life. Revel in the stars, and the flowers which mirror themselves therein, the denizens that disport there; and, should now and then an uncouth, repulsive creature catch your eye, reflect that the kingdom of God is still entangled in the contradictions of developement. Think upon that great world-net which gathers souls of every description, and upon the angel who, upon the great day, will separate them all. And now I commend you to God. Once more, may peace and joy in the Holy Ghost be your morning-gift."

And soon this "morning-gift" possessed her soul. Being fully prepared, her admission, as she had wished, could be immediate. But she desired to take the step in all quietness, and only a few of her friends, like Professor Haneberg and Phillips, were informed of it the evening before, she desiring to secure for herself their prayers.

On the 4th of December, 1843, Emily Linder, accompanied by her friend Apollonia, in the Georgian Seminary chapel made solemn profession of the Catholic faith. On the day following, the papal nuncio, Viale Prelà, administered to her, in his house-chapel the sacrament of confirmation; delivering, at the same time, an eloquent address in German. The friend before mentioned was godmother, and, as one present remarked, by her faith, her love, her prayers, and her efforts, she had indeed proved her spiritual mother. In company with this friend, she went to Regensburg, in order to withdraw into retirement, and to be alone with her new-born joy.

Her letters during this period give animated testimony to what extent, and with what daily increase, this joy was experienced. A jubilant rapture pervades the letters which announce the event to distant friends, particularly those addressed to Overbeck in Rome and Steinle in Frankfort; both friends and companions in art. These and a few others had been admitted to her confidence in spiritual matters. To the latter, whom, of her younger friends, she particularly prized and respected, she thus announces the circumstance, "This time I come to you with but few words; words no longer conditional, but right conclusive. I am a Catholic. Could I have written to you, as I wished, to ask your prayers for me before the eventful hour, even then you might have been taken by surprise; but now the news has doubtless reached you from Munich, and I write this letter simply as confirmation, and because I wish that you should be informed of it by me personally. You have lately hardly thought, I suppose, that it would come so soon; and yet I was long prepared for it. After many a struggle, particularly of late, it had become to me a positive necessity, a natural and necessary development of my spiritual life. When I had once announced my determination to the clergyman who for some time had been instructing me, my desire was to take the step right quickly. My good Apollonia left Regensburg immediately for Munich, to be present at my reception into the church; and the day following this I was confirmed. I have now accompanied my friend hither to escape from all excitement and pass some days in retirement; needed opportunity of fortifying myself against much that must necescessarily come, that is hard and disagreeable. {228} Yet has God been inexpressibly kind and gentle in his dealings with me thus far."

"My last letter was very, very brief; but the glad tidings had to come first, and for this few words were needed. But now six weeks have flown, and it may give you pleasure to hear that I am daily newly bleat, newly affected by the great goodness of God. You may not have doubted this, yet you may be glad to be assured of it, having always taken such interest in my welfare. Ah dear Steinle! how sweet, how sweet a thing to be in the church! I ask myself every day, Why then, I? Why just to myself has this grace been vouchsafed, in preference to others so much worthier of it? How can this have come about? For no other reason, surely, than because so many faithful souls living close to God, have interceded, so untiringly interceded for me, that God could not resist their importunity. How often, how very often must I exclaim, as you have done, God be praised and extolled for ever. Now for the first time do I understand that deep longing and incessant yearning of the heart. Oh! would that all, all were in God's one, great house; would that all could experience the friendliness, the inexpressible friendliness of the Lord, he whose mercy transcends all understanding and conception. Ah dear friend! supplicate and implore God for me, that this grace—I will not say may be deserved, how could this ever be?—but that I may daily more deeply comprehend and appreciate it, and that my life may become one song of thankfulness and benediction. I am still like a happy little child at rest in the lap of its mother. The cross will yet come, and perhaps must necessarily do so; yet am I not dismayed; for well I know where, at any hour, courage, and strength, and consolation are to be found.

"Hitherto has God made it very easy to me. My sister—the only one I have—was surprised and grieved at the first intelligence; but rather, I think, from a loving dread that I might be estranged from her. Now that she finds this is not the case, I hear no complaint from her. My nieces and my intimate friends at home are all unchanged. Just here, too, my friends have remained the same; only two of my young lady acquaintances thought it due to their religious convictions to break with me; but lo! on New Year's day they both came and threw their arms around my neck. … God be with us all! May he purify and sanctify us and help us mature to life eternal. Once again, pray to God for me. Join me in ascribing thanks to him for his inexpressible goodness. With heartfelt friendship,

From this time forth Advent possessed for her a peculiarly festive significance. She celebrated each recurring anniversary with feelings of the humblest gratitude, making it a threefold festival, and greeting it with the joyousness and bliss of a child who had received on that day the costliest of gifts; for it was the anniversary of her day of final decision, her reception into the church, and her confirmation. On the 27th of December, 1844, she thus writes again to the same friend:

"Shall I attempt to depict to you the experience of my inner life? Oh! it is ever yet to me, to use your own expression, the pure mother-milk of inexpressible grace and goodness. Such, at times, is the intensity of my joy, that it is as though I must hold fast my heart with both hands. I have been celebrating of late a great festivals of the soul; for at advent time I entered the church, but included in my devotional intention, also, was the celebration of my decision and confirmation; all these were occasions of spiritual festivity. One entire year of grace and blessedness! … The kind Tony F—— calls me 'the pet-child of the Lord.' This may be so; but when I enquire, Whence this to me? oh! then I must deeply, deeply bow myself, and with profoundest shame can only still enquire of my Lord, Whence this to. me? … Nor will I entertain forebodings for the future. He who infuses such rapture into the heart, can—yes, must—impart strength and courage, when he lays the cross upon our shoulders. He will do it, too—benedictions on his holy name!"

How idle, now, appeared all the fears and anxiety as to a too hasty step, which had rendered her final decision so difficult, while still standing at the diverging pathways. Not a trace more of the unrest which had so troubled her. The morning-gift of peace and joy in faith, which Diepenbrock's kind wishes bespoke her, had become indeed her assured inheritance. A song of thankfulness warbled unceasingly in her heart.

A few more expressions which escaped her, will show that the transport she experienced was not the effect of transient excitement. On one occasion she thus addresses a friend:

"You may be assured, of course, without written proof, that I often think of you: but how often I breathe to you spiritually my joy, my exceeding joy—do you know this? My heart often sings like that of a little child before a Christmas-tree, over the inexhaustible goodness of God, and knows not how it should demean itself in the possession of such imperishable gifts. How good, how very good has God been thus to call me into his holy church!"

On the recurrence of advent she writes again on the 8th of December, 1845, as to the celebration of this festive period of hers:

"During the past week I have been celebrating my apparently quiet but really great and momentous festival, the anniversary of my reception into the church. Ah! dear Steinle, what can I say more than, Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me bless his holy name! How inexpressibly great his mercy and grace, how past all thinking and conceiving! … To be safe-sheltered in the church in times like these, when no hold and no firm footing outside of her can be found! Oh! if our brethren but knew what peace is hers—if they could but imagine what they are thrusting away from them! It is enough to make one's heart bleed. But this I can assure them, that only in the church can one really know her; only by living her life can one understand that life. Outside of the church can one learn much about her, of course, and to a certain extent inform himself; but then, she is not only a something that has been—an historical church—she is a present-existing, living church, because Christ is still alive in her, and still active in his work of reconciliation. Of such a church-life. we can have no outside idea, just because we do not live it. How often should I like to tell Clemens how it is with me now. But, God willing, he surmises it and rejoices thereat. In all things be praise to God!"

In these words there rings out, certainly, the genuine, clear tone of a heart happy in its faith. Equally evident in these passages is the fact, that her personal relations with her Protestant friends and relatives knew no change. With a certain pious fidelity of friendship, which was peculiar to her, she sought to hold fast to the old ties which had become so dear, and always met her former companions in faith with the same simple, trusting affection. Cornelius, who welcomed her conversion with heartfelt interest, after his return from Rome writes to her from Berlin, on the 4th of June, 1844:

"In Rome I learned that you had at last fully taken heart. It did not surprise me. God bless you, and protect you hereafter both from spiritual pride and indifference."

Certainly no one could less need this admonition than Emily Linder, who was a pattern of lowly humility. No one was more sweetly considerate and liberal than she; and Abbot Haneberg most justly remarked at her grave, that, after her conversion, she was scrupulous to discharge all the duties of friendship toward her former companions in faith, and never failed fully to appreciate all who proved worthy of her respect.

This unchanging fidelity induced her to make a trip, the very summer after her conversion, to her native city of Basle, and to Lucerne, where resided other relatives of hers. A personal visit just at that time seems to her then more a duty than ever, in order that her relatives might have ocular evidence "that the Catholic Church is not an estranging one, and cherishes no feeling like that of hate." {230} This sentiment regulated her conduct throughout. A longing for a universal religious reunion strongly possessed her, and she was deeply grieved to see many honest Protestants standing so near Catholicity, who did not recognize "the historic church in the existing one," mainly (judging by her own experience) from a lack of proper information and from a certain shyness, which they could not explain even to themselves. "The emergency is great; souls are hungering and thirsting; but the more sensitive of the Protestants shrink from that shock to the feelings and social relations which they fear will ensue—a great mistake; for love will experience no diminution; it will be increased. But outside of the church they know nothing of this. Alas! how much do they not know!"

This was written in 1846. Three years later she recurred again to her favorite idea in a charming letter addressed to Professor Steinle from Regensburg, on Ascension-day, May 17th, 1849:

"As I stood gazing at the people thronging up the steps and through the grand old portals of our superb cathedral, my heart was strangely moved. I saw in spirit the time when all people, united again and happy, would stream with songs of hallelujah through these portals and proclaim the wonderful works of God. Could I but see this and then depart in peace! Such may not be my lot, but in eternity the intelligence may yet reach me and be a theme of thanksgiving to God."

As though from her very childhood a member of the church, she felt from the first moment entirely at home in her precincts and in the blessed activity of her communion, becoming quickly and easily wonted to all Catholic practices, to which she gave herself up with all the intelligence and abandonment of her soul. How well she now appreciated the truth of the words addressed to her on joining the church by the noble Cardinal Diepenbrock, "You press now the ground which, not only Christ's own footsteps, but his very hands, betokened as the foundation of his church; which his spirit consecrated, which, his love hallowed: the soil whence all those vines should spring, which clinging around and clambering over his cross, may literally by and on him bear fruits of love, of humility, of fidelity, to all eternity!" And following his faithful precepts, she forthwith launched her barque, and, wafted by the breath of God, it glided peacefully over the broad stream of the church-life.

Amid the deep peace which flowed in upon her, she now recommenced with fresh vigor her artistic occupations, devoting herself with more fervor than ever to religious painting. The forenoon was regularly passed at the easel. What a pleasure it must have been to her now to produce altar and other pictures for the house of the Lord! These she donated to poor churches, sending them sometimes to great distances, even to poor Catholic communities in Greece and Paris. Whenever a call for assistance reached her, according to her capacity she was ready with her offering. Her great industry in art enabled her to respond to numerous requests, and in the course of a long life she rendered many a poor parish happy, which would otherwise have been long compelled to dispense with churchly embellishment. Free from all artistic fastidiousness, she never disdained to make copies of other pictures. Thus with great interest and ability she made a copy of a picture by Overbeck, which she had in her collection, for the chapel of the Sisters of Mercy in Munich. {231} With a modest esteem for her own abilities, she always worked under the supervision of an old master, whose judgment never failed to have its weight with her. A deep and tender sensibility pervades her pictures; and if she betrays a certain timidity in the technical execution, there is evidence of great industry and attention to detail. One of her best works, perhaps, is a portrait of Brentano, an oil painting remarkable for likeness and spirituality of expression. After his death, she had this lithographed by Knauth, and copies struck off. It is given in the first volume of his complete works, and is accompanied by a verse which serves as a burthen to one of his most beautiful legends, as it might to the legend of his life, commencing,

  "O star and flower, soul and clay,
   Love, suffering, time, eternity."

The ancient and laudable habit among lovers of art to enrich, by special orders and purchases, their own homes—that noble privilege of educated wealth!—she practised to a lavish extent. Her collection of pictures embraced gradually works of the most eminent artists. Besides the masters already mentioned, (Overbeck, Cornelius, Eberhard,) Steinle was represented in a series of glorious creations. Several of these, like the "Manger-Festival of St. Francis," the "Legend of St. Marina," were the source of some of Brentano's beautiful inspirations and are now included in his sacred poems. In addition to these artists were Schnorr, Schraudolph, Schwind, Führich, Neher, Eberle, Ahlborn, Koch, etc. In another respect, also, she approved herself a true artist, namely, by rendering constant assistance to such pupils of the distinguished masters with whom she was friendly, as gave evidence of talent. Her helping hand alone rendered, indeed, many an artistic undertaking possible; and not a few artists had occasion, in such instances, to admire not only the liberality but delicacy with which she dispensed orders and bore with trying delays. She exhibited an extraordinary degree of patience in the friendly manner with which she would conform herself to personal circumstances and private relations which did not at all concern her, even in cases of work delayed for years and paid for in advance. She would even heap coals of fire upon their heads by surprising them with further money advances—a charity which at times was exceedingly opportune. By this and similar methods Miss Linder, without any display, accomplished much good, and constantly experienced the pure pleasure of making others happy. And in yet another manner she showed a noble liberality. With rare unselfishness she would allow copies to be made and disseminated of the most valuable drawings in her collection, her own private property. She not only encouraged efforts of this kind, but sometimes at her own expense actually initiated them. By this multiplication of fine works of art she shared prominently in that noble task undertaken by Overbeck and his companions—the establishment of a more dignified and elevated art standard.

True art seemed to assume with her, year by year, a graver aspect. In judging of a work, she deemed its intent just as important as its execution. She discerned in art a reflected radiance from the world of light: and all that did not tend upward to this she regarded as idle effort and labor lost. She observed with pain an increasing tendency to the material, particularly since the year 1850; and nothing more deeply incensed her than a demeaning of art to low and base uses. {232} Even in Munich, after Cornelius left and Louis. I. descended the throne, there existed no longer the ancient standard. What is now left of that school of sacred art, once blossoming out with such inspiriting vigor? It now leads the existence of a Cinderella. Even in the year 1850, Miss Linder remarked: "Our academy affords me no longer any very great pleasure: the period of love and inspiration has passed. Shall we ever see its return?"

The gathering clouds in the political horizon and the disturbance of social relations were not encouraging to any hope like this. But at just such a time, when outside life was forbidding, she found how grateful a definite aim and mission may be, and experienced the quiet delight of art and art-occupation more than ever. She thus writes from Pöhl, a favorite resort of hers in summer, adjacent to the Ammersee, "I shall yet make a little tour in the Tyrol and then ensconce myself in winter quarters, where I shall be happy in a work already commenced and which will immediately engross me. It is a source of the greatest happiness in these days to have a given task. How much it enables one to get rid of!" On viewing Gallait's picture of "Egmont and Horn" in the exhibition, she remarked, "I should not care to own the picture, and yet there is much to admire in it. The sphere of art is so extensive and yet so limited—after all, one cannot but feel that everything not in God's service is, to say the least, superfluous."

An evening quiet overspread her relations with the outside world. But uninterruptedly until her death she kept up, in her own home, the accustomed hospitality. Her house was always a central point of really good society. No literary or artistic celebrity could long tarry in Munich without an invitation to her table, around which every week a little circle was gathered. Privy-Counsellor von Ringseis usually acted as host, a man whose varied knowledge, ripe experience, and inexhaustible humor better befitted him than any other to blend the most opposite characteristics of the guests. With friends in the distance she maintained an extensive correspondence, and also cultivated her friendly relations with them by regular summer trips: a passion for travel and a love of nature remaining true to her into advanced old age.

A nature so profound, so true, and so enlightened was constituted for friendship, and Emily Linder served as a model in this regard. She possessed those two qualities by which it is best retained—candor and disinterestedness. What she was capable of as to the latter quality has already been sufficiently shown. An open frankness was the groundwork of her character. She possessed a kind but impartial judgment, and in the right place she knew how to assert it. The same sincerity was expected of others, and nothing with her outweighed truthfulness. Whoever offended in this point came to conclusions with her speedily and once for all. A half-and-half sincerity or prevarication could force even her dovelike mildness to resentment. When called to pass judgment upon the work of a friendly artist, there arose a noble contest between frankness and kindness. Her opinions were always to the point, and by the soundness of her judgment she gave food for reflection. But in cases of a change of opinion after more mature consideration, she was quick to acknowledge herself at fault. A single incident may illustrate this. On occasion, of a defence, by an artist, of a celebrated master, to one of whose works she had taken exceptions, she replied:

"My first judgment, then, was unquestionably hasty. But among friends I shall never like that degree of caution always insisted upon which admits of no quick and impulsive word; for thus would all open-heartedness be repressed; a thing which no amount of shrewdness or cool deliberation could ever replace. I beg for myself the privilege therefore, hereafter, just as often, and perhaps just as hastily, to express my opinion."

She reposed the same confidence in the judgment of others. All the more weighty art matters about which she concerned herself were submitted to the counsel and decision of intelligent friends of art. She took the most lively interest, also, in every important event or crisis in the families of these friends. Her thoughtful consideration loved to express itself in pleasant souvenirs and playful surprises of gifts; and her fidelity often extended even to the departed. Many a friend, after having passed to a long home, was endowed with a memorial Mass which she established for the repose of his soul. The Klee and Möhler memorial, a composition of Steinle, copies of which she caused at her own expense to be made, she intended (an intention, indeed, never realized) as an aid to the establishment of a Klee and Möhler fund; and a lasting monument it would have proved to the memory of these two noble men. For any expression of fidelity toward herself she was deeply grateful; particularly in her more advanced years, after she became more and more aware how rare a thing is disinterested attachment in this age of unprincipled selfishness. "Any instance of loyal attachment," said she, "moves me the more deeply in these times, when truly it is no fashionable virtue."

A special object of her loving thoughtfulness was her beloved Assisi, the little convent of the German sisters of St. Francis. In times of great distress, particularly during the ravages of the Revolution, it was no small consolation and delight to receive thence, after a long interval, reassuring intelligence. Particularly was this the case during the Mazzini terrorism of 1849. In the autumn of this year, she announced to a friend, with something like motherly pride: "I have received tidings lately from our German nuns at Assisi. Appalling things have happened at Rome, and indications of the same have threatened elsewhere, even at Assisi. But the good women bravely set at naught all intimidation and threat, and have come out entirely unharmed. Yes, even the gangs themselves are reported to have said: One cannot get the better of these Germans, they pray too much. May we all of us lay hands upon the same trusty weapon!" The burgher-maiden whom she took with her as candidate to Assisi on her journey to Rome in 1829, has already been, for the last twenty-four years, Superior of the German convent; it so chanced that she attained to this position the very year that Emily Linder became a Catholic. During that time, more than twenty Bavarian maidens followed her to Assisi. If the gratitude of happy people, who praise God daily that they have found "the true ark of peace," ever proved a blessing, this blessing accrued, in rich measure, to the artist from Assisi. Her name is entered in the memorial book of the convent, and, so long as this spiritual order exists, she will live there as their "best benefactress, and as their dear, good mother in Christ." Thus is she spoken of in the numerous and touching letters of the pious sisters.

Seldom has a human being made a more magnanimous use of a large income than the departed Emily Linder. Her benevolence was on a grand scale. Her whole nature was generosity itself; but that which at first was but natural good will to all became afterward, by the pious spirit which pervaded her, an element of her religious worship. She considered herself but as the almoner of the riches God had entrusted to her. Her goodness was of that serene character which never showed aught of impatience toward those begging or initiating charities. She gave to both with equal friendliness. She contributed lavishly to public institutions for the sick and suffering. And yet what she gave to the individual poor, and such special families as were commended to her, must also have been a very considerable sum. In these simpler distributions of charity she showed a marked delicacy. The modest poor who came to her house she never allowed to be waited on by her servants, but administered to their wants herself. In some instances she bore her gifts on certain specified days to their dwellings; and in these cases she was just as systematic, and as punctual to the day and the hour, as in all things else. Christmas in her house was a festival of the poor. The lines of Clemens Brentano in his collection of sacred poems, entitled To the Benefactress, on the Occasion of her Presentation to the Poor, refer to this incident. To what extent and in what instances she served as unknown guardian angel, her intimate friends rather guessed at than knew. The character of her benevolence, generally, was piously-noiseless and still. Through hidden channels she often reached far in the distance, sustaining and rescuing (both physically and spiritually) where the need was very urgent. Often, thus, a gift flowed forth from her and sped like a sunbeam into some languishing heart. Many an obstacle has she removed from the path of a struggling child of humanity; into many a stout but wounded spirit has she infused new life and energy. Clemens Brentano termed this a "heavenly little piece of strategy."

This noiseless activity in art and benevolence did not withdraw her attention from what was going on outside, and although she never stepped beyond the natural boundaries of her position, and was of too quiet a nature to mingle generally in the strife of parties, she nevertheless, to the last year of her life, maintained a lively interest in all the great church and political questions of the day. The prodigious changes which took place in the world during the fourth period of her life, what heart would not have been profoundly stirred by them? But, however painful to her the prevailing Machiavelism of the age, the insanity of the revolutionary leaders, the pitiable confusion of the people, and the undermining of all conservative bulwarks in state and society, courage and hope still maintained the upper hand. The pressure upon the church and the Pope filled her perhaps with concern, but did not dismay her. She had the right standard, and the consolation which it brought, in judging of the destinies of the nations. When the revolutionary storms of 1848 and 1849 burst upon them and swept over Germany and Italy, she remarked: "The experience of all history, and the consolation it imparts, is just this: God allows men their way to a certain point, and where the end seems just achieved. But then is inscribed with an almighty hand, the 'Thus far.' And though his church be shaken, this is far better for us than to be reposing upon cushions of ease."

Her confidence was similarly undisturbed during the succeeding momentous years. During her attendance upon the drama of The Passion, at Oberammergau, in the year 1860, she was occupied with reflections upon the stupendous drama of passion of our own times. "There is something so fearfully grand in the present events of the world," she wrote to her friend in Frankfort, "that a certain elevation fills the soul, raising one above this little life of ours upon earth. The image in our mind of the holy father is already so spiritualized that it begins to be invested with the sanctity of the martyr. How many may have to follow in his martyr footsteps? Shall we live to see the victory? At my time of life, no; and yet a secret joy often possesses me at the thought of this glorious era. But I say with you, the great task for us all is to gain heaven. God vouchsafe this!" The latest period of German distress she lived through with the intensest sympathy. She accepted the appalling catastrophe as a severe trial, even to her own personal feelings and hopes, and recognized in this calamity the initiation of a still greater. "For me," she wrote to the same friend, "the hope of any kind of a future is now past. I must subject my heart to no more disappointment; but the mercy of God for the individual is still attainable and great; to every one accessible and possible. You belong, of course, to the younger generation, and can still dream of a sunrise for our German fatherland. The result of the present calamity, swiftly as it may seem to be plunging us into irremediable ruin, will, nevertheless, never go the length intended by the Prince of Evil. God stands above him; that is certain. The future will be a different one; a very different one, from that which we could ever surmise or guess, even the future of the church. And this future will be God's. Let that content us."

Her life was a bright contrast to the demoralization, the unrest, the arrogant selfishness of our age. She presented to those among whom she lived the picture of a self-sustained, unselfish, reposeful soul. Humility, trust in God, and compassion, this was the fundamental harmony of her daily life. Old age, which often, indeed, smooths away from the good all little imperfections and blemishes of character, rendered her still more considerate, patient, and gentle. Her love of simplicity was as great as were her means. In her own household, well systemized, careful economy; outside of this, severe, almost noticeable plainness. But to her applied the line of the poet:

While denying herself, she gave with lavish hand to poverty and distress, to art and to the church. She moved with measured, dignified pace; but a certain religious harmony of action imparted to her being and doing an indescribable grace, which is always the accompaniment of inward purity, and a religion based upon humility.

The Abbé Haneberg, in his beautiful tribute at her grave, remarked, "She seemed, during the last twenty years of her life, to emulate the most pious of her friends and daughters of Assisi, and to aim even to outdo them, so systematic and untiring was her service to God." Of this, however, her friends knew but little. How much she thus quietly accomplished was never fully known until after her death. It will suffice here to state that in the year 1851 she informed herself, through the Superior at Assisi, of their daily regulations, and the usual succession of religious exercises. Her everyday life was identified with the daily life of the church. {236} She appreciated the significant beauty and expressive symbolism of churchly ordinances, and in close observance joined in their celebration. To this end, she followed the Ordo of her diocese, and her favorite prayer-book was the Missal. Her knowledge of languages stood her in good stead here; for, in addition to the modern languages, she had also learned Latin, and had become sufficiently familiar with it to follow intelligently the language of the church. Cardinal Diepenbrock, in 1850, wrote to her of a lady who was occupying herself with the Latin, or church, language; "A worthy study," he remarked. "Have you not also begun it? It strikes me that Clemens was saying something about it. But perhaps you were able to get no farther than the mensa; the mensa Domini would naturally be enough for you." But she went farther than this. In her manuscripts were found Latin exercises, written under the guidance of the worthy old Bröber. One room of her spacious residence was arranged as a chapel, in which was the superb altar-piece by Eberhard, "The Triumph of the Church." This chapel was favored by the ordinariat with a Mass licence. On the anniversary of her union with the church she was accustomed to receive holy communion here; and here the departed Bishop Valentin, of Regensburg, once celebrated Mass. Here, also, she devoted daily a certain time to meditation and the perusal of the Holy Scriptures. Her favorite place of devotion, however, was the little chapel of the ducal hospital which she frequented twice a day; early in the morning, and again at evening. She had for years a quiet little place in the organ gallery where, day by day, in all weather, and at all seasons of the year, she consecrated a couple of hours to prayer.

As the years flew by, she withdrew herself more and more from the world, and sought to be "hid in God." The departure to their final home of so many friends, together with other events, served as slight admonitions, which by her thoughtful heart were not unheeded. She recognized in this matter fresh cause of gratitude to God, who was dealing so tenderly with her to the very end. "I consider it," she wrote, "a special favor of the Lord that he grants me so long a preparation for my final hour." Years previously, she had put herself in Christian readiness for her last journey, and only hoped that it might prove "a good death hour." With customary precision, she had ordered all her temporal affairs. She had even made provision as to her interment, and the final burial service. Her arrangements for the latter of these, written in a bold and beautiful hand, were dated the 7th of October, 1865. On the festival of the Epiphany, 1867, she was for the last time in her favorite little chapel of the ducal hospital. Only a few weeks previously, she had begun to feel ill, and now symptoms of dropsy suddenly developed themselves. The invalid recognized her condition with Christian resignation, but did not yet relinquish hope of a recovery. "The task now is, to resign myself and to be patient. God help me to this," she wrote at the close of January. It was her last letter. Her friend Apollonia hastened from Regensburg, and she, who, twenty-three years before, had stood at her side when received into the church, was now to stand at her death-bed. The invalid requested that her friend should remain with her one week; and exactly at the close of the week she died. During her illness she found special consolation in the house-altar, where, to her great spiritual comfort, her worthy confessor repeatedly celebrated mass. {237} From this Eberhard altar, where she first made profession of Catholic faith and where she yearly commemorated that happy event, she now received the viaticum and extreme unction. In conformity with her wish, on the festival of St. Apollonia mass was again celebrated in her little chapel. It was her last mass, and the final union of the two friends in holy sacrament. She seemed now to rejoice in her approaching dissolution as though it were a return home. One morning as her priest entered, she stretched out her arms and exclaimed, "May I—oh! may I go home?" "Yes, the guardian angel accompanies you, he guides you thither," was the reply. Thereupon she was silent, remained in deep meditation, and spoke but little after. Yet she seemed to participate in all that transpired; if prayer were uttered, she prayed also; to all who drew near she gave a friendly glance, but, for the most part, remained absorbed and still.

On the day preceding her death, she summoned all her strength, and with difficult effort gave expression to several wishes, the last of her earthly life. She recalled an admirable artist, whom she held in high personal esteem, from whom she had long desired a picture as an addition to her collection. She directed a very considerable sum to be sent to him for a historical picture, which was now to be painted for the museum at Bale. The future of her poor, also, such as had been accustomed to receive little charities, engaged her thoughts; she desired that these charities should be continued until they had found other benefactors. Her last words were in allusion to Jerusalem. She bethought herself of the "Watchers at the Holy Sepulchre," (of the order of St. Francis,) and also of the "Zion Society," to both of which she had made yearly contributions, and which she now similarly remembered. Thus had her life its characteristic close. Her last mental activity was exercised in works of charity, of art, and of religion. With a glance at Jerusalem and the sepulchre of her Saviour, she now went forward toward the new Jerusalem. Her end was the falling asleep of a child. In the early morning of the 12th of February, 1867, without a single death-struggle, she sank into slumber—quietly, painlessly, peacefully.

A gentleman, intimately befriended with her, remarked, "After her death, I had occasion to observe the intense grief of those who had been recipients of her bounty, and then first became aware what a truly royal munificence had been hers, which all were ignorant of, save God and the poor." Such were the tears that followed her, together with those countless others, which during her life she had already dried.

On the afternoon of the 14th of February a long funeral procession, composed of the best Catholic society of Munich, and throngs of the poor, together with the superintendent of public charities, (then represented by the mayor of the city,) moved from the pleasant mansion on the corner of Carl street toward the cemetery, to render their last homage to this noble friend of art and the poor. The Abbé Haneberg, an old friend of hers, pronounced the benediction of the church over her grave, which was located not far from the grave of Möhler. {238} In her written instructions, Emily Linder desired only a simple stone cross above her, the pedestal of the cross bearing the inscription:

the simplest, but in its simplicity, the most touching testimony to a being whose interior life was all humility and trust in God, and whose exterior activity had been the purest mercy itself. To her might be applied a verse of the beautiful requiem addressed by Brentano to another departed friend:

  "He, for whom our willing gifts
     On the needy we confer,
   From his eight beatitudes
     Singled Mercy out for her."

The whole spirit which accompanied her through a life of seventy years still lived on in her bequests. The half of her large fortune she left to benevolent and charitable objects; chiefly to schools and hospitals. True Swiss that she was, she was specially mindful of her native city. The largest amount donated—200,000 florins—was bequeathed to the Bishop of Bale, for the benefit of his diocese. Her art-treasures were, with few exceptions, incorporated with the museum of Bale, to whose first establishment she had originally contributed no small amount, and which, with true patrician feeling, lavishly endowed during her life.

In these bequests to art and to the church, Emily Linder reared for herself a monument which will keep her in blessed remembrance; and this monument is only the last milestone of record on the pathway of a life thickly studded with works of charity. Truly a significant, steadfast existence, harmonious from its commencement to its very close.

In days of depression and perplexity would we gaze upon a portrait of true humanity, ennobled and enlightened by Christianity, (a portrait we might well present as a study to the young,) we may point with quiet confidence to the departed Emily Linder, and exclaim: Behold here a character noble, unselfish, and complete—a nature of rare purity and depth—a transparent and beautiful spirit, who verified her faith by her love.

The Irish Church Act Of 1869.

"They" (the Anglican ministers of Ireland) "will not fleece the sheep they cannot feed, and spend the spoils of a people conquered, not won.—

The measure for the disestablishment and disendowment of the English Church in Ireland, recently introduced by the English premier into the British Parliament, is one of the most startling and boldest steps which has yet been taken by that body to rectify the criminal blunders of three hundred years of mistaken legislation. Mr. Gladstone, in moving the first reading of the act, in a very long speech, evidently prepared with great care, while admitting it to be "the most grave and arduous work of legislature that ever has been laid before the House of Commons," felt the necessity of cautiously and almost apologetically stating the case and explaining the views of those with whom he acted. Mr. Disraeli, the leader of the opposition, while agreeing with his distinguished successor in office in nothing else, was forced to allow the scheme to be "one of the most gigantic that had ever been brought before the house"—an opinion which, judging from the temper of all parties inside and outside of parliament, appears to be unanimously entertained.

The friends of the act are numerous in England as well as in Ireland, embracing all the Catholic population and a very large portion of dissenting Protestants of more advanced and liberal views in both countries. The Catholics of Ireland see in it the destruction of that infamous system which has not only robbed them of their altars and the graves of their ancestors, but compelled them to support in idleness and luxury what even Disraeli himself long since denounced as "an alien church." Though the partial restitution contemplated at this late day by this act bears no corresponding comparison with the magnitude of the evils borne, it is still restitution, and a most significant and, in a sense, abject admission of the utter failure of the experiment of the English government to force Protestantism on an unwilling people. The successful passage of the act will also necessitate the expenditure of large sums of money for purely charitable purposes, and what, in a national sense, is of more importance, it will remove one of the most salient and fruitful causes of Irish discontent. But it is in England that the question assumes the most portentous magnitude; for it has become apparent to every one there that the fall of the Irish Establishment is but the first act in the drama of the total severance of church and state in the entire British empire. The entering wedge well driven home in Ireland, the results in other parts of the United Kingdom become merely a matter of time. Sir John Grey, one of the strongest supporters of Mr. Gladstone's bill, himself a Protestant, hints at this in an article in a late number of his paper, the Dublin Freeman's Journal, in which he says: "He (Gladstone) will soon have powerful auxiliaries in the English curates, and they have more influence in forming public opinion in England than the bench of bishops and the ten thousand incumbents. The Irish curates will be in Mr. Gladstone's favor, and if ever disestablishment should be the lot of England—and he would be a rash politician who would negative such a proposition—the English curates would have in Mr. Gladstone's Irish measure a precedent for an equal measure of justice to themselves."

The opposition to the act comes in the first place from the whole body of Anglican bishops and clergymen in Ireland, if we except the Bishop of Down and a few badly paid curates who would benefit by its passage. The Orangemen, that most pestiferous of all social and political scourges, of course sustain their reverend friends, and their loyalty on this occasion has culminated in a remonstrance signed, it is said, by over two thousand noblemen and landed "gentry." Hostility to the policy foreshadowed by Mr. Gladstone was very active and virulent in England during the late elections, and is now exhibited in the Commons by a large and active tory minority. The English ecclesiastics have also taken up the cry with equal earnestness and scarcely less vehemence. At the last sitting of the New Convocation of Canterbury in London, an address to the queen in opposition to the provisions of the act was proposed and carried by the upper house, and upon being sent down to the lower house for adoption, the following and similar amendments were enthusiastically added: {240} "Above all," say those reverend gentlemen, "we are constrained by our sense of duty to your majesty and to the Reformed Church of England and Ireland, humbly to represent to your majesty that disestablishment of the church in Ireland cannot be had without repudiation, on the part of the nation, of the necessity and value of the Reformation." This language is explicit and forcible enough, but the Synod of both Houses of Convocation of the Province of York, held on the same day, goes a little farther. "This convocation," they affirm, "view with sorrow and alarm the proposed attempt to disestablish and disendow the Irish branch of the United Church of England and Ireland, as seriously affecting the interests of the church in that part of the British dominions; as a fatal encroachment on the prerogatives of the crown; as unsettling the constitution of church and state guaranteed by engagements entered into by acts of union, and confirmed to members of the church by the solemn sanction of the coronation oath."

That part of the coronation oath prescribed by the first William and Mary, chapter sixth, to which allusion is here made and which is the straw that the drowning Anglicans are endeavoring to grasp, reads as follows: "Question: Will you, to the utmost of your power, maintain the laws of God, the profession of the Gospel, and the Protestant Reformed Religion established by law? And will you preserve unto the bishops and clergy of this realm, and to the churches committed to their charge, all such rights and privileges as by law do or shall appertain unto them or any of them? King and Queen: All this I promise to do, (king and queen lay hands on the holy Gospel, saying,) so help me God." The condition of this solemn oath would at first sight appear to preclude the queen from signing the act, were we not assured by the confident tone, and even the express words, of Mr. Gladstone that her majesty's views were entirely in accord with those of her first minister, and in fact, that she had already placed in the hands of parliament her right of ecclesiastical appointments in Ireland.

The history of the Irish Church Establishment, now happily about to disappear for ever, is so familiar to most intelligent readers that it requires but a passing notice. Since its birth at a so-called Irish parliament, summoned by Lord Grey in 1536, down to the present time, so unjust have been its proceedings, so rapacious its ministers, and so oppressive its exactions of an ill-governed and neglected people, with whom it never had the least sympathy, that Christendom has stood aghast in mingled wonder and disgust. Not only were the Catholics of Ireland despoiled of their churches, abbeys, and convents, the monuments of piety and learning and the dispensaries of Christian charity, reared by the hands of benevolent ancestors for over a thousand years, but the very humblest abodes of worship were handed over to a foreign clergy, preaching a new religion at the point of the sword, ignorant of the very language of the country, and by birth and training bitterly hostile to every interest, spiritual and temporal, of the people they were sent to teach. Nor was this all. The despoiled masses were compelled to pay, and still pay, for the support of this "alien" church a tithe on every foot of cultivated land in the kingdom, and upon the produce and stock derived from or raised on the same. {241} The amount of property thus filched from the overburdened farmers and peasantry of Ireland under color of law, and the additional annual revenue wrung from that half-famished nation, is thus estimated by no less an authority than the English premier: [Footnote 51]

[Footnote 51: This, of course, is but a very small portion indeed of the property taken from the Catholic Church in Ireland under Henry VIII. and succeeding monarchs. Most of the abbey lands were first vested in the crown and then granted to courtiers and others at a nominal rent as the reward of their apostasy. Many of the wealthiest families in Ireland derive their titles to their lands from those acts of spoliation.]

"The commissioners appointed in 1868 estimated the annual value at £616,000, but, with all respect for their long labors, he must differ from them, for they had placed it too low; for one of their body, in a subsequent publication, estimates it at £835,000, but for the present purpose he would take it at £700,000. The capitalized amount was as follows:

Tithe rent charge	£9,000,000
Land	£6,250,000
Other property in money, etc.	£750,000
Total	£16,000,000

The result is that the whole value of the ecclesiastical property of Ireland, reduced and cut down first of all by the almost unbounded waste of life tenants, and secondly by the wisdom or unwisdom of well-intentioned parliaments—the remaining value is no less than £16,000,000 of money, considerably more than on a former occasion I ventured to estimate, but then my means of information were smaller than they now are."

From the contemplation of past injustice we can now turn with a sense of relief to the provisions of the act itself, and which, under such peculiar circumstances, are perhaps as wisely and judiciously framed as can be expected. On its passage it may be slightly altered in some of its minor details, but there is little room for doubt that the act substantially as first presented will become law.

And first, those parts of the Acts of Union of the Irish and English parliaments, passed at the beginning of this century, permitting certain Irish bishops to sit ex officio as lords spiritual in the British House of Peers, and giving to the decrees, orders, and judgments of certain ecclesiastical courts in Ireland the force and authority of law in that part of the realm, are unconditionally repealed. The thirteenth section of the act prescribes: "On the 1st day of January, 1871, every ecclesiastical corporation in Ireland, whether sole or aggregate; every cathedral corporation in Ireland as defined by this act shall be dissolved, and on and after that day no archbishop or bishop of the said church shall be summoned to or be qualified to sit in the House of Lords."

Thus we see that Irish Anglican bishops will no longer be considered worthy to sit beside their right reverend brethren of England on the benches of that respectable but rather sleepy conclave known as the House of Lords, and that the Protestant Church in Ireland will be resolved into a mere voluntary body consisting of clerics and laity, whose regulations will only affect themselves as matters of mutual contract, but who will have no legal jurisdiction nor recognition except such as may be conferred by subsequent acts of parliament on local corporations. When we reflect that the prelates thus so unceremoniously thrust out of the Lords, and who with their confrères are stripped of all extrajudicial authority, were, and still are, the most active promoters of the Act of Union and the fiercest opponents of its repeal, we cannot help admiring the poetic justice which now offers the bitter draught to their lips. Like Macbeth, they but taught "bloody instructions, which, being taught, return to plague the inventor."

The act next provides for the appointment of a commission which shall exist for ten years from the commencement of its operations, and be clothed with full power to reduce to its possession all the property, lands, tenements, and interests of or now belonging to the Established Church of Ireland, and to reconvey, sell, or dispose of the same according to the provisions of the act, after the 1st day of January, 1871. The church-buildings now in use by the Established Church will be handed over, with all their rights, to the "governing body" of the particular church under the voluntary system of organization; those not in general use or so dilapidated as to be incapable of repair, being from their antiquity or the beauty of their architecture, like St. Patrick's, Dublin, to the number of twelve, will be transferred by the commissioner to the care of the Board of Public Works, with an adequate appropriation in money for their proper care and preservation. Against this latter arrangement we entirely and emphatically protest. St. Patrick's Cathedral at least, if not every one of those twelve churches which the Anglicans have neither the numbers to decently fill nor the generosity to keep in repair, instead of being put in care of poor-law commissioners or any other secular body, should be handed over to the Catholics of the country, the real owners and spiritual heirs of their founders. This, after all, would be nothing more than an act of tardy justice, and a reproof not only to the sacrileges committed in them by the "Reformers" of the sixteenth century, but to Anglican poverty and niggardliness in the nineteenth century. In the hands of the poor-law commissions, who have shown little reverence and less antiquarian lore, those magnificent temples will become simply objects of wonder to the passing tourist; surrounded by all the artistic and beautiful graces of our holy faith, they would be living, breathing evidences, as it were, of the unswerving devotion to and the glorious rejuvenation of that faith in the Island of Saints. If not too late, we wish to see this portion of the act changed; if this cannot be done, we wish to see the Catholic and the liberal members of parliament move in the matter by the means of subsequent legislation.

See and glebe houses and their curtilages and gardens vested in the commissioners may be sold to the governing body of any church to which they are attached, for a sum equal to twelve times the annual value of the house and land so conveyed, payment to be made in installments within twenty-two and a quarter years. Upon application from the same or a similar governing body, the commissioners may sell, in the case of a see house, thirty acres, and of any other ecclesiastical residence, ten acres, contiguous land, for such sum as may be agreed upon by arbitration. It is further provided that, whenever any church or church sites vest in the commissioners, not subject to the above conditions, they shall dispose of the same by public sale at their discretion. This latter clause, though simple in its terms and apparently unimportant, constitutes in reality one of the most interesting features in the act. Knowing as we do the intense devotion of the Irish Catholics for the crumbling ruins of the old churches built by their brave and zealous ancestors, where in the olden time walked so many holy men now with the saints in heaven, and the cold indifference or ignorance of the Anglican clergy in relation to such sanctified places, we can confidently predict that not many years will elapse ere those precious memorials of the past will be in the possession of the people who have so watched in silence and in tears their desecration by the followers of the religion of Henry and Elizabeth. {243} It will also be remarked in this part of the act the constant recurrence of the term "governing body," so expressive of the total reduction of the once proud Church of England in Ireland as by "law established" to the same condition as that occupied by mere Methodists and Presbyterians.

Graveyards, a subject scarcely less attractive than churches, is next dealt with in this elaborate act. When a church having a burial ground attached to it is vested in the commissioners, and the church-building is subsequently reinvested in the "governing body," the burial ground will be included in the order conveying the same; otherwise the burial grounds will be transferred to the poor-law guardians within whose district the same may be situated, to be used by them in a manner similar to those already taken or purchased by such guardians. This clause when carried out will change many graveyards now exclusively controlled by Protestants, but which in reality are and formerly were the property of Catholics, into places of public burial, and, a fortiori, Catholic.

Having disposed of the material interests and franchises of the Irish Church, we next come to the most important part (only, however, as far as the parties immediately affected are concerned) of the act, though the framers, evidently with a keen eye to the pockets of the disestablished, place it among the first in general interest. It appears under the unostentatious sub-title of "Compensation to persons deprived of Income." It provides that, on and after the 1st of January, 1871, the commissioners, having in the mean time ascertained the amount of annual income of the holder of any archbishopric, bishopric, benefice, or cathedral preferment, curacy, etc., shall pay to the holder of the same an annuity equal in amount to such income for life, or as long as such incumbent continues to perform the duties of such office; or such incumbent may commute his annuity in return for a certain payment in bulk, upon his own application and at the discretion of the commission. For these purposes the sum of about £5,000,000, or twenty-five millions of dollars, will be required to be paid out of the assets in the hands of the commissioners. This amount divided between two thousand ecclesiastics would give an average of twelve thousand five hundred dollars for each, but as that number includes the curates, the most numerous and worst paid of the Anglican clergymen, the archbishops and other high dignitaries will find themselves in receipt of enormous revenues during the term of their natural lives. Then there are other persons who are to become pensioners on the public bounty to the amount of four million five hundred thousand dollars; such as parish clerks, sextons, officers of cathedrals and ecclesiastical courts, parochial school-masters, organists, and all that sanctimonious and useless tribe whose mock gravity and unbending advocacy of church and state so frequently proved a source of amusement and derision to their less orthodox and perhaps less mercenary neighbors. With a sigh we part with that grave, shabby-genteel link between the Protestant curate and the seldom-met poor pauper of the Anglican Church, well remembering in our early boyhood with what awe we gazed upon their long, sallow visages as they stalked by meditatively, clothed in all the little brief authority of quasi-clerical life. {244} Thirty millions of dollars may be considered a large sum with which to pension off the clergy and their followers of a church which does not count three quarters of a million of souls, of all degrees, sexes, and ages; but it will be money well spent if it heep [helps?] to eradicate an evil which has so long afflicted a patient people. [Footnote 52]

[Footnote 52: A late number of The Catholic Opinion (London) gives us the following statistics: There are, it is said 700,000 Anglicans in Ireland and 36,000,000 Catholics in France; that is, 51 times as many Catholics in France as Anglicans in Ireland. The budget therefore of Catholic worship in France should be 51 times £800,000, or £40,800,000, to write which is enough to show the monstrous iniquity of which Ireland has been the victim. The Presbyterians, numbering 523,291 persons, receive a regium donum for their ministers amounting to £40,547, and a subsidy of £2050 for their theological college at Belfast, making a total of £42,597. Protestant dissenters have no endowment, nor yet Catholics, excepting a subsidy to the college at Maynooth of £26,360. Thus the Anglican Establishment in Ireland has a revenue of about £800,000 for 700,000 persons, or about £1 3s. per head. The Presbyterians receive from the government £42,597 for 523,291 persons, or about 1s. 7 1/2d. per head. Catholics, £26,360 for 4,505,265 persons, that is, LESS THAN ONE PENNY HALFPENNY per head.

According to the last census, that of 1861, there were in Ireland:

		Per Cent of the whole Population.
4,505,265	Catholics, that is	77.7
693,357	Members of the Established Church	11.9
523,291	Presbyterians	9.0
76,661	Protestant dissenters	1.2
393	Jews	0.0
5,798,967	Total	100.0

]

The holders of advowsons, or the right to appoint to church livings—with the exception of the queen, corporations sole and aggregate dissolved by the act, and trustees, officers, and persons acting in a public capacity—are entitled to certain compensation to be ascertained by arbitration; one million five hundred thousand dollars being allowed for the liquidation of this description of claims. As no Catholic can exercise this right, even though the owner of the land in fee from which the right to appoint arises, it follows that whatever compensation is made will go to Protestants only. It would seem to any person other than an Anglican landlord that this clause is not only not in harmony with the equitable spirit of the body of the act, but that it is manifestly unjust. Advowsons are as much a relic of ancient feudal barbarism as any that were abolished by law under the commonwealth or Charles II., and should have been swept away when all the other devices for defrauding the industrious poor were abolished centuries ago. We waive altogether the question of their simoniacal character; for a custom so convenient for the land-holder and so profitable for younger sons of aristocratic families would hardly be condemned on that account by those who so largely profit by it. In addition to all the money which the commissioners are to reimburse as above mentioned, we find that upon the property of the Irish Church there is a building debt of some one million and a quarter dollars for the repair of churches, glebes, etc., which the commissioners are instructed to pay.

Thus we see that the sum of nearly thirty-two millions of dollars has been set aside as an inducement to the loosening of the grip of a very small and mercenary faction on the public purse ostensibly, but in reality on the very vitals of the industrial interests of the country. Let us now see what corresponding compensation has been made for the Catholics and dissenters.

It is well known that for over a century the Presbyterians of Ireland have been annually in the receipt of a limited sum of money called the regium donum. At first, as the term indicates, this was simply a gift from the crown, but of late years it has been regularly voted by parliament, and last year it amounted to £45,000. This grant is to be withdrawn; and as an equivalent, a sum of about four millions of dollars is to be capitalized by the commissioners, the annual interest of which will be nearly equal to the present donation. In addition to this, seventy-five thousand dollars are to be bestowed on the Presbyterian college of Belfast.

But the Catholics, who, notwithstanding the vast emigration of the last twenty-five years, form three fourths of the entire population, fare even worse than their dissenting brethren. The paltry grant of £26,000 to Maynooth College is to cease, and a sum equal to less than a half of that appropriated to the Presbyterians is to be substituted, the interest only of which will be devoted to the support of that distinguished nursery of Catholic learning. The building debt of some twenty thousand pounds which the college owes to the Board of Public Works is to be paid off by the commissioners; but, apart from this trifling sum, the Catholics of Ireland gain no direct material advantage from the enforcement of the new act; and it is to be hoped that, when time confirms the sagacity of the statesmen who have suggested the introduction of the present reform, and has done full justice to the moral courage of the men who have proposed it to the imperial parliament, the self-denial and disinterestedness of the Irish Catholic hierarchy, clergy, and people will be duly appreciated. However little flattering such unequal distribution of funds may be to the rightful claims of Catholics, we presume they will not think it worth their while to object to it. Many of them, we are disposed to think, would be willing to dispense altogether with state aid, if the rule were made general as far as regards Protestant sects. The Catholic Church in Ireland has never been desirous of leaning for support on the arm of the British government, and the experience of its members at home and in this country has amply proved that the church is always more prosperous and more powerful for good in inverse proportion to its reliance on the secular arm.

There is no provision made for Trinity college, that being left for future legislation, with an intimation from the premier that, while its interests will be properly attended to, it shall be deprived of its exclusively sectarian character. This is well. Trinity was endowed with many thousand broad acres violently taken from the rightful owners, the Irish chiefs, by Elizabeth, which must now yield an enormous revenue. It has been in times past, to a great extent, the nursery of enlightened intolerance and philosophic indifference; but when we recall the names of Swift and Mollineux, Grattan, Curran, the Emmets, Petrie, and McCullough, and many other illustrious friends of Ireland, who studied in its venerable halls, and there partially developed the germs of that keen wit, fiery eloquence, and scientific lore which graced a nation even in its darkest hour of humiliation, we can forgive their old alma mater a great many backslidings. Trinity should be allowed to retain her revenues, and when her wide gates are thrown open for the reception alike of the Catholic, the Anglican, and the Dissenter, her sphere of usefulness will not only be enlarged, but doubly increased by the competition between the diverse elements of which the population of Ireland is composed. She will then cease to be sectarian, and become, in the truest sense, national.

We now come to the matter of assets to be reduced into possession by the commissioners, out of which the several sums above mentioned are to be paid—assets which, according to Mr. Gladstone's estimates, will amount to £16,000,000, or eighty million dollars. {246} Of this sum, £9,000,000, it is expected, will be derived from the commutation or obliteration of tithe rent charges; that is to say, the owners of lands from which tithes are now derived can, by the payment of a fixed sum to the commissioners, be for ever relieved from the tithe exaction; and, should they be unable to pay the whole sum down, they are to be allowed forty-five years wherein to pay it by instalments. Tithes, it must be remembered, have not, for nearly forty years, been collected directly from the cultivator of the soil, but from the owner, who, of course, added it to the rent, and thus, though the objectionable adjuncts of distrain and imprisonment for tithes, as such, were done away, the tenant had still to pay the odious tax in another form. As the clause of the act regulating this branch of the duties of the commissioners is perhaps the last of such a nature that will ever be allowed to encumber the statute-book of the British parliament, we quote it entire, simply premising that it seems fair enough, and in terms decidedly favorable to the landlords. Section 32 recites:

"The commissioners may at any time after the 1st day of January, 1871, sell any rent charge in lieu of tithes bestowed on them under this act to the owner of the land charged therewith, in consideration of a sum equal to twenty-two and a half times the amount of such rent charge, and upon any such sale being so made, the commissioners shall, by order, declare the rent charge to be merged in the land out of which it issued, and the same shall merge and be extinguished accordingly. Upon the application of any owner so purchasing, the commissioners may, by order, declare his purchase money, or any part thereof, to be payable by instalments, and the land out of which such rent charge issued to be accordingly charged as from a day to be mentioned in such order, for forty-five years thence next ensuing, with an annual sum equal to four pounds ten shillings for every one hundred pounds of the purchase money, or part thereof, so payable in instalments. The annual sum charged by such order shall have priority over all charges and incumbrances, except quit or crown rents, and shall be payable by the same persons, and be recoverable in the same manner as the rent charge in lieu of tithes, heretofore payable out of the same lands. Owner, for the purposes of this section, shall mean the person for the time being liable to pay rent charge in lieu of tithes under the provisions of the acts of the first and second years of the reign of her present majesty, chap. 109."

When all the charges incumbent on the commissioners are provided for, including one million dollars for themselves, a matter which they will not be likely to neglect, there will be left of the effects of the defunct Establishment the handsome sum of over seven million pounds sterling. What disposition to make of this money was a puzzling question for a long time among the legislative administrators. That it was to be devoted to some Irish purpose was understood from the first; but grants of money to Ireland have heretofore turned out to be mere jobs, much more beneficial to government employees than to the supposed recipients of the bounty. Besides, as Mr. Gladstone says, they wanted to make this measure a finality, and to dispose of the money once and for ever. To have divided it among all religious denominations per capita, would throw the bulk of it into possession of the Catholics, to the great chagrin of the sects; and to have expended it on one or two local internal improvements would have created sectional jealousy, and given rise to the cry of favoritism. Appreciating these difficulties, the friends of the act have resolved, and, we think, very wisely, to devote it to the general charities of the island, not directly connected with any particular denomination, as follows:

"1. The support of infirmaries, hospitals, and lunatic asylums in connection with the grand jury cess or other assessment in lieu thereof.

"2. In support of reformatory and industrial schools, Ireland acts, and in aid of other grants for that purpose.

"3. The salaries of trained or skilled nurses for poor persons in sickness or in labor.

"4. The suitable education and maintenance of the blind and of the deaf and dumb poor in separate asylums.

5. The suitable care, training, and maintenance, in separate asylums, of poor persons of weak intellect, not requiring to be kept under restraint. The commissioners may, from time to time, during their trust, report to her majesty whether there is any income available for the purposes mentioned in this section, and, upon such report being made, it shall be lawful for her majesty, by order in council, to direct such available portion of income to be applied for the aforesaid purposes, or any of them, under such management and control as aforesaid."

The poor-law commissioners are to be entrusted with this capital sum, and the distribution of the annual revenue arising therefrom, which is calculated at £310,000. There are two very patent reasons for this distribution. Already the sum of £140,000 for similar purposes is annually raised by a tax called "county cess;" "a heavy tax, an increasing tax," says Mr. Gladstone, "and a tax not divided, like the poor law, between the owner and the occupier, but paid wholly by the occupier; and a tax not limited, like the poor law, to occupations above four pounds in value, but going down to the most miserable huts and cabins. The holders of these most wretched tenements are now required in Ireland, and required increasingly from year to year, to pay, not that which is done by the wealthier portion of the occupants who contribute to the poor law, but to pay for that class of want and suffering which ought undoubtedly to be met, which in every Christian country should be liberally met, but which can only be met by the expenditure of considerable funds in comparison with those which are paid to support the pauper." The frightful increase of those classes of unfortunates to be thus provided for in view of the decrease of the entire population by emigration [Footnote 53] calls loudly for some legal interposition. From 1851 to 1861 the number of deaf and dumb persons increased from 5180 to 5653; and during the same decade the blind increased from 5787 to 6879, while the number of lunatics increased from 9980 to 14,098, or nearly fifty per cent!

[Footnote 53: The emigration from Ireland from May 1st, 1851, to December 1st, 1865 amounted to 1,630,722 souls.]

With this last act of Christian charity, we hope to see the traces of former injustice gradually fade away from the public mind, and the bitter memories and sectarian jealousies of the past give place to a new era of good feeling and brotherly affection. Time is not only a great healer of wounds, but a great reformer of ideas. Taking a retrospective glance at the history of Ireland for the past hundred years, and watching how, step by step, the church in Ireland, from the veriest depths of despondency and contumely, has risen in power, strength, and numbers by its own innate vitality, we are not too sanguine in believing that it has a glorious future before it, unsurpassed by that of any country in Europe. Though its members embrace the great majority of the poorest classes in the land, they have, in that short period, studded the country with magnificent cathedrals and substantial parish churches; though unaided by a government which, if not positively hostile, was certainly indifferent, they have built and are generously sustaining, hundreds of colleges, convents, hospitals, and asylums, where learning flourishes as in the pristine ages, and where the poor, the needy, and afflicted are comforted and consoled. {248} And though famine has decimated the hardy peasantry, and emigration has torn millions of the "bone and sinew" from their native shores, the Catholics of Ireland are still, as they always will be, the people of Ireland. It is true that a great many changes have yet to be effected through the means of legislation before the Irish or English Catholic is placed on an equal footing with his more favored fellow-subject. In Ireland, he must eventually have equal representation in the British parliament. The laws controlling the marriage of persons of different religious beliefs, those relating to the tenure of lands and spiritual devises, and to the disqualification for office on account of religious opinions, must be repealed and sent to dwell with all the other legal rubbish of a bygone age of bigotry. The Ecclesiastical Titles Bill, which is a disgrace to an enlightened government and a standing insult to the bishops and people of the country, must share the same fate before the crown can expect or ought to receive that heartfelt loyalty which springs from good and impartial government. The times in which we live imperatively demand those reforms, and we are very much mistaken in the strength and spirit of our co-religionists in the United Kingdom if they do not also quickly and pertinaciously demand them.

We are gratified, in looking over our files of leading English journals, to find that they all with one voice, a few old and obscure tory papers excepted, support the liberal party in its leading measure, and are waging war with their trenchant pens against the effete anti-Catholic party in the Commons. We hope, also, to see our brothers of the American press, secular and religious, who so generally advocate the support of churches by voluntary contributions, giving a word of encouragement to their cousins across the Atlantic.

Granting that the passage and proper execution of the present act will be a most important step in the right direction, it still seems to us unfortunate that it was not taken years ago. With a fatality that so generally attends English political and religious concessions, it has been so long delayed that it now appears to be more the offspring of fear and intimidation than the result of wise and mature conviction. If British statesmen will yield only to force what they refuse to sound argument and the logic of facts, they must expect the same motive power to be again applied when demands neither so reasonable nor so well founded are to be put forward. In common with our brethren in every part of the world, we view with great satisfaction this awakening sense of public justice in the English mind; but let it not falter now, as if exhausted by one solitary effort. Let a good landlord and tenant act be passed without unnecessary delay, and some comprehensive measures be adopted for the development of the industrial resources of the nation, and then, indeed, that chronic state of disaffection which has afflicted every generation in Ireland since the invasion may be radically cured.

My Mother's Only Son.

The rain is falling heavily, to-night. It has a dull, desolate, lonely sound, as if it were bent upon reminding me of another night more desolate, dull, and lonely even than the present. What right have I, who have so much happiness about me now, to be searching the dark annals of past sorrow, or to unearth a hidden misery, that will come like a blighting shadow between me and all the pleasures that might be mine? Yet that rainy, dismal night does come back to me with a force and terror I would rather not remember.

I would rather not remember it, because my son, just budding into manhood, has left me to-night, for the first time, and gone to take his place in an old firm in a neighboring city. The world and its allurements are temptingly laid out before him. He is a noble, handsome boy, so bright and promising. They tell me he will always have friends, plenty of friends; that he has all the elements of popularity, and is destined to become a general favorite. Dangerous attractions these; they have made wiser heads than yours, my darling, very giddy and very light; hearts, too, have been brought to mourning, while the admiring friends of yesterday could cast only a look of pity on their lost friends as they passed by.

My own brother was all this; gifted in an eminent degree with energy and manly courage to sustain him in any generous undertaking. We had everything to hope from him; he had everything to hope from himself. With prospects fair and bright, an old banker, a friend of my father's, gave him an eligible situation. It was an office of trust; he was proud of the confidence placed in him, and left home with the full resolve of filling it with honor to himself and credit to the good man who had placed him there. His letters were pleasant and joyous, full of the new pleasures he had never dreamed of in our quiet life at home. His graceful manners and natural gentleness soon established him as a favorite in society; his social pleasures were daily increasing, and his attention to business was both active and energetic.

My mother had a slight misgiving. It was only the shadow of a thought, she said—that Arthur, in the new pleasures that surrounded him, might become weaned from us or might learn to be happy without us. In her deep love for her gifted boy she had never thought such an event possible, and instantly reproached herself for the thought.

In going from home, my brother had left a great waste, an empty place behind him, and his letters were our only comfort.

What light and pleasure they brought to our quiet fireside, that would have been so dreary without them. There were only three of us, and while his letters were so fresh and vigorous, they almost kept up the delusion that we were not separated; but there came a change.

We may have been slow in discovering it, but we did discover it, and then to miss him as we missed him through the long winter nights seemed like losing a star that had led us, that we had followed, until it passed under a cloud and left us, still waiting, still watching, for it to come again. {250} He paid us a flying visit now and then, and my mother, unconscious of the cause of his disquietude—for he was both anxious and disturbed—would redouble her exertions to bring back his waning love, making every allowance for the indifference, the coldness, and the neglect that were so glaringly apparent to other eyes, yet so delicately obscured from her motherly vision. Not that my brother made any effort to conceal his restless desire to leave us, or that his interests and pleasures were centred elsewhere. I was very young, yet old enough to see that there was a mercy in this, my mother's blindness.

Her beautiful boy seemed to carry the sunshine of her life with him; she thought him caressed and petted, the favorite of society, and the embodiment of all that was noble. He has seen so much of the luxury and elegance of life in the great city, how can we expect him to be contented with our home, where everything is so different? Thus she would reason with me, and thus, I sometimes thought, she would reluctantly reason with herself.

One day, a letter came to us from the banking-house, where my brother had gradually risen to an honored position. It was from the banker himself, our dear old friend; he told, in the tenderest manner, that Arthur had acquired habits which rendered him unfit for an office of trust. He deeply regretted the necessity of making this known to her; he ended by suggesting that the gentle influence of home might do much toward bringing him to a sense of his condition.

My mother read the letter, folded it carefully, reopened it, and read it again. She then handed it to me without speaking a word. When I had finished reading it, I looked at her; she was still immovable, helpless as a child in this her great despair. Her apathy was the more distressing to me as I was entirely alone. I dare not consult any one, dare not ask the advice of our kind neighbors. She had roused herself just enough to tell me it must be kept as secret as death. I was only sixteen, I had never acted for myself—there had been no occasion in our quiet life for a display of individual courage or independence. I had grown up under my mother's guidance, had never been five miles away from home, where every day was like all the yesterdays that had gone before it. And now this great journey lay before me. There was no one else to go; I must take it alone.

We were both ignorant of the nature of my brother's disgrace. Mr. Lester had made no mention of it further than to say that he could keep him no longer in the bank. I could only conjecture in my own mind what it might be. Of course I thought of dishonesty; what else could have driven him from a situation where he was so honored and trusted?

The railroad was some miles distant from our little village; despatch was necessary; I must meet the evening train. My brother was ill; I was going to him; this would quiet our neighbors and put an end to curious speculations. Surely I was not far from the truth—he must have been ill indeed when his proud head was brought down so low.

Again and again reassuring my mother that I would bring him back, telling her in all sincerity that I knew he would be able to clear himself in her eyes so that not a spot or blemish would be left on his fair name, (Heaven knows how easy this might be. {251} Let him lay his head on her faithful breast, and twine an arm about her neck, and lovingly whisper, "Mother, I am innocent, all is right;" the world might sit in judgment and cry "Guilty," she would heed it not,) I became so preoccupied, so entirely absorbed with the object of my journey, that the journey itself had no novelty for me, though everything was new and startling. Now I was hurrying to the great city that I had so often thought and dreamed about. It was only in a confused way that I could settle it in my mind that I was really going there. That I was strange, and new, and unused to the busy scenes that lay before me seemed no part of my business. My brother—would he come home with me? He might be angry that I had come. Could I ask him to tell me the truth? No, I could not see him so humiliated; I would rather hear the story of his shame from other lips than his.

"Is Arthur Graham at home?" I, trembling, asked of a kindly looking woman who opened the door.

Had it come to this? Was my brother an object of pity, even to her? I asked to see him, not wishing to prolong this painful interview. She desired me to enter, and we approached his room. I opened the door cautiously. The woman's manner was so mysterious, I trembled and began to be afraid; she had told me he was not sick. Of course I thought he was a prisoner and perhaps chained in his own room. The light was very dim, and, as I advanced, I stumbled and was near falling over—what?—over the prostrate form of my own brother, lost, degraded, fallen.

As I bent down to see why he did not speak to me, I discovered the truth. He, the pride and hope of our lives, had sunk into a drunkard. I uttered no cry; I was no longer terrified; I thought only of my mother.

I was all that was left her now, and, as I bent over him, wondered if that face was his, so changed, so sickening; neglect and ruin had already settled there. I tried to smooth the heavy hair, that lay in thick, dank masses about his reeking forehead. How old, how terribly old, he had grown in so short a time! I dare not cherish a feeling of loathing; he was my brother, and needed my love as he had never needed it before. For him—for in him I was protecting my mother—I must set aside all youth and girlhood. A woman was needed now, a woman calm, firm, and resolute. Of myself I was weak, but Heaven would help me. A conviction settled upon me, as I sat there, with my travelling wrappings still unremoved, that his case was hopeless. I could see a lonely, dishonored grave, far away from us in a strange land. I know not why this sight should rise before me, my brother was young, and others as debased as he had risen to a good and noble life. Thus I reasoned with myself, and yet that lonely mound of earth would come before me, and I felt powerless.

But I had no time for misery. I had come to protect and assist. My girlhood was passing away with the shadows of the night, for to-morrow's sun must find me a woman, prepared to meet the stern duties that were now mine.

The night was far advanced, and I was trying to gather up my newfound energies, when I felt a kindly hand removing my bonnet. It was the good woman who had met me at the door; she was waiting to show me my room and to offer me some refreshment.

"You can do no good here," she continued, as she assisted me to arise, "until morning."

She shook her head doubtfully as she whispered, "You are very young, yes, quite too young to undertake it even then. But if you are afraid he will give you the slip before you are up, (he often does that,) just lock the door."

The little room assigned me was cleanly; it had an air of comfort about it greatly in contrast with the slovenly chamber I had just left. The gentle creature made nothing of undressing me, lamenting the while as if I had been a stricken child that had unexpectedly fallen into her motherly hands.

I had made no allusion to my brother as yet. I could not speak of him, and only ventured to ask the woman as she was leaving me how long he had been in this condition. "I might ask you the same question, miss, for surely it is not a day nor a month that has brought him to this."

To this! What a world of misery there was in that one simple word! It seemed to carry with it the low wailing of a lost soul.

We were to have paid my brother a visit soon, my mother and I. It was to have been a surprise, and I had gone so far as to arrange the dress I should wear, for I was anxious to appear at my best before Arthur's friends. And here I was spending my first night in New York. No kin of mine had bid me welcome. No brother had folded me in his loved embrace, and held me out to see how pretty I had grown, proudly kissing me again and again, and telling me how happy my coming had made him.

In my peaceful days I had thought of all this; and oh! how easily it might have been!

I arose early; but, early as it was, the woman had apprised Arthur of my arrival. I found him morose and sullen. He demanded my reasons for coming so abruptly upon him. He had not asked after my mother, nor given me one word of kindly greeting; and when, in a harsh tone, he asked why I thus intruded myself, my great reserve of womanly strength fled from me, and I cried long and bitterly.

He was naturally kind and gentle. He came to me, wiped the tears from my cheek, and told me he did not intend to be cruel. His hand trembled violently, as he laid it on my head, and his whole frame shook and quivered, though I could see he made a desperate effort to control himself. When he had recovered his composure, he seemed to know why I had come, and implored me not to say one word to him; he was miserable enough already.

"Come home with me, Arthur dear," I whispered. "You can soon change your life, and be your own self again."

I ventured to tell him that mother had been taken very ill, when, with a look, he begged me to say no more. He could not bear even an allusion to his condition, and I had no wish to harass him. What a slave he had become to the one ruling passion of his life!

Regardless of my presence, he drank again and again from a bottle near him. Once when I laid my hand upon the glass, he told me that he needed it to steady his nerves, and he would be all right soon. It was in vain that I urged him to accompany me home. He told me he had another situation in view, not anything like the one he had just left, but very good in its way. I could tell my mother this; it might comfort her.'Twas all the hope I had to carry home.

As years went by our sorrows were softened. We had become accustomed to Arthur's manner of life. At times he seemed changing for the better, and again he would go back to his old habits.

It was in early summer time, when everything on our little farm was at its best. The solitary womanly habits that had come so early upon me were still very strong with me. I was not yet old, only twenty-two; and on this lovely summer night I was planning our quiet future, when a carriage stopped before the door, and Arthur came in, leading, or rather carrying, a delicate young girl.

"Oh! yes," he replied. "We have been married nearly a year, and I hoped to better my circumstances before I should make the fact known to you." We saw that the poor child, for such she seemed, was sadly in want of woman's kindly care. So pale, so sorrow-stricken, so young, yet so bowed down and disappointed! I knew nothing of her story, but she was my brother's wife, and I gave her a sister's love. That night I watched by her bed; and, as the pale moonlight fell upon her rippling hair, I wondered what art, what witchery or power my brother had used to bring this delicate creature to be a sharer of his misery and shame. She waked with a sudden start, and called in a wild, frightened way for help. She was really ill, now, and before morning the doctor laid a feeble baby in my mother's arms.

My new-found sister and her wailing infant had all our tenderest care. We were glad that she had come to us that we might, in the love we gave her, make up in some degree for the sorry life the poor unfortunate child had taken upon herself. She staid with us; our home was hers. Arthur returned to New York.

Her history was soon told. She was an orphan, entirely dependent upon the bounty of an aunt who had daughters of her own to be settled in life. She met Arthur. The fascination of his manners and the interest he took in her friendless condition won her heart. The misfortune of his life was well known to her, but she trusted to her love, feeling sure that a life's devotion must redeem him. A dangerous experiment, this; too often tried, and too often found a hopeless failure. For her sake, he did try to be firm and strong, and manfully combated his besetting sin; but an hour of weakness came; old associates returned, and old habits with them. In a moment of hilarity and pleasure all his firmness gave way; his delicate young wife was forgotten, and she awakened all too soon to the knowledge that her husband's love for liquor was greater than his love for her. The dear, sweet girl and her pretty infant had lived with us nearly a year, when, one cold, drizzly night like this, Arthur came home. He had grown so reckless of late, that we were not surprised when he came reeling into our presence. He began by demanding a small amount of money which Grace had been husbanding with care. She made no reply to any of his angry threats, nor did she give him the money. Dead to all sense of manhood, he rose to strike her. Her infant was sleeping on her breast. She leaped to flee from him, but before we could save her, he struck her. She fell heavily; the sleeping babe was thrown against the iron fender. It uttered one feeble cry, and closed its eyes for ever.

The mother rose, and with a desperate effort snatched her dead child from my arms, pressed it to her breast, rocked it to and fro, and tried to give it nourishment. My mother and I spent that terrible night with a dead infant, a frenzied mother, and a father lost in hopeless despair. Every rustle in the trees, every sound in the air, brought the horror of death upon us, for each murmur seemed fraught with vengeance. Was my brother a murderer? His own tender infant had fallen dead at his feet. The act must pass without a name, for in our woe we had none to give it.

He sat there through the weary hours of the night, a haggard, desperate fear settling upon him. He dare not approach his wife; the sight of him increased her frenzy, and she prayed that she might never see his face again.

Misery had made my mother strong and she could help me. Calm, cool, and deliberate action was necessary now.

Arthur must leave us before morning. No one had known of his coming. The child's sudden death must be in some way accounted for, in what way I knew not. My mother whispered God would help us.

Arthur slunk away in his guilt and misery. He took no leave of us, but silently crept out in the darkness. There was darkness on every side, it was bearing down upon him with the weight of an avenging fury. I watched him, bowed and desolate, stealing away from us, away from all that was dear to him, from all that had loved him, and could not, even now, cast him off. I lingered until the last sound of his footsteps died away. I knew then as I know now, that we should never see him again. The rain fell upon him as he passed out. It fell upon me as I stood there, and I thought it was falling far away where I had seen a lonely grave.

I washed our martyred babe and dressed it for the burial. There was a mark upon its little neck that the solemn wrappings of the grave must cover. It might be bared before the judgment-seat to plead for an erring father.

My mother died soon after of a broken heart. She never recovered the shock of that terrible night. The curse that settled upon her poor, misguided son made him none the less her child; and she would try, with all the tenderness of her wounded spirit, to think of him as he was, innocent, true, and noble, when first he left her. When we learned that he had died on foreign shores, and was buried on a lonely island, she thanked God that he was no longer a homeless wanderer.

My sister Grace is with me still, loving and cherishing my young children, leading them and me to better life by the chastened beauty of her own Christian character.

Catholicity and Pantheism.

Number Six.

The Finite.

In the pantheistic theory, the finite has no real existence of its own. It is a modification, a limit of the infinite. The sum of all the determinations which the primitive and germinal activity assumes, in the progress of its development, constitutes what is called cosmos. The interior and necessary movement of the infinite, which terminates in all these forms and determinations, is creation. The successive appearance of all these forms in this necessary development is the genesis of creation. The finite, therefore, in the pantheistic system, does not exist as something substantially distinct from the infinite, but is one form or other which it assumes in its spontaneous evolutions.

As the reader may observe, this theory rests entirely upon the leading principle of the system that the infinite is something undefined, impersonal, indeterminate, and becomes concrete and personal by a necessary, interior movement; a principle which, viewed in reference to the finite, gives rise to two others, first, that the finite is a modification of the infinite; second, that the finite is necessary to the infinite, as the term of its spontaneous development. Now, in the preceding articles, we have demonstrated, first, that the infinite is actuality itself; that is, absolute and complete perfection; second, that in order to be personal, he is not impelled to originate any modification or limit. Hence, two other principles concerning the finite, quite antagonistic to those of pantheism. First, the finite cannot be a modification of the infinite, because perfection, absolutely complete, cannot admit of ulterior progress. Second, the finite is not necessary to the infinite, because the interior and necessary action of the infinite does not terminate outside of, but within himself, and gives rise to the mystery of the Trinity, explained and vindicated in the last two articles. Consequently, his necessary interior action being exercised within himself, he is not forced to originate the finite to satisfy that spontaneous movement, as Cousin and other pantheists contend. The finite, therefore, can neither be a modification nor a necessary development of the infinite. And this consequence sweeps away all systems of emanatism, of whatever form, that may be imagined. Whether we suppose the finite to be a growth or extension of the infinite, as the materialistic pantheists of old seemed to imagine; or mere phenomenon of infinite substance, with Spinoza; or ideological exercise of the infinite, as modern Germans seem to think—according to the principle laid down, the finite is impossible in any emanatistic sense whatever. To any one who has followed us closely in the preceding articles, it will appear evident that these few remarks absolutely dispose of the pantheistic theory concerning the finite, and close the negative part of our task respecting this question.

As to the positive part, to give a full explanation of the whole doctrine of Catholicity concerning the finite, we must discuss the following questions:

Before we enter upon the discussion of the first question, we must lay down a few preliminary remarks necessary to the intelligence of all that shall follow.

God's action is identical with his essence, and this being absolutely simple and undivided, his action also is absolutely one and simple. But it is infinite also, like his essence, and in this respect it gives rise, not only to the eternal and immanent originations within himself, but also may cause a numberless variety of effects really existing, and distinct from him, as we shall demonstrate. Now, if we regard the action of God, in itself originating both ad intra and ad extra, that is, acting within and without himself, it cannot possibly admit of distinction. But our mind, being finite, and hence incapable of perceiving at once the infinite action of God, and of grasping at one glance that one simple action originating numberless effects, is forced to take partial views of it, and mentally to divide it, to facilitate the intelligence of its different effects. These partial views and distinctions of our mind, of the same identical action of God, producing the divine persons within himself, and causing different effects outside himself, we shall call moments of the action of God.

There are, therefore, two supreme moments of the action of God, the interior and the exterior. Whenever we shall speak of the action of God producing an effect distinct from and outside of him, we shall call it exterior action, to distinguish it from the interior, which originates the divine personalities. Moreover, we shall call exterior action of God, all the moments of it which produce different effects. We shall call creation that particular moment of his external action which, as we shall see, causes the existence of finite substances, together with their essential properties and attributes.

Now, as to the first question, in what sense can creation be understood; or, otherwise, what are the conditions according to which creation may be possible? On the following: First, the terms laid down by the action of God must be in nature distinct from him. Second, they must be produced by an act which does not cause any mutation in the agent. Third, therefore, they must be finite substances. For, suppose the absence of the first condition, creation would be an emanation of the divine essence; since, if the terms created were not different from the nature of God, they would be identical with it, and consequently creation would be an emanation or development of the substance of God. The absence of the second condition would not only render it an emanation of the substance of God—because, if creation implied a mutation in him, it would be his own modification—but it would render it altogether impossible, since no agent can modify itself but by the aid of another. If, therefore, creation cannot be either an emanation or a modification of God, it must be distinct from his substance. Now, something distinct from the substance of God, and really existing, and not a modification, cannot be anything but finite substance. Finite, because, the substance of God being infinite, nothing can be distinct from it but the finite; substance, because something really existing, and which is not a modification, gives the idea of substance. {257} Creation, therefore, cannot be understood in any other sense except as implying the causation of finite substances. But is creation of finite substances possible? In answer to this question, let it be remarked that the essence of a thing may have two distinct states: one, intelligible and objective; the other, subjective and in existence. In other words, all things have a mode of intelligible existence, distinct from the being by which they exist, in themselves; the one may be called objective and intelligible; the other, subjective. To give an instance, a building has two kinds of states: one, intelligible, in the mind of the architect; the other, subjective, when it exists in itself.

Now, the possibility of a thing to have a subjective existence in itself, depends upon the intelligible and objective state of the same thing. Because that only is possible which does not involve any contradiction. But that which does not involve any repugnance, is intelligible. Therefore the possibility of a thing implies its intelligibility, and its subjective existence depends upon its objective and intelligible state. This is so true, that the transcendental truth of beings, in their subjective state of existence, consists in their conformity with their intelligible and objective state. As the truth of a building consists in it conformity with the plan in the mind of the architect.

From these principles it follows that, in order to establish the possibility of the creation of finite substances, we must prove three different things: First, that they have an intelligible state; in other words, that their idea does not involve any repugnance. Second, that there exists a supreme act of intelligence, in which the intelligible state of all possible finite substances resides. Third, that there exists a supreme activity, which may cause finite substances to exist in a subjective state conformable to their objective and intelligible state. When we have proven these three propositions, the possibility of creation will be put beyond all doubt. Now, as to the first proposition, pantheists have denied the possibility of finite substances. Admitting the general possibility of substance, they deny the intrinsic possibility of a finite one; and, as everything which is finite is necessarily caused, the whole question turns upon this—whether, in the idea of substance, there is any element which excludes causation and is repugnant to it. Every one acquainted with the history of philosophy knows that Spinoza coined a definition purposely to fit his system. He defined substance to be that which exists in itself, and cannot be conceived but by itself. [Footnote 54]

This definition is purposely insidious. That which exists in itself may have a twofold meaning; it may express a thing, the cause of whose existence lies in itself, a self-existing being; or it may imply a thing which can exist without inhering in or leaning on any other. Again, that which cannot be conceived but by itself may be taken in a double sense—a thing which has no cause, and is self-existent, and consequently contains in itself the reason of its intelligibility; or it may signify a thing which may be conceived by itself, inasmuch as it does not lean upon any other to be able to exist. Spinoza, taking both terms of the definition in the first sense, had the way paved for pantheism; for if substance be that which is intelligible by itself because self-existent, it is evident that there cannot be more than one substance, and the cosmos cannot be anything but phenomenon of this substance. {258} Hence the question we have proposed: Is there, in the true idea of substance, any element which necessarily implies self-existence, and excludes causation? Catholic philosophy insists that there is none. For the idea of substance is made up of two elements: one positive, the other negative. The positive element is the permanence or consistence of an act or being—that is, the existing really. The second element is the exclusion or absence of all inherence in another being in order to exist.

Now, every one can easily perceive, that to exist really does not necessarily imply self-existence, or contradiction to the notion of having been caused by another. Because the notion of real existence or permanence of a being does not necessarily imply eternity of permanence, or, in other words, does not include infinity of being. If the permanence or real existence of a being included eternity of permanence, then it could not have a cause, and should necessarily be self-existent. But we can conceive a being really existing, which did not exist always, but had a beginning. The better to illustrate this conception, let it be remembered that duration or permanence is one and the same thing with being; and that, ontologically, being and duration differ in nothing. The permanence and duration of a being is, therefore, in proportion to the intensity of a being. If the being be infinite, the highest intensity of reality, the being is infinitely permanent; that is, eternal, without beginning, end, or succession. If the being be finite and created, the permanence or duration is finite also; that is, has beginning, and may, absolutely speaking, have an end. Everything, therefore, really existing without inhering in another, whether it be infinite or finite reality—that is, whether it have a cause or be self-existent—is a substance. If it be self-existent, it is infinite substance; if it be caused, it is finite substance. This is so evident that none, slightly accustomed to reflect, can fail to perceive the difference between being self-existent and existing really. The two things can go separately without the one at all including the other. A thing may exist as really after being caused, as the substance which is self-existent and eternal, so far as existing really is concerned.

To show that the idea of substance, however, is such as we have been describing, it is sufficient to cast a glance at our own soul. It is evident from the testimony of consciousness, that there is a numberless variety of thoughts, volitions, sensations; all taking place in the me, all following and succeeding each other without interruption, like the waves of the ocean rolling one upon the other, and keeping the sea always in agitation. We are conscious to ourselves of this continual influx of thoughts, volitions and sensations; but, at the same time that we are conscious of this, we are conscious also of the identity and permanence of the me amid the fluctuations of those modifications. We are conscious that the me, which yesterday was affected with the passions of love and desire, is the same identical me which is to-day under the passion of hate. This permanence or reality of the me, amid the passing and transitory affections, gives the idea of substance or real existence; whilst the numberless variety of thoughts and feelings which affect it, and which come and go while the me remains, gives the idea of modification, or a thing which inheres in another in order to exist.

The above remarks must put the possibility of finite substance beyond doubt. But before we pass to the second question, we remark that any one sooner than a pantheist could call in question the possibility of finite substance; because if, as we have demonstrated in the second article, the infinite of the pantheists be not an absolute nonentity, a pure abstraction, it is nothing but the idea of finite being or substance. Hence, to prove the possibility of finite substance to the pantheist, we might make use of the argument ad hominem. That which is intelligible is possible, by the principle of contradiction. But the idea of finite substance is intelligible to the pantheists, being the foundation of their system; therefore, finite substances are possible.

Second question: Is there a supreme act of intelligence, in which reside all possible finite substances in their objective and intelligible state?

For the idea of finite substance does not involve any repugnance, by the principle of contradiction. Therefore it is necessarily possible, as we have demonstrated. But that which is necessarily possible, is necessarily intelligible; because everything that is possible may be conceived. Therefore the idea of finite substance is necessarily intelligible, and may be conceived by an intelligence able to grasp the whole series of possible finite substances. But God is infinite intelligence, and as such is capable of apprehending all possible finite substances. Therefore in God's intelligence resides the whole series of possible finite substances, in their intelligible and objective state.

To render this argument more convincing, let us look into the ontological foundation of the possibility of finite substances. Finite substances are nothing but finite beings; consequently they are not possible, except inasmuch as they agree with the essence of God, which is the infinite, the being, and as such is the type of all things which come under the denomination and category of being. God, therefore, who fully comprehends his essence, comprehends, at the same time, whatever may agree with it; or, in other words, comprehends all possible imitations, so to speak, of his essence; and consequently, all the possible imitations of his essence residing in his intelligence, there dwells at the same time the intelligible and objective state of all possible finite substances. St. Thomas proves the same truth with a somewhat similar argument. "Whoever," he says, "comprehends a certain universal nature, comprehends, at the same time, the manner according to which it may be imitated. But God, comprehending himself, comprehends the universal nature of being; consequently he comprehends also the manner according to which it may be imitated." Now, the possibility of finite substance is a similitude of the universal being. Hence, in God's intelligence resides the whole series of possible finite substances.

Third proposition: There exists a supreme activity which may cause finite substances to exist in a subjective state. For St. Thomas argues that the more perfect is a principle of action, the more its action can extend to a greater number and more distant things. As for instance, if a fire be weak, it can heat only things which are near it; if strong, it can reach distant things. Now, a pure act, which is in God, is more perfect than an act mixed of potentiality, as it is in us. {260} If therefore by the act which is in us we can not only produce immanent acts, as for instance, to think and to will, but also exterior acts by which we effect something; with much greater reason can God, by the fact of his being actuality itself, not only exercise intelligence and will, but also produce effects outside himself and thus be the cause of being. [Footnote 55] The great philosopher Gerdil, appropriating this reason of St. Thomas, develops it thus: "In ourselves, and in particular beings, we find a certain activity; therefore activity is a reality which belongs to the being or the infinite. The effect of activity when the agent applies it to the patient, consists in causing a mutation of state. The intensity of acts, depending on intelligence, has a force to introduce a mutation of state in the corporal movements. This may be seen in the real though hidden connection of which we are conscious to ourselves, between the intensity of our desires and the effect of the movements which are excited in the body; and better still, in certain phenomena which sometimes occur, though rarely, when the imagination, apprehending something vividly and forcibly, produces a mutation of state in the body which corresponds somewhat with the apprehension of the imagination. [Footnote 56]

[Footnote 55: C. G. lib. ii. ch. 6.]

[Footnote 56: An imminent danger of being burned to death, vividly apprehended, has sometimes entirely cured persons altogether paralyzed and unable to move.]

Now this change in the body, corresponding to what takes place in the fancy, that is, in the objective and intelligible state, shows that there exists a certain, though hidden, force and energy by which, from what exists in an intelligible state, may be introduced a mutation in the corresponding state of subjective existence. Therefore the efficacy of the supreme intelligence, being the greatest and the highest, in force of the supreme intensity of being which resides in it, may not only effect a change conformable to a relative, intelligible state in things already existing, but also cause them to pass altogether from the intelligible state into the state of existence. And, assuredly, if the finite intensity of desire and of imagination may produce an effort of corporal movement, the supreme intensity of the Infinite Being may, certainly, produce a substantial, existing being; since the supreme intensity of the Being bears infinitely greater proportion to the existence of a thing, than the intensity of desire does in relation to a corporal movement. The term, therefore, of the supreme activity, is to effect, outside of itself, the existence of things which had only an intelligible and objective being in itself." [Footnote 57]

It is well to remark here, that the supreme activity is not by any means determined necessarily to create; for the activity may be determined to a necessary operation, in that case only when the agent is actually applied to the subject capable of receiving a change of state. But creation is not the result of the application of the supreme activity to a subject coexisting with itself; because nothing coexists originally with the supreme activity. Therefore creation cannot be an action determined by any necessity, but must depend only upon the energy or will of the supreme intelligence in which the highest activity dwells. Hence it follows, that creation, as to its term, is not necessary, either because there is any principle in God impelling him necessarily to create, as we have seen, or because there is any principle outside of God forcing him to create; because outside of the supreme activity nothing exists. {261} What is necessary about the creation of finite substances, is their intelligible and objective state, or their intrinsic possibility. For everything which does not imply any repugnance by the principle of contradiction, is intrinsically possible and intelligible. That which is intrinsically possible is essentially, necessarily, and eternally so. Consequently, the objective state of finite substances is necessarily so.

Pantheists, confounding the objective and intelligible state of the cosmos with its state of subjective existence; in other words, identifying the ideal with the real, the ideological with the ontological, have been led to admit the necessity of creation. This is particularly remarked in the systems of Schelling and Hegel; the one admitting, as first principle, the absolute identity of all things; the other identifying the idea with being. Both confounded the objective and intelligible state of the cosmos with its state of subjective existence; and once the two are identified, it follows that, as the one, which is the intelligible, is necessary, eternal, and absolute, the other, the subjective, becomes also necessary and eternal; and hence the necessity of creation. Catholicity, on the contrary, carefully distinguishing between the ideal and the real, the objective and the subjective, and admitting the necessity and eternity of the first, because everything intelligible necessarily and eternally resides in the supreme intelligence, denies the necessity of the second, because of that very intelligible state which it admits to be necessarily and eternally so.

For a finite substance is not, and cannot be conceived as possible or intelligible, except it is supposed to be contingent or indifferent in itself to be or not to be, not having in itself the reason of its existence. This is the only condition according to which finite substances can be possible. Were it otherwise, were a finite substance supposed to be necessary, it would be self-existent, and have in itself the reason of its existence; and in that case it would no longer be finite, but infinite. To suppose, therefore, a finite substance not contingent is to suppose it necessary, is to suppose a self-existing finite substance, or, in other words, an infinite finite substance, which is absurd, and, therefore, unintelligible and impossible.

The intelligibility, therefore, or objective state of finite substances, which is necessary, eternal, and absolute itself, requires the contingency of their existence in a subjective state; and, consequently, their contingency is necessary because their intelligibility is necessary; and their creation is free, because whatever is indifferent in itself to be or not to be, absolutely depends, as to its existence, upon the will of the supreme intelligence.

An objection is here raised by pantheists impugning the possibility of the creative act. It is as follows: Given the full cause, the effect exists. Now, the creative act, the full cause of creation, is eternal; therefore, its effect must exist eternally. But, an eternal effect is a contradiction in terms; because it means a thing created and uncreated at the same time. Therefore, creation is impossible in the Catholic sense, and can be nothing more than the eternal development and unfolding of the divine substance. Given the cause, the effect exists. Such an effect, and in such a manner as the cause is naturally calculated to produce, it is granted; such an effect and in such a manner as the cause naturally is not intended to produce, it is denied. {262} Now, what is the cause of creation but the will of God? And how does the will naturally act, except by a free determination, and in the manner according to which it determines itself? Consequently, creation being an effect of the will of God, it will follow just when and how the will of God has determined it shall. Hence the will of God being eternal, it does not follow that the effect should be eternal also. In other words, given the full cause, the effect exists when the cause is impelled to act by a necessary intrinsic movement. But when the cause is free, and perfectly master of its own action and energy, the cause given is not a sufficient element for the existence of the effect, but, two elements are required, the cause and its determination, and the free conditions which the cause has attached to its determination. Nor does this imply any change in the action of God when creation actually takes place. For that same act which determines itself from eternity to create, and to cause substances and time, the measure of their duration, continues immutable until the creation actually takes place; and the creation is not an effect of a new act, but of that same immutable and eternal determination of God.

We conclude, finite substances are intrinsically possible; they have an intelligible and objective state in the infinite intelligence of God. God's infinite activity may cause them to exist in a subjective state conformable to their intelligible mode of existence. Therefore, creation in the Catholic sense is possible.

First. God can act outside himself, since he can create finite substances with all the properties and faculties which are necessary elements of their essence, and naturally and necessarily spring from it.

Second. The creative act implies two secondary moments; one, called preservation, and the other, concurrence. Hence, if God does create, he must necessarily preserve his effects, and concur in the development of their activity. Preservation implies the immanence of the creative act, or the continuation of the creative act of God, maintaining finite substances in their existence. The necessity of this movement is proved by the following reason:

Every finite being is, in force of its nature, indifferent to be or not to be; that is, every finite being contains no intrinsic reason necessarily requiring its existence. Hence, the reason of its existence lies in an exterior agent or cause. But the finite being once existing, does not change its nature, but intrinsically continues to be contingent, that is, indifferent to be or not to be. Therefore, the reason of the continuation of its existence cannot be found in its intrinsic nature, but in an exterior agent; that is, in the action of the Creator. So long, therefore, as the action of God continues to determine the intrinsic indifference of contingent being to be or not to be, so long does the finite exist. In the supposition of the act ceasing, the finite would simultaneously cease to be.

Nor does this argument impugn the substance of finite beings. For, as we have seen, substance is that which exists really, though the reason of its existence lie in the creative act; whereas, what we deny here in the argument is the continuation of existence by an intrinsic reason, which would change the essence of the finite, and, from contingent, render it necessary.

The second moment of the creative act is concurrence. Finite substance is a being in the way of development; a being capable of modification. Now, no being can modify itself, can produce a modification of which it is itself the subject, without the aid of another being who is pure actuality. Therefore, finite substances cannot modify themselves without the aid of God. The action of God aiding finite substances to develop themselves, is called concurrence. We have already proved, in the second article, the principle upon which this moment of the action of God is founded. We shall here add another argument. A finite substance is a being in the way of development; a being in potency of modification; and when the modification takes place, it passes from the power or potency to the act. Now, no being can pass from the power to the act except by the aid of being already in act. Consequently, finite substances cannot modify themselves except by the aid of being already in act. Nor can it be supposed that finite substances can be at the same time in potency and in act with regard to the same modification; for this would be a contradiction in terms. It follows, then, that having power of being modified, they cannot pass from the power to the movement without the help of another being already in act. This cannot be a being which may itself be in power and in act, for then it would itself require aid. It follows, therefore, that this being, aiding finite substances to modify themselves, must be one which is pure actuality, that is, God.

Third corollary: From all we have said follows, also, the possibility of God acting upon his creatures by a new moment of his action, and putting in them new forces higher than those forces which naturally spring from their essence, nor due to them either as natural properties, attributes or faculties. For, if God can act outside himself, and effect finite substances distinct from him; substances endowed with all the essential attributes and faculties springing from their nature; if he can continue to maintain them in existence, and aid them in their natural development, we see no contradiction in supposing that he may, if he choose, grant his creatures other forces superior altogether to their natural forces, and, consequently, not due to them as properties or attributes of their nature.

For the contradiction could not exist either on the part of God or on the part of the creature. Not in the former, because God's action being infinite, may give rise to an infinity of effects, one higher and more sublime, in the hierarchy of beings, than the other. Not in the latter, because the capacity of the creature is indefinite. It may receive an indefinite growth and development, and never reach a point beyond which it could not go. Therefore, the supposition we have made does not imply any repugnance either in God or in the finite, the two terms of the question. Now, that which involves no repugnance is possible. It is possible, therefore, that God may act upon his creatures by a moment of his action distinct from the creative moment, and put in them forces higher than their natural forces, and not due to them as any essential element or faculty.

Aubrey de Vere in America.

[Footnote 58: Irish Odes and Other Poems.
By Aubrey De Vere.
New York: The Catholic Publication Society,
126 Nassau street. 1869.]

The first if not the strongest attraction this book will have for American curiosity is not in its contents, but in their selection. The poems presented are culled from a much greater number, especially and expressly for the American market, and the choice interests us vividly as indicating an English author's deliberate business opinion of that market. This edition has not been prepared without thought: Mr. De Vere does not often do anything without thought. Moreover, it has been, if we are not misinformed, somewhat unusually long in press, and several of the poems already published have been actually revised and improved on by their painstaking author to the very last copy, and differ in quite a number of minutiae from their former selves. Hence Americans must be all the more surprised at the singular estimate of taste and the singular conception of their character, which appear to underlie this book. We cannot help thinking—nay, we cannot help seeing—that Mr. De Vere has not selected so well as he would have done if he had ever lived in America, or, if he had had intelligent, practical, and experienced American advice. There was only one way to do this thing rightly. It was to consider either what we, the Americans, ought to like the best, or what we would like the best; to weigh the facts well, to settle on some definite plan or theory of selection, and carry this out with some little sternness to the end, only leaving the path for the very choicest flowers. We cannot trace any strictness of system in this book: it has neither spinal column nor spinal cord, but is made up of miscellaneous samples—disjecta membra poetae. Sometimes we imagine it to be a compromise of plans, and sometimes a random jumble. Too many of the best poems we miss, and some of the author's most taking lines of thought stated nearly, and some totally unrepresented. On the other hand, some mediocre pieces abound as to which we seek but cannot find an extrinsic cause for their reproduction. Our own suggestion to Mr. De Vere would have been to make general interest his prime criterion in choosing. We are a very heterogeneous nation, and it is not every topic that can unite our various tastes. For any wide or national success here, a book must have at least a kernel of thought or sentiment which shall appeal directly to almost the only thing we have in common here—our humanity. Next to such poems—and Mr. De Vere has written not a few—we should have taken the best expressed; the boldest or most beautiful. This indeed is but a branch corollary of the other principle, because we all love fine expressions of ideas. On these two principles we think we could have made up from the copies of Mr. De Vere's poetry one of the most attractive books of the year. We think he has missed this in several ways. To begin with, we cannot see anywhere that he ever once grasped the idea of addressing himself to the whole American people. There is pabulum enough for Boston, and for devout Catholics everywhere; but where is the intelligence of Georgia, or California, or Ohio in his estimates for the popularity of this volume? {265} Some of the poems err in the direction of abstruseness, many in being founded on obscure facts; a few embody the gross fault of being occasional pieces—the flattest and most surely flat of all possible forms of dulness. That Mr. De Vere could forget himself to this last degree is to us proof positive that he never thought of pleasing the whole American reading community.

We have heard this praised as sagacity, since this work's appearance, on the ground that, as an outspoken Catholic and Irishman, he could never have succeeded. To this the American observer says, "Distinguo." Mr. De Vere is too elevated and refined a thinker to be a poet of the people anywhere; but it is, if anything, his religion, not his Celtic outbursts, that stand in his way here. We are—heaven knows with good reason—tolerably well past literary prejudices against foreigners. A foreign author, having no friends nor enemies, no clique nor counter-clique among the critics here, will have a fair trial by American public opinion always, on the one condition that he do not stand upon his being a foreigner and insist on cramming pet theories down our throats.

But we do question whether there may not be a measure of truth in the suggestion that Mr. De Vere, here as everywhere, is too conspicuously Catholic for popularity. We see little of sectarian prejudice among our best non-Catholic men; perhaps because so many of them are freethinkers or indifferentists in religion. But Protestant prejudice controls some otherwise first-class criticism, much more of lower grade, and very many ordinary readers and buyers of books. Perhaps Mr. De Vere is too pronounced for these—too full and too proud of his faith. Many a bigoted Protestant who can just barely make up his mind to hear a man out in spite of his being a "Romish idolater," etc., etc., lays down a book the instant he suspects—what Protestantism is always peculiarly quick to suspect—propagandism. Such men might know that if proselyte-making were Mr. De Vere's aim, his obviously shrewder plan would have been, first to gain influence and popularity by neutral poems, and then, entrenched on the vantage-ground of public favor, to bombard the community with his explosive Catholic notions to some purpose. But this would be far too much thinking for a bigoted man to go to the trouble of, especially when it is so much cheaper, as well as more sweet to the deacons and elders, to be unjust and slurring. So we fear that many Protestant organs of opinion will reject the poetry for the religion, and so do Mr. De Vere's book harm as an American venture so far as the non-Catholics are concerned.

On the other hand we do believe that his Irish pieces would be his best hold on public favor; for he certainly is one of the best-informed men in Irish history of all the late writers; and if there is one thing an American admires more than another—in literature or anything else—it is a man that knows what he is talking about.

But this is all of the dead past now; the book is upon us. We go on to this question—since Mr. De Vere did not aim to please us all, what was his aim? He has not told us in the natural place—the preface—and we can only ask the reader to decide for himself whether it is, as we said, compromise or jumble. The selection of the Irish pieces is infinitely the worst of all. The best, because the most truly Irish, of these, are in Inisfail. {266} There are very many Irishmen indeed who would not appreciate the sonnet to Sarsfield and Clare, and who could make neither head nor tail of "The Building of the Cottage;" but take up Inisfail and read out "The Malison," or "The Bier that Conquered," or the "Dirge of Rory O'More," to any Irish audience, and see if they understand it or not!

There lay one main element of strength of a book like this; and yet we do not recall a single piece from "Inisfail" in the entire collection! It is inconceivable to us except upon the very well-known and extremely ill-understood principle that an author always differs with his readers, and generally with posterity, as to what is his best. In our own humble opinion, for instance, "The Bard Ethell" or "The Phantom Funeral," as historical pictures, or the "Parvuli Ejus" or "Semper Eadem" as pure poetry, is singly worth the whole fifty pages of Irish Odes, sonnets, and interludes that begin this new volume: and we doubt as little that Mr. De Vere would smile in benign derision at our notion. So we will not dispute about tastes, and simply say that we do not understand the classification of the main body of the Irish pieces. Especially is this hard to discover the reason for omitting Inisfail in the light of the following passage from the preface: "I cannot but wish that my poetry, much of which illustrates their history and religion, should reach those Irish 'of the dispersion,' in that land which has extended to them its hospitality. Whoever loves that people must follow it in its wanderings with an earnest desire that it may retain with vigilant fidelity, and be valued for retaining, those among its characteristics which most belong to the Ireland of history and religion."

The remainder of the selected poems are purely miscellaneous, and are chiefly remarkable to us as again showing how curiously authors estimate themselves. We do indeed meet with much of the best there is; but we miss, as we have said, very much more. And having, as we have, a personal intimacy with many of Mr. De Vere's poems, we feel really resentful to see our favorites slighted and supplanted by others which—as it seems to us, be it remembered—no one could ever like half so well.

After all, Mr. De Vere may be right and we wrong; but we feel so interested in his success, and so earnestly desirous of recognition for his high abilities, that—we do wish he had done it our way!

The first sixty pages of the present volume are composed mainly of a sort of rosary of ten odes, all strung on Ireland and the Irish. Now, odes we disbelieve in generally. We think they contain more commonplace which we imagine we admire, and which we don't and can't admire, than any other variety of composition in English literature. They are the supremely fit form of a few peculiar orders of thought. The cause of Ireland is not one of these, and Mr. De Vere has tried hard and failed, to prove the contrary. Irish griefs are too human, Irish sympathies too heartfelt, to be reached by this road in the clouds. One good ballad or slogan is worth practically a million odes. As Ode I. in this very series beautifully puts it,

  "Like severed locks that keep their light,
     When all the stately frame is dust,
   A nation's songs preserve from blight
     A nation's name, their sacred trust.
   Temple and pyramid eterne
     May memorize her deeds of power;
   But only from her songs we learn
     How throbbed her life-blood hour by hour."

But, waiving their final cause, three of the odes are good, the first two, and the seventh—the best of all—which, as also the ninth, is republished from the book of 1861. The close of this is singularly touching and true, and well worth recalling even to many who must have admired it before.

  "I come, the breath of sighs to breathe,
     Yet add not unto sighing;
   To kneel on graves, yet drop no wreath
     On those in darkness lying.
   Sleep, chaste and true, a little while,
     The Saviour's flock and Mary's,
   And guard their reliques well, O Isle,
     Thou chief of reliquaries!

  "Blessed are they that claim no part
     In this world's pomp and laughter:
   Blessèd the pure; the meek of heart
     Blest here; more blest hereafter.
  'Blessed the mourners.' Earthly goods
     Are woes, the master preaches:
   Embrace thy sad beatitudes,
     And recognize thy riches!

  "And if, of every land the guest,
     Thine exile back returning
   Finds still one land unlike the rest,
     Discrowned, disgraced, and mourning,
   Give thanks! Thy flowers, to yonder skies
     Transferred, pure airs are tasting;
   And, stone by stone, thy temples rise
     In regions everlasting."

  "Sleep well, unsung by idle rhymes,
     Ye sufferers late and lowly;
   Ye saints and seers of earlier times,
     Sleep well in cloisters holy!
   Above your bed the bramble bends,
     The yew tree and the alder:
   Sleep well, O fathers and O friends!
     And in your silence moulder!"

Scattered about between these odes we find a miscellany of minor pieces whose function seems to be that of interludes or thin partitions. Of these hors-d'oeuvres some are new, some old; the majority, for Mr. De Vere, commonplace. He cannot write a page without hitting on some happy phrase or just thought, but there is a little more than this to be said of almost all. The best is this sonnet which we do not remember having seen before:

        "The Ecclesiastical Titles Act.

  "The statesmen of this day I deem a tribe
   That dwarf-like strut, a pageant on a stage
   Theirs but in pomp and outward equipage.
   Ruled inly by the herd, or hireling scribe.
   They have this skill, the dreaded Power to bribe:
   This courage, war upon the weak to wage:
   To turn from self a Nation's ignorant rage:
   To unstaunch old wounds with edict or with jibe.
   Ireland! the unwise one saw thee in the dust,
   Crowned with eclipse, and garmented with night,
   And in his heart he said,'For her no day!'
   But thou long since hadst placed in God thy trust,
   And knew'st that in the under-world, all light,
   Thy sun moved eastward. Watch! that East grows gray!"

We have also a long series of selections from the entire body of our author's published works. Here we are glad to welcome to America many of his best poems. The sonnets especially are as a rule well chosen. We miss many a lovely one, but we should miss these that are before us just as much. Mr. De Vere has also with excellent judgment honored with a place in this book his three charming idylls, "Glaucè," "Ione" and "Lycius"—among his very finest pieces of word-painting, and which have more of the old classic mode of expression than any modern poems in our language save Landor's, and perhaps Tennyson's "OEnone." We wonder, by the way, why a man who could write these idylls has never given us any classical translations. We are sure they would be remarkably good. The long poem of "The Sisters" is also reprinted in full. It is good, and we will not say that it is not a good piece here; but on reading it over, the discussion and description which frame the picture seem to us better than the picture itself. Indeed, we have begun to suspect more and more that Mr. De Vere's strength lies in his descriptive powers. It might surprise many other readers of his, as much as it did us, to examine for themselves and discover how many of their most admired passages are portraits. In mere verbal landscape-painting he stands very high. His very earliest books abound in felicities of this sort, and the May Carols are fairly replete with them, and in fact contain a whole little picture gallery in verse. {268} And from the "Autumnal Ode—one of the very latest in his latest book [Footnote 59] —we select one of many passages which amply prove that Mr. De Vere's hand has not forgotten her cunning:

  No more from full-leaved woods that music swells
    Which in the summer filled the satiate ear:
  A fostering sweetness still from bosky dells
    Murmurs; but I can hear
  A harsher sound when down, at intervals,
  The dry leaf rattling falls.
  Dark as those spots which herald swift disease,
  The death-blot marks for death the leaf yet firm.
  Beside the leaf down-trodden trails the worm.
  In forest depths the haggard, whitening grass
  Repines at youth departed. Half-stripped trees
    Reveal, as one who says,'Thou too must pass,'
  Plainlier each day their quaint anatomies.
  Yon poplar grove is troubled! Bright and bold
  Babbled his cold leaves in the July breeze
  As though above our heads a runnel rolled.
    His mirth is o'er; subdued by old October,
    He counts his lessening wealth, and, sadly sober,
  Tinkles his minute tablets of wan gold."

This is very vivid, and the closing fancy extremely graceful and pleasing. Poplars, by the way, seem to be a favorite theme of our author. Every one familiar with his poems will recall another beautiful description in his idyll of "Glaucè," in which occur these lines:

                     "How indolently
  The tops of those pale poplars bend and sway
  Over the violet-braided river brim."

But it is waste of argument to go on giving illustrations of Mr. De Vere's power to depict the external world; it is like proving Anacreon a love-poet. What we wish to call attention to is the nature, not the existence, of his talent for description. It seems to us that, throughout his works, the faculty of delineation is not the ordinary sensuous susceptibility of poets, but rather a clear, tender truthfulness in reproducing impressions alike of thought and sense. The somewhat unusual result from which we deduce this opinion is, that he describes quite as happily in the moral order as the physical. This has not been adequately noticed by his critics, His beautiful genre pictures appear to have absorbed almost all of the public attention. We think this is more than their due. Indeed, whenever he sets out to paint traits, Mr. De Vere is quite as sure to make a hit as in his landscape sketches. This volume chances to afford us one striking set of examples of this. There are in it three several summaries of the characteristics of different nations. One—the remarkable epitome of England in the sonnets on colonization—has been published in this magazine before, (Vol. iv. No. 19, p. 77.) The next we take from the "Farewell to Naples," (p. 70.) We think it will bear quoting, though it has been in print since 1855, and was written as long ago as 1844.

  'From her whom genius never yet inspired,
   Nor virtue raised, nor pulse heroic fired;
   From her who, in the grand historic page,
   Maintains one barren blank from age to age;
   From her, with insect life and insect buzz,
   Who, evermore unresting, nothing does;
   From her who, with the future and the past
   No commerce holds, no structure rears to last;
   From streets where spies and jesters, side by side,
   Range the rank markets, and their gains divide;
   Where faith in art, and art in sense is lost,
   And toys and gewgaws form a nation's boast;
   Where Passion, from Affection's bond cut loose,
   Revels in orgies of its own abuse;
   And Appetite, from Passion's portals thrust,
   Creeps on its belly to its grave in dust;
   Where Vice her mask disdains, where Fraud is loud,
   And naught but Wisdom dumb and Justice cowed;
   Lastly, from her who, planted here unawed,
   'Mid heaven-topped hills, and waters bright and broad,
   From these but nerves more swift to err hath gained,
   And the dread stamp of sanctities profaned,
   And gilt not less with ruin, lives to show
   That worse than wasted weal is wasted woe—
   We part, forth issuing through her closing gate
   With unreverting faces not ingrate."

Is this not stingingly true? If only the critics found it in Byron, would it not be inevitable in all the select readers and speakers, and rampant in the "Notes on France," "Letters from Italy," "Thoughts while Abroad," etc., which ministers are so sure to write, and which we hope congregations buy?

The other is a still stronger, and, coming from Mr. De Vere, a very bold as well as trenchant portraiture—no less than the English idea of Ireland. True, Mr. De Vere does not even pretend to agree with it, but that, an Irishman himself, and a devoted patriot, he can see her so exactly as others see her, makes it wonderfully good, and raises what would otherwise have been a mere success of exact expression, to the rank of a high imaginative effort.

  "How strange a race, more apt to fly than walk;
   Soaring yet slight; missing the good things round them,
   Yet ever out of ashes raking gems;
   In instincts loyal, yet respecting law
   Far less than usage: changeful yet unchanged:
   Timid yet enterprising: frank yet secret:
   Untruthful oft in speech, yet living truth,
   And truth in things divine to life preferring:
   Scarce men; yet possible angels!—'Isle of Saints!'
   Such doubtless was your land—again it might be—
   Strong, prosperous, manly never! ye are Greeks
   In intellect, and Hebrews in the soul:
   The solid Roman heart, the corporate strength
   Is England's dower!"

We cannot devise an addition that could complete this picture of the Sassenach's view of the Gael. It is to the life—the "absolute exemplar of the time." Only we fear that Mr. De Vere has furnished those who do not particularly love his country with rather an ugly citation against her, and Irishmen may perhaps complain of him for giving to such a powerful delineation the sanction of an Irish name. If so, it will be the highest compliment in the world; yet it has ever been a dangerous gift to be able to see both sides of the shield.

We have only suggested our belief, not asserted it as a fact, that Mr. De Vere's fullest power is in description; but the idea grows on us every year, and we wish he would set the question finally at rest in some future work. Let him for once in his life make this great gift of his the essential, instead of the incident, and write something purely descriptive.

There is another thing—rather a curious thing, perhaps—that we note in the choice of the old poems. In a former review, some little time since, we took occasion to speak of the chameleon-like way in which Mr. De Vere's style—always in its essence his own—unconsciously reflects his reading of certain of our best authors. There are poems that recall Shakespeare, and Wordsworth, and Landor, and Tennyson, and Shelley. But there are also others—many of them among his best—which are all himself. Consciously or unconsciously, Mr. De Vere has come back to these at the last, and they constitute a notable majority of those he has picked out for this volume. The ode on the ascent of the Apennines, the "Wanderer's Musings at Rome," the "Lines written under Delphi," the beautiful "Year of Sorrow," "The Irish Gael (alias Irish Celt) to the Irish Norman"—all these are of this class. Perhaps the poet has come to love the best those of his poems which hold the purest solution of his own nature, or perhaps it may be mere chance; only certain it is that the most characteristic of his pieces predominate very largely throughout.

We cannot, however, pass on to the new poems without expressing our profound disrespect for one selection in this volume. It is notorious that, as we hinted before, authors are poor judges of the relative excellence of their own works. To this rule there are, apparently, no exceptions. Let us take one rankling example. No lover of Tennyson but groans inwardly with disgust over that insane hoot called "The Owl," with its noble description of the very witching hour of night:

  "I would mock thy chant (!) anew,
     But I cannot mimic it.
   Not a whit of thy tuwhoo,
     Thee to woo to thy tuwhit," etc., etc.

We had long loved to believe that this was a sceptred hermit of an example, wrapped in the solitude of its own unapproachable fatuity. It has gone blinking and tu-whooing through edition after edition, with the muffy solemnity characteristic of the eminent fowl, its subject. But Mr. De Vere has paralleled it at last with a certain "Song" which we find in this volume. On the 4th of September, 1843, in a preface to his first book of verses, [Footnote 60] he tells us that this poem was written considerably earlier than 1840.

Three years ago, we remember observing and laughing at it, and thinking whether it would not be well to speak of it as the one blemish in all his works, on his elsewhere perfect grammar. Deeming it a mere Homeric dormitation, we passed it by. And now, after thirty years face to face with it, comes Mr. De Vere, at last, and drags from utter and most laudable oblivion this hapless

                 "SONG.

  "He found me sitting among flowers,
     My mother's, and my own;
   Whiling away too happy hours
     With songs of doleful tone.

  "My sister came, and laid her book
     Upon my lap: and he,
   He too into the page would look,
     And asked no leave of me.

  "The little frightened creature laid
     Her face upon my knee—
  'You teach your sister, pretty maid;
     And I would fain teach thee.'

  "He taught me joy more blest, more brief
     Than that mild vernal weather:
   He taught me love; he taught me grief:
     He taught me both together.

  "Give me a sun-warmed nook to cry in!
     And a wall-flower's perfume—
   A nook to cry in, and to die in,
     'Mid the ruin's gloom."

If Mr. De Vere had only attended in 1840 to the very reasonable request of the young person in the last verse, we should have been spared one of the very silliest little things in the English language. And yet in thus haling it from the

  "nook to sigh in and to die in
    'Mid the ruin's gloom,"

where public opinion had long since left it in peace, he has done good. It is instructive to his admirers to see for themselves how very badly he could write before the year 1840. If intended as a public penance of this nature, it is perfect of its kind, and the humility of it will rejoice all Christian souls, excepting, perhaps, the indignant shade of Lindley Murray.

Not far behind this in inanity is the "Fall of Rora," all the good part of which was published years ago, and all the bad part of which is raked up and added for this edition. But from this to the end of the book are new poems of a very different order. To begin with, we have a number of miscellaneous sonnets. They are none of them poor, but the first that particularly arrests attention, by its fine harmony and happy illustration, is

                 "Kirkstall Abbey.

  "Roll on by tower and arch, autumnal river;
   And ere about thy dusk yet gleaming tide
   The phantom of dead Day hath ceased to glide,
   Whisper it to the reeds that round thee quiver:
   Yea, whisper to those ivy bowers that shiver
   Hard by on gusty choir and cloister wide,
   My bubbles break: my weed-flowers seaward slide:
   My freshness and my mission last for ever!'
   Young moon from leaden tomb of cloud that soarest,
   And whitenest those hoar elm-trees, wrecks forlorn
   Of olden Airedale's hermit-haunted forest,
   Speak thus,'I died; and lo, I am reborn!'
   Blind, patient pile, sleep on in radiance! Truth
   Dies not: and faith, that died, shall rise in endless youth."

The arrangement of the double rhymes, which gives the peculiar, rich rhythm, is a very unusual one with these sonnets. In the whole two hundred and fifty before this, we only recall one or two other instances, notable among which is the famous one beginning,

On the heels of this treads another (of the same rhythm also) too good to pass by:

             "Unspiritual Civilization.

  "We have been piping, Lord; we have been singing!
   Five hundred years have passed o'er lawn and lea
   Marked by the blowing bud and falling tree,
   While all the ways with melody were ringing:
   In tented lists, high-stationed and flower-flinging
   Beauty looked down on conquering chivalry;
   Science made wise the nations; Laws made free;
   Art, like an angel ever onward winging,
   Brightened the world. But O great Lord and Father!
   Have these, thy bounties, drawn to thee man's race
   That stood so far aloof? Have they not rather
   His soul subjected? with a blind embrace
   Gulfed it in sense? Prime blessings changed to curse
   Twixt God and man can set God's universe."

Better, perhaps, than either of these, as combining the best qualities of both, is the one on

                "Common Life.

  "Onward between two mountain warders lies
   The field that man must till. Upon the right,
   Church-thronged, with summit hid by its own height,
   Swells the wide range of the theologies:
   Upon the left the hills of science rise
   Lustrous but cold: nor flower is there, nor blight:
   Between those ranges twain through shade and light
   Winds the low vale wherein the meek and wise
   Repose. The knowledge that excludes not doubt
   Is there; the arts that beautify man's life:
   There rings the choral psalm, the civic shout,
   The genial revel, and the manly strife:
   There by the bridal rose the cypress waves:
   And there the all-blest sunshine softest falls on graves."

This is, we think, one of the author's very best. It evolves a happy allegory very neatly with a happy description, to express a thought too large, it is true, for development in such brief space, but highly suggestive. The question, how far wisdom lies in action, may be raised in a sonnet, and remain unsettled by a thousand treatises.

Several versions from Petrarch's sonnets are admirable, and serve to confirm our already expressed opinion that Mr. De Vere could give us excellent translations.

Perhaps, however, readers of our author will be most interested by the following, which is in an altogether different vein from the general run of these sonnets, and indeed is perhaps rather a curious subject for a sonnet to be made about at all. Still there is no accounting for these poets. Here it is, with all its oddities upon its head:

                "A Warning.

  "Why, if he loves you, lady, doth he hide
   His love? So humble is he that his heart
   Exults not in some sense of new desert
   With all thy grace and goodness at his side?
   Ah! trust not thou the love that hath no pride,
   The pride wherein compunction claims no part,
   The callous calm no doubts confuse or thwart,
   The untrembling hope, and joy unsanctified!
   He of your beauty prates without remorse;
   You dropped last night a lily; on the sod
   He let it lie, and fade in nature's course;
   He looks not on the ground your feet have trod.
   He smiles but with the lips, your form in view;
   And he will kiss one day your lips—not you."

Where did our pious philosopher, of all men, learn to discourse thus sagely and plainly of the uncertainty of all things amorous? We think he makes a very good case, and only add our emphatic indorsement, if that can serve the young lady, and join in warning her to find a warmer lover, unless the untrembling and unsanctifled is very, very handsome, in which case we know better than to advise her at all.

The next particularly good piece is the opening one of a miscellany, and is called

            "The World's Work.

  "Where is the brightness now that long
     Brimmed saddest hearts with happy tears?
   It was not time that wrought the wrong:
     Thy three and twenty vanquished years
   Crouched reverent, round their spotless prize,
     Like lions awed that spare a saint;
   Forbore that face—a paradise
     No touch autumnal ere could taint.

  "It was not sorrow. Prosperous love
     Her amplest streams for thee poured forth,
   As when the spring in some rich grove
     With blue-bells spreads a sky on earth.
   Subverted Virtue! They the most
     Lament, that seldom deign to sigh;
   O world! is this fair wreck thy boast?
     Is this thy triumph, vanity?

  "What power is that which, being nought,
     Can unmake stateliest works of God?
   What brainless thing can vanquish thought?
     What heartless, leave the heart a clod?
{272}
   The radiance quench, yet add the glare?
     Dry up the flood; make loud the shoal!
   And merciless in malice, spare
     That mask, a face without a soul?

  "Ah! Parian brows that overshone
     Eyes bluer than Egean seas!
   One time God's glory wrote thereon
     Good-will's two gospels, love and peace.
   Ah! smile. Around those lips of hers
     The lustre rippled and was still,
   As when a gold leaf falling stirs
     A moment's tremor on the rill!"

We wish to call attention here to the very curious image italicized in the second verse. Every one is struck by it at once; every one sees the great beauty of it at once: and yet the code of a narrow and merely rhetorical criticism would weed it out like a wildflower shyly intruding in "ordered gardens great." The simile is not at all a particularly happy one in relation to the preceding idea; it is well enough, but there have been apter similes, and there will be. And reducing it to fact, probably it is one of the most exaggerative images ever written. But yet it is beautiful—really beautiful, not a verbal juggle that entraps the imagination in fine words. The force lies in the bringing into juxtaposition in a new way those old emblems of beauty, flowers and sky, and the daring inaccuracy of it only adds a charm. It does a poetical thought sometimes no harm to be loose. Nature can do clear-cut work enough when she makes things for use; but all the visible loveliness of this world is in vague outlines, formless masses, incomplete curves. The law that softens the distant mountain-tops is the same that makes the beauty of these lines. Theirs is the rarer excellence that rises above rule. We notice it the more in Mr. De Vere that his strength lies generally in the other direction, of photographic exactness in reproduction. We like the very looseness of such expressions; they are like the flowing robes of beautiful women. The third verse also is excellent throughout, especially in the fine metaphor in the sixth line, and the intensity of "merciless in malice." This makes it so much the more provoking that the end is weak, insignificant, and abrupt, and in a vicious style that seems to be more and more the fashion of to-day. Still, there have been worse things; does not Horace end an ode with "Mercuriusque"?

The next short song, though nothing remarkable, perhaps, as pure poetry, we cite because it is so like the author—Aubrey De Vere all over, and the shortest epitome of his style we have yet seen in any of his works.

               "A Song Of Age.

                       I.

  "Who mourns? Flow on, delicious breeze!
     Who mourns, though youth and strength go by?
   Fresh leaves invest the vernal trees,
     Fresh airs will drown my latest sigh.
   What am I but a part outworn
     Of earth's great whole that lifts more high
   A tempest-freshened brow each morn
     To meet pure beams and azure sky?

                     II.

  "Thou world-renewing breath, sweep on,
     And waft earth's sweetness o'er the wave!
   That earth will circle round the sun
     When God takes back the life he gave!
   To each his turn! Even now I feel
     The feet of children press my grave,
   And one deep whisper o'er it steal—
     The soul is His who died to save.'"

We like the honesty and earnestness of this none the worse for knowing that Mr. De Vere is no longer a young man. And yet does it not seem hard to realize that so good a writer has been before the public nearly thirty years, and seen a generation of flimsy reputations hide him from the eyes of the herd? We can only with difficulty realize, beside, that any one with so romantic and novel-like a name can ever be old. And will he ever be? Is it not true in a deeper and other sense, that whom the gods love die young?

The "Lines on Visiting a Haunt of Coleridge's" are not excelled by anything in all the volume, but hang so closely together, that, having to quote all or nothing, we are constrained by their length to pass on to an interpolated copy of verses by S. E. De Vere, which gives us a moment's pause. We do not know whether the unknown S. E. is a gentleman or lady; whether the mysterious initials stand for Saint Elmo or Selah Ebenezer, Sarolta Ermengarde or Sarah Elizabeth. But we do know that in this poem, "Charity," (p. 276,) is one passage of some beauty, as thus:

  "O cruel mockery, to call that love
   Which the world's frown can wither! Hypocrite!
   False friend! Base selfish man! fearing to lift
   Thy soilèd fellow from the dust! From thee
   The love of friends, the sympathy of kind
   Recoil like broken waves from a bare cliff,
   Waves that from far seas come with noiseless step
   Slow stealing to some lonely ocean isle;
   With what tumultuous joy and fearless trust
   They fling themselves upon its blackened breast
   And wind their arms of foam around its feet,
   Seeking a home; but finding none, return
   With slow, sad ripple, and reproachful murmur!"

We find concluding the work a set of sonnets called "Urbs Roma," dedicated to the Count de Montalembert; all smooth, polished, elegant, and dim; with no salient beauties anywhere that distinguish one above another—golden means. The real climax of the volume is at the "Autumnal Ode." This is far the best of the new poems, and one of the best of any of its author's, new or old. In structure it bears a general resemblance to the rest of Mr. De Vere's longer odes; and the style is ripe, lofty, easy, and well-sustained. We have already given one citation from its rich stores, but there are two more especially worthy of attention. The first is a description like the one cited, and quite in Mr. De Vere's own vein.

  "It is the autumnal epode of the year;
     The nymphs that urge the seasons on their round,
   They to whose green lap flies the startled deer
       When bays the far-off hound,
   They that drag April by the rain-bright hair,
   (Though sun showers daze her and the rude winds scare)
       O'er March's frosty bound,
   They whose warm and furtive hand unwound
   The cestus falls from May's new-wedded breast—
   Silent they stand beside dead Summer's bier,
   With folded palms, and faces to the west,
   And their loose tresses sweep the dewy ground."

                     III.

  "A sacred stillness hangs upon the air,
     A sacred clearness. Distant shapes draw nigh:
   Glistens yon elm-grove, to its heart laid bare,
     And all articulate in its symmetry,
   With here and there a branch that from on high
     Far flashes washed as in a watery gleam;
   Beyond, the glossy lake lies calm—a beam
   Upheaved, as if in sleep, from its slow central stream."

The images, and the way the allegory is sustained, are the beauty of the first stanza. The second is perhaps more artistic still. The adjective "sacred" is an artful and ingenious one. Without any apparent particular propriety in its places—a hundred other words might be effective as qualifications of "stillness" and "clearness"—yet, we find, on passing to the next thought, that it has had its result in preparing the mind for a more vivid and imaginative view of the whole scene. The remaining delineation is exact and cumulative, as our author's descriptions always are; and the closing lines are a singularly true and acute observation of an effect of light that very few would notice in the actual landscape, or will appreciate even now their attention is called to it. But people who are sensible enough to bask now and then in the ripeness of an autumn day will feel an electric contact of recognition.

Perhaps we cannot do better than to close this rambling notice with the closing lines of this elegant and thoughtful poem:

  "Man was not made for things that leave us,
     For that which goeth and returneth,
   For hopes that lift us yet deceive us,
     For love that wears a smile yet mournetlh;
   Not for fresh forests from the dead leaves springing,
     The cyclic re-creation which, at best,
   Yields us—betrayal still to promise clinging—
     But tremulous shadows of the realm of rest;
       For things immortal man was made,
     God's image, latest from his hand,
       Co-heir with Him, who in man's flesh arrayd
     Holds o'er the worlds the heavenly-human wand:
     His portion this—sublime
     To stand where access none hath space or time,
     Above the starry host, the cherub band,
     To stand—to advance—and after all to stand!"

These lines are the real end and culmination of a book which will, on the whole, do much to raise Mr. De Vere's reputation in this country to a level nearer his deserts. With its human share of faults, it is a truer, an abler, and a more scholarly book than often issues from an American press, and contains everywhere lofty and pure thought, with never a taint of evil, and never a morally doubtful passage. And we only wish for our country, that, of his readers, there may be many in whom these his poems may sow motives as unselfish and aims as noble as those which, we sincerely believe, inform the inner life of the true poet and Christian, Aubrey De Vere.

About Several Things.

And, to begin with, about the poverty and vice of London! Hood and and Adelaide Anne Procter, Dickens, James Greenwood, [Footnote 61] have made these more familiar to us than the streets of our own cities. We have talked with Nancy on London bridge and skulked with Noah Claypole beneath its arches—swept crossings with poor Joe and starved with the little ragamuffin in Frying Pan Alley.

[Footnote 61: Author of a Night in a London Workhouse, and of the True History of a Little Ragamuffin.]

The poor of London are representative beings to us all. As we walk through the streets, each ragged or threadbare wanderer tells us a story heard long ago and half forgotten. That miserable woman huddled up in a doorway is a brickmaker's wife, and the thin shawl drawn about her shoulders hides the only marks of attention she ever receives from her pitiful husband. Her baby is dead, thank God! safe beyond the reach of blows and hunger and cold. Her story will soon be ended, if we may judge by her thin face, and the eager look in her eyes, and the short, hacking cough. The shilling you slip into her hand will only prolong her misery, but it gives you a moment's consolation, and brings a flash of gratitude into her poor face. Good-by, Jenny! When we meet you at the judgment-seat of God, we wonder if it will occur to us we might have done more for you to-day than give you a shilling and a glance of recognition.

  "Alas for the rarity
   Of Christian charity
     Under the sun.
   Oh! it was pitiful!
   In a whole city-full
     Home she had none."

We wonder if Thomas Hood was much better than other people? If he found homes for the homeless and food for the hungry? We cannot get Jenny out of our head. Her wants would be so easily supplied. In all London is there no place where lodging and fire and food are provided for the decent poor?

The portly policeman at the street corner says yes, there are several refuges, but the one in this district is kept by Sisters of Mercy, in Crispin street, No.30 or thereabouts. Asking poor Jenny to follow us, (she manifests a mild surprise at our sympathy,) we cross Finbury Circus, pass Bishopsgate street, without; and soon find ourselves in Crispin street, standing at the modest entrance of the House of Mercy. We are not the only applicants for admission this dreary November afternoon. Women with children and women without them are sitting on the steps or leaning against the wall, waiting for the hour of five to strike, blessed signal for the door to open. It is only half-past four now, says the sister portress. Jenny must join the throng lingering about the house; but we as visitors may come in and see the preparations made for their entertainment.

This then is the refuge described by Miss Procter, and her pretty garland of verses is still sold for its benefit. In 1860, there was no Catholic refuge in England, and excellent as were those supported by Protestants, they did not supply all demands. Rev. Dr. Gilbert of Moorfields Chapel found in a block of buildings, called by a pleasant coincidence, "Providence Row," a large empty stable separated by a yard from No. 14 Finsbury Square. The Sisters of Mercy were then seeking a house more suited to their needs than the one in Broad street. The two projects fitted each other like mosaic; No. 14 Finsbury Square should be the convent, the stable should be the refuge. Benches and beds were provided at first for fourteen persons only; but in February, 1861, additional provision was made for forty-six women and children. Before the month of April, 1862, 14,785 lodgings, with breakfast and supper, had been given.

But charity is as unsatiable in its desires as self-indulgence, and Dr. Gilbert's ideas soon outgrew the stable in Providence Row. The present refuge, giving accommodation to three hundred adults and children, was opened last autumn. It will be in operation from October to May of every year, on week-days from five P.M. to half-past seven A.M.; on Sundays, throughout the twenty-four hours. In this room on the ground floor, with its blazing fire, the women are received for inspection. If any one shows herself unworthy of assistance, either by intoxication or by the use of bad language, she is turned away. Without doubt many sinners are admitted to the refuge, and the sisters rejoice in being able to check their course of evil for twelve hours; but no one receives hospitality here unless she can conform outwardly to the habits of decent persons. This is the only refuge where admission depends on the good character of the applicant. It has proved an efficient preventive of the contamination so much to be dreaded whenever the poor and ignorant are brought together in large numbers.

The selection of guests being made, their dresses and shawls, wet with London fog and mud, are dried by the fire; and the fixture basins round the room are placed at their service with a bountiful supply of water.

From the inspection-room they pass to a large apartment, where they have supper, and sit together in warmth and comfort until bedtime. The supper consists of a bowl of excellent gruel and half a pound of bread for each person. It is to be observed that, though the accommodations are good of their kind, affording a decent asylum to the homeless, they are not calculated to attract those who can find comfortable shelter elsewhere.

At an early hour night-prayers are said by a sister, and the women are shown to the dormitories. The beds are constructed in an ingenious manner, economizing space and making perfect cleanliness practicable. Two inclined planes, fastened together at the higher end, pass down the middle of the dormitory. Two more inclined planes pass down the sides of the room with the higher end next the wall. These platforms are partitioned off by planks into troughs about two feet wide and six feet long, (that is to say, the length of the slope of the platform,) looking much like cucumber frames without glass. These are the beds, and at the foot of each is a little gate, which can be opened to admit of drawing out a sliding plank in the bottom of the trough. This is done every morning by the sisters in charge of the dormitories, and the floor beneath is swept. But now the little gates are closed and the beds are ready for their forlorn occupants. Each is furnished with a thick mattress and pillow covered with brown enamel cloth and with a large coverlet of thick leather. As the women go to bed thoroughly warm and wear their clothing, they sleep comfortably under these odd-looking quilts; especially the mothers, who often hold one little child in their arms while another nestles at their feet. The bedding is wiped carefully every morning, and thus the dormitories are kept free from vermin. A cell partitioned off at each end of the dormitory, with two or three windows, provides the sisters in charge with a private room and at the same time with a post of observation. The arrangements for water throughout the house are excellent, including a hose fixed in the wall of every dormitory, ready to be used in case of fire.

At half-past six in the morning, the sleepers are roused; at seven they have breakfast, consisting, like the supper, of a basin of gruel and half a pound of bread. At half-past seven, they leave the refuge, some times to be seen no more, sometimes to return night after night for weeks together. On Sunday they can remain all day. But, as persons are admitted without distinction of creed, they are allowed to leave the refuge during the hours of morning service to go to church. A short lesson in the catechism is given every evening at the refuge; but only Catholics are allowed to attend the classes unless occasionally by especial permission. They have, for their Sunday dinner, as much strong beef soup as they can eat with bread.

The arrangements for men are similar to those for women, though less extensive. The entrances are separate, and there are watchmen in the male dormitory. The refuge provides thirty-two beds for men and one hundred and fifty for women. It is by packing in children with their parents that so many individuals are lodged.

The survey of the building ended, we pass out of the front door just as five o'clock strikes, and the tattered throng, Jenny among them, present themselves for admission. This institution could be copied with good effect in several American cities. Its system of management guards against two evils. Provision being made only for the bare necessities of life, no temptation is offered to impostors. Propriety of behavior being ensured by strict surveillance, the chance of contamination is materially lessened, perhaps wholly removed.

It is no unusual thing, even in the United States, for men and boys, women and girls, to spend a night in the station-house because they have no other place to sleep. A refuge is less expensive than other charitable establishments. The first cost of a building is considerable; the annual outlay in provisions, fuel, and light, comparatively trifling. The money spent every year in indiscriminate almsgiving in a large city would serve to support a night refuge for several hundred persons. But while providing for the houseless poor of to-day, we should remember that their numbers are increasing with every successive generation. The children of our poorest class must be rescued from their present migratory life, divided between street, jail, and penitentiary.

Much has been done for girls, and we can only desire an extension of the work. With an increase of funds, the Sisters of Charity, of Mercy, of the Good Shepherd, and of Notre Dame could accomplish a mission of great importance to the future prosperity of our country. These ladies devote their lives to saving from misery and degradation the children of those who cannot or will not perform a parent's duty. They need money to accomplish this. We too often dole it out to them as if they had asked alms for themselves. Let us give them not only money but sympathy and encouragement. Many a good work has failed for want of friendly words to give the strength for one final vigorous effort.

But what is to be done for the boys? They may be divided into three classes. First, children guilty of no worse crime than friendlessness. Second, small boys obnoxious to the police for petty infringements of the laws; third, newsboys, bootblacks, and costermongers, more or less familiar with the vices of city life. The third class is developed from the other two, because neglected poverty naturally gravitates to vice and crime.

The development of a true ragamuffin is a process painfully interesting to watch. At an age when the children of the rich take sober walks attended by nursery-maid or governess, he knows the streets as well as any watchman. At seven years old, he is arrested by some energetic policeman for throwing stones, bathing, stealing a bunch of grapes, or some other first-class felony. Once in the hands of the law, there is no redress for him unless he is "bailed out." He must go to jail to wait for trial-day—perhaps three or four weeks. The turnkeys do their best for him; find him a decent companion if he is frightened, or, still better, give him a cell to himself, where he looks more like a squirrel in a cage than a criminal offender. I have seen in one day four mere babies in prison for "breaking and entering!"

But, with all the precautions used in a well-ordered jail to prevent mischief, our infant ragamuffin comes out older by many years than he went in. He has been in prison, and his tiny reputation is gone for ever. A few years later he comes back, arrested for some grave misdemeanor; a sly, old-fashioned little rogue by this time, gifted with an ingenuity fitting him admirably to be the tool of some professional thief. Then begins a course of sojourns in workhouses and juvenile penitentiaries. By and by he reappears in jail with a smart suit of clothes, the fruit of a successful burglary, and you are informed with an air of conscious superiority that this time it is a house of correction or State's prison offence. There is ambition in crime as well as in other careers, we may be sure. He grows up to be a drunkard, a libertine, a bad husband, and the father of children more degraded than himself. We know of an entire family having been in prison at one time, father, mother, and all the children.

Who is to blame for this career of vice and crime? Not the officers of the jail, who bitterly regret the necessity of receiving children, but cannot set them free. Not the judges, who are sworn to administer the laws as they stand, not to improve upon them.

The police are to blame for exercising their enthusiasm for order upon babies, instead of making examples of grown men guilty of similar misdemeanors, but harder to catch.

The public is to blame for making insufficient provision for the reclamation of juvenile offenders. Above all, we Catholics are to blame, because these are usually the children of foreign parents, and Catholics, at least in name.

Let us build an asylum in the air for these poor little urchins. Aerial philanthropy requires no funds, and very little executive ability. Who knows but our plan may be carried out in earnest, one of these days, by some Dr. Gilbert, trustful of small beginnings, and content to let his project first see the light in a stable?

We would have one division devoted to little orphans, and children whose parents are willing to resign them for a time or for ever.

A second division should be given to the infant criminals of whom we have just spoken. Their offences are always bailable. A trustworthy person should be employed to go bail for all children under ten years of age, and bring them to the asylum to await their trial. The judges gladly sentence children to serve out a term at a juvenile home instead of sending them to penitentiaries. Thus we should recover them after their trial, for a length of time proportioned to the importance of severing old associations. Their circumstances should be thoroughly investigated and reported to the judge—character of parents, place of residence, etc., etc.

These two divisions should be under the charge of female religious; with several male attendants to do menial work and enforce discipline in the few instances where strong measures might be necessary, but without possessing any authority except the reflected one of acting under the matron's orders. The necessity of vigilance can hardly be exaggerated. One child of vicious habits can corrupt many more. But since direct surveillance is irritating even to children, a routine of light and frequently-varied occupation would be found useful in giving vent to restless activity, which is at the root of many childish misdemeanors. The superintendents must learn to distinguish fun from mischief; energy from insubordination.

A third division should provide a refuge for newsboys and others of the same tribe. These older boys should be under the charge of the Christian Brothers. An evening school, a library of books such as boys enjoy, and a collection of innocent games would form an important element in the plan of management. They should be persuaded to put a portion of their earnings in the savings bank, and induced if possible to alter their roving life and learn a trade. Preference should be shown to lads of correct life over those who have been in prison, but encouragement and countenance given to every boy willing to conform to the rules of the refuge. We lay less stress upon separating the good from the bad among the lads for two reasons. A boy of fourteen or fifteen who has not been corrupted by street life must be temptation-proof. It is difficult to judge the respective merits of lads of that age or to learn their past histories. They must to a great extent be taken on trust.

In the course of a few years a fourth division would become necessary to provide for the little boys grown too old for petticoat government. This division should also be under the charge of the Christian Brothers.

The institution would be very expensive, unless it were made partially self-supporting. There is a good deal of light work connected with trades that might be done by boys resident in the house. Perhaps in time city governments would wake up to the fact that it costs less to give boys a good plain education than to support rogues and paupers; but our dream of charity is rudely dispersed by a yawn from our companion and a suggestion that we should reach Piccadilly sooner by the underground railroad than on foot. The gaslights stare despondingly at me through the yellow fog. A London Arab solicits a penny for clearing the slimy crossing, and wonders at the glow of charity with which we press sixpence into his grimy palm. Where are we? In London? Yes, but there are orphans wandering homeless about the streets of American cities, too; bootblacks going to destruction by scores; tiny children falling victims to the misplaced zeal of policemen; and not even the corner-stone of our asylum is laid!

A Chinese Husband's Lament For His Wife.

Translated From The French Of M. Stanislas Julien,
Professor Of The Chinese Language, Paris.

It was in the fifth watch of the first day of the year, when the winter's cold was most intense, that my tender wife died. Can there be on earth a man more unhappy than I? O my wife! if thou wert still here, I would give thee a new robe for the new year; but woe is me, thou art gone down to the sombre abode where flows the yellow fountain. Would that husband and wife could see one another again! Come to me in the night—come to me in the third watch—let me renew for a little while the sweetness of the past.

In the second moon, when spring has come, and the sun stays each day longer in the sky, every family washes its robes and linen in pure water, and husbands who have still their wives love to adorn them with new garments. But I, who have lost mine, am wasting my life away in grief; I cannot even bear to see the little shoes that enclosed her pretty feet! Sometimes I think that I will take another companion; but where can I find another so beautiful, wise, and kind!

In the third moon, the peach-tree opens its rose-colored blossoms, and the willow is bedecked with green tresses. Husbands who have still their wives go with them to visit the tombs of their fathers and friends. But I who have lost mine go alone to visit her grave, and to wet with my hot tears the spot where her ashes repose. I present funereal offerings to her shade; I burn images of gilded paper in her honor. "Tender wife," I cry with a tearful voice, "where art thou, where art thou?" But she, alas! hears me not. I see the solitary tomb, but I cannot see my wife!

In the fourth moon, the air is pure and serene, and the sun shines forth in all his splendor. How many ungrateful husbands then give themselves up to pleasure and forget the wife they have lost! Husband and wife are like two birds of the same forest; when the fatal hour arrives, each one flies off a different way. I am like a man, who, beguiled by the sweet fancies of an enchanting dream, seeks, when he awakes, the young beauty that charmed his imagination while he slept, but finds around him only silence and solitude. So much loveliness, so much sweetness vanished in one morning! Why, alas! could not two friends, so dearly united, live and grow gray together!

In the fifth moon, the dragon-headed boats float gaily on the waters. Exquisite wines are heated, and baskets are filled up with delicious fruits. Each year at this season, I delighted to enjoy the pleasures of these simple feasts with my wife and children. But now I am weary and restless, a prey to the bitterest anguish. I weep all day and all night, and my heart seems ready to break. Ah! what do I see at this moment? Pretty children at merry play before my door. Yes, I can understand that they are happy; they have a mother to press them to her bosom. Go away, dear children, your joyous gambols tear my heart.

In the sixth moon, the burning heat of the day is almost unbearable. The rich and the poor then spread their clothes out to air. I will expose one of my wife's silken robes, and her embroidered shoes to the sun's warm beams. See! here is the dress she used to wear on festal days, here are the elegant little slippers that fitted her pretty feet so well. But where is my wife? Oh! where is the mother of my children? I feel as if a cold steel blade were cutting into my heart.

In the seventh moon, my eyes overflow with tears; for it is then that Nieaulan visits his wife Tchi-niu in heaven. Once I also had a beautiful wife, but she is lost to me for ever. That fair face, lovelier than the flowers, is constantly before me. Whether in movement or at rest, the remembrance of her that is gone from me never ceases to rack my bosom. What day have I forgotten to think of my tender wife—what night have I not wept till morning?

On the fifteenth day of the eighth moon, her disk is seen in its greatest splendor, and men and women then offer to the gods melons and cakes, ball-like in form as the orb of night. Husbands and wives stroll together in the fields and groves, and enjoy the soft moonlight. {281} But the round disk of the moon can only remind me of the wife I have lost. At times, to solace my grief I quaff a cup of generous wine; at times I take my guitar, but my trembling hand can draw forth no sound. Friends and relations invite me to their houses, but my sorrowful heart refuses to share in their pleasures.

In the ninth moon, the chrysanthemum opens its golden cup, and every garden exhales a balmy odor. I would gather a bunch of newly-blown flowers if I had still a wife whose hair they could adorn! My eyes are weary with weeping—my hands are withered with grief, and I beat a fleshless breast. I enter the tasteful room that was once my wife's; my two children follow me, and come to embrace my knees. They take my hands in theirs, and speak to me with choking voices; but by their tears and sobs I know they ask me for their mother.

On the first day of the tenth moon, both rich and poor present their wives with winter clothing. But to whom shall I offer winter clothing? I, who have no wife! When I think of her who rested her head on my pillow, I weep and burn images of gilded paper. I send them as offerings to her who now dwells beside the yellow fountain. I know not if these funereal gifts will be of use to her shade; but at least her husband will have paid her a tribute of love and regret.

In the eleventh moon, I salute winter, and again deplore my beautiful wife. Half of the silken counterpane covers an empty place in the cold bed where I dare not stretch out my legs. I sigh and invoke heaven; I pray for pity. At the third watch I rise without having slept, and weep till dawn.

In the twelfth moon, in the midst of the winter's cold, I called on my sweet wife. "Where art thou," I cried; "I think of thee unceasingly, yet I cannot see thy face!" On the last night of the year she appeared to me in a dream. She pressed my hand in hers; she smiled on me with tearful eyes; she encircled me in her caressing arms, and filled my soul with happiness. "I pray thee," she whispered, "weep no more when thou rememberest me. Henceforth I will come thus each night to visit thee in thy dreams."

A May Flower.

  A look and a word, my sweet lady;
    A thought of your kind heart, I pray,
  For a flower that blooms by the roadside,
    This beautiful morning in May.

  I know that engagements await you;
    I know you have many to meet;
  Yet, pray, linger here for a moment,
    And look at this flower of the street.

  'Tis but May, my sweet lady, and hardly
    Has spring had the time to look bright;
  Yet this flower it called into being
    Already is smitten with blight.

  Already upon its fair leaflets
    Lie heavy the grime and the dust;
  Its shrivelled and lack-lustre petals,
    Tell a story—stop, lady!—you must.

  For a soul is in danger, my lady,
    The soul of this drooping street flower;
  And you by a look can recall it
    To life, or 'twill die in an hour.

  Ah me! if you knew but the power
    Of one word of kindness from you;
  Could you see what a tempest of passion
    A glance of your eye would subdue!

  What hope once again would awaken
    To arm this poor soul for the right!
  Thanks, my lady! Go happily onward,
    The tempted is strengthened with might.

New Publications.

The Formation Of Christendom.
Part II.
By T. W. Allies.
London: Longmans, Green, Reader & Dyer.
New-York: The Catholic Publication Society.

This volume is the dictation of a scholarly mind and the work of an experienced pen. It forms the second volume of a work not yet complete, the first part of which appeared in 1865. In the six chapters which composed the first volume, as the author tells us in his advertisement to the present one, he described Christianity creating anew, as it were, and purifying and introducing supernatural principles into the individual soul; showing how the new religion restored the fallen dignity of man by insisting on his individuality and personal responsibility, by consecrating the married and counselling the virginal life. The vile secrets of that viler pagan society are partly revealed, and the influence of the Gospel is shown in a graceful parallel between St. Augustine and Cicero. The author further says, that, having examined the foundations, he has now reached the building itself and comes "to consider the Christian Church in its historical development as a kingdom of truth and grace; for while the soul of man is the unit with which it works, 'Christendom' betokens a society." It is then the first epoch of such a kingdom that the author would describe in the present volume. Accordingly, we have a graphic account of the polytheism which, at the birth of Christ, reigned throughout the world, save in one of its most insignificant lands, the frightful power of this false worship, its relation to civilization, to the political constitution of the empire, to national feeling in the provinces, to despotism and slavery, and its hostile preparations for the advent of the "Second Man." Then follows the teaching of Christ and the institution of his church, a statement of the nature of the latter, its manner of teaching and propagation, its episcopacy and primacy. Then, a picture of the history of the martyr church through the first three centuries, its sublime patience under persecution, and its struggle with swarming heresies that menaced from within. After this, the author prepares for a dissertation on that strife between Christianity and heathen philosophy, which terminated on the downfall of the Alexandrian school, by sketching the history and influence of Greek philosophy until the reign of Claudius; and, reserving this dissertation for a future volume, the author closes the present number of his contemplated series. It is a serious disadvantage to any work to be published piecemeal. Nevertheless, English readers, interested in the study of the early ages, and especially those who have read with pleasure Mr. Allies's former productions, will be glad to notice the publication of this volume. But Mr. Allies's work, also, belongs to a class, small indeed, but all the more worthy of encouragement, namely, that of original Catholic histories in the English language. It is, therefore, an attempt to partially supply a want which no one book, however popular, can adequately meet. In the face of an ungrateful heathenism that to-day secretly sighs after the Augustan age, and openly asks, "What has been gained by all this religion?" daring to draw unjust parallels between the heroes of Christian tradition and contemporary pagan models, it is the duty of all who love the Christian name to encourage true historical criticism; that men may know all that they at present owe to the Catholic Church; and if they will not acknowledge her to-day as the guide to true civilization, may learn from the record of the past how her genius has presided over all that is greatest and noblest in the past history of mankind.

Thunder And Lightning.
By W. De Fonvielle.
Translated from the French, and edited by T. L. Phipson, Ph.D.
Illustrated with thirty nine engravings on wood.
1 vol. 12mo, pp. 216.

The Wonders Of Optics.
By F. Marion.
Translated from the French, and edited by Charles W. Quinn, F.C.S.
Illustrated with seventy engravings on wood.
1 vol. 12mo, pp. 248.
New York: Charles Scribner & Co. 1869.

These two volumes are the first issues of the "Illustrated Library of Wonders," to be published by Messrs. Scribner & Co. They are highly interesting to the general reader, as well as to persons of scientific attainments. The accounts given of the peculiar and novel freaks of lightning are curious and instructive. The illustrations in both volumes are well executed, and make these books specially attractive to young people. In the work on optics, the telescope, magic lantern, magic mirror, etc., are fully explained.

Why Men Do Not Believe;
Or, The Principal Causes Of Infidelity.
By N.J. Laforet, Rector of the Catholic University of Louvain.
Translated from the French.
New York: The Catholic Publication Society,
126 Nassau Street.
Pp. 252. 1869.

Whoever has had the happiness of attending the Catholic Congress of Belgium must have noticed among the distinguished gentlemen seated by the side of the president the prepossessing, intellectual countenance of Mgr. Laforet, the Rector Magnificus of the University of Louvain. Although still a young man, he holds a high place among the writers who adorn European Catholic literature. His best known and most elaborate work is an excellent History of Philosophy. In the present volume, which is quite unpretending in size, and written in such a simple and easy style as to be easily readable by any person of ordinary education, he has, perhaps, rendered even a greater service to the cause of religion and sound science than by his more elaborate works. It is an excellent little treatise on the causes of infidelity, which has already produced happy fruits among his own countrymen by bringing back a number of persons to the Christian faith, and we trust is destined to accomplish a still greater amount of good in its English as well as its French dress.

Mgr. Laforet assigns as the causes of the infidelity which prevails, unhappily, to such a considerable extent in our days, ignorance of the real grounds and nature of the Christian religion, materialism, and the consequent moral degradation which it has produced. He denies in a peremptory manner that it has been caused by progress in science or the more perfect development of the reasoning faculty, and supports this denial by abundant and conclusive proofs. The origin of modern infidelity he traces historically and logically to Protestantism, showing that it has been transplanted into France and other Catholic countries from England and Germany. Anti-Catholic writers are fond of retorting upon us the charge that Protestantism breeds infidelity by the countercharge that Catholicity breeds infidelity. They say that it lays too great a burden on reason by teaching, as Christian doctrine, dogmas that intelligent, educated men cannot receive without doing violence to their reason. They point to the infidelity that prevails to a certain extent among educated men in Catholic countries as a proof of this assumption. The writer of an article in a late number of Putnam's Monthly, entitled, "The Coming Controversy," has reiterated this charge, and alleges the fact that some of the educated laymen belonging to the Catholic Church in the United States do not approach the sacraments, as an evidence that they have lost their faith, which is a corroboration of the alleged charge against the Catholic religion of breeding infidelity in intelligent, thinking minds. {285} The whole of this specious argument is a fabric of sand. In the first place, it is no proof that men have lost their faith because they do not act in accordance with it. The entire body of negligent Catholics are not to be classed among infidels, any more than negligent Jews or Protestants. Nevertheless, we would call the attention of those Catholic gentlemen of high standing who neglect the practice of their religious duties, and fail to take that active part on the side of the church and of God which they ought to take, to the scandal they thus give and to the occasion which the enemies of the church take from their criminal apathy to revile that faith for which their ancestors have suffered and contended so nobly. Neither is it true that anywhere in the world the apostates from the faith are superior in intelligence and culture to its loyal adherents. We hear too much of this boasting from free-thinkers and infidels of their intellectual superiority. On the field of philosophy and positive religion they have been completely discomfited by the champions of religion. Some of their ablest men have passed over to our camp convinced by the pure force of argument, as, for instance, Thierry, Maine de Biran, Droz, and to a certain extent Cousin. Many others, and recently one most notorious individual, Jules Havin, the chief editor of the infamous Siècle, of Paris, have repented at the hour of death. D'Holbach, one of the chiefs of the infidel party in France, thus writes: "We must allow that corruption of manners, debauchery, license, and even frivolity of mind, may often lead to irreligion or infidelity. … Many people give up prejudices they had adopted through vanity and on hearsay; these pretended free-thinkers have examined nothing for themselves; they rely on others whom they suppose to have weighed matters more carefully. How can men, given up to voluptuousness and debauchery, plunged in excess, ambitious, intriguing, frivolous, and dissipated—or depraved women of wit and fashion—how can such as these be capable of forming an opinion of a religion they have never examined?" [Footnote 62] La Bruyère says, "Do our esprits forts know that they are called thus in irony?" [Footnote 63] It is no argument against either Catholicity or Protestantism that infidelity exists in Catholic or Protestant countries. Before this fact can be made to tell in any way against either religion it must be proved that it contains principles which lead logically to infidelity, or proposes dogmas which are rationally incredible, and thus produces a reaction against all divine revelation. This has never been done, and never can be done in respect to the Catholic religion. So far as Protestantism is concerned, it has been done repeatedly and can be done easily. We do not rejoice in this; on the contrary, we grieve over it, and our sympathies are with those Protestants, such as Guizot, Dr. McCosh, President Hopkins, and others who defend the great truths of spiritual philosophy, of Theism, the divine mission of Moses and Christ, and other Christian doctrines against modern infidelity. Nevertheless, we cannot help pointing out the fact that they are illogical as Protestants in doing this, and are unable, after giving the evidences of the credibility of Christianity, to state what Christianity is in such a manner as completely to satisfy the just demands of human reason, or to justify their own position as seceders from the genuine Christendom.

[Footnote 62: Système de la Nature, tom. ii. c. 13. Cited on page 106. ]

[Footnote 63: Les Caractères, ch. xvi. Cited on page 188.]

Our own youth are exposed to the temptation of infidelity on account of their imperfect religious education, and the influence of the Protestant world in which they live, saturated as it is with the most pestilent and poisonous influences of heresy, infidelity, and immorality. Good Protestants they will never become. They can only be good Catholics, bad Catholics, or infidels. Our friends of the Protestant clergy have no reason, therefore, to count up and exult over those who are lost from the Catholic fold, for Satan is the only gainer. {286} Let us have a sufficient number of clergy of the right sort, an ample supply of churches, colleges, schools, and Catholic literature, and we will engage that the desire for a purer and more spiritual religion will never lead our Catholic youth to become Protestants, or the desire for a more elevated and solid science make them infidels. Such books as the one we are noticing are of just the kind we want, and we recommend it warmly to all thinking young men and women, to all parents and teachers, and to all readers generally.

The Montarges Legacy.
By Florence McCoomb.
Philadelphia: P. F. Cunningham. 1869.

We thank the gentle author of this charming story for the satisfaction derived from its perusal. Not wishing, by entering into detail of plot or incident, to diminish the pleasure in store for its readers, we will merely say that, while sufficiently exciting, it is by no means morbidly sensational; that the characters are well portrayed; the incidents varied; the dialogue not strained, yet not monotonous; the descriptive portion easy and natural; and that, pervading all, is a true Catholic spirit.

Anne Severin.
By Mrs. Augustus Craven.
New York: The Catholic Publication Society.
1 vol. 12mo, pp. 411. 1869.

We do not like the controversially religious novel. There is generally too much pedantry; too great an admixture of theology, politics, and love, to suit our taste. But the story of Anne Severin, by the gifted author of A Sister's Story, is not of this kind, it is permeated throughout with a purely religious feeling; just enough, however, to make it interesting, and to give the reader to understand that the writer is truly Catholic in all she writes. The scene of the story opens in England, about the beginning of this century, when there were "troublous times in France," and changes to the latter country, where the thread of the narrative is spun out. The heroine, Anne Severin, is not an ideal character. It is one that is not rare in Catholic countries, or in Catholic society. She is a true woman, in the truest sense of the word, a model for our daughters. The contrast between her and the English-reared girl, Eveleen Devereux, is clearly drawn. The one truthful, religious, conscientious in all her actions, kind, amiable, and loveable; the other, fickle-minded, constantly wavering, and a flirt, courting admiration for admiration's sake, yet intending to do right in her own way, but failing because she did not have the true religious teaching that Anne Severin had. No better book of the kind could be put in the hands of Catholics as well as non-Catholics of both sexes. No one can help for a moment to see in what consists the difference between these two women. Anne Severin had a positive, soul-sustaining faith to fall back upon in her troubles. Eveleen Devereux had nothing but the emptiness of a religion of the world which failed her in the hour of tribulation.

Eudoxia: A Picture Of The Fifth Century.
Freely translated from the German of Ida, Countess Hahn Hahn.
Baltimore: Kelly, Piet & Co. Pp. 287. 1869.

This historical tale, which has already appeared as a serial in an English periodical, and also in an American newspaper, has been very favorably received on both sides of the Atlantic. It is now issued in handsome book form, and will, no doubt, have, as it deserves, an extensive circulation.

The Illustrated Catholic Sunday School Library.
Third Series. 12 vols. pp. 144 each.
New York: The Catholic Publication Society,
126 Nassau Street. 1869.

Bad Example;
May-Day, and other Tales;
The Young Astronomer, and other Tales;
James Chapman;
Angel Dreams;
Ellerton Priory;
Idleness and Industry;
The Hope of the Katzekopfs;
St. Maurice;
The Young Emigrants;
Angels' Visits;
and The Scrivener's Daughter, and other Tales.

That in the variety of its contents this series is fully equal to its predecessors is evident from the above list; and the careful supervision to which each issue is subjected renders it unnecessary to say another word in its praise. We can safely promise a rare treat to our young friends when, either well-deserving at school, or an indulgent parent, will have made them happy in its possession.

This last work of The Catholic Publication Society will be appreciated by every Sunday-school teacher who has experienced the torments of an ill-arranged and poorly-made classbook. The chief characteristics of this small but important work are clearness and completeness. Its new feature is the plain, brief, but very decided rules to be found on the inside of each cover. In size it allows a goodly space for marks in detail. In binding and quality of paper, it is far in advance of anything yet offered to the Catholic Sunday-school teacher. It provides a "register" for eighteen or twenty scholars, in which should be plainly and neatly written the names, etc., of each member of the class. Then comes a monthly record, extending across two pages, in which allowance is made for "the fifth" Sunday, and a space for a "Monthly Report." And in this we have the grand improvement on all other classbooks in use.

Twelve such double pages are furnished, thus covering the space of one year; and on the last half-page there are columns provided for a yearly report, in which plain figures must be placed by every teacher to the satisfaction of superintendents, who have so often experienced the mortifying necessity of declaring teachers' methods of marking more mysterious than hieroglyphics.

What has long been needed is not a class-book fitted for the educated few who devote their spare hours to Sunday-school teaching, nor a mere record book for large and continually changing classes of beginners, but a plain, comprehensive book which any teacher can understand at a glance, and which will enable him to influence the conduct, if not the studious habits, of those committed to his charge, instead of calling for an extra waste of time, in order to mark with precision in perhaps a badly lighted school-house. Let every teacher send for a copy, examine it for himself, and see how simple this often neglected duty can be made. If the rules which are contained therein be attended to, there will be no necessity of carrying the book away from the school, which arrangement insures the double object of marking while the impression of each recitation is fresh and of having the book in readiness to mark at the next recitation. And, until every teacher attends to both these duties, in spite of qualifications in other respects, he will still have much to learn before he becomes a perfect Sunday-school teacher.

This little book is substantially bound in cloth, and is sold for twenty cents a copy, or, to Sunday-schools, at two dollars per dozen.

Studious Women.
From the French of Monseigneur Dupanloup, Bishop of Orleans.
Translated by R. M. Phillimore.
Boston: P. Donahoe. Pp. 105. 1869.

This able essay of the Bishop of Orleans was translated for and appeared in The Catholic World very soon after its appearance in France, nearly two years ago. We see Mr. Donahoe has used the London translation.

We cannot praise the "poems" contained in this volume, and the modesty of the author's preface disarms adverse criticism.

A Manual Of General History:
being an outline history of the world from the creation to the present time.
Fully illustrated with maps.
For the use of academies, high-schools, and families.
By John J. Anderson, A.M.
New York: Clark & Maynard. Pp. 401. 1869.

This compendium is in some respects inaccurate; much that is comparatively trivial is admitted, while really important events are entirely ignored; and on certain points there is, if not an actual anti-Catholic bias, an absence, at least, of that strict impartiality to be demanded, as of right, in all compilations intended for use as text-books in our public schools.

The Catholic Publication Society has now in press the Chevalier Rossi's famous work on the Roman Catacombs—Roma Sotterranea. It is being compiled, translated, and prepared for the English reading public by the Very Rev. J. Spencer Northcote, D.D., president of Oscott College, Birmingham, and author of a small treatise on the catacombs. The present work will make a large octavo volume of over five hundred pages, and will be copiously illustrated by wood-cuts and chromo-lithographs—the latter printed under De Rossi's personal supervision. This will be an important addition to our literature, and will, we doubt not, attract considerable attention in this country. The same Society will have ready about May 1st, Why People do not Believe—a library edition as well as a cheap edition; Glimpses of Pleasant Homes, by the author of Mother McCauley, with four full-page illustrations; Impressions of Spain, by Lady Herbert, with fifteen full-page illustrations. The two last-mentioned books will be very appropriate for college and school premiums. In Heaven we know Our Own will be ready in June. The Fourth Series of the Illustrated Catholic Sunday-School Library is also in preparation. The Life of Mother Margaret Mary Hallahan, O.S.D., founder of the Dominican Conventual Tertiaries in England, is announced, and will be ready in June or July.

Messrs. John Murphy & Co., Baltimore, announce as in press The Life And Letters Of The Rev. Frederick William Faber, D.D., Priest of the Oratory of St. Philip Neri. By Rev. John E. Bowden, priest of the same oratory.

P. F. Cunningham, Philadelphia, has in press, and will soon publish, Ferncliffe.

From Joseph Shannon, Clerk of the Common Council, New York. Manual of the Corporation of the City of New York for 1868.

From P. Donahoe, Boston: America in its Relation to Irish Emigration.
By John Francis Maguire, Member of Parliament for the City of Cork. Swd. Pp. 24.

From Fields, Osgood & Co., Boston:
The Danish Islands: Are we bound in honor to pay for them?
By James Parton. Swd. Pp. 76. 1869.

The Catholic World.

Vol. IX., No. 51.-June, 1869.

Spiritism And Spiritists.

[Footnote 64: 1. Planchette; or, the Despair of Science. Being a full Account of Modern Spiritualism, its Phenomena, and the various Theories regarding it. With a Survey of French Spiritism. Boston: Roberts Brothers. 1869.

2. Des Rapports de l'Homme avec le Démon. Essai Historique et Philosophique. Par Joseph Bizouard, Avocat. Paris: Gaume Frères et J. Duprey. 1863 et 1864. Tome VI., 8vo.

3. The Spirit-Rapper. An Autobiography. By o. A. Brownson. Boston: Little, Brown & Co. 1854.

4. Interesting Facts in relation to Spirit Life and Manifestations. By Judge Edmonds. New York: Spiritual Magnetic Telegraphic Agency.

5. Spiritualism Unveiled, and shown to be the Work of Demons. By Miles Grant. Boston: The Crisis Office.]

Worcester, in his dictionary, gives as the second meaning of the word spiritualism, "the doctrine that departed spirits hold communication with men," and gives as his authority O. A. Brownson. We think this must be a mistake; for Dr. Brownson uses in his Spirit-Rapper, the term spiritism, which is the more proper term, as it avoids confounding the doctrine of the spiritists with the philosophical doctrine which stands opposed to materialism, or, more strictly, sensism, and the moral doctrine opposed to sensualism. We generally use the word spiritual in religion as opposed to natural, or for the life and aims of the regenerate, who walk after the spirit, in opposition to those who walk after the flesh, and are carnal-minded. To avoid all confusion or ambiguity which would result from using a word already otherwise appropriated, we should use the terms spiritism, spiritists, and spirital.

The author of Planchette has availed himself largely of the voluminous work of the learned Joseph Bizouard, the second work named on our list, and gives all that can be said, and more than we can say, in favor of spiritism. He has given very fully one side of the question, all that need be said in support of the reality of the order of phenomena which he describes, while the French work gives all sides; but he passes over, we fear knowingly and intentionally, the dark side of spiritism, and refuses to tell us the sad effects on sanity and morality which it is known to produce. A more fruitful cause of insanity and immorality and even crime does not exist, and cannot be imagined.

We have no intention of devoting any space specially to Planchette, or the "little plank," which so many treat as a harmless plaything. It is only one of the forms through which the phenomena of spiritism are manifested, and is no more and no less the "despair of science," than any other form of alleged spirital manifestations. Contemporary science, indeed, or what passes for science, has shown great ineptness before the alleged spirit-manifestations; and its professors have, during the twenty years and over since the Fox girls began to attract public attention and curiosity, neither been able to disprove the alleged facts, nor to explain their origin and cause; but this is because contemporary science recognizes no invisible existences, and no intelligences above or separate from the human, and because it is not possible to explain their production or appearance by any of the unintelligent forces of nature. To deny their existence is, we think, impossible without discrediting all human testimony; to regard them as jugglery, or as the result of trickery practised by the mediums and those associated with them, seems to us equally impossible. Mr. Miles Grant in his well-reasoned little work on the subject, says very justly, it "would only show that we know but little about the facts in the case. We think," he says, p. 3,

"No one, after a little reflection, would venture to say of the many thousands and even millions of spiritualists, [spiritists,] among whom are large numbers of men and women noted for their intelligence, honesty, and veracity, that they are only playing tricks on each other! … Can any one tell what object all these fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, children, dear friends, and loved companions can have in pretending that they have communications from spirits, when they know, at the same time, that they are only deceiving each other by means of trickery?"

In our judgment such an assumption would be a greater violation of the laws of human nature or the human mind and belief, than the most marvellous things related by the spiritists, especially since the order and form of the phenomena they relate are nothing new, but have been noted in all lands and ages, ever since the earliest records of the race, as is fully shown by M. Bizouard.

The author of Planchette says the Catholic Church concedes the facts alleged by spiritists. This, as he states it, may mislead his readers. The church has not, to our knowledge, pronounced any official judgment deciding whether these particular facts are real facts or not; for we are not aware that the question has ever come distinctly before her for decision. She has had before her, from the first, the class of facts to which the alleged spirit-manifestations belong, and has had to deal with them, in some place, or in some form, every day of her existence; but we are not aware that she has examined and pronounced judgment on the particular facts the modern spiritists allege. She has, undoubtedly, declared the practice of spiritism, evocation of spirits, consulting them, or holding communication with them—that is, necromancy—to be unlawful, and she prohibits it to all her children in the most positive manner, as may be seen in the case of the American, or rather Scotchman, Daniel Home, the most famous of modern mediums, and the most dangerous.

For ourselves, we have no doubt of the order of facts to which in our view the spirit-manifestations so called belong; we have no difficulties, a priori, in admitting them, though we do not accept the explanation the spiritists give of them; but when it comes to any particular fact or manifestation alleged, we judge it according to the generally received rules of evidence, and we require very strong evidence to convince us of its reality as a fact. {291} We adopt, in regard to them, the same rule that we follow in the case of alleged miracles. We have not a doubt, nor the shadow of a doubt, that miracles continue to be wrought in the church, and are daily wrought in our midst; but we accept or reject this or that alleged miracle according to the evidence in the case; and, in point of fact, we are rather sceptical in regard to most of the popularly received miracles we hear of. Credulity is not a trait of the Catholic mind. It is the same with us in relation to this other class of alleged facts. We believe as firmly in the fact that prodigies are wrought as we do that miracles are; but do not ask us to believe this or that particular prodigy, unless you are prepared with the most indubitable evidence. We are far from believing every event which we know not how to explain is either a miracle or a prodigy.

We have examined with some care the so-called spirit-manifestations which the spiritists relate, and we have come, according to our best reason, to the conclusion that much in them is trickery, mere jugglery; that much is explicable on natural principles, or is to be classed with well-known morbid or abnormal affections of human nature; but, after all abatements, that there is a residuum inexplicable without the recognition of a superhuman intelligence and force. We say superhuman, not supernatural. The supernatural is God, and what he does immediately or without the intermediation of natural laws, as has been more than once explained in this magazine. The creation of Adam was supernatural; the generation of men from parents is not supernatural, for it is done by the Creator through the operation of natural laws or second causes. What is done by created forces or intelligences, however superior to man, is not supernatural, nor precisely preternatural, but simply superhuman, angelic, or demoniac. There is a smack of paganism in calling it, as most contemporary literature does, supernatural; for it carries with it the notion that the force or intelligence is not a creature, but an uncreated numen, or an immortal.

Now, what is this superhuman intelligence and force revealed by these spirit-phenomena? We know that many who admit the phenomena refuse to admit that they reveal any superhuman force or intelligence. They explain all by imagination or hallucination. These, no doubt, play their part, and explain much; but the author of Planchette, as well as M. Bizouard, have, it seems to us, fully proved that they do not and cannot explain all, even if they themselves did not need explanation; others again, to explain them, have recourse to what they call animal magnetism, or to a force which they call od, odyle, odyllic, or odic force; but these explain nothing, for we know not what animal magnetism or what odic force is, nor whether either has any real existence. These terms do but cover our ignorance. Mr. Grant ascribes them to demons, and endeavors to show that the demon mesmerizes the medium who wills with his will, and acts with his force and intelligence; but our modern science denies the existence of demons.

The spiritists themselves pretend that the phenomena are produced by the presence of departed spirits. But of this there is no proof. It is acknowledged on all hands that the spirits can assume any outward form or appearance at will. What means, then, have we, or can we have, of identifying the individuals personated by the pretended spirits? The author of Planchette says, in a note, p. 62:

"If spirits have the power, attributed to them by many seers, of assuming any appearance at will, it is obvious that some high spiritual sense must be developed in us before we can be reasonably sure of the identity of any spirit, even though it come in bearing the exact resemblance of the person it may claim to be. We think, therefore, that the fact that the spirit … bore the aspect of Franklin, and called itself Franklin, is no sufficient reason for dismissing all doubts as to its identity. It may be that we must be in the spiritual before we can really be wisely confident of the identity of any spirit."

That is, we must be ghosts ourselves before we can identify a ghost, or die in the flesh, and enter the spirit-land, before we can be sure of the identity of the spirits, or of the truth of anything they profess to communicate not otherwise verifiable!

It is pretended that the spirits have latterly rendered themselves visible and tangible. Mr. Livermore, of this city, sees and embraces his deceased wife, who caresses and kisses him, and he feels her hands as warm and fleshlike as when she was living. Suppose the phenomena to be as related, and not eked out by Mr. Livermore's imagination; the visible body in which she appeared to him could have been only assumed, and no real body at all, certainly not her body during life—that lies mouldering in the grave. And all the spirits teach that the body thrown off at death does not rise again. They nowhere, that we can find, teach the resurrection of the flesh, but uniformly deny it. If the spirits, then, do really render themselves visible and tangible to our senses, it must be in a simulated body; and why may they not simulate one form as well as another? The senses of sight and touch furnish, then, of themselves, no proof that a departed spirit or a human spirit once alive in the flesh, is present, communicating through the medium with the living.

The assertion of the pretended spirit of its identity counts for nothing, whether made by knocks or table-tipping, by writing or by audible voice and distinct articulation; for the spiritists themselves concede that some of the spirits, at least, are great liars, and that they have no criterion by which to distinguish the lying spirits from the others, if others there are, that seek to communicate with the living. Conceding all the phenomena alleged, there is, then, absolutely no proof or evidence that there are any departed spirits present, or that any communication from them has ever been received. The spirit of a person may be simulated as well as his voice, features, form, handwriting, or anything else characteristic of him. Spiritism, then, contrary to the pretension of the spiritists, proves neither that the dead live again, nor that the spirit survives the body. It does not even prove that there is in man a soul or spirit distinct from the body. We call the special attention of our readers to this point, which is worthy of more consideration than it has received.

The spiritists claim that the alleged spirit-manifestations have proved the spirituality and immortality of the soul, in opposition to materialism. This is their boast, and hence it is that they call their doctrine spiritualism, and seek to establish for it the authority of a revelation, supplementary to the Christian revelation. Their whole fabric rests on the assumption that the manifestations are made by human spirits that have once lived in the flesh, and live now in the spirit-world, whatever that may be. {293} Set aside this assumption, or show that nothing in the alleged spirit-manifestations sustains it, and the whole edifice tumbles to the ground. There is nothing to support this assumption but the testimony of spirits that often prove themselves lying spirits, and whose identity with the individual they personate, or pretend to be, we have no means of proving. Unable to prove this vital point, the spiritists can prove nothing to the purpose. The spirits all say there is no resurrection of the dead, and therefore deny point-blank the doctrine that the dead live again. If we are unable, as we are, to identify them with spirits that once lived united with bodies that have mouldered or are mouldering in their graves, what proof have we, or can they give, that they are, or ever were, human spirits at all? If they are not proved to be or to have been human spirits, they afford no proof that the soul is distinct from the body, or that it is not material like the body, and perishes with it. If, then, the men of science have shown themselves little able to explain the origin and cause of the phenomena, the spiritists have shown themselves to be very defective as inductive reasoners.

"But the phenomena warrant the induction that they are produced by spirits of some sort, or that there are intelligences not clothed with human bodies between whom and us there is more or less communication." Of themselves alone they warrant no induction at all, but are simply inexplicable phenomena, the origin and cause of which lie beyond the reach of scientific investigation; but, taken in the light of what we know aliunde, they warrant the conclusion that they proceed from a superhuman cause, and that there are spirits which are, in some respects, stronger and more intelligent than men; but whether the particular spirits to whom the spirit-manifestations in question are to be ascribed are angelic or demoniac, must be determined by the special character of the manifestations themselves, the circumstances in which they are made, and the end they are manifestly designed to effect.

We make here no attack on the inductive method followed in constructing the physical sciences. We only maintain that the validity of the induction depends on a principle which is not itself obtained or obtainable from induction. Hence Herbert Spencer and the positivists who follow very closely the inductive method, relegate principles and causes to the "unknowable." The principle on which the inductive process depends cannot be attained to by studying the phenomena themselves, but must be given immediately, either in a priori intuition or in revelation. Books have been written, like Paley's Natural Theology and the Bridgewater Treatises, to prove, by way of induction, from the phenomena of the universe, the being and attributes of God, and it is very generally said that every object in nature proves that God is, and that no man ever is or can be really an atheist; but no study of the phenomena of nature could originate the idea or the word in a mind that had it not. Men must have the idea expressed in language of some sort before they can find proofs in the observable phenomena of nature that God is. Hence, those savants who confound the origination of the idea or belief with the proofs of its truth, and who see that the idea or belief is not obtainable by induction, are really atheists, and say with the fool in his heart, God is—not. We do not assert that God is, on the authority of revelation; for we must know that he is before we have or can have any means of proving the fact of revelation; yet if God had not himself taught his own being to the first man, and given him a sign signifying it, the human race could never have known or conceived that he exists. {294} The phenomena or the facts and events of the universe which so clearly prove that God is, and find in his creative act their origin and cause, would have been to all men, as they are to the atheist, simply inexplicable phenomena.

So it is with the spirit-manifestations, whether angelic or demoniac. The existence of spirits must be known to us, either by intuition or revelation, before we can assign these phenomena a spirital origin and cause. We do not and cannot know it intuitively; and therefore, without recurring to what revelation teaches us, these manifestations, however striking, wonderful, or perplexing they might be, would be to us and to all men inexplicable, and we could not assign them any origin or cause. Revelation—become traditionary, and so embodied in the common intelligence through language as to control, unconsciously and unsuspected, the reasonings even of individuals who pride themselves on denying it—furnishes the principle needed as the basis of the induction of the principle and cause of the spirit-manifestations. Revelation teaches that God has created an order of intelligences superior to man, called angels, to be the messengers of his will. Some of these remained faithful to their Creator, always obedient to his command; others kept not their first estate, rebelled against their sovereign Lord, were, with their chief, cast out of heaven into the lower regions, and became demons or evil spirits.

The spiritists complain of our scientific professors, but without just reason; for, on the principles of modern science, the proofs they offer of their doctrines prove nothing but their own logical ineptness. Science, if it will accept no revelation, and recognize no principle not obtained by the inductive method, has no alternative but either to deny the manifestations as facts, or to admit them only as inexplicable phenomena. The class of facts are as well authenticated, as facts, as any facts can be; but the explanation of them by the spiritists is utterly inadmissible, and sound inductive reasoners, who exclude all revealed principles, must reject it. The professors are not wrong in rejecting that explanation as unscientific; for it would be even more unscientific to admit it; and perhaps, if compelled to do one or the other, we should hold it more unreasonable to admit it than to deny outright the facts themselves.

The fault of the professors is in denying the necessity to the validity of induction of principles neither obtainable nor provable by induction, and in supposing that we can construct an adequate science of the universe without the principles which are given us only by divine revelation. Without these principles we can explain nothing, and the universe is a vast assemblage of inexplicable phenomena; for it is only in those principles we do or can obtain a key to its meaning. Hence, modern science, which excludes both revelation and intuition a priori, explains nothing, reduces nothing to its principle and cause, and only generalizes and classifies observable phenomena, which, we submit, is no science at all. Certainly, we do not pretend that science is built on faith, as the traditionalists do, or are accused of doing; but we do say that, without the light of revelation, we cannot construct an adequate science of the universe, or explain the various facts and events of history. {295} If I did not know from revelation that the devil and his angels exist, I might observe the facts of satanophany, but I should not know whence they came, or what they mean. I might be tempted, vexed, harassed, besieged, possessed, by evil spirits as the spiritists are; but I should be ignorant of the cause, and utterly unable to explain my trouble, or to ascribe it to any cause, far less to satanic invasion. The prodigies would be for me simply inexplicable prodigies. But, taught by revelation that the air swarms with evil spirits, the enemies of man, and enemies of man because enemies of God, we can see at once the explanation of the spirit-manifestations, and assign them their real principle and cause.

We know that many who call themselves Christians are disposed to doubt, if not to deny, the personal existence of satan, and to maintain that the word, which means an enemy or adversary, is simply a general term for the sum of the evil influences to which we are exposed, if not subjected. As if a generalization were possible where there is nothing concrete! We get rid of no difficulty by this explanation. Influence supposes some person or principle from whom or from which proceeds the influence or the in-flowing. If you deny satan's personal existence, you have no option but either to deny evil altogether or to admit an original eternal principle of evil warring against the principle of good, that is, Manichaeism, or Persian dualism, which, though Calvinism, indeed, in teaching that evil or sin is something positive, may imply it, is neither good philosophy nor sound Christian theology. According to sound philosophy and theology, God alone hath eternity, and by his word has created heaven and earth, and all things therein, visible and invisible. All the works of God are good, very good; and as there is nothing in existence except himself that he hath not made, it follows necessarily that evil is not a positive existence, but is simply negative, the negation or absence of good. It originates and can originate only in the abuse of his faculties by a creature whom God hath created and endowed with intelligence and free-will, and therefore capable of acting wrong as well as right. To assert that man is subjected or exposed to evil influences leads necessarily to the assertion of a personal devil who exerts it. You must, then, either deny all evil influences from a source foreign to or distinguishable from man's own intrinsic nature, or else admit the personal existence of satan and his hosts.

Satan and his hosts having rebelled against God, and in refusing to worship the incarnate Son as God, were cast out of heaven, and became the bitter enemies of him and the human race. Satan, as the chief of the fallen angels, evil demons, or devils, carries on incessant war against God, and seeks to draw men away from their allegiance to him, and to get himself worshipped by them in his place. Hence, he seeks by lying wonders to deceive them; by his prodigies to rival in their belief real miracles; and, by his pretended revelations of the spirit-world, to substitute belief in his pretended communications for faith in divine revelation, and thus reestablish in lands redeemed by Christianity from his dominion the devil-worship which has never ceased to obtain in all heathen countries. The holy Scriptures assure us that all the gods of the heathen are demons or devils. These took possession of the idols made of wood or stone, gold or silver, [Footnote 65] had their temples, their priests and priestesses, their service, and were worshipped as gods.

[Footnote 65: This explains Planchette, which is a step toward the revival of heathen idol-worship.]

They gave forth oracles, and were consulted, through their mediums, in all great affairs of state, and their omens and auguries, which the people consulted to learn the future, as the spiritists do their mediums. Spiritism belongs to the same order. The spirits, as Mr. Grant well proves, are demons, and the whole thing has for its object to reestablish, perhaps in a modified form, the devil-worship which formerly obtained among all nations but the Jews or chosen people of God, and still obtains among all nations not yet Christianized. It began in the grand apostasy of the Gentiles from the patriarchal religion, which followed the confusion of tongues at Babel; and the spiritists are doing their best to revive it in the grand apostasy from the Christian church, which took place in the sixteenth century, and of which we have such clear and unmistakable predictions in the New Testament. So adroitly has satan managed, that, if it were possible, the very elect would be deceived. So much we say of the origin and cause of the spirit-manifestations.

If we examine more closely these manifestations, we shall find evidence enough of their satanic character. All satanic invasions bring trouble or perturbation, while the angelic visitations always bring calm, peace, and order. The divine oracles are clear, precise, distinct, free from all ambiguity; for he who gives them knows all his works from their beginning to their end. Satan's oracles are always ambiguous, stammering, and usually deceive or mislead those who trust them. Satan is a creature, and his power and intelligence, though superhuman, are not unlimited. The universe has secrets he cannot penetrate, and he can do no more than his and our Creator permits. He has no prophetic power, for God keeps his own counsels. He can only guess or infer the future from his knowledge of the present. He has no creative power, and can never produce any thing as first cause. Hence, he can operate only with materials fitted to his hand. The spiritists tell us that it is not every one that can be a medium. It is only persons of a certain temperament, found much oftener among women than among men, and, among men, only with those of a feminine character, and wanting alike in manly vigor and robust health. The spirits can communicate only through such as nature or habit has fitted to be mediums, and the communications have always something of the character of the medium through which they are made. The limited power of satan, his inability to know the future, which exists only in the divine decree, and his lack of power to form his own medium, render the spirit-communications extremely vague, uncertain, obscure, and feeble.

The dependence of satan on the medium is manifest. The spirits will not communicate if anything disturbs the medium, or puts the pythoness out of humor, like the presence of hard-headed sceptics, or a too critical examination by keen-sighted scientific professors determined not to be deceived. Their communications, oral or written, from the pretended spirits of distinguished authors, poets, philosophers, statesmen, are by no means creditable to satan as a scholar or a gentleman. Then again, the spirits really tell us nothing that amounts to anything of the spirit-world. Their representations make it a dim and shadowy region, in which the spirits of the departed wander about hither and thither, without end or aim, apparently worse off than in the Elysian fields of the ancients, which resemble more the Christian hell than the Christian's heaven. {297} There is an air of unreality about them; they are the umbrae of heathen philosophy, not living existences; and their region, or, more properly, their state, would be distressing, if one believed at all in the representations given by them. One thing is evident—the spirits know or can say nothing of the beatific vision, which proves that they are not blessed angels. They do not see God, and are clearly banished from his presence. He forms not the light nor the blessedness of their state. They seem, like troubled ghosts, to linger around the places where they lived in the body, pale, thin, shadowy, miserable, anxious to communicate with the living but only occasionally permitted to do so, and even then only to a feeble extent. Friends and acquaintances in this life may recognize, we are told, each other in the spirit-world, but whether with pleasure or pain, it is difficult to say. The picture of their disembodied life is very sad, and the Christian soul finds it dark, hopeless, cheerless, and depressing; as the condition of those doomed to take up their abode with the devil and his angels must necessarily be.

The doctrines the spirits teach and confirm with lying wonders are what the apostle calls "the doctrines of devils." They are unanimous in declaring that there is no devil and no hell. God may not be absolutely denied, but his personality is obscured, and he appears only in the distance, as an infinite abstraction, being only in the sense in which, Hegel might say, being and not-being are identical—remote from all contemplation, indifferent to what is going on in the world below him, asking neither prayers nor worship, love nor veneration, praise nor thanksgiving, and receiving none. The spirits echo the dominant sentiments of the age, and especially of the circle with which they communicate. They are, where they are not held in check by the lingering respect of the circle for Christianity, furious radicals, great sticklers for progress without divine aid, and of development without a created germ. Yet the doctrines they teach are such as they find in germ, if not developed, in the minds of their mediums. They sometimes deny every distinctively Christian doctrine, and are sure to pervert what of the faith they do not expressly deny. In general, they assert that the form of religion called Christianity has had its day, and that there is a new and sublimer form about to be developed, and that they come to announce it, and to prepare the way for it. The new form of religion will free the world from the old church, from bondage to the Bible, to creeds and dogmas, the old patriarchal systems and governments, and place the religious, social, and political world on a higher plane, and moved by a more energetic spirit of progress. This is the mission of spiritism. It is destined to carry on and complete the work commenced by Christ, but which he left unfinished, and inchoate.

The special object of the spirits, it is pretended, is to convince the world of the immortality of the soul; but in what form, what condition, what sense? The immortality of the soul, or its survival of the body, was generally believed by the heathens, however addicted to demon-worship they might be; but the life and immortality brought to light by the Gospel they did not believe, and the spirits do not teach it or affirm it. The spirits seem to know nothing of immortal life in God, and into which the sanctified soul enters when it departs this life, and is purified from all the stains it may have contracted in the flesh.

The only immortality they offer is the immortality of evil demons or the angels who kept not their first estate. But even of such an immortality for the human soul, they offer no proof. They are lying spirits, and their word is worthless, and their identity with human souls once united to human bodies which they personate, is not and cannot be established. They deny the resurrection of the dead, which St. Paul preached at Athens, and they give, as we have seen, no proofs that the soul does not die and perish with the body. Their doctrines are simply calculated to deceive the unwary, to draw them away from their allegiance to the Lord of heaven, and to drag them down to the region where dwell the angels that fell.

The ethical doctrines of the spirits are as bad as can be imagined, and the morals of the advanced spiritists would appear to be of the lowest and most revolting sort. It matters not that the spirits give, now and then, some good advice, and say some true things; for the object of satan is to deceive, and his practice is usually to lie and deceive by telling the truth. The truth he tells gains him credit, and secures confidence in him as a guide. But he takes good care that the truth he tells shall have all the effect of falsehood. He gives good moral advice, but he removes all motives for following it, and takes away all moral restraints. He wars against authority in matters of faith and morals, as repugnant to the rights of reason, and in political and domestic life as repugnant to liberty and the rights of women and children. All should do right and seek what is good, but no one should be constrained; only voluntary obedience is meritorious; forced obedience is no virtue. The sentiments and affections should be as free as the air we breathe, and to attempt to restrain them is to war against nature herself. They are not voluntary either in their origin or nature, and therefore are not and should not be subjected to an outward law. Love, the apostle tells us, is the fulfilling of the law, the bond of perfection. How wrong, then, to undertake to put gyves on love, to constrain it, or to subject it to the petty conventionalities of a moribund society, or the rules of an antiquated morality! Taking no note of the distinction between the supernatural love, which Christians call charity, and love as a natural sentiment, and as little of the distinction between the different sorts of love even as a natural sentiment, as the love of parents for children and children for parents, the love of friends, the love of country, the love of truth and justice, and the love of the sexes for each other, or simply sexual love, satan lays the foundation, as we can easily see, if not blinded by his delusions, for the grossest corruption and the most beastly immorality.

Hence the spiritists very generally look upon the marriage law as tyrannical and absurd, and assert the doctrine of free love. The marriage is in the love, and when the love is no more, the marriage is dissolved. None of our sentiments depend on the will; hence, self-denial is unnatural, and immoral. Prostitution is wrong, for no love redeems and hallows it; and for the same reason it is immoral for a man and a woman to live together as husband and wife, after they have ceased to love each other. It is easy to see to what this leads, and we cannot be surprised to find conjugal fidelity not reckoned as a virtue by spiritists; to find wives leaving their husbands, and husbands their wives, or the wife choosing a new husband as often as she pleases or wills; and the husband taking a new wife when tired of the old, or an additional wife or two, Mormon-like, when one at a time is not enough. {299} Indeed, Mormonism is only one form and the most strictly organized form, of contemporary spiritism, and woman's-rightism is only another product of the same shop, though doubtless many of the women carried away by it are pure-minded and chaste. But the leaders are spiritists or intimately connected with them. The animus of the woman movement is hostility to the marriage law, and the cares and drudgery of maternity and home life. It threatens to be not the least of the corrupting and dangerous forms of spiritism.

Mr. Grant, who is a staunch Protestant, and hates Catholicity with a most hearty hatred, gives, on adequate authority, a sketch of the immorality of spiritists which should startle the community: we make an extract:

"We pass to notice some further facts relative to the moral tendency of spiritualism. We have read its claims, and found them very high; but there is abundant proof to show that, instead of its being 'ancient Christianity revived,' it is the worst enemy Christianity ever had to meet. We believe it to be satan's last grand effort to substitute a false for the true Christianity. His snares are laid most ingeniously; and, unless very watchful, ere people are aware of it, they will be caught in some of his traps. Thousands and millions are already his deluded victims, and, like a terrible tornado, he is sweeping with destruction on every side. Occasionally we hear a warning voice from one who has escaped from his power, like a mariner from the sinking wreck; but most, after they once get into the spiritualist 'circle,' are like the boatman under the control of the terrible whirlpool on the coast of Norway—destruction is sure.

"The next witness we introduce is Mr. J. F. Whitney, editor of the New York Pathfinder. He was formerly a warm advocate of spiritualism, and published much in its favor. He says:

"'Now, after a long and constant watchfulness, seeing for months and years its progress and its practical workings upon its devotees, its believers, and its mediums, we are compelled to speak our honest conviction, which is, that the manifestations coming through the acknowledged mediums, who are designated as rapping, tipping, writing, and entranced mediums, have a baneful influence upon believers, and create discord and confusion; that the generality of these teachings inculcate false ideas, approve of selfish, individual acts, and endorse theories and principles which, when carried out, debase and make them little better than the brute.'

"Again he says: 'Seeing as we have the gradual progress it makes with its believers, particularly its mediums, from lives of morality to those of sensuality and immorality, gradually and cautiously undermining the foundation of good principles, we look back with amazement to the radical change which a few months will bring about in individuals.'

"He says in conclusion: 'We desire to send forth our warning voice; and if our humble position as the head of a public journal, our known advocacy of spiritualism, our experience, and the conspicuous part we have played among its believers; the honesty and the fearlessness with which we have defended the subject, will weigh anything in our favor, we desire that our opinions may be received, and those who are moving passively down the rushing rapids to destruction, should pause, ere it be too late, and save themselves from the blasting influence which those manifestations are causing.'

"Among other instructions of the spirits, the apostle Paul has assured us that they will be opposed to the marriage laws,'forbidding to marry.' I Tim. iv. 3.

"At the Rutland (Vt.) Reform Spiritualist Convention, held in June, 1858, the following resolution was presented and defended:

"'Resolved, That the only true and natural marriage is an exclusive conjugal love between one man and one woman; and the only true home is the isolated home, based upon this exclusive love.'

"The careless reader may see nothing objectionable in the resolution; but please read it again and observe what constitutes marriage, according to the resolution,'an exclusive conjugal LOVE between one man and one woman.' {300} The poison sentiment is covered up by the word 'one.' What constitutes marriage now, according to the laws of the land? Do we understand that, when we see a notice of a marriage in a paper, which took place at a certain time and place, that then the parties began to love each other exclusively? Certainly not; but at that time their love was sanctioned by the proper authorities, and thus they became husband and wife. But the resolution states that the marriage should consist in the 'exclusive conjugal love.' Then it follows, when either party loves another exclusively, the first marriage is dissolved, and they are married again; and if the other one does not happen to find a spiritual 'affinity,' then there is no alternative left but to make the best of it, as many have been compelled to do. According to this resolution, one is married as often as his love becomes 'exclusive' for any particular individual. This is one item in the boasted 'new social order,' which the spirits propose to establish when the political power is in their hands. It is called by them the 'Divine Law of Marriage.' A large number of spiritualists are already carrying out this resolution practically, regardless of the laws of the land.

"A similar resolution was presented at the National Spiritual Convention held in Chicago, from Aug. 9th to 14th, 1864 It was offered by Dr. A. G. Parker, of Boston, chairman of the committee on social relations. This point is strongly urged by the spirits and spiritualists.

"At the Rutland Reform Convention, which closed June 27th, 1858, the resolution under consideration was earnestly advocated by able men and women. Said Mrs. Julia Branch, of New York, as reported in The Banner of Light, July 10th, 1858, when speaking on the resolution: 'I am aware that I have chosen almost a forbidden subject; forbidden from the fact that any one who can or dare look the marriage question in the face, candidly and openly denouncing the institution as the sole cause of woman's degradation and misery, are objects of suspicion, of scorn, and opprobrious epithets.'

"She further remarked in the defence of the resolution, and the rights of women, 'She must demand her freedom; her right to receive the equal wages of man in payment for her labor; her right to have children when she will, and by whom.'"

Much more to the same effect, and even more startling, we might quote; we might give the account of the spiritist community at Berlin, Ohio; but we have no wish to disgust our readers, and this is enough for our purpose; it is sufficient to prove to all, not under the delusion, that spiritism is of satanic origin, and to be eschewed by all who wish to remain morally sane, and to lead honest and upright lives. We are not disposed to be alarmists, and, like the majority of our countrymen, are more likely to err on the side of optimism than of pessimism; but we cannot contemplate the rapid spread of spiritism since 1847, when it began with the Fox girls, without feeling that a really great danger threatens the modern world, and that there is ample reason for all who do not wish to see demon-worship supplanting the worship of God throughout the land, to be on their guard. Mr. Grant, who seems to be well informed on the subject, tells us that since that period, spiritism "has become world-wide in its influence, numbering among its ardent supporters many of the first men and women of both continents. Ministers, doctors, lawyers, judges, congressmen, governors, presidents, queens, kings, and emperors, of all religions, are bowing to its influence, and showing their sympathy with its teachings."

Mr. Grant should not say, "of all religions;" some Catholics may have become spiritists, but they cannot become so, and persist in following spiritism without severing themselves from the church. Some spiritists have been told by the spirits to become Catholics; but the church has required them to give up spiritism, and they have either done so, or left her communion, like Daniel Home, and returned to their communion with the demons. The church forbids her children to have any dealings with devils. But with this rectification the statement is not exaggerated. {301} The spread of spiritism has been prodigious, and proves not only the power and cunning of satan, but that the way for his success had been well prepared, and that no small portion of the modern world were in the moral condition of the old world at the epoch of the great Gentile apostasy, and ready to return to the heathen darkness and superstition, the vice and corruption, from which the Gospel had rescued them, or, at least, had rescued their ancestors.

We know not the number of spiritists in our country. We have seen it stated that they reckon their numbers by millions; but there can be no doubt that they include a very large portion of our whole population. Has this fact anything to do with the astounding increase of vice and crime in our country within the last few years, the undeniable corruption of morals and manners, and the growing frequency of murder and suicide? Senator Sprague, an honorable and an honest man and a true patriot, stated, the other day, in his place in the Senate of the United States, that our country is morally and politically more corrupt than any other country in the civilized world. We hope he is mistaken, but we are afraid that he is not wholly wrong. It is idle to attribute this corruption to the influences of the late civil war, and still idler or worse than idle, to attribute it, as some do, to the heavy influx of foreigners; for, though among those are many old-world criminals, the great body of the foreigners, when they land here, are far more moral, honest, upright, conscientious, than the average of native Americans; and though they soon prove that "evil communications corrupt good manners," much of the patriot's hope for the future depends on them, especially the Catholic portion of them, if, in due season, their children can be brought under the influence of the church, and receive a proper Catholic training.

Unhappily, the simple, natural virtues of former times, such as existed in ancient Greece and Rome, and exist even now in some pagan and Mohammedan countries, have, to a fearful extent, been lost with us, and the sects have nothing with which to supply their place, or to oppose to this terrible satanic invasion. They have indeed done much to prepare the way for it, and are doing still more, by their opposition to the church, to render it successful. But, though the danger is great and pressing, we are not disposed to think, with Mr. Grant, that we are in what he calls the "world's crisis." The danger is far less than it was; because the satanic origin and character of the so-called spirit-manifestations are widely suspected, and are beginning to be exposed. Satan is powerless in the open day. He is never dangerous when seen and known to be satan. He must always disguise himself as an angel of light, and appear as the defender of some cause which, in its time and place, is good, but, mistimed and misplaced, is evil. He has done wonders in our day as a philanthropist, and met with marvellous success as a humanitarian, and will, perhaps, meet with more still as the champion of free love and women's rights. But he has no power over the elect, and, though he may besiege the virtuous and the holy, he can captivate only the children of disobedience, who are already the victims of their own pride, vanity, lust, or unbelief.

The end of the world may be at hand, and these lying signs and wonders may be the precursors of antichrist; but we do not think the end is just yet. Faith has not yet wholly died out, and the church has seen, perhaps, darker days than the present. {302} The power of Christ, or his patience, is not yet exhausted; the gospel of the kingdom has not yet been preached to all nations; three fourths of the human race remain as yet unconverted, and we cannot believe that the church has as yet fulfilled her mission, and Christianity done its work. Too many of the sentinels have slept at their posts, and there has been a fearful lack of vigilance and alertness of which the enemy has taken advantage. The sleepers in Zion are many; but these satanic knocks and raps, and these tippings of tables, and this horrid din and racket of the spirits to indicate their presence, can hardly fail to awaken them, unless they are really sleeping the sleep of death. The church is still standing, and if her children will watch and pray, she can battle with the enemy as successfully as she has done so many times before.

Many Catholics have had their doubts of the reality of the alleged spirit-manifestations, and, even conceding them as facts, have been slow to recognize their satanic origin and character. But those doubts are now generally removed. The fearful moral and spiritual ravages of spiritism have dispelled or are fast dispelling them, and it will go hard but here and now as always and everywhere, what satan regards as a splendid triumph shall turn out against him and bring him to shame. Thus far in his war against the Son of God all his victories have been his defeats.

One thing is certain, that the only power there is to resist this satanic invasion is the Catholic Church; and there is, unless we greatly deceive ourselves, a growing interest in the Catholic question far beyond any that has heretofore been felt. Thinking and well-disposed men see and feel the impotence of the sects; that they have no divine life, and no divine support; that they stand in human folly, rather than even in human wisdom. Eminent Protestant ministers eloquently proclaim and conclusively show that Protestantism was a blunder, and has proved a failure; and there springs up a growing feeling among the more intelligent and well-disposed of our non-Catholic countrymen, that the judgment rendered against the church by the Reformers in the sixteenth century was hasty, and needs revision, perhaps a reversal. This feeling, if it continues to grow, can augur but ill for the ultimate success of satan and his followers.

Daybreak.

Chapter VI.

Presentiments.

Mr. Granger's family took the full benefit of their holiday at the seaside. They rose before the lark, and watched the days come in: radiant, solemn mornings, all light and silence; tender, mist-veiled dawns, less like day than a dream of day; and angry, magnificent sunrises, blazing with stormy colors all over the sky, soon to be quenched in a fine gray fall of rain.

They lay in hammocks slung out under the pine-trees, till nature adopted them for her own, and little wild creatures came and went about them unscared.

"Margaret," Mrs. Lewis called, one day, out of her hammock over to the other, "you remember how the foxes went to St. Francis—wasn't it St. Francis?—and held out their paws to shake hands with him, and said, 'How do you do, St. Francis?' and he gave them his hand, and said, 'How do you do?"'

"I remember nothing of the kind," was the indignant reply. "But I know that Robinson Cru—"

"O fie!" cries the little lady. "Why won't you own that my legend is beautiful and sublime, whether true or not? And it will be true when the kingdom comes for which all good people pray. For the last hour I have been trying to get acquainted with a squirrel; but just as I thought that he understood me, and as I was about to offer my hand to him, the little wretch darted away. At this moment he is perched in the very top of a pine-tree, and peering down at me as if I were a hyena. Alas!"

They wandered on the beach at evening, singing, talking, silent; or if in merry mood, skooning little flat stones over the water, and counting how many wave-tips they would trip before falling.

"Mon armant m'aime—un peu—beaucoup—passionnément—pas du tout!" laughed Mrs. Lewis, seeing Miss Hamilton counting to herself. "You must only try that oracle in flower petals, my dear. To count it in salt water signifies tears."

Sometimes they floated out in the harbor, and felt the fresh breath of the ocean, while the treacherous waters lapped, and fawned, and gurgled about the bows of their boat, and overhead the sky was thick with stars.

All this was not with the ladies mere idle pleasure, but was as seriously planned as it was heartily enjoyed. They had resolved that whatever exciting discussions and differences the gentlemen should have abroad, at home they should find nothing but peace. Politics were banished; and they sometimes even restrained their impatience to hear the war-news when they suspected that the relation was likely to produce any unpleasant entanglement. Without being religious, they yet had some perception of a pathway lying changeless and peaceful, far above parties and nationalities, and they felt that woman's proper place is there.

The gentlemen soon learned to submit to a restraint which they would never have imposed on themselves. When they stepped out at the little station near their cottage, their discussions were at an end.

"There is our flag of truce," Mr. Lewis would say, pointing to the thread of smoke that showed, over the trees, Mrs. James's kitchen-fire just kindled to prepare their dinner. "Understand, Mr. Southard, I oppose both you and Louis tooth and nail, and I'd like to fight it out with you now. But our time is up; and there are three little girls behind the trees there who would break their hearts if we should go home with cross faces. Let's shake hands till next time."

The only news of which they could all speak fearlessly and with pleasure was what concerned Mr. Granger's cousin. Scarcely a week passed that did not bring some laudation of him. He was one of those men who, without effort, are always conspicuous wherever they go. Opportunities that others sought with pain presented themselves unsought to him; and he had a gallant, dashing, and, withal, a lordly way that embellished even brilliant exploits.

"Upon my word," his cousin said, "at this rate it is not impossible that he may be made lieutenant-general."

Mr. Southard was, perhaps, the hardest to keep within bounds, probably because he felt himself religiously obliged to "cry aloud and spare not." But even he was subdued after a while. He seemed indeed too dependent on the ladies to willingly offend them. All the time he was not in the city he spent in their company, unbending as much as was possible to him, that his presence might not be a restraint on their pleasures. He brought his books to the parlor, and had his special corner there, the "lion's den," he called it, with a slight touch of reproach in his voice, when he saw how the others kept away from its vicinity. He rendered himself agreeable in many ways. He read aloud to them, he played and sang for them, sometimes he took the brush from Miss Hamilton's hand, and helped her with a bolder line than she could achieve.

"It takes a strong hand to give a fine stroke," she said. "Where I would be delicate, I am only soft." "Let me finish this for you, since the stippling is done," he said, as she paused to contemplate a major-general reposing pacifically on her easel. "I will not touch the face. Say what you will, there is a softness and richness in your shading which I can never attain. I may have a fine or bold touch, but it is hard. Shall I deepen this background a little to throw the figure out? And may I intensify his shoulder-straps?"

Margaret left her work to him, and, taking possession of his den, divided her attention between a book, and watching Dora at play with Aurelia outside.

Since they left the city the child had been set loose from all city restraints, and turned out to consort with bees and grasshoppers, harrowing the soul of Mrs. James by the number and heinousness of her soiled frocks and stockings, but drawing in full draughts of health. Both Dora and her father were bankers. But his bank in the city dealt in paper and specie; hers was a flower-bank. When she wanted him to buy her anything, she brought him buttercups, which were gold dollars with handles to them, and he scrupulously kept account and returned her change. No lover could wear in his buttonhole the rosebud presented by his lady's hand with a more tender pride than this father cherished for the bunch of wildflowers given him by his little daughter.

Mrs. Lewis approached the minister's table, and began turning over his books. "I don't know anything," she said mournfully, opening a Greek copy of Homer, and passing her fingers caressingly over the dear little quaint letters. "Wallace, wasn't it?—that poor Horace Binney—

             'Doubly dead,
  In that he died so young,'

writes of the 'arrowy certainty of Grecian phrases.' Woe is me! I cannot get at the point. I can only see the feathering."

Margaret looked up with an exclamation from the book in her hand. "Listen! Coleridge, à propos of having republished his earlier poems without correction, writes, 'I was afraid of disentangling the weed for fear of snapping the flower.' Snapping! only a poet would have chosen that word. The flower-stem that you can snap must be of sudden and luxuriant growth, made up of water and color, with just fibre enough to hold the two together. As I read that, I thought instantly of a red tulip bursting up bright and hasty through the moist, warm mould. That sends me outdoors. I want to see weeds and flowers growing tangled together."

"Wait a little and let me go with you," Mr. Southard said. "And meantime let Mrs. Lewis read us one of her poems, as she promised to do."

Mrs. Lewis had been for years one of those pretty lady writers of which the country is full, by no means an artist, or dreaming of any such distinction, but writing acceptably to her friends, and sometimes pleasing a not too critical public. But she had abjured the pen from the day when a friendly publisher, meaning to compliment her, issued a volume of "Extracts" from her writings.

"A volume!" she cried in dismay. "Why not a bottle? There were my poor little fancies torn from their homes and set up in rows, like flies and bugs transfixed on pins. I shuddered. I wrote no more."

"I forgive you for asking me," she said to Mr. Southard. "I dare say you want to hear my rhyme, and will think it very pretty. And she read:

           Beating The Bars.

  "0 morning air! O pale, pure fire!
     Wrap and consume my bonds away.
   This stifling mesh of sordid flesh
     Shuts in my spirit from the day.

  "Through sudden chinks the radiance blinks,
     And drives the winged creature wild.
   She hears rejoice each ringing voice,
     She guesses at each happy child.

  "In fleeting glints are shining hints
     Of freer beings, good and glad;
   Her dream can trace each lovely face,
     Each form, in lofty beauty clad.

  "She hears the beat of joyous feet
     That break no flower, fear no thorn;
   And almost feels the breeze that steals
     From out the ever-growing morn.

  "She hears the flow of voices low,
     And strains to catch the half-known tongue.
   She hears the gush of streams that rush
     Their thrilling waters into one.

  "With longing sighs, her baffled eyes
     She sets where burn the unseen stars.
   With frantic heats her wings she beats,
     And breaks them on the stubborn bars.

  "O light!' she cries, 'unseal mine eyes,
     Or blind me in thine ardent glow.
   O life and breath! O life in death!
     O bonds! dissolve, and let me go.

  "'Let drop this crust of cankering rust,
     The only crown my brow hath won;
   Shake off the sears of briny tears,
     And dry my pinions in the sun!'"

"My dear," said Mrs. Lewis, "I do not mean it as a rule, but as an exception. That was written during my equinoctial."

"You don't know it yet," the lady continued, "but you will learn in time that every woman has her line-gale. It usually comes between thirty and forty, sooner or later, and is more or less violent. After that, we settle down and let the snows fall on us."

Ending, she laughed a little; but there was a tightening of the lines about the mouth that showed at least remembered pain.

Margaret, going out, stopped to look over Mr. Southard's shoulder, drawn there by the absent, dreamy expression of his face. If he was painting backgrounds, she thought, what mountains of melting blue, what far-away waters, half cloud, half glitter, must be stealing to life beneath his hand!

He had placed a blank sheet on the easel, and was idly covering it with fragmentary improvisations. Under the heading of "synonyms" he had written, "Cogito quia sum, et sum quia cogito," the text illustrated by a drawing of a cat running round after her own tail.

He drew steady, straight lines, crossing them off with wonderful regularity; then some airy grace stole down to the tips of his firm white fingers, and the ends of the lines leaved and budded out, audacious tendrils draped the severest angles, and stars and crescents peeped through the spaces. Half impatiently he returned to geometrical figures; but pentagons grouped themselves to look like five-petaled blossoms or star-crystals of frost, and hexagons gathered themselves into a mosaic pavement whereon a sandalled foot was set.

"This is the Nile," he said, going over all with bold, flowing lines; "and here comes Cleopatra's barge, the dusky queen dropped among her cushions, a line of steady glow showing under each lowered eyelid, cords of cool pearls trying in vain to press into quiet her untamable pulses.

"This is a close-shut forest solitude, with a carpet of greenest, softest moss, whereon I lie like Danae while the heavens shower gold on me."

Then, with a start, came recollection, and the rush-tip became an asp to the Egyptian, and the Greek was drowned in ink.

"Aura," said Margaret when they reached the veranda," will you come down to the beach with us?"

Miss Hamilton's eyes flashed a little impatiently. She did not like the way in which they withdrew themselves when she was with Mr. Southard. But after going a few steps, she glanced back at Aurelia, and the two smiled. At the moment it struck her that there was something new in Miss Lewis's expression, an unusual seriousness and dignity under her sweetness.

The day was sultry, but otherwise perfect, the green as fresh as at spring, the harbor purple and sparkling, and the sky a deep azure, except where a rim of darkness lay piled around the north and west, cloud-peaks and cliffs showing as hard and sharp as if hewn of stone, but illuminated now and then by lightnings that stirred uneasily within them, changing their dense shadows to molten gold, or leaping in dazzling crinkled flashes from point to point. It seemed a gala-day of nature, so wide, so brilliant, so consciously beautiful was everything.

"'Visibly in his garden walketh God!'" quoted Margaret, looking abroad with delight.

"The god Pan, you mean," said the minister, whose little sparkle of gayety seemed to have been suddenly extinguished.

"Yes; but we have changed all that," was the reply. "We have put the heart in the wrong place."

"Moses and Molière," thought Miss Hamilton, amused at the juxtaposition; then added aloud, "Christ pointed to the lilies of the field."

"For a moral and a reproof, yes. He made them not a text, but the illustration of a text. This delight in inanimate nature is not harmful if subordinate to the thought of God; otherwise it is a lure. It leads to materialism, or to sentimental religion that is worse than none, since it bars the way to a true piety."

Margaret made no reply. In spite of herself, his remarks depressed her, and cast some faint shadow over the beauty of the scene.

"The breakers are coming in," Mr. Southard said presently, in a tone of voice that showed his regretful sense of having been disagreeable. "We shall have a tempest."

They had reached the shore, and stood looking off over the water, The liquid emerald wave they watched came rolling toward them, paused an instant, then rose and flung itself at their feet, rustling away in foam and sliding, silky water, no longer a breaker, but a broken.

"Mr. Southard," Margaret said after a minute, "you know that I would like to be religious, if I knew how; but it doesn't seem possible. I am like one who, in the dark, wanting to get into a house, knocks all about the walls without finding a door. I am trying—in a sort of way—" She hesitated. What would he say if he knew in what way she was trying?

"What you propose to me is not a path, but a pedestal!" she exclaimed, turning from him to go back to the house. "And I am not marble."

He followed her, looking both hurt and annoyed. Outside the door she stopped, and bending toward a little cluster of violets that grew there, shook a warning finger in their innocent blue eyes. "Don't look at me," she said. "You're wicked!"

"Do not give all your kindness to those who think only of your temporal welfare," said the minister hastily, "Remember those also who care for your soul."

"Oh! why should I remember those who do me good for God's sake?" said Miss Hamilton coldly, "Let him reward them; I shall not."

There was no one in the parlor when they went in; but they did not perceive that at first, it was so dim. The sky had darkened rapidly, the clouds rolling up as if self-impelled; for there was scarcely a breath of air stirring. A shadow had swept the sparkle off the water, and all the western view was shrouded in gloom. Southward a single point shone out like a torch amid the surrounding obscurity, a beam of sunlight drop-ping on it through a cleft cloud, and showing in a golden path visible across the heavens. Suddenly, like a torch, it was quenched; and all was darkness.

Mr. Southard stood before an open window, with his hands clasped be-hind him, and his clear eyes lifted heavenward. Margaret heard him repeating lowly, "'Canst thou send lightnings, and will they go, and will they return and say to thee, Here we are?'"

"After all," she said, "God is love, And however circumstances may hem us in from each other, he looks down on all. Perhaps some day, lifting us, each after his own way, he will show us not only himself, but one another, face to face. I think that there are more mistakes than sins in the world; and God is love."

His words were almost lost in a low rumble of thunder that curdled all about the heavens. Margaret stood beside him, and looked out at the piled-up blackness shot through by flying thunderbolts.

"Ossa upon Pelion," she said. "It is the battle of the gods over again, and Jove is everywhere, 'treading the thunders from the clouds of air.'"

As she spoke, a flash sprang from the north and a flash from the west, and caught in their glittering toils the grouped inky crests of the tempest, that for an instant stood out against the pale blue of the zenith, a stupendous, writhing Laocoon. Then the lightnings leaped from that height to the midst of the harbor, and stung the hissing waves till far and wide they quivered with a froth of flame. As they fell, the heavens seemed to burst in one awful report.

There were cries through the house, and the whole family, servants and all, came rushing into the parlor. Mr. Southard was leaning against the wall, with both hands over his face. The shock had been severe, and for a little while he was stunned.

He recovered himself, and looked up. "No. Where is Miss Hamilton?" Miss Lewis drew back immediately, and showed him Margaret holding the frightened Dora in her arms and hushing her cries.

It seemed indeed as though they were. That thunder-clap had loosened the pent rain, and it came pouring down in floods, veiling them in grayness, the multitudinous plash and patter mingling with a sound like myriad chariot wheels driving overhead.

They closed the windows, which immediately became sheeted with water, the servants went back to their places, Dora took courage, and ventured to uncover one blue eye, with which she looked askance at the window. Mrs. Lewis began to take an esthetic view of the matter, and Miss Hamilton a practical, which she carried out by setting herself to kindle a fire against the coming of the absent ones. They were sure to be drenched.

She had wood brought, removed the pine boughs from the fireplace, and, kneeling on the hearth, began arranging the pile after the most scientific country fashion, miniature back-log, back-stick, and fore-stick, then the finished pyramid, sloping smoothly with the chimney. It was pretty enough to burn, built of birch, amber and golden-hearted, with bark of silver and cinnamon. Nothing else in woods so beautiful as those birch colors.

Then it must be lighted with ceremony, being their first fire, their beltane a little belated. Fresh, drowned roses were snatched in out of the drip to crown the pyre, and the ladies had the temerity to despatch the minister, as officiating priest, with a wax taper, to bring sacred fire from the kitchen grate. Lucifer matches were not to be thought of.

The lambent flame shone softly out through the chinks, then reddened and grew broader, tongues of fire lapped the sticks, and disappeared and reappeared, becoming bolder each time, blistering brownly the silvery bark, catching at the edges, and rolling it up and off the sticks. Columns of milk-white smoke rose, propped by half-sheathed flames, and curled over, mimicking every order of convolution. Mr. Southard recited:

  "'A gleam—a gleam from Ida's height,
      By the fire-god sent it came,
    From watch to watch it leaped, that light,
      As a rider rode the flame.'"

The smoke shut thickly down, a moment; then a broad blaze burst out, wrapped the logs, and began to devour them, roaring like a lion.

The others gathered about the cheerful fire which was reflected in their faces; but Margaret glanced out at the storm, then went up to the long chamber entry from which a window looked down the townward road, and began walking to and fro there, wringing her hands, and listening to the wind and the rain lash the windows. A sudden darkness and terror had settled upon her. It was more than that atmospheric influence to which many are susceptible, more than a mere vague impression of evil; it was a thought as clearly defined as if some one had that moment given it utterance in her hearing, and it held her like a conviction. Some one whom she knew was at that instant dying, or dead!

She had been too happy. She might have known that it could not last. She had known it. In all those happy months, had she not drunk every sweet moment with eager lips that had felt, and must again feel, the bitterness of thirst? Had she not constantly said to herself, It is too bright to last?

The walls shook in the clutch of the blast. Noises came up from the sea; and wild voices answered them from echoing rocks and from out the hollow woods. A great wall seemed to have risen between her and paradise, with a ceaseless swing of lightning guarding the entrance.

She fell on her knees and prayed, one of those terrible, voiceless prayers when the heart strains upward, but utters no petition, because it dares not think what it fears or what it desires.

Leaning exhausted then against the window frame, whom should she see but her great drenched hero striding down the road, no form but his, she knew, though a slouched hat covered his face, and a long cloak wrapped him from neck to heel.

In a flash, the great wall changed its front, and now shut her inside paradise. She ran joyfully downstairs to open the door, and caught the wind and rain in her face, but caught also with them a smile.

"Where is Mr. Lewis?" she asked, thinking of that gentleman by a happy inspiration.

Mr. Granger stepped in and shook himself like a half-drowned Newfoundland dog. "Mr. Lewis stopped to drink General Sinclair's health. He will come down in the next train."

"Yes; Maurice is made a brigadier. He doesn't have to climb the ladder, you see, the ladder comes down to him. And truly he is a gallant fellow. He goes in front of his men, and laughs at danger as he laughs at fortune."

He looked at her smilingly, pleased at the childish delight in his coming which she did not try to hide. Why should she? "Have you? That's pleasant. Now help me off with my cloak. I cannot unfasten that buckle at the back of the neck. Stand on the stair with the railing between us, that you may not get wet."

"I brought them out for you," he said, giving them to her. "See! not a stem is broken."

She ran up-stairs to put the flowers in her chamber—they were too sacred to be shared with others—and coming down, entered the parlor just after Mr. Granger. Presently Mr. Lewis appeared, and they had dinner.

The conversation chanced to turn on presentiments; and since they were all in very friendly humor, Miss Hamilton told of her afternoon terror, making it as presentable as possible. "I suffered a few minutes of mortal fear," she said. "I seemed to know that some dreadful accident had happened to one of the family. What is the meaning of those impressions that are often false, but sometimes true, and that come to us so suddenly, uninvited and unexpected?"

"They are the conclusion of which a woman is one of the premises," Mr. Lewis said in his rough way. "Did you ever hear of a man having presentiments? Of course not. He may have if his liver is out of order; not otherwise."

Mrs. Lewis had been listening with interest. She was one of those persons who believe that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in most philosophies. Her husband called her superstitious.

"I believe in those presentiments which come to us unexpectedly," she said. "We may know that they come from outside by the shock of their coming. We may not be clear. We may think that they point to the past or the present, when really they indicate the future. I think that what we call a true presentiment is a communication from some outside intelligence."

Margaret started and looked uneasily at the speaker. Mr. Lewis regarded his wife with affectionate contempt. "There's the woman who always wishes when she sees two white-faced horses coming toward her, and when she sees the new moon over her right shoulder, and who won't wear an opal because it's an unlucky gem, though it is her favorite. That's the way with women. Their manner of arriving at conclusions is a caution to common sense.

Mrs. Lewis sugared her strawberries, and seemed to soliloquize. "'Two wings are better than ten legs,' says the butterfly to the caterpillar."

Mr. Granger good-naturedly came to the rescue. "It is my opinion," he said, "that these excessively reasonable people make as many mistakes as the most imaginative, only their mistakes are not so obvious, though often far worse. They chill fresh spontaneous feeling, they dampen enthusiasm, they wound hearts that they cannot heal. In ordinary matters, I set reason above all; but when we would measure the walls of the new Jerusalem, we must have a reed of gold, and it must be in the hand of an angel."

Mr. Southard had also his word to say in defence of woman against Mr. Lewis's slighting remarks. But his serious defence was more irritating than the others' laughing attack. He spoke honorably, and often truly; but in the tone of one who understands the subject, root and branch. The three ladies listening felt as if they were three primers with pretty pictures, and nice little good lessons in large print, which Mr. Southard had read with edification to himself in the intervals of more serious study.

"Woman," he said, "woman is—" And paused there, catching an impatient sparkle in Miss Hamilton's eyes.

"Oh! I know," she exclaimed with the stammering eagerness of a child who can spell a big word—"I know what woman is! 'Hominis confusio.' I—I read it in a book."

After dinner the party gathered about the parlor fire, and as it fell from flame to coal, told stories of hurricanes, and tornadoes, and shipwrecks, the fearful recitals intensifying their sense of comfort and safety.

While they talked, the storm passed away, and there was only the sound of vines swinging against the panes, and the ceaseless murmur of the sea. When they opened the window, clouds of perfume came in. The sky was quite clear, and there was a tinge of orange yet lingering in the west. In the east was a still brighter aurora, and the full moon, coming up, feathered with a crest of gold every crisp, bright wavelet.

They all went out and strolled down to the beach. Every leaf and twig and blossom, and the long line of the eaves, were hung full of glittering rain-drops, and the grass shone as if sheathed in burnished silver.

They sighed and were silent. A scene so lovely and peaceful is always like a rebuke.

  "This monarch, so great, so powerful,
     must die, must die, must die."
  "Praise be to him who liveth for ever."

During that whole summer there was a quiet but potent influence at work under Margaret Hamilton's superficial life; ever at work, yet silently, scarcely recognized by herself. The spark struck out by Mr. Southard in his anti-Catholic lecture was slowly kindling in the depths of her being.

There was not a thought of controversy in her mind. As she read, one doctrine after another appeared, and showed its harmony with some need of hers; or if not needed, it was not antagonistic, like the pleasant face of a stranger who may become a friend. Fortunately, no person and no book had said to her, You must believe; and so awakened opposition. Or if the obligation had been insinuated, she had not perceived it. She felt that it was for her alone to say what she must believe, as long as she invited truth generously, and was ready to accept it when it appeared to her with a truthful face. Of course she was not one to make syllogisms at every step, and, being a woman, was not likely to think that necessary. She looked up to find one truth after another standing smiling and confident on the threshold of her heart, and as smilingly she bade them welcome. Reason gave up the reins to intuition, and light came without a cloud. She realized nothing, till, startled by some outside call that woke a many-voiced stir of hitherto silent guests, she opened her eyes, and found herself a Catholic.

The first emotion was one of incredulity; then followed delight, mingled with a fear which was merely the shadow cast by old bugbears that, looked at fearlessly in that new light, faded and fled like ghosts at dawning. Then all surprise faded away. She recognized her proper place. She was at home.

But how to tell Mr. Granger! For she must tell him without delay. It was not an easy task. If he had suspected, perhaps she could have spoken; but he never dreamed of the change in her. If the subject had been introduced, she must have spoken; but for some reason, the "papists" were allowed to rest unscathed in the family conversations. {312} It was the war; it was General Sinclair, sabre in hand, riding into battle as if it were a féte; it was the weather, a whole month of persistent and most illogical rain, pouring down through west winds, through dry moons, through red sunsets, through every sign that should bring clear skies, Taurus being clerk of the weather, they concluded; it was when they should go back to town—" Not till the trees should resume specie payment," was Mr. Granger's professional dictum; it was any and everything but theology. And so the weeks went past, and October came, and the story was not told. But he must know before they returned to town, for then she was to be baptized.

Her uneasiness did not escape Mr. Granger, and in some measure it communicated itself to him. He perceived that she wished to say something to him, yet was afraid to speak.

"After all," he thought, "why should I wait for her to begin? She is as timid, sometimes, as much of a baby, as my Dora. I dare say it is some foolish thing, only fit to laugh at. I must help her."

It was Sunday. Mr. Southard was in town, Mr. and Mrs. Lewis and Aurelia taking their farewell walk in the pine woods, for the family were to leave the seashore that week, and Dora was in the kitchen, hushing to sleep an interesting family of kittens. Miss Hamilton walked up and down the piazza, and Mr. Granger sat just inside one of the windows, looking at her. He saw that she occasionally glanced his way, and hesitated, and that with some suspense or fear her face had grown very pale.

She came to him immediately, eagerly; a faint smile just touching her lips, and fading again.

"I wanted to tell you; but I was afraid," she said, speaking like one out of breath.

Margaret could not look at him, but leaned against a pillar near the window, and averted her face.

"My dear child, what a coward you are!" he exclaimed, half laughing. "You are worse than Dora. She had not such an air of terror when she broke my precious Palissy plate. Must I apply the thumbscrew?"

"Would you be much displeased, Mr. Granger, if I should be a Catholic?" she asked; then held her breath while she awaited his reply.

"Don't believe that!" said Margaret. "I am so firmly a Catholic that I would die for the faith. It has been growing in my mind a long time; and now the work is finished. I could not go back, even to please you, Mr. Granger. I must follow my convictions."

"Certainly," he said very quietly, looking down. "No one has a right to interfere with your convictions. Do you intend to become openly a Catholic, and leave your own church for that?"

"I do not know how to believe one thing and say another," she replied. "I am to be baptized as soon as I go in town."

"Since your mind is so fully made up, and your arrangements perfected, there is, of course, no more to be said about the matter. I am surprised, since I have not been led to expect anything of the sort; but I have neither the right nor the desire to control your religious opinions. Fortunately, conscience is free in this country."

"But you are displeased!" she exclaimed tremulously; for every word had fallen like ice upon her heart.

Margaret sighed heavily under the first pressure of her cross. "You wish me to go away?"

He looked at her in astonishment. "Certainly not! When I say that I have no right or desire to interfere in your religion, I mean that I am not to persecute you or to make any difference with you on account of it. Nothing is to be changed unless you wish it."

She had expected him to ask some explanation; but not a word more did he say. He seemed to think that the subject was disposed of.

His silence wrung her heart like the veriest indifference; but he was not indifferent. He thought, "She has done all this without confiding in me, and tells me only when she must. It is not for me to question her. What I am to know she must communicate voluntarily."

She waited a moment, then turned slowly away, went in at the door, and up-stairs to her chamber.

When they met again, Mr. Granger tried to be quite as usual. He was even more scrupulously respectful than formerly. But she felt the chill of all that courtesy that had once been kindness. The next day she went in town, and was baptized. The sooner the better, she thought. But, if she had expected any delight or conscious change to follow the reception of the sacrament, she was disappointed. There was only that calm which follows the consciousness of being in the right way. The baptism was strictly private; no one present but the two necessary witnesses; and after it was over, she took the cars back to the country.

"Everything is peaceful," she thought, walking through the silent woods, now burning with autumn colors. "Everything is sweet," she added, as, coming in sight of the house, she saw little Dora running joyfully out to meet her.

That evening Mr. Southard came home alone, and with a very grave face. "I have bad news for you," was his first greeting on entering the parlor.

They thought that some accident had happened to Mr. Granger or Uncle Charles," explained Aurelia, seeing the minister's astonishment.

"Some people never know how to tell bad news!" cried Mrs. Lewis, her face still crimson with that first terrified leap of the heart. "Can't you see, Mr. Southard, that you ought to have begun by saying that our family were all well? Look at that girl! She is like a snow image. Oh! well, excuse me; but you did give me such a start. Now tell us the whole, please. I am very sorry."

Poor Mr. Southard took his scolding with the greatest humility, but was so disconcerted by it that he could hardly finish the recital.

Mr. Granger had received a telegram from Washington, and had gone on immediately to bring the remains of his cousin home for burial. He wished them to go into town, and have the house open for the funeral. General Sinclair's wife was ill in Montreal, and could not be present. Mr. Granger had telegraphed her before starting.

They went to town the next day, and hastened to put the house in order; and on the second day Mr. Granger arrived.

It was impossible to have a private funeral. Mr. Sinclair had a host of friends, his reputation was a brilliant one, and he had died in battle. Military companies offered their escort, and the public desired to honor the dead by some demonstration. Finally, Mr. Southard opened his church, and consented to preach the sermon.

One would have thought that some public benefactor had died. The church was crowded, and crowds lined the streets through which the procession passed. Many a great and good man has died, yet received no such ovation.

A military funeral is the sublime of mourning. We may not know whose memory is thus honored, whose silence thus lamented; but those wailing strains of music touch our heartstrings as the wind sweeps the windharp, and tears start at the obsequies of him whose name we never heard, whose face we never looked upon. Perhaps it is that requiem music mourns not that one man is dead, but that all men must die.

Mr. Southard had felt a temporary embarrassment as to the manner in which he should treat his subject. He could not hold the dead up as a model, for Mr. Sinclair had been an unbeliever and a man of the world. There was but one way, and that one was congenial to the speaker and welcome to the hearers. The man must be, as much as was possible, ignored in the cause.

From the moment when the minister rose in the pulpit, the spirit in which he would speak was plain to be seen. His mouth was stern, there was a steel-like flash in his eyes, and his voice was clear and ringing when he announced his text:

"And he said to Zebee and Salmana: What manner of men were they whom you slew in Thabor? They answered: They were like thee, and one of them as the son of a king. He answered them: They were my brethren, the sons of my mother. As the Lord liveth, if you had saved them, I would not kill you. And he said to Jether his eldest son: Arise, and slay them."

There was a pause of utter silence; then the minister extended his hands toward the open, flag-draped, flower-crowned coffin in front of the pulpit, and exclaimed, "One of them as the son of a king!"

Instantly every eye was turned on that white and silent face, and the princely form extended there, superbly beautiful as a marble god. It seemed regicide to kill such a man. After that look, scarcely one present revolted at the tone of the sermon, which echoed throughout the vengeful call, "Arise, and slay them!"

As the family sat that evening at home, trying to throw off the gloomy impressions of the day, and to talk quite as usual, the conversation, by some chance, turned on theology, and settled upon Catholicism. Mr. Granger, who had been sitting apart and silent, roused himself at that, and tried to introduce some other topic, but without success. Miss Hamilton was mute, feeling that her time had come. If only her friend were on her side, she would not have cared so much; but he was far from her. The coldness that had arisen between them at first had increased rather than diminished. Perhaps it was partly her own fault; but it hurt her none the less.

"The papists are certainly gaining ground in this country," Mr. Southard said. "We have hard work before us. They know how to appeal to the frivolous tastes of the times, as of old they appealed to the superstitious. Their music pleases opera-goers, and their ceremonies amuse the curious. Worse than that, their sophistries deceive the romantic and the credulous."

"Oh! live and let live," interposed Mr. Granger hastily. "There are a good many roads to heaven."

"If there is but one," Mr. Granger said, rising, "he is a bold man who will say that he is right, and all the others wrong."

Margaret's heart gave a bound. She breathed an aspiration. Her time had come. She was sitting alone opposite them all, and they all looked at her as she leaned forward with a slight gesture that checked further speech.

The minister started up with an exclamation, the others stared in astonishment; but Mr. Granger took a step and placed himself at Margaret's side.

O generous heart! She did not look at him, but she began to tremble, as the snow-wreath trembles in the sun before it quite melts away.

He leaned against the table near him, too much excited to sit, too much overcome to stand unsupported.

"You mean that you are pleased with their ceremonies, that some of their doctrines are plausible, not that you accept them all, and pay allegiance to the pope of Rome. It cannot be!"

"I honor the pope as the head of the church, and I can listen to no teacher of religion whom he does not approve," was the reply.

"My God!" muttered the minister. He stood one moment looking at her as if he saw a spectre, then turned away with drooping head, and went toward the door, staggering so that he had to put his hand out for support. To that sincere but mistaken man it was as if he had seen the pit open, and one he loved drawn into it.

The others sat silent and embarrassed, till Aurelia, bursting into tears, started up and left the room.

Margaret glanced at Mrs. Lewis, and found that she had quite recovered from her surprise.

"The programme seems to be flourish of trumpet, and exeunt omnes," the lady said. "But I mean to stand my ground. I don't find you in the least frightful. You look to me precisely as you did an hour ago, only brighter perhaps. My only fear at this instant is lest we may have to tie you up to keep you out of a convent."

"Oh! well, I don't see but we can get along with everything else. There's fish on Fridays, and the necessity of holding one's tongue occasionally. I think we can manage. Mr. Lewis, can you shut your mouth sufficiently to give an opinion?"

Thus called upon, Mr. Lewis found voice. "What in the world did you want to go and turn Catholic for?" he demanded angrily. "Couldn't you like 'em well enough at a distance, as I do? That's just a woman's romantic, headlong way of doing things up to the handle. You've upset your own dish completely. Nobody will marry you now."

Miss Hamilton smiled. "That is a view of the matter which I never thought to take," she said.

"No, thank you; I won't," she replied, rising. "I thank you all"—with downcast eyes and a little tremor in her voice—"I thank you that you are not too angry with me for what I could not help. I could not have borne—" There words failed her.

She glanced at Mr. Granger as she went out, and caught one of those heartfelt smiles which lighted his face when he was thoroughly friendly and pleased.

There was little rest for her that night. Hour after hour she heard Mr. Southard's step pacing to and fro in his chamber beneath, not ceasing till near morning. But after she went to bed, Aurelia came softly in, and, bending, put her arms around Margaret, and kissed her.

"I am sorry if I made you feel bad by going away so," she said in a voice stifled by long weeping. "But you know I was so taken by surprise. Of course we are all the same friends as ever. Good-night, dear! Go to sleep, and don't worry about anything. Mr. Granger and aunt and uncle told me to say good-night to you for them."

In the morning all appeared as usual, except that there was no Mr. Southard at the table. Luncheon-time came, and Mrs. James reported the minister to have locked his door and declined refreshment. When the dinner-bell rang, still Mr. Southard had not come down.

"If he doesn't come to dinner," Miss Hamilton thought, thoroughly vexed, "I will send him a note which will give him an appetite. This is sheer nonsense."

But as they entered the dining-room they heard his step on the stairs, and he followed them in.

Hearing him greet the others quite in his usual manner, Margaret glanced at him, and found him waiting to bow to her. He looked as if he had had a long illness.

"What! you desert your seat too?" he said, seeing her go toward the other end of the table.

"I thought you might be afraid to sit by me," she replied pettishly. Then, as he dropped his glance and colored faintly, she repented, and went back to her seat by him.

When they rose, he spoke to her aside. "May I see you in the library now, or at your convenience? I would gladly speak with you tonight."

"Now, if you please," she answered, thinking it best to have the interview over at once, since it was inevitable.

It would be worse than useless to repeat the minister's arguments. With more of patience and humility than she had expected, he asked for and listened to the story of her conversion. But his calmness deserted him more and more as he perceived how firmly grounded was her conviction, and how hard would be the task of reclaiming her.

Polemical discussions were always irritating, but not always convincing, she insisted. She could not trust herself to engage in them, even if she were capable. She did not want to be told that such a man had been wicked, that such an abuse had existed. When treason had found a place among the apostles, it might well taint some of their successors. It mattered not; her faith was not based on any individual. Let Mr. Southard take the doctrines of the church, as she had learned them, from the church itself, and then prove them false if he could. Let him take the books that had satisfied her, and answer their arguments, theologian to theologian. With her the contest would be unequal; but she would gladly listen to his refutation, she assured him.

"What books have you read?" he asked, resting his head on his hand, disconcerted to find that, instead of being opposed to an uninstructed young woman, he was to have arrayed against him the flower of Catholic theologians.

She named them, an imposing list, at the repetition of which a slow red crept up into the minister's cheeks. Apparently the young woman was not so uninstructed as he had thought.

"Mr. Southard," she concluded, "I have no desire but to know the truth. If you can convince me that I am wrong, I will renounce my errors as promptly as I adopted them. If you are thoroughly convinced that you are in the right way, then you ought to be fearless. But if it is too much trouble for you to study the subject, if I am not worth it, then let the matter drop."

"I will read the books, and go over their arguments with you," the minister said, looking at her keenly as if he suspected some hidden motive in her proposal.

"I am honest!" she said, hurt by his expression. "What have I to gain, if not heaven? What have I not to lose? I feel surely that our happy household will never again be the same that it has been."

"I must believe you sincere," he replied. "But I cannot imagine what should have set you, of all persons, on this track."

Miss Hamilton smiled as she rose. "It was you, sir. You should beware of the flattery of abuse."

The next morning after breakfast the minister found on his study table a pile of controversial works that the housekeeper had been instructed to leave there for him. Beside them lay a crucifix. He touched it, and it seemed to burn his fingers. He pushed it away, and it burned his heart.

"After all, it is the image of my crucified Redeemer," he said; and took it in his hand again. Looking at it a moment, his eyes filled with tears.

Good Old Saxon.

By An English Catholic.

During the last five years an admirable society, formed in London, and called the Early English Text Society, has been reproducing at a cheap rate a large number of curious and valuable works written in the thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries. Many of these existed in manuscript only, while others were out of print, and very difficult of attainment. They range over a variety of different subjects, and being beautifully printed, amply supplied with notes and glossaries, and each edited by an accomplished Anglo-Saxon scholar, they afford clergymen, antiquarians, and men of letters in general an excellent opportunity of becoming familiar with the earlier forms of the English language, and the best authors during a literary period hitherto regarded as obscure.

These publications synchronize with, and have partly grown out of, a movement which, though retrograde, has been really an improvement and an advance—a movement, namely, from Latinized to Saxon English. We may perhaps date its commencement from the time when Dr. Johnson was approaching his sixtieth year. He had, for a long time, been lending the weight of his great name to the practice of using very long words, and those chiefly of Latin origin. In doing this he had not merely followed a crowd of classical English writers, but had put himself at their head. The genius of the language was being lost, and when it seemed to be gaining strength, it was in reality growing weaker. Its original tendency had been toward words of one syllable, but under Shaftesbury, Bolingbroke, and a multitude of essayists and pamphleteers of the eighteenth century, it tended strongly toward the use of words of many syllables. Thus sound was frequently substituted for sense, and sentences, though they ran more smoothly, had in them far less fibre. An air of pedantry was thrown over expressions, when such a word as "tremulousness" was substituted for "quivering," and "exsiccation" for "drying." Mannerism was certainly the mildest epithet that could be applied to such changes, when they became frequent and systematic. An instance of the habit in question is often quoted from Johnson's Dictionary, where, in defining "net" and "network," he calls the first, "anything made with interstitial vacuities," and the second, "anything reticulated or decussated, at equal distances, with interstices between the intersections."

Yet Johnson himself had, in the grammar prefixed to his Dictionary, pointed out clearly how very monosyllabic English was originally, how "our ancestors were studious to form borrowed words, however long, into monosyllables;" how they cut off terminations, cropped the first syllable, rejected vowels in the middle, and weaker consonants, retaining the stronger, which seem "the bones of words." Thus, from "excrucio" they made "screw;" from "exscorio," "scour;" from "excortico," "scratch;" from "hospital," "spittle;" and the like. {319} By such processes, performed not according to rule, but by the unconscious working of national instincts, our forefathers produced a wonderful agreement between the sound of their words and the thing signified. Squeak, crush, brawl, whirl, bustle, twine, are but a few among a multitude of instances which will occur to any one who gives attention to the subject. Wallis, indeed, a writer often quoted in the grammar referred to, establishes the fact of a great agreement subsisting between even the letters, in the native words of our language, and the thing signified; and his analysis of the meaning conveyed by sn, str, st, thr, wr, sw, cl, sp, and other combinations is highly ingenious and, on the whole, satisfactory. He comes to the conclusion that one of our monosyllable words "emphatically expresses what in other languages can scarce be explained but by compounds, or decompounds, or sometimes a tedious circumlocution."

But although Dr. Johnson, like Wallis, appreciated highly the Saxon origin and character of English, though he fully recognized the strength which it derives from its native sources as opposed to southern innovations, his own practice was eminently faulty, and sure, in the hands of his imitators, to degenerate into pedantry and stilts. It was well, therefore, that when his career was drawing to a close, an obscure but highly gifted boy in Bristol ransacked the muniment room of St. Mary Redcliffe's Church, and found, or pretended to have found, in its old chests, the poems of Rowley, who was said to have written in the time of Edward III. The poems were not without merit in themselves, but, when Chatterton had, amid the pangs of hunger, put an end to his short and weary existence, they attracted attention in consequence of the antiquated form in which they appeared. They were like the fossil remains of extinct animals, and spoke of a literary period little known at that time even to the best English scholars. They breathed the language and the spirit of Chaucer; and from the moment of their appearance may be traced the reaction in favor of Saxon phraseology which marks the literature of the present day. The boy-author saw by intuition what Dr. Wallis had reduced to rules. Perhaps he had never analyzed very closely his own reasons, nor traced attentively the process of nature in the formation of words, so as to produce in them an agreement between the sound and the thing signified; but his youthful ear was charmed with the native energy of what Byron called our "northern guttural," and he loved to imitate, in such lines as these, the rugged sweetness of the early English poets:

  "The rodie welkin sheeneth to the eyne;
   In dasied mantles is the mountain dight,
   The neshe young cowslip bendeth with the dew."

In these lines, all the words are of the pure Saxon type; and the same may be said of almost every stanza in Chaucer's Tales.

  "The flowrs of many divers hue
   Upon their stalkis gonin for to spread,
   And for to splay out their leavis ill brede,
   Again the sun, gold-burned in his sphere,
   That down to them y-cast his beamis clear.'

  "And whanne sche com hom sche wolde brynge
     Wortis and other herbis tymes ofte,
   The which sche shred and seth for her lyvyng
     And made her bed ful hard, and nothing softe."

This, as regards language, is the mould in which the Tales are cast. The same Saxon stamp imprinted on the verse of Spenser, though the Fairie Queen came two centuries after the Canterbury Tales. One stanza shall suffice as a specimen:

  "Then came the jolly summer, being dight
     In a thin silken cassock coloured greene,
   That was unlyned all, to be more light;
     And on his head a girland well beseene
   He wore, from which as he had chauffed been
     The sweat did drop; and in his hand he bore
   A bow and shaftes; as he in forrest greene
     Had hunted late the libbard or the bore
   And now would bathe his limbs with labor heated sore."

The habits and tastes of Ben Jonson and of Milton were largely influenced by their classical studies. The best authors of ancient Greece and Rome filled their memories, and it was only natural that their writings should betray at every turn the sources from which they had been fed. Yet a multitude of passages might be cited from these poets in which the genuine ring of the early English rhymers only is heard. Thus Ben Jonson, in a favorite piece of advice to a reckless youth, says:

  "Nor would I you should melt away yourself
   In flashing bravery; lest, while you affect
   To make a blaze of gentry to the world,
   A little puff of scorn extinguish it,
   And you be left like an unsavoury snuff
   Whose property is only to offend."

The last line has more than one word of Latin origin; but in Milton's Mask of Comus we find long passages entirely free from the foreign element. Thus, Sabrina sings:

  "By the rushy-fringed bank
   Where grows the willow and the osier dank,
       My sliding chariot stays,
   Thick set with agat, and the azure sheen
   Of turkis blue and em'rald green,
       That in the channel strays;
     Whilst from off the waters fleet
     Thus I set my printless feet
     O'er the cowslip's velvet head
     That bends not as I tread."

Now it must not be supposed that in calling attention to the Saxon character of English as opposed to, or distinct from, its Latin and Norman aspects, we are advocating any exclusive system. We rejoice in our language being a compound; and as some of the most exquisite perfumes are produced by distilling a variety of different flowers and leaves, so languages formed by the mixture of several races, and influenced by numerous changes and chances in the history of the people who speak them, are often, in their way, as vigorous and beautiful as any of more simple origin. This is especially the case with that tongue which, being our own, is dearer to us than all besides. But because it consists, and must ever consist, of various elements, there is no reason why we should be indifferent to the relative proportions in which these elements are mixed together; nor is it by any means superfluous to inquire whether the tendency of a compound language may not, at any particular period, be toward corruption and decay, and, at another time, toward health, consistency, majesty, melody, and strength.

We have assumed that Saxon is the basis of English, and that of late years there has been among English writers a tendency to reascend the stream to its source, to freshen and invigorate their diction by the use of native, as distinct from foreign words. We have mentioned Chatterton as being, perhaps unconsciously, a leader in this movement; and we would add that Burns also fostered the reviving taste for pure English; for, though he wrote in the Scottish dialect, that dialect had, and has still, a thousand points of contact with our language in the days of its youth. Though its peculiarities were of Gaelic rather than Saxon origin, yet they resembled old English in this, that they were marked by short words and many consonants. Hence Robert Burns's verse revolts instinctively from the many liquid syllables of the South, and is wild and ragged as the crags and glens which were his favorite haunts. So far as it influenced our literature, it recalled it from the smoother and less vigorous course of Latinized or Johnsonian English to the sharper, simpler, and clearer notes of less artificial times.

  "Your critic-folk may cock their nose
   And say, How can you e'er propose,
   You who ken hardly verse frae prose,
       To mak a sang?
   But, by your leaves, my learned foes,
       Ye're may be wrang."

The touch and racy dialect of the Border Minstrelsy, which Walter Scott edited, Mr. Evans's Collection of Old Ballads, and Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, guided public taste into a direction opposed to the tame mediocrity of the imitators of Dryden and Pope. The ear and the mind alike were charmed by the exceeding simplicity of the style of these old ballads, and their almost exclusive use of monosyllables.

Here are a few notes from one of those Jacobite songs which resounded so freely among the Highlands when Prince Charles Edward came to recover the crown of his fathers. Walter Scott compares such ballads to the "grotesque carving on a Gothic niche:"

  "It's nae the battle's deadly stoure
   Nor friends pruived fause that'll gar me cower,
   But the reckless hand o' povertie,
   Oh! that alane can daunton me!

  "High was I born to kingly gear,
   But a cuif came in my cap to wear,
   But wi' my braid sword I'll let him see
   He's nae the man will daunton me."

The Lake school of poetry, being founded in a deep love of nature and a close scrutiny of her works, had a concurrent influence in restoring the liberal use of the older forms of speech. Writers like Charles Lamb, whose minds were richly stored with the treasures of Elizabethan lore, were sometimes accused of affectation in employing archaisms, but "the old words of the poet," as the author of "Summer Time in the Country" observes, "like the foreign accent of a sweet voice, give a charm to the tone, without in any large degree obscuring the sense." Indeed, if the most popular passages in Wordsworth, and in his great master Shakespeare, be examined, they will be found to answer on the whole to that ideal of English phraseology which is here formed—one, namely, in which the Saxon element largely predominates. Thus, almost at random, we quote from The Midsummer Night's Dream:

  "What hempen home-spuns have we swaggering here,
   So near the cradle of the fairy queen?"

  "Beneath a rock, upon the grass,
     Two boys are sitting in the sun;
   Boys that have had no work to do,
     Or work that now is done.
   On pipes of sycamore they play
     The fragments of a Christmas hymn;
   Or with that plant which in our dale
   We call stag-horn or fox's tail,
     Their rusty hats they trim:
   And thus, as happy as the day,
   Those shepherds wear the time away."

Shakespeare's description of Queen Mab, in Romeo and Juliet, may also be pointed out as a signal example of pure Saxon English throughout; but it is too long and too familiar to our readers to be quoted here.

There are not wanting men of talent and research, who have remarked the change which has come over the national literature in its rebound toward Saxon diction, and who have recommended it very distinctly. Dean Swift, though in point of time he preceded the movement, held as a principle that no Saxon word should be allowed to fall into disuse. Dean Hoare has, in our own time, expressed his decided conviction that those speakers and writers impart most pleasure whose style is most Saxon in its character; and this remark applies, as he believes, especially to poetry. It is in accordance with the spirit of the age that we recoil from that "fine writing" which is generally mere declamation. {322} In proportion as we become practical, the racy style—pointed, suggestive, and curt—rises in value. By the exercise of thought and cultivation of science we become exact, and through plenty of business we become brief-spoken. Vague talking and writing is now at a discount, and persons express themselves with more substance and strength because they are trained in the love of truth, historic and scientific, and have contracted a hatred of shams of every kind. Directness of statement is what is now most valued in a writer, and such men as Dr. Newman among Catholics, and Carlyle and Emerson among non-Catholics, have contributed in an immense degree to promote reverence for this quality. Circumlocution and over-expansion are faults which no one will now tolerate, and this jealousy for the clear and ready conveyance of ideas has a great deal to do with recurrence to the pregnant monosyllables, the picture-words, the gnarled and knotted strength of Saxon English.

It is, however, to Tennyson, more than to any other modern writer, that the public owes the more frequent use of short and sinewy words already known to most readers, and the enrichment of the language by the revival of many words which had become obsolete. Enoch Arden, though a poem consisting of two thousand lines, contains scarcely a word that is not of Saxon origin. It is, as far as language is concerned, simplicity almost in excess. Thus, to take but one example, it is not till we reach the last word of the following passage that we are reminded of the partly Latin origin of our tongue:

      "For in truth
  Enoch's white horse, and Enoch's ocean-spoil
  In ocean-smelling osier, and his face,
  Rough-reddened with a thousand winter-gales,
  Not only to the market-cross were known,
  But in the leafy lanes behind the down,
  Far as the portal-warding lion-whelp,
  And peacock-yewtree of the lonely hall,
  Whose Friday fare was Enoch's ministering."

In this passage all the words are in common use, but in other parts of the same volume, and, indeed, in all which the laureate has published, we perceive a strong tendency to antique and grotesque forms of speech, derived from long and devoted attachment to the old writers. If they were introduced by design, simply because they are archaisms, the artifice would be apparent, and the pedantry complete. But when they form a genuine part of the author's inner life of thought and memory, the case is different, and what would have been formal and stiff becomes natural and easy. They comport well with the idea one forms of a great thinker, and indicate a thorough mastery over the mother tongue. They might, no doubt, easily degenerate into affectation, but when employed with judgment and skill, they are like fossils in a well-arranged cabinet, or old china in a well-furnished room. Resembling, as they do, the tough, tortuous olive-tree, they are valuable signs of a people's mental vigor; for as surely as the "soft bastard Latin" of the Apennines indicates a population less martial than the Romans of old—as surely as the soft and sibilant Romaic tells of a race fallen from the higher walks of Grecian philosophy, history, science, and song—so surely would Latinized English be a sign that the people writing and speaking it, were falling away from the marked character of their forefathers, and contrasting with them as strongly as the silken senators whom Chatham denounced contrasted with the iron barons of the days of King John.

Waiting.

  Flame, rosy tapers, flame!
        Though flushing day
  Is mounting into heaven, it cannot shame
  The weakest rush-light burning in his name
        Who soon will say,
     "Peace to this house!" Consoling word,
     Which patient ones have heard,
        Then meekly sighed,
  "Now let thy servant, Lord, depart in peace!"
  And, granted swift release,
        Next moment died.

	Flame, rosy tapers, flame!
	No garish day can shame
     Your ruddy wax a-light in Jesus' name!

  Close, giddy honeysuckles, clambering free,
  Close your moist petals to the wandering bee.
  That with your cloistered dews you may adore
  My Lord, when he shall enter at the door.
        O blossoming sweet-brier!
  Now flushing like a seraph with desire
        To do him homage, send abroad
  Your aromatic breath, and thus entice,
        With innocent device,
  His quickening steps unto my poor abode.
  Calm lilies for his tabernacle sealed,
     O spicy hyacinths! now yield
     Your odors to the waiting air
        His welcome to prepare;
	Nor fear that by my haste
        Your perfumes you will waste;
	For each expectant sigh
     Is dearer, to the Holy One so nigh,
     Than all your honeyed nectaries exhale.
        Young rose and lilac pale,
	And every flow'ret fair,
	Incense the blissful air,
	   And bid him, hail!
{324}
	      Flame, rosy tapers, flame!
	      No garish day can shame
     Your ruddy wax a-light in Jesus' name!
        Sing, lark and linnet, sing
	The graces of this King,
	Who, in such meek array,
	Will visit me to-day:
  Young swallows, twittering at my cottage eaves,
  Shy wrens, close-nested in the woodbine leaves,
  Blithe robins, chirping on the open gate,
  Upon his coming wait:
  Glad oriole, swinging with the linden bough,
  I do entreat you, now
     With gushing throat
     Repeat your most ecstatic note.
        Afar I hear,
        With instinct quick and clear,
  His step who bears, enshrined upon his breast,
  The God who soon within my own will rest.
        Angelic choirs
	Are touching their exultant lyres:
  Sing, lark and linnet, sing,
  And with your artless jubilations bring
  Their joy to earth; and you, melodious thrush,
  While my glad soul keeps hush,
        Attune your song
        My silent rapture to prolong.

              Flame, rosy tapers, flame!
	      No garish day can shame
     Your ruddy wax a-light in Jesus' name!

From The Rivista Universale, Of Genoa.

The Supernatural.

By Cesar Cantu.

Petulant tyranny of science! It will not allow us to say that two and two are three; that there can be more than the sum of two right angles in a triangle; or that the radii of a circle are not equal. What arrogance thus to confine my liberty; to deny me leave to assert that there is an exact relation between the diameter and circumference of a circle; that the duplication of the cube is possible, the trisection of an angle, and perpetual motion! Why should not error have the same rights as truth? Reason is mistress of the world; unlimited mistress of herself. She can prove that yes is identical with no; that being and nothing are all one. Why tire ourselves with the science of ultimate reasons? We must regard the effects without ascending to the causes; we accept only what can be felt and seen. What is substance? What is cause? What are ideas? Let them pass; we hold only to phenomenon and effect.

All would not dare to express these assertions with such boldness, and yet they are necessary inferences from the current sophisms and phrases of a science which stains its tyranny by petulance and bald negations. Experience! Experience! it cries daily, and proceeds to invent theories on the formation of the universe which will never meet the approval of experience; it repudiates every truth a priori, and yet establishes, a priori, that faith is contradictory to reason. In the name of free-will it demands the destruction of free-will; as if man were more free while seeking than after having found the truth; as if true liberty did not consist in willing what is right.

And nowadays a multiform war is waged against ancient belief by a contracted and intolerant science, and a system of retrogressive and egotistical politics. Arguments and buffoonery, decrees and violences, alternate, not only against the priests, but against Christ. Some disfigure dogmas, and then throw them to the fishes, or abandon them to the anger of a mob dressed in black waistcoats or in red caps. Some resuscitate ancient errors under modern phraseology, or excite the demon of curiosity. Some, faithful to the system of defamation and intimidation, libel as clericals or obscurantists those Christians who loved liberty when it was not a mere speculation, if they are unwilling to believe that the Italy of the future must deny the Italy of the past, to become strong. One party in the name of authority attacks its chief source. Some drag into the lists a conventional nationality and an exclusive patriotism, against the universality of faith and charity, and hurt the partial reasons of a state against ecumenical reason. Some fight in the garb of doctors, striving to apply the methods of observation to what is super-sensible, confounding the proximate with the first cause, and thus arriving at scientific scepticism, positivism, which repudiates ideas, or at a criticism which considers generations as succeeding each other without a connecting law—by mere evolution—without seeking what absolute truth corresponds to the successive rise of nations, or clearing up the future by the past—that which is going to happen with what is permanent. {326} And thus they whirl in a pantheism which either accepts no God but the human mind, or makes everything God except God himself; leaving him the splendor of his idea, the sovereignty of his name, but depriving him of the reality of his being and the consciousness of his life.

There are others who, with frivolous argumentation, produce excellent pillows for doubt, and refuse to examine, contenting themselves with repeating the affirmations of the most accredited organs of the press. Let us pass over those who flatter the animal instincts of nature by writings and images which Sodom would condemn, and proclaim the divine reign of the flesh, saying, with Heine, "The desire of all our institutions is the rehabilitation of matter. Let us seek good in matter; let us found a democracy of terrestrial gods, equal in happiness and holiness; let us have nectar and ambrosia; let us desire garments of purple, delights of perfumes and dances, comedies and children."

Hence comes the deplorable degradation of minds plunged not only in ignorance but in base adulations to slaves and to the slaves of slaves, to the rabble hailed by the people, to a debasement called progress, to a freedom which consists in robbing others of liberty.

In such a state of affairs, what ought a priest or Christian to do who reserves to himself the right of not calling evil things good? Grow low-spirited, reproach the century, grow timorous of science, groan like Jeremias over the woe of Jerusalem, and await the rock which is to crush the clay-footed colossus? It looks like compelling Providence, when we refuse to co-operate with it in the conflict between good and evil, unless on conditions which suit our little egotism, or please our frivolous vanity. The timid compromise their character with strange conventions between truth and error, by shameful oscillation between liberty and despotism, resigning themselves to tyranny as a hypocrite may act toward an atheist.

Christ came to carry the sword, and the time has come when he who has one should draw and brandish it. Certainly, God will save his church. He alone will have the glory, but will man have the merit of it? Where silence is, there is death; and, outside of what directly touches revealed truth, discussion is useful, even when held with those who err; it teaches us, at least, how we are not to act or think, if nothing else.

Some say, "It is enough to preach morality. What have rigorous truths to do with good sentiments? the aspirations of the heart with the deductions of cold reason?"

Superficial questions! As if one should say, "What has the soul to do with the soul?" Do not ethics depend on dogma? do not our actions follow from metaphysical conditions? Every doctrine becomes an element of life or a principle of death for the soul. A sophist may, indeed, boast of a new code of ethics, or a new law; as if truth could be contingent and relative as well as universal, eternal, necessary, and, as such, not produced by man, who is mortal and limited. International associations, conspiring to assassinate Christian civilization, will soon respond with consequent acts to such inconsequences of literature.

When the system of attack is changed, we must change the system of defence. Preaching can no longer be confined to mere prones, or exhortations to the good and inculcating the fides carbonaria; [Footnote 66] but we must gird on the sword of science and eloquence, and attack resolutely those who assail us resolutely. Truth can be saved only by victory; and in this case, as in war, the best defence is an attack.

If errors fortify themselves in the newspapers, and come on in serried ranks, protected by gazettes, decrees, arts, and sciences, we must meet them with the same means, humble them with the truths rejected or distorted by the sophists, turn their own weapons against them; for error, which is a stumbling-block for the incautious, may become a ladder for the wise to ascend higher. Nowadays, when all the arguments of unbelief are allied in an invisible church which has fraternities, missionaries, sacrifices, and even martyrs, to assault the visible church in the name of progress, enlightenment, morality, reason, and the future, we must draw out all the reasons of belief in opposition. The manifestation of truth, even though it may not destroy error, weakens its power. It is not enough to show that our adversaries are wrong; we must be right ourselves. Let us not allow men to think that there are truths incompatible with faith, or outside of its dogmas; but that, notwithstanding exaggerations, absurdities, erroneous and culpable notions, those truths obtain from faith all their reality, vitality, and durability; and that he who looks well will see that every incontestable and positive progress comes from the organization of Christian society.

In this labor, can reason ask the aid of revelation? And why not? The rationalists might complain if we attempted to overwhelm the question with the weight of revealed authority; but when revelation is united to reason, the power of the latter is doubled. Mysteries are above reason, not contrary to it. Faith is only the most sublime effort of reason, which is persuaded to believe by arguments, convinced of its impotence without faith, as well as of its greatness with faith. Faith is a grace, because it is not sensible certainty. It springs from the desire of a pure heart and of a right mind that the harmonious structure of revelation should be true. Reason by itself cannot obtain the knowledge of a mystery, any more than it can comprehend a mystery when revelation makes it known. Reason, however, understands that a mystery is above it, but not opposed to it; and recognizes the necessity of the supernatural to explain even the mysteries of nature. In like manner, though we cannot look at the sun, yet by its light we see all things.

Some, seeing our adversaries use the sciences and politics against religion, work with the arts, speak with ability, begin to vituperate civilization, attack its acts and writings, deplore the times, deny the stupendous progress of the age—the fruit of so much study, fatigue, and genius.

This is not only an evil; it is a danger. Instead of repudiating natural truths, we must seek to reconcile them with the super-sensible, show ourselves just toward what is new, use it to rejuvenate the decrepit, and apply it to the branches which have lost vitality. The time will never come when all objections will be conquered. They will always arise with new forms and new phases. {328} Great thinkers give the word of command for new revolts against truth; it is therefore necessary for great theologians to combat them. Every Catholic is not fit to enter the list as a champion, but every Catholic ought to know why faith is necessary in general, and what he ought to believe in particular. The least that can be expected of him is not to be less ignorant than the curious, the learned, and the railers who, on every side, pick up arguments for not believing. And how few know their religion, not only among the common people, but even among the educated classes! The fault lies in the fact that, while we Catholics are so superior to our adversaries, we do not know how to use our advantage, because we know not in what this superiority consists. Otherwise, every educated person would find by himself as many new, ingenious, and brilliant proofs to defend the religion of his ancestors as others invent to destroy it—original, personal proofs, as light, perhaps, as the objections, but sufficient for the discussion of circles, to answer presumptuous contempt, false ideas, and false principles, which are published in seductive garb, with specious propositions, audacious negations, and intrepid affirmations, [Footnote 67] and which penetrate into politics, science, art, repugnant not only to logic, but even to the instincts of common sense.

[Footnote 67: See a golden work of the Princess Wittgenstein Iwanowska, Simplicité des Colombes, Prudence des Serpents, where she refutes the most common objections, and exhorts especially ladies to prudence and simplicity in controversy and conduct.]

But, moreover, who does not feel the deficiency in scientific and really practical education in that science which satisfies the reason, the heart, and faith.

The religious element should form a great part in education, and it would suffice to change the tone of controversy, from being sour, contemptuous, diffident, discourteous, provoking, and partial, the result of the usual impoliteness of journalists, to a courageous yet prudent, conscientious as well as learned, indulgent yet immovable, method; abandoning a phraseology which did not formerly shock men's feelings, those sarcasms which neither heal nor console, and remembering that our adversaries are probably men of high intelligence, in error precisely on this account; perhaps persons of right mind, unimpeachable morals, and even of delicate sensibility.

This is the arena of conférences. Fraysinnous began the work of uniting religion with science in the pulpit. Those of Wiseman did better at Rome. Then arose the famous names of Lacordaire, Ravignan, and now of Fathers Felix and Hyacinthe, [Footnote 68] and in Italy, Fathers Maggio, Fabri, Rossi, Giordano, and others. Among these must be named Alimonda, provost of the cathedral of Genoa, who gave a course of lectures, all depending on one proposition, and has just published them in four volumes, with the title Man under the Law of the Supernatural. Genoa, 1868.

[Footnote 68: At this time Father Hyacinthe is treating of "The Church under her most general aspect," in Notre Dame, at Paris. He treats of the providence of God.]

But four volumes cost more than a box of cigars! How much time it takes to read them! some will exclaim who have, perhaps, read Les Miserables of Hugo, or La Stella d'Italia; have a copy of Thiers; subscribe for four or five magazines, and who require a hundred or a hundred and fifty pages to be printed on a question of finance or railroads, but find that number too great where the discussion is about man's being, or his power of working, on the essence of God, the immortality of the soul, the necessity of virtue, and the necessity of religion to create it, the divinity of Christianity, or belief in its dogmas.

But those who do not merely aspire to cloud the human intellect, and repress sublime desires under the weight of self-interest, passion, and the tyranny of prejudice, and who exclaim, with Linnaeus, "Oh! quam contemta res est homo nisi super humana se erexerit," [Footnote 69] know that to follow great ideas becomes a nobler habit, as trivialities become common; and that essential truths, which are never out of place or time, are based on the same systematic method which seemed to deny them entirely.

[Footnote 69: "Oh! how contemptible a thing is man if he cannot arise above what is human!"]

Scientific atheism asserts that "common sense is the test of belief in the supernatural," and that the greatness of every religious conception referable to this standard is counterbalanced by the greatness of scientific conceptions on nature and the universe. Whoever, then, does not belong to the party of those who presume to differ with the atheist, can easily perceive how unacceptable a treatise on the supernatural must be; since Alimonda began by demonstrating that it is true, and credible; and that it imports us not only in the next life but even in this to believe it. To desire to invent a mechanical theory of the universe, a material origin of human intelligence and liberty, originates the anarchical conception of giving the explanation of the cosmological whole by means of every special science. Büchner and Vogt modified the Cartesian ideas by teaching "that there is no force without matter, no matter without force; that matter thinks as well as moves; and that all things are but dynamic transformations of matter." Hence comes intelligent electricity, cogitating phosphorus; and Moleschott was invited to teach in our universities that "thought is a motion of cerebral matter, and conscience a material property." Rognero taught that "conscience dwells in the circulatory system." These doctrines have been preached in every revolutionary tavern with all that personal exaggeration which we always find in those who retail second-hand dogmas.

Well! granted these hypotheses, we still ask, What is this force? What is this primary motion? Where is the mover? Would an activity anterior to existence have ever created itself imperfect and subject to evil? Can the relation of necessary succession be confounded with the relation of causality? Does the metaphysical conception of cause remain indistinct from the conditions of existence? If the order of ideas be distinguished from the order of facts, everything leads us to a first cause, to the most real of realities, to the will of a supreme artificer which determined inert matter to motion rather than to rest.

If, then, this motion endures with fixed laws; if, in so great a diversity of infinite bodies, I recognize a system according to which no one interferes with the other, but all agree in a supreme harmony of mode; if, for instance, the destruction of one of the celestial bodies would discompose the marvellous structure of the universe; if from the alteration of the orbit of a planet the man of science can conclude the existence of another, thousands of miles distant, it is not the holy fathers but Voltaire who will exclaim, "If the clock exists, there must necessarily be a clock-maker." It is impossible to kill a moral being, a universal sentiment, by arms, or books, or declamations.

The Deity does not offer himself to sensation, observation, or experience; hence the sensists and perceptionists see in him but a hypothesis, and reject all theology and all metaphysics. They abuse the method of observation by applying it to what is not observable. No object of experiment can be God; nor can any perception reach him in this world, since he can only manifest himself to us ideally; that is to say, by the reflection of thought on itself, under the pure form of an idea; and an idea necessarily supposes an existence. Reason must come to God through the medium of the idea of God: whence an illustrious writer defending religious philosophy adopted the appropriate title of "IDEA OF GOD."

Nowadays, when the series of generations are brought to laugh and dance at the funeral of God and the evaporation of Christ, it is not superfluous to accumulate psychological and social proofs on the existence of a first necessary Cause, on its reality, and on its divine life reverberating in the great labor of creation; on those laws of phenomena which others call the ideas of nature, and we call the Creator. The word must be personified, and substantiated to express something real.

Among these laws I have always found that those regarding the origin of language had great influence on me and are of great help against the atheists. The more we study, the more we are convinced that the languages have a common source. How did man ever discover that ideas could be represented with sounds, or real thought by the medium of words, and then invent symbolical, phonetic, or alphabetic signs to represent both ideas and sounds? Or is the word only the means of expressing our thoughts, or the essential form of them, the indispensable condition necessary to our having them? Can sensation draw anything out of a word but a material sound? How is it that all the human races—Iranic, Semitic, Gallic, or Black—speak, and only men speak? How is it that although there is a common element in all languages, yet such diversity exists among certain groups? The more we study this indispensable complement of creation, this condition of our intellectual development, the more we are led to confess that there are mysteries in the human word as well as in the divine word; and all this reveals the name of God.

When we have proved the reality, we must investigate the essence of God. And here we meet the mystery of unity and trinity, which, considered in itself, explains being; considered outside of itself, explains beings. Because, if we repudiate a supernatural God, we must substitute another in his place—a being of reason and abstraction, or a material god, or a god of pleasure. But these insane hypotheses must be made to explain the existence of the universe. They are either the eternity of matter or emanatism. Life put into matter we know not how; born, we know not how, we have spontaneous productions, or transformations of species, as Lamarck and Darwin maintain; but the learned show that these theories are impossible both as to soul and body. And then no one of these naturalists explains the end of man, nor his most precious gift—liberty.

The God of the Bible alone contains the true explanation of man and the universe. He who, spontaneously putting his omnipotence into activity without material elements, drew the world out of nothing; and this because he is good, and wills the good and the beautiful.

The most prodigious part of creation is man, destined for eternity; nor could there be in him a tendency without a scope, an end without a means, nor a merit without a recompense. The world is for his use, but he must not forget that eternity is his destiny. For the purpose of proving the material origin of the human intellect philosophers reject all who would give to life a distinct principle, isolated from organism, supposing that life, at least in its rudimental form, could spring from the bosom of organic liquids. Virchow praised the little cell, the only one of the anatomic elements which Milne-Edwards called organical, and which is a nucleus of various forms, surrounded by a protoplasm of organic matter without figure. From the cell are formed the embryos, which gradually become perfect and form animals, until the ape changes into man.

Finally, on interrogating life in its unity, in its harmonies, in its cause and end, in its full and substantial reality, we find that it does not contain in itself a causal unity which is sufficient for it; and the great modern physiologist Bernard says: "The problem of physiology does not consist in pointing out the physico-chemical laws which living beings have in common with inorganic bodies, but in discovering the vital laws which characterize them." By studying mental diseases, and perceiving that atrophy of a certain part of the brain will cause the loss of certain faculties, and that the injection of oxygenated blood will reawaken them, and with similar experiments, it has been attempted to prove the materiality of cogitation, and to show that the soul is a chimera. These are irrational materialistic interpretations of physiological facts, for the cause of the fact is confounded with the conditions of the phenomenon.

This same Virchow, who seemed to have discovered such a powerful argument against spiritualism in his theory of the cell, cannot explain with physics and optics alone the phenomena of vision; becomes confounded before the mystery of life, and declares: "Nothing is like life, but life itself. Nature is twofold. Organic nature is entirely distinct from inorganic. Although formed by the same substance, from atoms of the same nature, organic matter offers us a continued series of phenomena which differ in their nature from the inorganic world. Not because the latter represents dead nature—for nothing dies but what has lived; even inorganic nature possesses its activity, its eternally active labor—but this activity is not life except in a figurative sense." [Footnote 70]

[Footnote 70: "The Atom and the Individual," a discourse pronounced at Berlin in 1866.]

We do not think it superfluous to oppose these reflections, added to those of Alimonda, to the negations of the materialists, which have weight only because they have been often repeated; and we conclude with Alimonda that man is an inexplicable mystery if we do not accept the other mystery of original sin. Hence the conflict between reason and the passions; the inclination to evil and bloodthirstiness; the necessity of wars and prisons. {332} If we admit the intrinsic goodness of man, there is no guilt and there can be no chastisement; society can institute no tribunals, but only hospitals to cure diseases. This has been said in our age; and common sense rejected it. The primitive fall and successive activity show how man progresses indefinitely, according to nature, not according to socialistic utopias. This explains the inequality of the faculties and of labor, and hence of goods, of property, which otherwise would be a theft.

The whole of ancient society attests this degradation; but a Redeemer was promised; he was confusedly expected by all nations; he was clearly predicted by the prophets of Judea, in order to console mankind, that they might believe in him to come, hope in him, and love him by anticipation.

These promises, and the figures which personified them, are deposited in the Bible; that divine history which clears up the origin of humanity and the changes of civilization, and whose witnesses, though apparently contradictory, only make the thesis and the antithesis of a great synthesis, interpreted by an infallible authority. The unity of the human species asserted in that book has been proved by the sciences, even by paleontology, which some pretended to arm against the biblical affirmations; and while the frivolity of the last century thought it had mockingly dissipated truth, we have scientific progress proving the Bible to be wonderfully in accord with the least expected discoveries.

The continual intervention of Providence in the Bible is repugnant to human pride, which would be the centre and creator of all events; yet this providence it is which satisfies, at the same time, the wants of the human heart, gives a legal constitution to society, a sanction to human acts, without which we should only have cutthroats and the gallows.

Thus far we nave presented man in relation to God; let us consider man in relation to Jesus Christ, a theme by far more important, as we can say with the psalmist: "Convenerunt in unum adversus Dominum et adversus Christum ejus." [Footnote 71] In this most corrupt world reparation was expected from humanity, but who could fulfil it but the incarnate Word? Greater than all the great ones of the earth, he established his providential kingdom, making it the social centre of men and centuries.

Our first parents aspired to become gods, and their pride was transmitted to their posterity; but behold how God really unites himself to man!

Men felt a secret want of expiation, expressed by their sacrifices and mortifications; and Christ satisfied their desire by uniting in himself the two natures, and by fecundating with holy merits the sufferings of individuals and of nations.

Yet men wish to make a myth of him! And after the encyclopaedists have derided him, now they hypocritically try to crown him with human greatness and beauty, to rob him of his divinity! But how can you explain his influence on the most cultivated nations, lasting so many centuries, and through an incessant war from Simon Magus to Renan? Is not his immeasurable influence over the human race divine? With the light of his doctrine he created the life of intelligence and of conscience. His is no hidden and recondite word, but common and popular; not methodized into a philosophical system, equipped with proofs; not even robed in eloquence. {333} His scope is not to invent, but to reveal—that is, lift the veil which covered primitive truths, and excite to good. He is virtue personified, the model of men, with grace through which charity triumphs over egotism—grace, the most profound and most beautiful word in the dictionary of religion. But here human pride rebels, because Christ taught mysteries.

What, then, are mysteries but our ignorance, and the insufficiency of our reason? Thus the vulgar believe that the sun goes around the earth because the senses show it; thus a silly man would deny the existence of the imponderable fluids because he does not see or touch them, although he feels their effects. Three temples rise in the world: of nature, of reason, and of religion; and in all there are mysteries. There are mysteries in space, atoms, divisibility, forces, life, thought, the cell, sensation, idea, limits: in everything under the form which passes away there is a mystery which remains. If a miracle is humanly conceivable, it ought to be divinely possible.

If you exclude the idea of the supernatural, nothing is left but nature, with the character of necessity which reason denies it; with a series of monstrous and gratuitous affirmations which constitute pantheism.

But some will say, "Yes, there is a God distinct from nature; he is self-conscious and free, but he is immutable: while the supernatural represents him as changeable and arbitrary."

Thus reason those who, led by anthropomorphic illusions, subject the action of God to succession. The acts of man, who is ephemeral and localized, are necessarily successive; and because the results of divine activity are manifested to our eyes in time and space, they seem new and wonderful. But God is not limited by time or space; his act is one, eternal, immanent like his will; everything which proceeds from that act is the act itself, one, eternal, and immanent, and thus the differences between the natural and supernatural disappear.

To defend the idea of the supernatural is not, therefore, to attack science or smother intelligence; but to defend the idea of God, who is the hinge of all science. This, indeed, banishes the supernatural from its domain; but if every reality is not reducible to nature, it is impossible not to admit a higher principle of the laws which nature reveals, and of which nature is not the necessary principle. Christianity pronounces nothing on the science of nature, except that the supernatural is above natural laws; that there is a God, as St. Augustine says, "pater luminum et evigilationis nostrae." [Footnote 72] Is this a mystery? But is not everything which exists an incomprehensible manifestation of the supernatural? Is not the free-will of man an incomprehensible mystery?

But revealed mysteries, much more than dry theorems which restrain reason, are fruitful in meditation, humility, gratitude, and aspiration after a life of bliss: they are light to the intellect, motives for virtue; all have a comprehensible side; they have their wherefore; and this is sufficient for the happiness of individuals, and works efficaciously on the whole of society.

Miracles, which are extraordinary to man, are natural to God, and he uses them to manifest Christ the Redeemer. But the diminishers of great things wish to make Christ a mountebank, or a magician working by natural means like the mesmerizers, in whom they believe rather than in Christ. They deny Christ and offer incense to Hegel, who said that "the universe is a simple negation." Every religious, moral, or political doctrine must stand the test of actualization: the idea must be realized; the thought must become life; and the result is the criterion. But the greatest miracle of Jesus Christ was the establishment of the new kingdom of grace on the ruins of the kingdom of the world; to substitute the eternal edifice of the church for corrupt institutions; instead of proud science, to put the holy word of the apostolate; charity, generous even to martyrdom, in the place of brute force. Martyrdom! this is another word which shocks the free-thinkers who retail cheap heroes, and deafen us with hymns to the martyrs of fatherland, ennobling with this title assassins on the scaffold. Christ is a martyr for humanity; he is a God of order, wisdom, and charity.

But here they stop us again, and pretend that he aimed at an impossible perfection, and was a utopist; and as such, they reject him, although they are admirers of such dreamers as More or Giordano Bruno, Fourier or Saint-Simon.

But is it true that Christ's doctrine cannot be realized? There are precepts and counsels in it; and you, by confounding them, condemn Christianity, as if it commanded all to observe what is counselled only to a few exceptional existences called by God. To observe the counsels special virtue is required, and those monks who deserved so well even of society practised them. Rather than deride and destroy them, they diffused the evangelical counsels which they practised in their own lives—obedience, abstinence, purity; those virtues which would give that facilitas imperii—that self-control—which is so hard to keep; that virtue which is the order of love. Those monks peopled the Thebaid, lived in the poverty of St. Francis, in the austerities of St. Bruno, awaited death in caverns, and ate only herbs; others fled the world to pray for it, but the church never gave them pharisaical faces; life, soul, talents, imagination characterized them; the happiness of their existence was increased by the blessing of the church; feasts, music, and sacred rites abounded; social, domestic, and scientific life were nourished by Christian virtue and education; patriotism had its hymns if fortunate; audits, litanies, if unsuccessful; art and poetry became incorporated with worship; admiration for natural beauties was aroused; activity and prudence stimulated and eulogized, progress approved, and civilization encouraged.

Yet the rationalists would give the glory of this civil society of which we boast to man alone, while it is in fact the work of the supernatural gospel. In this we find light, virtue, harmony; that is, power, subjection, and agreement. The gospel establishes a respected and vigilant authority in face of a policy which traffics in opinions. Kings are bound by the same morality as the least subjects. Rulers swear to observe the law of God; that is, never to become tyrants. Power is exercised after the example set by God; and the head of the state is the first-born among brothers. Subjects are children who obey not propter timorem sed propter conscientiam—not from fear but for conscience' sake; an obedience to God rather than to men. Christianity asserted the true doctrine of equal rights with inequality of rank when it proclaimed that we are all brothers; it broke the chains of the slave; abolished hereditary enmity between nations, and all superiority save that of merit.

To deny that these advantages are derived from Christianity would now be stupidity; but they say that while it formerly worked wonders, there is no longer any necessity for religion, the priest, or Christ: morality has become acclimated; necessary truths are acquired; and so man can progress with laws, tradition, and social organization.

Those who speak in this way do not comprehend the connection between metaphysical and practical truth; do not realize that the most common maxims which we drink in with our mother's milk would become gradually obscured by separation from their source; as the necessary sanction would be wanting to them.

Between the merely honest man and the Christian, there will always be the difference which exists between the bird that can only hop and the full-fledged bird which flies. Let us suppose, even, that the learned of the future will govern themselves better than the philosophers of antiquity; still it is only religion that can say to the multitude, "Hope always and never obtain." If there is no heaven, if gold and pleasure are the only aspirations, why not enjoy them? Let a revolutionist arise and promise them, he will obtain a hearing much more readily than the philosopher who can promise only a doubtful eternity. But then what will become of society? If you preach resignation to the poor without giving them hope, will not hope arise without resignation?

It was the gospel which humanly unfettered the child, woman, and the poor. By it alone were exposed children and orphans gathered together; it founded hospitals and pious retreats for every disease of the body and mind. Vincent of Paul, Girolamo Miani, Calasanctius, and a host of others never ceased in the church; and even the world blesses their name, blesses their work, that of the holy infancy, and that for the education of Chinese children, and for the redemption of captives among the Moors. Entire religious congregations have been founded to save children from death, from penury, and from ignorance; so that at the destruction of these religious orders, we ought to say, as Christ to the mothers of Jerusalem, "Weep not over me, but over your children." We should weep the more when we see their intellects and souls entrusted to state officials who fashion them to suit their masters.

And woman? From what base degradation and turpitude has she been raised by Christianity. But the state law wills that she should be thus addressed: "Thou hast been brought up to purity; to avoid every impure act and look; but henceforth I, the mayor, command thee to give thyself up to the man whom I, the mayor, designate as thy husband." On the other hand, the socialists wish to take her out of the domestic sanctuary to take part in business, in government, in war; she must become a woman of letters, a politician and a heroine. Ah! the heroism of woman consists in fulfilling her domestic duties, in the apostleship of doing good; let her have the heroism of faith and virtue, and she will save the world, as she helped so much to do in the person of Mary over eighteen centuries ago.

"Blessed are the poor, for theirs is the kingdom of God," said Christ; and his chief followers took care of the poor, instructed them, supplied their wants with alms; made them noble with blessings; and, since it is necessary to suffer, the poor were taught to bear their ills with the hope of immortal recompense. {336} But the strong-minded of this age fiercely scream about the rights of the poor; and yet rob spontaneous and virtuous charity of the means of supplying the wants of the poor. The necessity of official aid is created, and thus pride and rancor against the rich are excited, while suffering remains without consolation.

All these points have their objections and suitable answer well developed in our orator's work. Alimonda examines man in relation to the church and shows how human reason, while it strives to rebel against her, is obliged to bless her, even by the mouth of her most determined enemies, as happened to the prophet Balaam. This church was not established by the power of man or by progressive development; she was born beautiful and perfect, the same in the upper room at Jerusalem as in the Council of Trent; she underwent every species of hostility, violent and puerile, of kings and people, of rogues and editors, and yet always remained whole and alive.

While human institutions regulate man, the church aspires to the government of souls. Although she aimed at so much, she was listened to; she defined what good meant; restricted authority; gave the law of work; and was believed. Even the ancient churches by their very nature were spiritual societies; but they exercised no influence on consciences, little on men's conduct, less even than the schools of philosophy. Later heresies and schisms could not spread or establish themselves, except by force and war, or by allowing every one to be the judge of his own conscience and reason; that is, heresy did not pretend to direct souls. Our church has a perfect and unchangeable order for the government of conscience, an order which does not vary according to opinion. The latter will say with Thierry that the conquered are always right; with Cousin and Thiers, that it is the conqueror who is is always right. Which is one to believe? It will be said that the voice of the people is the voice of God, and that common sense ought to be the rule of our actions. Well, suppose it is; how can we interrogate it? Where is its decision? Where its organ? They will tell us to-day it is "universal suffrage." We shall not dwell on such nonsense: we merely inquire, must I ask its advice in reference to my private actions? I need for these safe, well expressed, and efficacious principles.

The church answers every question; and her answers are always the most generous, the most human, and the most kind to the weak. She has a mixed government—monarchical, aristocratic, and democratic; her aristocrats are poor fishermen. By this she is the type of modern governments which have the representative system. Rationalism wants to substitute revolution for this; takes away from the people the good conditions peculiar to them, acquired by them, legitimate and independent of governments; and makes atheism the lever with which to subvert politics. The apostles of rationalism adore liberty, provided they are her priests and sacrificators; create a new author of civilization—the rabble; oblige kings to divide their authority with the mob; the mob upsets its creatures; kings run away; good men hide; the owners of property, menaced by the dogma of plebeian avidity, oppose the bayonet to the knife of the rabble until these are overcome.

Precisely because the temporal mission of the church is great as the mistress and legislator of nations, precisely because she is authority, the impotent violently, and the powerful foolishly, attack her at a time when men want rights without duties, the husband as well as the citizen, the laborer as well as the legislator.

The church alone has saints; she is universal, perpetual, irreformable: characters which manifest her divine origin and divine actuation.

This divinity of the church is found in Catholicism, not in Protestantism. Catholicity alone has positive unity of faith, love, civilization; that is, light, sacrifice, virtue, which Protestantism lacks. All history and statistics, not systematically false or officially disfigured, which looks further than merely a few years, show that civilization does not progress so well with Protestantism. The Catholic Church had conquered the world and formed modern civilization before the unity of faith and charity was broken; and she would have done more had there been no rupture; and had not the religious wars impeded her power, menaced Europe with a new barbarism, subjected it again to the scourge of armies and conquests, which prevent us even yet from considering our age superior to the most deplorable of past centuries.

The Catholic Church established her primacy in Rome by three miracles, by conquering Rome when she was mistress of the whole world; by using Rome, her language, civilization, and legislation, to defend Christianity; and by perpetuating the primacy in Rome. Everything that exists has a reason for existence; resurrection is a proof of divinity. Christian Rome, though often driven to agony, has always revived. Exiled kings die in banishment, abandoned and despised; this is a daily spectacle to our age; the popes become more glorious with persecution; a pope in exile at Avignon or in a prison at Savona is as powerful as in the Quirinal palace. If the most powerful emperor, the most iron will of our century, like the acrobat who kicks away the ladder after using it to ascend, robbed the pope who assisted him to rise, insulted and imprisoned him, all Europe—Catholic, Protestant, and schismatic—took arms to restore the pontiff. Thrones crumble, dynasties disappear; but the old man always returns to his seat, from Avignon or Salerno, from Fontainebleau or from Gaeta.

Modern servility may grow indignant to see Henry V. at the feet of Gregory VII.; but it could not see Pius VI. kiss the hand of emperors, as Voltaire did with Catharine or with Frederic of Prussia; in vain will it hope to see Pius IX. at the feet of diplomatists or demagogues; but he will say with St. Augustine, Leo victus est saeviendo; Agnus vicit patiendo. [Footnote 73]

The church lives immortal, neither in nor above but with the state. Her relation with the state may be either of protection, limitation, or separation. Protected as in the beginning and as she was often under the ancient kings, the church would not be degraded. She had her autonomy in her laws, ordinances, and hierarchy; she was, not the slave or the flatterer of the power under which she lived.

She does not seek limitation or restrictions, but supports them without changing her nature. By degrees, as kings prevailed in modern society, and abridged the power of the people, of the lords and corporations, they became jealous of the authority of the church, restricted her action and obstructed her freedom. Powerful in armies, money, and slaves, kings imposed on the church; she became resigned, sacrificed some minor points in order to guard the chief ones in tact; but notwithstanding all the chains of concordats, she remained sovereign in her freedom.

Separation from the state is like the separation between soul and body; hence the church is opposed to a state that is unchristian.

The church, destined to illuminate the world with her divine light, and not to govern it politically, is by nature conservative. She was so even when the Roman emperors oppressed her; when they went away from Rome, she respected them at Constantinople, until she found it necessary for her defence and for the cause of national freedom to withdraw herself and Italy from imperial control. When she absolved nations from their oaths of allegiance, it was in the name of morality, and not of a political or social idea; to preserve for God what belongs to him, and not to deny to Cesar what belongs to him. [Footnote 74]

[Footnote 74: By the recent work, Religious and Civil History of the Popes, of Wm. Audisio, published at Rome in 1868, many precious facts have been recalled to my mind. One is that Gregory XVI., while Portugal was divided between Don Pedro and Don Miguel, tried to settle the dispute by recalling the ecclesiastical tradition, to render civil obedience to him who governs in fact: Qui actu ibidem summa rerum potiatur. In this he wished to settle the dispute between the contending parties; for the church seeks qua Christi sunt, qua, ad spiritualem aeternamque populorum felicitatem facilius conducant, ("those things which are of Christ, which conduce to the spiritual and eternal happiness of peoples.") The other in which Pius VII., in the consistory of July 28th, 1817, authorized the oath of allegiance to be taken to the constitution and laws, because this oath did not oblige in reference to laws which kings might make in spiritual matters; laws which are null of themselves, for kings have no right to make them. This decision regarding France was repeated October 2d, 1818, in regard to Bavaria.]

Thus although we may find no constitution which abolishes slavery, no one will deny that it ceased through the influence of Christianity, which modified customs and habits, and these influenced the laws. Thus the time will come when all that is good in modern society will be assured to it; and then the influence of Christianity will be made manifest in purifying and consecrating all that came from its teachings, or from needs which it caused to be felt; so that the so-called liberals will see that it is not necessary to attack Christianity in order to defend the acquisitions of their age, nor will the faithful attack the age as an irreconcilable enemy. Does not everything happen by the will or permission of God? Are not all political changes and social transformations providential facts? If the Christian cannot praise them, he becomes resigned to them; he does not increase the evil by anger; he trusts in God, who can change the stones into children of Abraham; and we, separating ourselves from those whose patriotism consists in denouncing others as enemies of their country, say to the men of good-will of our day:

  "O socii (neque enim ignari sumus ante malorum)
   O passi graviora, dabit Deus hic quoque finem." [Footnote 75]
                       AEneid, lib. I.

[Footnote 75: "Companions! we have borne evils before this; ye who have suffered worse, remember that God will put an end even to these woes."]

How can you who have learned the watchwords of "Progress," and "Go-ahead," expect hasty "progress" at Rome, so slow in her motions?

Napoleon boasted that he had done in three hours what men formerly took three months to execute. Yes, he ran from Alexandria to Vienna, to Madrid, to Moscow, and—to St. Helena; while Rome remained at her post. Those who do not look superficially admit that she showed splendidly her wisdom in certain circumstances by not closing the way to future wisdom. In the modern exuberance of fungous intelligence, new systems easily sprout up, die in a few years; and the heroes of to-day become the objects of hatred to-morrow. {339} Rome, eternal guardian of truth, cannot make and unmake in haste, take up and lay down, like human societies; but she proceeds slowly and patiently, yet she advances.

Certainly the church will find a new field in which she can co-operate with the state to preserve for humanity, no longer the antique forms or the mere letter given by Catholics alone, but the Christian spirit; a new method of protecting Catholic truth in countries open to every people, and every worship; deprived of the help of force and decrees, she will have no other support but truth; and since this is greater and more secure in Catholicism, it will always succeed in propagating itself. Will not this be the object of the approaching Council? The General Council will not have to destroy what is irremovable, or what derives necessarily from eternal truth; but it will help us worldlings to separate, in principle, the substance from the form, the essence from the application.

Certainly the hate which inspires men in these times against true liberty, makes governments justify and praise every attack against the church, and deprive her of every right, even when they pretend to protect her.

Do these governments want to form national churches? This would be to go back in civilization, which progresses toward union; to deny catholicitv or the universality of the race; to give up souls as well as bodies to the power of kings, as before Christianity; to give the direction of consciences and the judgment of morals to the civil power, which should rule only bodies.

Some would tolerate Catholicity provided there be liberty of conscience and of worship; let there be no temporal power in the church; no religious corporations; and let the secular clergy be raised to the height, as they say, of the age.

What is meant by liberty of conscience has been sufficiently explained by the pamphleteers, and the popes have given solemn decisions on the subject. Conceive a society in which it would be unlawful to expel those who violate its laws or disturb its order! The church simply expels from the communion of prayers and sacrifice those who are obstinate in violating her dogmas. How! You insult our community; refuse to communicate in our rites; you will not accept the pardon which the church always offers you; and yet you pretend to force her to comfort your last moments with sacraments which you repel and deride even then; to force her to bless your corpse, and bury it in the holy ground where repose those with whom you refused to associate during life!

As to temporal goods or the right to possess them, and as for religious corporations—that is, the liberty of community life, of prayer, benevolence, of wearing a peculiar dress, and of worshipping according to your conscience—what could Alimonda say which had not been said by all the independent men of our century?

As to those who assert that the clergy are not educated up to the standard of modern civilization, we need only appeal to those who have any knowledge to see if the ecclesiastics do not rank high in every part of the encyclopedia; nor do we hesitate to say that the most educated man in every village is ordinarily the priest; the priest who is compelled to make a regular course of study, to pass repeated examinations, and assist at conferences.

It is very strange that at a time when the love of show has become a mania; when kings, ministers, journalists, and myriads of ephemeral heroes are honored with canticles, poems, and ovations; when some button-holes have more decorations than our altars; when there is hardly a name to which pompous titles are not appended, it should be deemed necessary for the benefit of religion to abolish external worship in our churches. Is not our century especially vain of its investigations in matter? Is not the aspiration of the age after physical comfort? Why, then, try to restrict religion to the spiritual, to prevent the erection of temples which would please the senses of that double being—man?

When Constantinople, austerely interpreting the evangelical ordinances, attempted to destroy reverence for holy images, the church fought for the right to cultivate the fine arts; and sustained martyrdom and exile to maintain the privilege of guarding the fine arts in her sanctuaries. When the reform of the sixteenth century called the Catholic Church Babylon, because she asked Michael Angelo and Raphael to immortalize the grandeurs of Christianity, she resisted again—knowing how to distinguish the exceptional life of the voluntary anchorite from the social life of the merely honest man; exacting virtues from all her children, but virtues suitable to their state, to the mystic life of Mary and to the external life of Martha, to the viceroy Joseph and to the shoemaker Crispin.

The same church defends, to-day, love and art from the modern iconoclasts and spurious Puritans.

Discoursing about worship, our author begins by that of Mary, showing it to be a religious principle in accord with reason; a public fact, approved by history; a most tender affection, sanctioned by the heart. It is not long since the chief of the English ritualists, Doctor Pusey, made the most honorable admissions in reference to the Catholic dogmas and ceremonies, excepting, however, the reverence which Catholics have for the Mother of God. Archbishop Manning's [Footnote 76] reply is one of the most beautiful and rational apologies for this worship for which Italy is so remarkable. For all republics were consecrated to her; she was the chosen patroness of our chief cities; her likeness was impressed on our coins and seals; our first poets sang her praises, and their echoes have not yet died; our painters could find no higher or sweeter model; our architects competed in erecting grand temples to her honor; our musicians to compose canticles to her praise; great expeditions were undertaken in her name; colonies were consecrated to her, where now Italian power, but not Italian influence, has ceased. And it is Mary who will save our Italy from humiliations, and from that degradation which seems to be the only aspiration of her intolerant sons. [Footnote 77]

[Footnote 77: I may be permitted to refer the reader to the fifty-fourth chapter of my Heretics of Italy, in which the respect due to saints and to Mary is discussed.]

The intolerant repeat that laws, decrees, and social organization are sufficient to regulate civil society.

They are sufficient; but they require science to prepare them and virtue to apply them; both to be invoked from on high. The safety of one's country, the fulfilment of its aspirations, the triumph of justice, must come from heaven. Formerly the Italians marched to battle under the standard of the saints or of the cross; the heroes of Legnano, of Fornovo, and of Curzolari prostrated themselves in prayer before fighting; and the Italians of those times conquered and gave thanks to God for having given to them a beautiful, great, and prosperous country. But now we have popular tumults and the ravings of newspapers.

Our strong-minded heroes consider it degrading to bow before the Author of all things. Yet, passing over all the wise men of antiquity, the most free nation in Europe opens its parliaments with prayer, and obeys the orders of the queen to fast in time of disaster, or feast in time of great success. The President of the United States, no matter what may be his creed, orders a day of thanksgiving to God, and he is obeyed. When the telegraph from America was able to carry a message to Europe on August 17th, 1858, the first words which leaped along the wire were, "Europe and America are united. Glory to God in the highest; peace on earth; to men, good-will." "What grander spectacle can there be than to see a whole people united in the duties imposed by its religion in celebrating great anniversaries? What heroic outbursts, how many noble sacrifices, were expressed in the monologues of holy days! What high thoughts and magnificent conceptions arose in the souls of philosophers and poets! How many generous resolutions were taken! When the observance of the Sunday was neglected, the last spark of poetic fire was extinguished in the souls of our poets. It has been truly said, without religion there is no poetry. We must add, without external worship and feast days there is no religion. In the country, where the people are more susceptible of the religious sentiment, the Sunday still keeps a part of its social influence. The sight of a rustic population united as one family by the voice of its pastor, and prostrated in silence and recollection before the invisible majesty of God, is touching and sublime; is a charm which goes to the heart."

Who speaks in this way? Proud hon. [sic] And Napoleon says, "Do you want something sublime? Recite your Pater noster."

The most sublime prayer is the mass—the culminating point of worship; the perennial expiation of perennial faults. From the mass Alimonda passes to confession; then to communion; and thence to the responsibility of present life. He exhorts all to understand and believe. This is the creed of the Christian: Credere et intelligere.

We have thus far followed the illustrious Alimonda, repeating or developing his arguments. Let us now examine his manner of treating the questions which he discusses.

The classic Greek orators had wonderful simplicity of style, in which the familiarity of their expressions ennobled their sentiments and gave force to their reasoning. The Eastern fathers followed in their footsteps. The Latins ornamented eloquence so as to make it a special art, assigning it a measured cadence, a peculiar intonation of voice, a system of position and gesture. Hence, the Latin fathers studied speech even to affectation, sought after rhetorical figures, yet always more attentive to the practical than to the abstract. The French formed themselves rather according to the Greek models; and the noble simplicity of Bossuet, Massilon, and Fénélon renders them still models for one who would discourse before a polished people.

The Italians, if you except some of the very earliest preachers, preferred to ornament their speeches and indulge in artificial figures. In the ages of bad taste, the worst display of metaphors disgraced the pulpit; whence the custom passed to the bar and parliament, where there have been and still are so many examples of unnatural oratory. {342} Hence, in so great an abundance of literature, we have no good preachers except Legneri. In modern times, the style of the pretentious Turchi has been changed to that of the academic Barbieri; but that style of preaching "whose father is the Gospel, and whose mother is the Bible," is rarely heard in our pulpits. Our very best eloquence, that of the pastorals and homilies of our bishops, is spoiled by too frequent citations, and is often devoid of that sentiment which comes from the heart and goes to it. We do not want to borrow the French style. It is a mistake to steal the language of another nation, either in writing or preaching. Peoples have different dispositions. It would not do to address the Carib in the same way as the Parisian, or the contemporaries of Godfrey as the subjects of Napoleon.

Our author, beside being familiar with the first propagators and defenders of Christianity, is highly educated in the classics, and has always ready phrases, hemistichs, and allusions which display his erudition. His method is prudent, his divisions logical, and the train of ideas well followed up; his language correct, and the clearness and marvellous beauty of his style show him to be a finished orator.

He draws an abundance of materials from the most diverse and recondite sources. He adduces the most recent discoveries of science regarding the essence of the sun, nebula, aerolites, and on the nature of matter. Without mentioning the biblical and legendary portions of his work, there are in it traces of every part of both ancient and modern history: Camoens and Napoleon, Abelard and Renan, Isnard and Jouffroy, Donoso Cortes and Cagliostro, Marie Antoinette and Madame de Swetchine, Ireland and Poland, the discourses of Napoleon III. and of Cavour. The author brings us through the byways of London to the prison of Thomas More, to the solitude of St. Helena, and to the lands where the missionaries are laboring. He quotes even the heroes of romance: "Renzo" and the "Unknown," Renato, Werter, St. Preux, the Elvira of George Sand, Wiseman's Fabiola, and Victor Hugo's Valjean. With the spoils of the Egyptians Alimonda builds a tabernacle to the living God. Who will censure him, since our Holy Father, in a brief of September 20th, 1867, approves his labor?

The nineteenth century can be saved only by means suitable to the nineteenth century; and Simon Stylites or Torquemada, the Crusaders or the Flagellants, would be as much out of place to-day as catapults or the theory of uncreated light. We must fight with modern weapons.

[Footnote 78: "We must use the weapons and dress of the Greeks." AEneid, lib. ii.]

We must study Catholicity in all its bearings, and reconcile divine and human traditions with modern exigencies; authority established on an immovable pedestal, with liberty which is always developing.

Courage! Let us arouse ourselves from lethargy, and not suffer a condition of affairs for which we are responsible. Let us remember, with Bacon, that prosperity was the boon of the Old Testament; adversity, of the New; persuaded, with Donoso Cortes, that "it is our duty, as Catholics, to struggle, and that we should thank God who has chosen us to fight for his church," let us display that energetic will which is so rare among good people. With charity and faith, by association and perseverance, we can conquer hatred and unbelief, the divisions of sects, and the onslaughts of error on the strongholds of Catholic truth.

Two Months In Spain During
The Late Revolution.

The train leaves Cordova at six A.M., and we are delighted to be again on our journey. The route proves of little interest between Cordova and Seville; the Guadalquivir is first on one side of us and then on the other; the hills and mountains bound each side of the plain, where are olive groves, and peaceful flocks, and ploughmen, as if no revolution were occurring around them. At Almovar, (situated on a high hill,) we see the ruins of a Moorish castle where that half-Moor, Peter the Cruel, confined his sister-in-law, Doña Juana de Lara. Carmona is another town which has the same celebrity. Here he imprisoned many of his female favorites when tired of them. We grow very hungry in spite of these tragic histories, and our young gentleman buys a great melon de Castile, which, proving very delicious, we make a good breakfast à l'espagnol; but are not sorry to see the towers of the Giralda, and soon after we enter Seville—the most charming of all Spanish towns; the city of Don Juan and Figaro; the gayest, the most celebrated for its beautiful women, its graceful men, its bull-fights, its gypsies, its tertulias, its fandangos, its cachuchas, its Murillos, its cathedral, (said to rival St. Peter's,) and its Alcazar, which is almost as wonderful as the Alhambra.

After dinner, we hasten to the cathedral through busy, crowded streets, by handsome shops; passing occasionally a pretty Sevillian whose black dress, bare arms and neck seen through the black lace mantilla, with the dainty pink rose peeping from beneath it, harmonize exactly with one's idea of the Spanish woman. And presently, upon a terrace ascended by several steps, we see before us this wonderful pile of buildings: the Giralda (Moorish tower) on one side; the Sagrario (the parish church) on the other; the chapter house, and offices facing the cathedral; and in the centre of all these the court of oranges! The cathedral is entered from this court by nine doors. We scarcely know how to describe this magnificent gothic building, which has affected us more than any we have ever seen. Coming upon us so immediately after the mosque of Cordova, (each of these a perfect specimen of its kind,) one sees in each the reflection of the different faiths they represent. The graceful, elegant mosque seems to appeal more to the senses, to speak of a faith which promises material joys, while the grand and majestic gothic cathedral carries one's heart to the heaven in which these lofty arches seem to be lost. In despair of being able to do justice to so high a theme, I must borrow from O'Shea's guide-book the following description of this building:

"The general style of the edifice is gothic of the best period of Spain, and though many of its parts belong to different styles, these form but accessory parts, and the main body remains strictly gothic. Indeed all the fine arts, and each in turn, at their acme of strength, have combined to produce their finest inspiration here. {344} The Moorish Giralda, the Gothic cathedral, the Greco-Roman exterior, produce variety, and repose the eye. Inside, its numerous paintings are by some of the greatest painters that ever breathed; the stained glass, amongst the finest known; the sculpture, beautiful; the jewellers' and silversmiths' work unrivalled in composition, execution, and value. The cathedral of Leon charms us by the chaste elegance of its airy structure, the purity of its harmonious lines; the fairy-worked cimborio of that at Burgos, its filagree spires, and pomp of ornamentation are certainly more striking; and at Toledo, we feel already humbled and crushed beneath the majesty and wealth displayed everywhere. But when we enter the cathedral of Seville, there is a sublimity in these sombre masses and clusters of spires whose proportions and details are somewhat lost and concealed in the mysterious shadows which pervade the whole, a grandeur which quickens the sense, and makes the heart throb within us, and we stand as lost among these lofty naves and countless gilt altars, shining dimly in the dark around us, the lights playing across them as the rays of the glorious Spanish sun stream through the painted windows. Vast proportions, unity of design, severity and sobriety of ornament, and that simplicity unalloyed by monotony which stamps all the works of real genius, render this one of the noblest piles ever raised to God by man, and preferred by many even to St. Peter's at Rome."

It is said that the canons and chapter resolved to make this church the wonder of the world; and with this view, sent for the most celebrated architects and artists of the world to adorn it, denying themselves almost the necessaries of life to accomplish the great work.

The pillars are one hundred and fifty feet high; the church, four hundred feet long, two hundred and ninety-one wide, with ninety-five windows and thirty-seven chapels; and nearly each one of these contains some pictures of Murillo, Cespedes, Campana, Roelas, or some Spanish painter of celebrity. We go from chapel to chapel, gazing upon these, lingering before the altar "Del Angel de la Guarda," where is Murillo's exquisite picture of the guardian angel with the young child by the hand (so often reproduced,) and lost in awe before his grand picture of St. Anthony of Padua, to whom the infant Jesus descends, amidst angels and flowers and sunbeams, into the arms ecstatically extended toward him. In a little chapel we come upon a lovely Virgin and Child, by Alonso Caño, called N. S. de Belem, (Bethlehem.)

But the sun declined, and we ascended the Giralda to see his last beams shine upon so much beauty. What a strange and charming scene! The forest of white houses painted with delicate blue and green; the flat roofs decorated with gardens; the four hundred and seventy-seven narrow streets, some hardly admitting two people abreast, through which toiled the patient mules bearing burdens of stones, mortar for building, wood, and vegetables; the one hundred ornamented squares and promenades; the orange gardens; the plaza de Toros; the cathedral just beneath us, with its hundreds of turrets; the Torre del Oro, (Tower of Gold,) so named from its yellow hue; the Lonja, (Exchange,) with its pink color; the grey Alcazar; the palace San Telmo by the Guadalquivir, which winds through the city and over the plain; and convents, and churches, and palaces; and, beyond all, the verdant plains and the blue mountains! As the sun sank, the convent bells rang the "Ave Maria."

  "Blessed be the hour!
   The time, the chime, the spot."

Our first visit to-day is to San Telmo—the royal palace given by Queen Isabella to her sister, the Duchess de Montpensier—on the banks of the Guadalquivir, with enchanting gardens, palms and citrons, and orange-trees; and within, all oriental in its style and decorations. Here are some lovely pictures—one of Murillo's most beautiful Virgins, several splendid Zurbarans, a Sebastian del Piombo, Holy Family, etc.

Next we visit the great tobacco manufactory, where 4000 women are employed making cigars. As all these were talking at once, we were glad soon to escape. And then the Alcazar, the wonderful Moorish palace, than which not even the Alhambra can be more beautiful—as it seems to us. We wander in delicious gardens —like those described in the Arabian Nights—and then enter the enchanted palace! Passing several courts, we find the great door of entrance sculptured and painted in arabesque. Here is a long hall, with exquisitely carved and painted roof, from which we pass into a square marble court, or patio, with double rows of marble columns and a fountain in the centre. From the four sides of this patio you enter by immense doors, carved and inlaid, into the apartments beyond. First, the Hall of the Ambassadors, which communicates with others through elegant arches profusely ornamented, supported by marble pillars of every color with gilded capitals. The walls and dome are ornamented with sentences from the Koran, in gilt letters upon grounds of blue and crimson. Every chamber has different decorations, all equally elegant.

Below, opening from the garden, we are shown some subterranean cells said to have been the prisons of Christian captives, and above these the luxurious baths of Maria de Padilla—the famous mistress of Peter the Cruel. It was the custom for the king and courtiers to sit by and see her bathe, and for the latter to pretend to sip the water of the bath. Seeing one of these fail in this gallant duty one day, the king asked why he omitted it. "Because, sire," (said the witty courtier,) "I am afraid to like the sauce so well that I shall covet the bird." Peter the Cruel lived much in this palace, and did much to embellish it through the Moorish artists whom he employed. Many of the Spanish kings lived there, and Charles V. was married in one of the upper rooms. These we did not see, and learned afterward that they were inhabited by "Fernan Caballero," one of the most popular writers of Spain—whose delightful books we learned later to admire. Fernan Caballero is the nom de plume of this lady, who has had many misfortunes, and who by permission of the queen lives in the Alcazar, devoting her life to deeds of benevolence amongst the poor, whose traits and trials she records in many delightful works. It is a pity that out of France these books should be unknown. One of our party determines to take some of them to America, that they may be translated and bring to the knowledge of our people these charming scenes of Spanish home life so inimitably described.[Footnote 79]

[Footnote 79: One of "Fernan Caballero's" (Mrs. Fabre) books, The Alvareda Family, has already been translated here and published in The Catholic World three years ago; and two others, The Sea Gull, and The Castle and Cottage in Spain, have appeared in an English dress in London, and Lucia Garcia is already translated and will soon appear in this magazine.—ED. CATH. W.]

In the evening we go to a ball, to see the Andalusian dances in their proper costume. Boleros, and cachuchas, and seguidillas, and manchegas! Such graceful movements, such little feet in such dainty satin shoes!

Generally to the accompaniment of the guitar, with most peculiar and monotonous music, singing at the same time, clapping the hands, stamping the feet, and the dancer always with castanets. All the dances were peculiar, solos, often in couples, or three at a time, some of these coquettish—one, especially, danced by a man and a woman, he in hat and cloak, she with fan and mantilla. How she wielded this little "weapon"!—now hiding her face, now peeping from behind it, which he also did with his manta. By and by he takes off his hat and humbly lays it at her feet. She dances over it scornfully; without ever losing the step, he recovers it. She flies; he pursues, opening his manta entreatingly; she relents; again he throws down the hat; she stoops and gives it to him, and eventually they dance away with the manta covering both.

We go again to the wonderful cathedral; examined many pictures which yesterday escaped us. In the chapter house is one of Murillo's "Conceptions," and eight charming heads (ovals) painted by him, in the same room. In the chapel of the kings lies the body of St. Ferdinand, and of Murillo; who asked to be buried at the foot of a picture (The Descent from the Cross) of which he was particularly fond, which is above the main altar.

Near the great entrance of the cathedral a stone in the pavement marks the spot where lies Fernando, the son of Christopher Columbus, with the motto upon it, "A Castilla y á Leon, mundo nuevo dió Colon." From his tomb we go to the great Columbine Library given by him to his country, containing some interesting MSS. of his father—one, a book of quotations containing extracts from the psalms and prophets, proving the existence of the new world. There are a series of portraits round the room, of Columbus, his son, St. Ferdinand, Cardinal Mendoza, and Cardinal Wiseman, (who was a native of Seville.) There is also preserved here the great two-edged sword of Ferdinand Gonsalves.

Some of our party go to visit the archbishop, in the hope to get permission to see the treasures of the church, which are very valuable; but the presence of the revolution obliges him to deny us this as well as the entrée to the convent of St. Theresa, which is said to be exactly the same as when she founded it. It was here she underwent such great trouble and persecution, and where (finding she had but two or three coppers with which to begin a great foundation) she said to her nuns, "Never mind, two cents and Theresa are nothing; but two cents and God are everything."

And this interesting convent we could not see.[Footnote 80] Indeed, the time of our visit to Spain was inopportune for seeing the inside of religious houses. A former revolution having deprived them of their property, they have now the fear of being turned out of their convents.

[Footnote 80: For a full description of this convent see Lady Herbert's Impressions of Spain, just from the press of the Catholic Publication Society. This work also contains illustrations of cathedrals, churches, gardens, palaces, and other places described in these letters.—ED. CATH. W.]

While we wait in the church for the return of our friends, we enter into conversation with two of the little boys of the choir, whose beauty attracts us, begging them to describe the style in which they dance before the Blessed Sacrament on Corpus Christi, which is said to be a ceremony most solemn, grave, and impressive. These children evinced great curiosity about us, and when told that one of the party was "a convert," (had been a Protestant,) could not be made to comprehend what it meant; for they confound all Protestants with unbelievers. {347} "And did not know about our dear Lord!" said one little fellow with a look of sorrowful compassion, reminding one of the scene in one of Fernan Caballero's tales (The Alvareda Family) where the hero comes home from his travels and describes a country covered with snow so that people are sometimes buried under it.

We go to see the house in which Murillo lived and the spot where he was first buried—passing the house in which Cardinal Wiseman was born, upon which is a large tablet with a beautiful and appropriate inscription. In Murillo's house is an extensive gallery with many of his loveliest pictures, and some of the pictures of monks for which Zurbaran is so famous.

Here we see the Infant St. John with the Lamb, and the Infant Saviour, so often repeated by Murillo, apart and together an exquisite Ecce Homo; several Madonnas, and Saints.

On our way we are shown the shop where dwelt the original Figaro, and also the house of Don Juan!

The Casa de Pilatos, one of the residences of the Duke of Medina Coeli, next claims us—a curious old palace, built in the sixteenth century in imitation of Pilate's House in Jerusalem, which was visited at that time by the founder. The patio is fine, with a beautiful fountain, and double row of columns, (one above another,) with statues at the four corners. The marble staircase and halls—lined with azulejos, (colored porcelain tiles,) universally used in this country—are particularly handsome.

Next we go to the "Caridad," one of the most celebrated hospitals in the world, founded by a young nobleman of Seville in the seventeenth century, upon ground which belonged to a brotherhood whose duty it was to give consolation to those about to die on the scaffold. This young man (Don Miguel de Mañara) was distinguished for his profligacy, but also for his bravery, generosity, and his patronage of art. One of our friends told us some most interesting anecdotes connected with his conversion.

Returning from some orgies, one night, he saw a female figure upon a low balcony beckon him. Thinking to have an adventure, he sprang into the open window and found a dead body with a with lights about it alone in the room. Another time, returning at midnight through the streets, he saw a church lighted, and, wondering what could be going on at such an hour, entered. Before the altar was a bier upon which was extended a body covered with the mantle of the knights of the order to which he belonged, the priests about it singing the office for the dead. Asking whose funeral it was, he was answered, "That of Don Miguel Mañara," and going to the corpse and uncovering it, saw his own face. The morning found him stretched upon the pavement, the vision gone. But the impression remained, in which he recognized a call from God to a better life, which he soon after entered, giving his whole fortune to found this institution for the sick, the aged, and "incurables;" and here he lived and died an example of humility, piety, and penitence. Murillo and other eminent artists were also members of this confraternity, and a letter of the former is here shown in which he asks permission to join the brotherhood. To the friendship of Don Miguel for Murillo the hospital is indebted for some of the finest pictures in the world. In the church are two of his grandest and largest pictures, "Moses striking the Rock," called here the "Sed," (thirst,) and the "Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes," a Visitation, an Infant Saviour, and a St. John. {348} There are also several most remarkable pictures by Valdes Leal; one, "The Triumph of Time," in which the skeleton Death stands triumphantly above crowns and sceptres and "all there is of glory." Opposite to this is "The Dead Prelate," a picture made at the suggestion of Mañara. From the top of the picture a pierced hand holds the scales, in one side of which a kingly crown, and jewels, and sceptre, weigh against the mystic "I. H. S." and a book, the Word of God. Below lies a dead prelate, in mitre and crosier, half eaten by the worms; on the other side, Don Miguel Mañara, wrapped in his knightly mantle, upon which also the worms run riot. On one of the scales is written "nor more;" upon the other, "nor less."

Murillo told the painter that he could never pass this picture without involuntarily "holding his nose." Under the pavement, near the door, lies the body of the founder; "the ashes of the worst man that ever lived," so he styles himself in his epitaph; and he requested that he might lie where the feet of every passer should walk over him. The sisters conduct us over the clean and airy wards. On the wall of the patio are these words, from the pen of Mañara himself, "This house will last as long as God shall be feared in it, and Jesus Christ be served in the persons of his poor. Whoever enters here must leave at the door both avarice and pride." And over his own cell is inscribed, "What is it we mean when we speak of death? It is being free from the body of sin, and from the yoke of our passions. Therefore, to live is a bitter death, and to die is a sweet life."

Another of the charming histories told us by the same lady was of St. Maria Coronel, whose body is preserved in the convent of St. Inez, which we could not be permitted to see. Peter the Cruel, because enamored of her great beauty, condemned her husband to death, but offered to save him if she would yield to his wishes. The husband was actually executed, and Maria fled to this convent, where the king pursued her. One night he entered her cell; and, seeing no other way to escape him, she seized the burning lamp, and emptied its boiling contents over her face. The poor lady lived the life of a saint, and died in this convent. Her body is as fresh as if she had died yesterday, and the marks of the oil upon her face as clearly visible as upon the day when the heroic deed was committed.

In the evening we walk in the crowded streets, and find splendid shops filled with lovely women, who go at this hour to walk or shop, never stirring out in the day. As late as eleven, when we came in, the streets and shops were yet filled with ladies.

We spend the morning in the gallery, which is considered the finest in Spain, after that of Madrid. This is especially rich in Murillos, and has several Zurbarans, the Spanish Caravaggio so famous for his pictures of monks. Here is "The Apotheosis of St. Thomas Aquinas," considered his masterpiece; and of Murillo there are about twenty-four of his greatest pictures: the "St. Thomas of Villanuova giving Alms," which was the painter's own favorite; the "St. Anthony of Padua kneeling before the Infant Saviour," who stands upon his book—the most perfect type of a child God; and the ecstasy, the fervor, the humility, in the pale, attenuated face of the monk brings the tears to one's eyes, you so feel with him. {349} Next this is a picture preferred to the other by most persons, "St. Felix of Cantalicia," with the infant Saviour in his arms, the blessed Mother leaning forward to receive him. The beauty of the Virgin Mother and the grace of her attitude is said by critics to be beyond all praise. Then comes a beautiful "Annunciation," a "St. Joseph with the child Jesus," "Saints Rufina and Justina," (the patrons of Seville,) "Saints Leandro and Buonaventura," several "Conceptions," and the exquisite "Virgin de la Sevilleta," (Virgin of the Napkin,) said to have been painted on a dinner napkin, and given as a present to the cook of the convent where Murillo worked. The "St. John Baptist in the Desert" should also be mentioned, as well as many others.

This evening we bid farewell to beautiful Seville, with all its delights, and set out for Cadiz.

Certainly it is the Spaniards, not the French, who are "the politest people in the world." The conductor opens the railway carriage with "Good evening, ladies. May I trouble you for your tickets?" concluding with "A happy night to you." In passing a street, the other day, a gentleman with whom we had crossed the mountains, and whose name we do not even know, rushes from his house to say, "Ladies, is anything wanting? Here is your house." Such is the pretty exaggerated Spanish phrase. Leaving Seville, we pass orange-groves and fields divided by aloe and cactus hedges, but the country is flat and uninteresting; and, except Lebrija, which has a tower, the rival of the Giralda, and Jerez, we see no towns of any size or interest till we near Cadiz. "Jerez de la Frontera" (the frontier town) has always been of importance; one of the earliest Phoenician colonies. Close to this took place the battle of the Guadelete, which opened Spain to the Moors. St. Ferdinand recovered it in 1251; but it was retaken, and again recovered by his son, Alonzo the Learned, in 1264, who granted to it many important privileges, peopling it with forty of his hidalgos—the source of the present Jerez nobility. It has an Alcazar of great interest—its Alameda—some fine old churches, and near it are the ruins of a fine old Carthusian convent upon the Guadelete, which the Moors called the River of Delight. Jerez is now celebrated for its wines; the sherry so prized in England and America, which occupies palaces rather than wine-cellars. These are called "bodegas," and sometimes hold ten thousand casks. As we near Cadiz we see Puerta San Maria, at the mouth of the Guadelete—a pretty town, looking upon the sea, with a suspension bridge looking most picturesque in the moonlight; then Puerto Real, San Fernando, Cadiz.

The guide takes us first to hear high mass in the new cathedral—a handsome building, entirely of white marble, within and without. Some good pictures, (copies of Murillo,) fine music, and the most devout of congregations. The loveliest of women, in modest black dresses, mantillas, and fans, sat or knelt upon the matting, which is spread upon the space between the high altar and the choir. No seats are provided. A few bring little black camp-stools. The bishop (who gave the benediction) is a most dignified and elegant-looking person; and the guide tells us he is much beloved and respected. Already the new order of things pulls down churches and banishes the Jesuits, as the first proof of that "liberty of worship" which is one of the most popular of the war cries. {350} Such bandit-looking fellows as we saw yesterday! Catalan soldiers, in red cap, short pantaloons with red stripe, half-gaiters, and a red blanket on the left shoulder, a leathern belt, with pistols and a great rifle.

The revolution spreads everywhere, "peacefully," as they say. We see a handbill posted, in which the queen is spoken of as "Doña Isabella of Bourbon," to whom they wish "no harm."

Some Spanish ladies who had once lived in America, and are friends of ours, came to visit us. They are intensely loyal, as are all the women of Spain whom we encounter. From these we learn that, as in all revolutions, the dregs of the people come to the top, and are most conspicuous. It is only they make it who have nothing to lose, and all to gain. These "juntas," who now rule in each city under the provisional government, are composed of people of low birth and bad morals. Here they are taken from the low trades-people, who are noted drunkards and unbelievers. Into such hands are committed the destinies of this lovely city. Their first work has been to try and kill the Jesuits, who, with a hundred little boys under their care, had to defend themselves from these men and the rabble they encourage. And but for the officers of the fleet, who, with pistols in hand, thrust themselves between them, they must have been murdered. These officers took them on board the ships for safety, and some are yet secreted in the town, waiting an opportunity to escape. To-day our guide takes us to several curious old churches which were formerly convents, with pretty cloisters and marble courts. These, he says, are doomed by the junta to be torn down to build houses and theatres, thus destroying these beautiful old monuments of a past time in their blind fury against religion.

In the evening we change our hotel to the "Fonda de Cadiz," on the gay "plaza San Antonio." After dinner walk by the seashore on the walls. As we pass the streets, we enter several churches, where the people are hearing sermons, or saying prayers with the priests. Such picturesque groups!

To-night we see from our windows a procession carrying the Blessed Sacrament to the sick, from the parish church opposite. A carriage is always sent, and a long procession, bearing lights, precedes and follows. One of the ladies present tells us that last carnival, in the midst of the gayeties on this square, men and women, in every variety of ridiculous costume, were dancing to merry music, when suddenly the bell was heard preceding the Blessed Sacrament, which was being carried to a sick officer, living upon the square. In an instant every knee was bent of the motley throng, and the band struck up the Royal March in the most effective manner, and accompanied the procession to the house; returning, the fun recommenced. This lady says there was never anything witnessed more affecting. "And," added she, "this is the faith these revolutionists would take from us. Already they talk of introducing every religion, and they will build a mosque and a synagogue!"

The morning is given to shopping, to see the lovely mantillas of every shape and style; fans of wonderful workmanship and exquisite painting on kid or silk; the beautiful figures in every variety of Spanish costumes, made in Malaga, of a particular kind of clay for which Spain is famous; the pretty mattings of Cadiz, etc. {351} In the evening we walk with our friends upon the "Alameda," a charming promenade by the seaside, where stately palm-trees wave above marble seats and columns. Entering the church of Mount Carmel we find it filled with people saying prayers and the rosary. To-night we are kept awake by the mob, who are marching with drums and ringing the church bells in honor of a victory over the queen's troops near Cordova.

At eight o'clock we set out upon an excursion to Jerez, to visit the bodegas and taste the fine wines. Passing the salt-meadows we see the white pyramids of salt glistening in the sunlight, which had so puzzled us when we last saw them by moonlight. The bay of Cadiz is on one side, the broad ocean on the other, in the distance the mountains of the Sierra del Pinal. A friend joins us at Puerta Real, and takes us to one of the largest bodegas in Jerez, where are 10,000 casks of wine—each cask valued at $500! The proprietor (a gentleman of English or Irish descent) is most kind, shows us this extraordinary place, and gives us to taste of the finest wines—brown sherry and pale sherry, fifty years of age. But the most delicious of all are the sweet wines—which are also sherries—and are called "Pedro Ximenes" from the name of the person who first introduced this grape. These wines are rich and oily, (perfect "nectar,") and are made from the grape when almost as dry as raisins—twelve days from off the vine. In the midst of these oceans of fine wines, Mr. Graves (the proprietor) tells us he rarely tastes them, only occasionally taking a glass of the sweet wine.

Jerez is said to be the richest town in Spain, the richest of its size in the world. Beautiful plazas planted with palms, and fine old palaces. We visited an ornamental garden belonging to one of these wine princes, where were lakes, and streams, and grottoes, and bridges, and groves, and flowers of every variety, birds and fowls, and model cattle, etc. And then we saw San Miguel, one of the finest churches we have seen, (gothic interior,) of the fifteenth century, (1432,) elegantly ornamented. There is also a cathedral and another most interesting church, (St. Dionisius,) built by Alonzo the Learned in the thirteenth century, said to be a particularly fine specimen of the gothic moresque of that period. After a fine breakfast of the delicious Spanish ham, chocolate, cakes, and sherry, we return to Cadiz. Passing "Puerta San Maria," we see the Jesuit college, from which they have just been ejected, the broken trees, the trampled gardens telling their own story of violence. One of the gentlemen in the train tells us there were two hundred and fifty boys cared for here, and that the Jesuits fed five hundred poor each day with soup from the leavings of the table. The great building looked a picture of desolation.

To-night we have another ringing of bells and marching to the sound of the odious revolutionary hymn. One of the gentlemen of our party goes out to hear the speeches in the square. Some of the speakers propose to offer the crown to the father of the King of Portugal, (of the Catholic branch of that lucky Coburg family who, possessing nothing, gain everything by marriage,) others are for the Duke of Montpensier. Some cry "Vive Napoleon." In fact, they are in great embarrassment—have caught the elephant and do not know what to do with him, like another nation we know of.

To-day we hear that all Catalonia has "pronounced," and even Madrid, and that the rejoicings of last night were for the victory of "Alcolea," just won, over the queen's troops, in which, however, the liberals have lost three thousand men. These troops were commanded by Serrano, (Duke de Torres,) who owes everything to the queen's favor; and on the queen's side by the Marquis de Novaliches, "faithful found amongst the faithless." We hear of one of her officers (the young Count de Cheste) who has shut himself with his men in the fortress of Montjuich, at Barcelona, resolving to die rather than submit. One must admire such devotion, in whatever cause it is shown. "Loyalty! the most pure and beautiful feeling of the human breast. It is a love which exists without requiring the usual nourishment of return; a feeling void of every shade of egotism; that desires and requires nothing but the happiness of loving, that causes one joyfully to sacrifice life and property for the exalted object whose voice, perhaps, never reached his ear. This feeling, in its highest purity, is the very triumph of human capacity." Such is the true definition of "Loyalty," which, like "Liberty," is often profaned and constantly misunderstood. With our pretty Spanish friends we go to see a church called the "Cave," a church only for gentlemen, where they may go privately to their confession and devotions. The confessionals are unlike those used for women, for the men go in front and kneel face to face with the priest. It is a beautiful chapel, wonderfully rich in marbles and fine vestments and bassi-relievi, and below it is a gloomy chapel from whence the church derives its name. Over the altar is represented the crucifixion. It is dimly lighted through a dome, and the figures (large as life) seem to live. Here the men go for meditation, and for the Good Friday and other solemn festivals. At one end of the chapel is a carved chair, raised on a platform, upon which the priest sits to give his instructions, while a lamp is so arranged that the light falls only upon the speaker's face, leaving the rest of the chapel in darkness. The young priest who showed us the church had the face of an angel, so fair and young and holy; or, rather, such a face as is represented in a picture of St. Aloysius Gonzaga, the patron of youth.

As we wander from shop to shop one of our pretty friends meets one of the beaux of Cadiz, whose "loyalty" she suspects and whom she berates most violently for deserting his queen in her need, and helping to embarrass his country. The pretty way with which she shakes her fan at him, and gesticulates with her hands, the expressive eyes and play of feature, is altogether charming and Andalusian.

Late this evening, we hear particulars of the late battle. Novaliches fought against fearful odds—three thousand men to sixteen thousand. He was severely if not mortally wounded, and was carried off by his men to Portugal, the only way of retreat open to them. This defeat, we suppose, will put an end to the war.

This is the feast of the Guardian Angel of Spain, so we hear mass where the devotion of the forty hours begins. As in Italy, two by two, kneeling and holding lights, the men of the congregation keep watch before the Blessed Sacrament during these forty hours, while hundreds of adorers continually coming and going attest the devotion of this pious people. {353} The Church of the Guardian Angel is near that belonging to the military hospital; and on the opposite side of the square is an asylum for widows, founded many years ago by a converted Moor—a most interesting institution. Widows of all ranks and conditions find shelter here when their necessities require it. Each one has her own chamber and sitting-room, and each one her little cooking apparatus separate. The court with its open corridors on every story, its pretty flowers, its fine promenade on the roof, makes it a very inviting abode; and, with the usual Spanish courtesy, the old widow who showed us about (the widow of an officer, who had been there these forty years) placed it at our "disposition." These poor women go out to walk, and to church when they wish, though there is also a chapel in the house.

We go next to see the "Albergo dei Poveri," a magnificent charity, founded and endowed by one man in memory of his mother, and dedicated to St. Helena. Here five hundred children of both sexes are taught weaving, sewing, washing, shoemaking, etc., and there is also an asylum for five hundred old men and old women. The school-rooms and dormitories are large and airy; the marble courts, where the children play, and the sewing-room, where a hundred girls sat at work, looked out upon the sea, and were deliciously cool and comfortable. The school-rooms were decorated with pictures of Bible history, and seemed to have all the modern inventions which make easy the way to learning. The sister told us how much they had been disturbed by this revolutionary movement. Her little orphan boys (who had been taught music with the view to enter the army as musicians) had been carried off at night to play the revolutionary hymn, kept out marching over the town till two o'clock in the morning, and then sent home foot-sore and with aching heads.

The most interesting thing of all was to see the old men at dinner—that helpless thing, an old man. Placed by the nice table, a man with snow-white apron served the soup, a sister gave round the meat, and then came a pudding. The bread was as white as is all the bread of Spain, (even the poorest people have bread of this very white flour,) and there seemed about a hundred of these men over sixty years of age. The rain drives us home, but by and by we go out again to buy some of the boots and shoes of Cadiz, which are the prettiest in the world and cover the prettiest of feet.

We go to the lovely church of the Rosary for high mass. The decorations are very tasteful and beautiful, and hundreds of men and women, in their grave black garments, assist most devoutly; the men have benches on each side, the women sit or kneel upon a bit of matting before the altar.

From this we go to the "Capuchinos," where we see three of Murillo's finest pictures, the "Marriage of St. Catherine," over the altar, which he left unfinished and which is surrounded, in five compartments, by five pictures of Zurbaran, almost equal to the centre piece. There is here another "Conception," and that picture of pictures, "St. Francis receiving the Stigmata," which is certainly the most extraordinary of all the works of this great master. The face of the saint seems to come entirely out of its dark surroundings, and so do the wonderful hands. These all look like the living flesh, and move us as if they were so.

This Capuchin convent, which Murillo loved to adorn, and in painting for which he lost his life, is now a hospital for lunatics—the monks all gone; the present Bishop of Cadiz was one [of] them. And to show the devotion of the common people to Murillo, they will not allow the bishop to move this picture of St. Francis to an opposite altar, where it would be in a better light and preserved from the smoke of the altar candles. "No; the place for which Murillo painted it must be the best place, and there it shall stay." In a chapel near by is a lovely picture of "Our Lady of the Rosary," which must be a copy of the one in the gallery of Madrid so celebrated. In this chapel and everywhere here we see statues or pictures of the "Martyrs of Cadiz," (Servando and Germano,) two young Roman soldiers who, becoming converts, died for the faith on a spot near the present city gates. It is said that on the occasion of the terrible earthquake which occurred here November 1st, 1755, when the sea rose and threatened to devour the city, two young men in strange garments appeared on the spot of their martyrdom and were seen by hundreds of the inhabitants to stay the waves, speaking to the people and bidding them pray to God. On another side of the city the Dominican priests bore the favorite statue of "Our Lady of the Rosary," with many prayers, to the waters' brink, and "the waves receded and there was a great calm."

On the third side, where Cadiz is most exposed to the sea, is a little church in which the priest was saying mass on the eventful morning. 'The people ran to him saying, "Behold! the sea is at the very door." He made haste to consume the consecrated Host, then seizing the crucifix and the banner of "Our Lady of Mercy," went out upon the door-step where the waves already licked his feet: "My Mother, let them not come further"—and they did not!

What is so remarkable in the accounts of this earthquake is, that there had been no storm to precede it, but on a soft sunshiny day came this terrible convulsion of the elements. We went to see this church, where is yet shown the crucifix and the banner which played so important a part on this occasion; and see the point to which the water rose, and an inscription on the wall of a house recording the event exactly as here related. Next we visit the church of San Lorenzo, and afterward that of the Scalzi, (barefoot friars,) where to-day was said the "last mass;" the "junta" having decreed that it be torn down to build a theatre. The work of destruction had already commenced. How the strong old walls resisted! A dozen carpenters were taking down the gilded altars and curiously carved "retablos," which, belonging to the days when Spain had her argosies from the new world laden with gold, were made to resist "all time." Four men with iron crowbars were striving to dislodge an angel suspended over an altar, which positively refused to come down; while below him, on the floor, stood saints and martyrs covered with dust and débris, hastily dislodged from the pedestals on which they had rested for centuries—a rueful group! No wonder the women wept, and eyed resentfully the malicious-looking revolutionists employed to order the work; while armed soldiers, with the hateful red ribbon on the arm, (the revolutionary mark,) kept off the populace, who strove to get in at the doors, by the market, to bid farewell to these ancient altars. {355} It had been the church of the market people, the cradle of some of popular saints, the scene of the "first communion," the "nuptial mass," the baptism of their children, the funeral mass for their dead. Great is the clamor outside! Old people kiss the walls, and the young gather bits of the broken altars, while sorrowful-looking priests are permitted to carry away the mutilated statues and gildings.

The convent of the Good Shepherd, opening into the church, is also to be torn down, and its unhappy inmates driven elsewhere to seek shelter. They are putting into the same convent these, with Carmelites, Ursulines, and others; crowding together those who teach with those who save the Magdalens in strange and painful confusion. Such are some of the fruits of revolution! And this is the "liberty" which England and America seek for the Spaniard!

To-night we hear that the Marquis de Novaliches has died of lockjaw, his face having been dreadfully wounded by a ball. The Conte de la Cheste, who held Monjuich at Barcelona, has gone to join the queen, abandoning his "forlorn hope" at her request.

To-day we hear the high mass in the cathedral, and go to see the jewels in the sacristia. They have a remarkable "custodia," (the gift of an ancestor of the Calderon de la Barca,) set in pearls and emeralds of immense value; a superbly chased crucifix, the gift of Alonzo the Learned; a small but exquisitely worked tabernacle of gold with beautiful amethysts forming a cross, given by the same king. After the mass we go to buy some of the famous Cadiz gloves, and then drive on the ramparts to see the fine sea view. In the evening, to the church of the Carmel. As it is the eve of the feast of "Our Lady of the Rosary," the church of the Rosary is illuminated, and most of the houses throughout the city.

In the church of the Rosary is a beautiful ceremony. The music is lovely; the wind instruments, in certain parts of the mass, most effective, and the whole one of the most solemn services at which we have assisted.

The sermon is delivered with such grace and unction that we could but realize the truth of that saying of Charles V., that Spanish is the language in which to speak to God! So grand, so sonorous! And there is something in the grave dignity of the Spanish priest which makes him seem the perfection of ecclesiastical character. We are all struck with the decorum of the people in the churches, the quiet and devotion; none of the running in and out and the familiarity with holy things which in Italy makes one see that the people regard the church as their father's house, in which they take liberties. Here, it is alone the house of God, as is seen in the reverential manner and careful costume. All wear black, and not even is a lace mantilla usual, but the Spanish mantilla of modest silk. The men are alike reverential, and nowhere have we seen so many men in church, particularly at night.

To-day we hear the good news that the government of the city is taken from the hands of the junta and given into the care of the former military governor of Cadiz, in conjunction with the admiral of the fleet. This is received with great favor by the people of moderate opinion of both sides, as putting a stop to extreme measures. They have countermanded the destruction of the two old churches, the Franciscan and the Scalzi; of the last-named they tell a most extraordinary story to-day. {356} Yesterday the destroyers had knocked down a portion of the thick old wall. This morning it was found rebuilt as if by invisible hands, with the same heavy masonry, as strong as before, and even the white plaster upon the outside dry and barely to be distinguished from the rest of the building. Everybody runs to look at it. The people cry "a miracle," and say that the Blessed Virgin, whose feast it is to-day, had a hand in it.

We go for the last time to the shops, and to hear our last mass in San Antonio; for to-morrow we leave beautiful Cadiz and the dear friends who have made our stay so delightful. The political horizon to-day is a little clearer. In consequence of some outrages upon priests and churches one man has been banished to Ceuta, and large placards are upon the streets threatening with like punishment every one who insults a priest or injures a church. The banished man had harangued the mob, assuring them that a Dominican father in the convent of that order had some instruments of torture, formerly used in the Inquisition, and that he applied them to his penitents. The unthinking mob, guided by him, rushed to search the convent, broke the church windows, and not finding what was promised them, turned their fury upon the man who had deceived them.

In the war of 1835, when Saragossa began the work of burning the monasteries and murdering the monks, Cadiz gave her monks five hours to get away, and armed guards saved the monasteries. To be sure, the populace burned the libraries and furniture; but as Cadiz was then more moderate than her sister cities, she will not now be less kind than then. How impossible to believe, in looking out upon a city so smiling and so lovely, that evil passions should lurk in it anywhere!

The Approaching Council Of The Vatican.

The preparations for the approaching council continue to be made on a grand scale, and with the greatest diligence. From the Chronicle of Matters relating to the future Council, which is regularly published at the office of the Civilta Cattolicà, in Rome, we copy the list of the different commissions and their members which are preparing the matters to be discussed and decided upon by the bishops assembled in ecumenical council.

The supreme directive congregation is composed of the most eminent cardinals, Patrizi, de Reisach, Barnabo, Panebianco, Bizarri, Bilio, Caterini, and Capalti. To these are joined, as secretary, Mgr. Giannelli; and as consulters, Mgr. Tizzani, Mgr. Angelini, vicegerent of Rome, Mgr. Talbot, (an Englishman,) Don Melchior Galeotti, of the seminary of Palermo, F. Sanguineti, S. J., professor of canon law in the Roman College, Professor Feije, of the University of Louvain, and Professor Hefele, of Tübingen. {357} The commission of ceremonies is composed of prelates who have the general supervision of the grand functions which take place in the principal churches of Rome. The politico-ecclesiastical commission is composed of;

Cardinal de Reisach, president,
Mgrs. Marini,
del Parco a Theatine,
Bartolini,
Jacobini,
Ferrari,
Nussi,
Gizzi, (a judge in one of the high courts,)
Guardi, (vicar-general of the religious congregation of ministers of the sick,)
Canon Kovaes, of Kolocza in Bohemia,
Canon Molitor of Spire in Germany,
the Abbé Chesnel, vicar-general of Quimper,
Canon Moufang of Mayence,
the Abbé Gibert, vicar-general of Moulins, and Mgr. Trinchieri, secretary.

Cardinal Barnabo, president,
Don John Simeoni, of the Propaganda,
F. Bollig, S. J., professor of Sanscrit and Oriental languages in the Roman university and Roman college,
F. Vercellone, (Barnabite religious; since deceased,)
F. Theiner, of the Oratory,
the Most Rev. Leonard Valerga, prefect of Carmelite missions in Syria,
the Right Rev. Joseph David, a Syrian bishop,
Canon Roncetti, professor in the Roman seminary,
Don Joseph Piazza,
Don Francis Rosi,
F. Haneberg, abbot of St. Boniface and professor of theology in the university of Munich,
F. Martinoff,
S. J., Mgr. Howard, (an Englishman,) and
Mgr. Cretoni, secretary.

Cardinal Bizarri, president,
Mgrs. Marini, Svegliati, and Lucidi,
F. Capelli, (Barnabite,)
F. Bianchi,(Dominican,)
F. Cipressa, (Minorite Franciscan,)
F. Cretoni, (Augustinian,)
F. Costa, (Jesuit,)
Mgr. Guisasola, arch-priest of the cathedral of Seville, and
Don Francis Stoppani, secretary.

Cardinal Bilio, president,
Mgr. Cardoni, president of the ecclesiastical academy,
F. Spada, (Dominican,) master of the sacred palace and professor of dogma in the Roman university,
F. de Ferrari, (Dominican,)
F., Perrone, S.J.,
Mgr. Schwetz, professor of theology in the university of Vienna,
F. Mura, ex-general of the Servites, rector of the Roman university,
F. Adrogna, definitor-general of the conventual Franciscans,
Mgr. Jacquenet, curé of St. Jacques at Rheims,
the Abbé Gay, vicar-general of Poitiers,
F. Martinelli, (Augustinian,) professor of Scripture in the Roman university,
Don Joseph Pecci, professor of philosophy in the same,
F. Franzlin, S. J., professor of theology in the Roman college,
F. Schrader, S.J., professor in the university of Vienna,
Professor Petacci, of the Roman seminary,
Professor Hettinger, of Wurtzburg,
Professor Alzog, of Friburg,
the Rev. Dr. Corcoran, of Charleston, S. C.,
Canon Labrador, professor of philosophy and theology at Cadiz, and
Canon Santori, rector of the pontifical lyceum in the Roman seminary, secretary.

Cardinal Caterini, president,
Mgrs. Giannelli,
Angelini,
Svegliati,
Simeoni,
Nina,
Nobili,
Lucidi,
de Angelis, professor of canon law in the Roman university,
F. Tarquini, S.J.,
Canon Jacobini,
Professor Hergenroether, of Wurtzburg,
Professor Feije of Louvain,
the Abbé Sauvé, of Laval,
Canon Giese, of Munster,
Professor Heuser, of Cologne,
Professor de Torres, of Seville, and
Mgr. Louis Jacobini, secretary.

Several other distinguished men have been added to these commissioners since this list was published. Dr. Newman was invited to assist, but declined on account of his infirm health. Dr. Döllinger was also invited.

The sessions of the council will be held in one of the large chapels of St. Peter's Church, which is capable of containing several thousand persons. The principal architects of Rome are already engaged in preparing the proper accommodations, under the immediate supervision of the Holy Father himself. The altar of the council is at one end of the chapel, the throne of the sovereign pontiff at the opposite end. On the right and left of the throne are placed the seats of the cardinals, patriarchs, and ambassadors of sovereigns. The seats of the prelates are ranged in two semicircles, each tier being elevated above the one before it; the tribune of the orators is placed in the middle of the open space between, and there are also tribunes prepared for those who will be admitted as spectators of the public sessions.

A large and beautiful piece of black marble, which was found among the treasures of the Emperor Nero, at the recent exhumation, is to be made into an obelisk commemorative of the council, which will be erected near the spot where St. Peter was crucified. The base of the column is to be made of a number of small blocks of white marble, equal to the number of prelates assisting at the council, each one placing his own block, with his name and title engraved upon it.

The bishops alone are entitled to a seat in the council by divine right. Cardinals, abbots, and generals of religious orders are entitled to a seat also, by ecclesiastical law or privilege. The question of the right of bishops in partibus infidelium to a seat is now under discussion, and we have not learned whether it has yet been decided or not.

This circumstance has given the Roman correspondent of the New York Heralda chance of furnishing a specimen of the ridiculous and reckless falsification of matters relating to the Catholic Church, by which the ordinary readers of newspapers are perpetually befooled and mystified. The doubt respecting the right of these bishops is represented as having been raised in order to keep out those who are not sufficiently subservient to the holy see, and the conclusion drawn—with the usual flippant impertinence of this class of writers—that Rome will admit none who are not prepared to carry out fully her own policy. The truth is, however, that these bishops in partibus—who are prelates holding merely titular sees which are in fact extinct or in the possession of schismatics, many of them having been decorated with the episcopal character by the pope only for the sake of honor—are precisely the men who have the least power of opposing the holy see and the greatest interest in procuring its favor. Some of them are vicars-apostolic governing missionary districts, others are coadjutors of diocesan bishops, others are prelates who have resigned their sees, and the remainder are prelates filling certain high offices in the Roman court. It is evident enough that if there were any reason to apprehend opposition to the pontifical authority from any portion of the hierarchy, it would be rather from the primates and metropolitans of old and powerful sees, who have been nominated by sovereigns, and who would have all their support and authority to sustain them. There is no reason, however, to apprehend that any collision will take place between the holy see and the hierarchy, who have never in the whole history of the church been more completely united than they are at present.

The bishops take no theologians with them, and, besides the prelates themselves, only the theologians of the holy see and the representatives of the sovereigns will participate in the deliberations of the council.

In regard to the matters which will be proposed for the adjudication of this supreme tribunal, we find many conjectures, more or less plausible, both in Catholic and secular periodicals. We prefer to wait until the acts of the council are made known in an authentic manner, before speaking on this subject. We remark merely that there is not the slightest foundation for the rumors which are reported in certain newspapers respecting proposed changes in the established discipline of the church, regarding matters which have long ago been definitely settled.

The impression made upon the whole civilized world by the convocation of an ecumenical council is deep, universal, and continually increasing as the time for its assembling draws near. The infidel and red-republican party in Europe manifest a fear and dread which is certainly remarkable, and very encouraging to all friends of religion and order. The politicians of the old régime of state supremacy over the church also manifest a terrible and perfectly well-founded alarm, lest the church should assert and regain her perfect liberty and independence, and condemn, without any hope of appeal, those maxims and opinions by which they have hitherto held a certain number of sincere Catholics in alliance with themselves.

The reception given by the emperor of Russia and the patriarch of Constantinople to the pope's invitation is too well known to need any fresh notice. Of course, the great body of the oriental prelates follow the dictation of these two potentates—a striking commentary upon the value and sincerity of the protest which they make against the tyranny of the Roman patriarch. There are not wanting, however, certain instances showing the impression which the pope's invitation has made upon the more sincere and conscientious members of these separated communions. The bishop of Trebizond, a man of venerable age, received the encyclical letter with marks of great respect, raising it to his forehead and pressing it to his bosom, exclaiming at the same time with emotion, "O Rome! O Rome! O St. Peter! O St. Peter!" He would not, however, declare any decisive intention either to attend the council or to absent himself. The bishop of Adrianople returned the letter, saying, "I wish first to reflect. I wish to decide for myself." Letters from the east testify that many of the Greek schismatics openly blame the patriarch and the bishops who have refused to attend the council, saying, that by this refusal they have shown that they are afraid to enter into discussion with the Latin bishops. It is believed that the Armenian bishops who were summoned by their patriarch, residing at Constantinople, to advise with him respecting the pope's invitation, were in favor of accepting it, from the fact that he afterward sent the encyclical to the patriarch of Esmiasin with the report of the doings of the synod. A strong unionist party has been formed among the Armenians, and one of their prelates, Mgr. Narses, has published a long letter advocating union with the Roman Church. The Ottoman government favors union as a means of weakening the influence of Russia, and has separated the Bulgarians, who number four millions, from the jurisdiction of the patriarch of Constantinople. It has also refused to recognize a prelate sent by the patriarch of Esmiasin to act as his nuncio at Constantinople for the purpose of counteracting the efforts of the unionist party, and has given a semi-official warning to one of the most violent Russophilist journals. [Footnote 81]

[Footnote 81: Later news informs us that the Armenian patriarch of Constantinople has been forced to resign by the clamors raised against him, that the Greek patriarch had called an "ecumenical" council, and that the Coptic patriarch of Alexandria received the encyclical with great respect and many expressions of courtesy toward the prelate who was the bearer of it.]

It is an interesting fact that the king of Birmah, when made acquainted with the desire of the Holy Father that sovereigns should place no obstacle in the way of the attendance of the bishops in their dominions at the council, exclaimed: "What! can there be any princes who would oppose such a just and holy desire? For my part, I not only promise to interpose no obstacle, but I engage to pay the travelling expenses of the bishops of my kingdom both going and returning." He has also announced the intention of sending by each of the bishops a jewelled cross as a present to the pope.

The Jansenist bishops of Holland, who are five or six in number, each one having two or three priests and about a thousand people under his jurisdiction, find themselves compelled, by their own professed principles, to submit themselves to the judgment of the council. They have appealed, ever since the condemnation of Jansenius, from the pope to an ecumenical council. Now they find an ecumenical council on the eve of assembling, before which they have full liberty to appear, and plead their case. They acknowledge the infallibility of the tribunal, and therefore can have no choice but to submit to its decision, which they openly profess their readiness to do, so that without doubt they will all be reconciled to the church.

Among Protestants we find everywhere a great excitement respecting the council, a full recognition of the immense importance of the crisis which it must inevitably bring upon Protestantism; in general, a disposition to rouse up for the defence of their losing cause, and oppose an obstinate renewal of their old protest to the admonition of their chief pastor to return to their allegiance, but occasionally a manifestation of a different sentiment—a disposition to listen, to hope for good results, and to welcome the thought of a possible reconciliation.

On the tenth day of last November, M. Guizot uttered the following words at a reunion of ecclesiastics and laymen, at Notre Dame de Dozulè, in Normandy:

"You priests have faith; it is faith which directs you; and even when you seem to act imprudently, success always justifies you in the end. … It is thus that the Catholic Church sustains itself, happily for France and the world. … The clergy dies not, the papacy does not fall. … Pius IX. has exhibited an admirable wisdom in convoking this grand assembly, from which, perhaps, will issue the salvation of the world; for our societies are very sick; but, for great evils there are great remedies. [Footnote 82]

The German publicist, Wolfgang Menzel, in the number of his Literary Leaves for last October, thus writes:

"We are far from wishing to blame a reunion of all good Christians, even though the same authority in Protestants who are truly Christian is not sufficiently recognized. Every tentative of reunion, however restricted it may be, must be hailed with joy."

"It is the Catholic Church which has directed and accomplished the education of humanity during the whole middle age. Since the Reformation, it has sustained without succumbing three centuries of violent struggles, and, if the eternal truth of God lives in it, we shall see the realization of the word of its founder, that "there shall be one fold and one shepherd."

"It is impossible to deny that the Protestant church of Germany is at present running a very great danger. The different confessions are becoming daily more opposed to each other. Theological parties engage in mortal combats; the liberal party is combated by the servile party. The bond of peace is with deliberate purpose torn and broken and a large portion of the German people, witnesses of these disputes, fall into discouragement, distrust, and indifference. The ancient and malign enemy laughs at our folly, that, after having bitten one another, we shall finish by eating one another up. … Let us say it, to our shame, we have no remedy to oppose to this evil. Interiorly divided, absorbed in party disputes, deprived of autonomy, the sport of political calculations, and politico-ecclesiastical experiments which are perpetually changing, torn by theological hatred, abandoned by the populations, thrust aside by all classes of citizens, our church resembles only too much a shipwrecked vessel which lets in water on every side. How can we face the violent tempest which is brewing, when we lack unity of direction, when we lack a head, are destitute of any solid interior or exterior organization, when we are consuming our forces in the continual wars of one confession against another?"

We are sorry, Professor Schenkel, that we really cannot tell you how you can do it. Perhaps Dr. Bellows, the American and Foreign Christian Union, or the New York Observer might suggest something a little consoling or encouraging to the unfortunate gentleman.

The official replies made by various Protestant bodies in Europe are, as we might expect, a reiteration of their old protests against the Roman Church, and a declaration of their contentment with their present state. The most courteous and well-reasoned of these papers which we have seen is that of the Unitarian pastors who sit in the seat of Calvin at Geneva. It makes the issue between rationalism, liberalism, and humanitarian progress, on one side, and the supernatural revelation of doctrine and law, on the other, very distinctly—imputing, in the usual style, servility, formalism, tyranny, and obscurantism to the Catholic Church, and claiming for Protestantism the merit of protecting and promoting true liberty, intelligence, and happiness. There is more of the same kind in the number of the Liberal Christian (February 6th) in which we have read this address. As statements of the position and opinions of the parties issuing them, these documents may pass. We are to expect that those who are challenged in the way they have been will reply in just such a manner. These are only the preliminaries of an earnest controversy which must be carried on for a long time before any result can be looked for.

Dr. Hedge, of Harvard University, has rendered himself supremely ridiculous by denying that St. Peter was bishop of Rome, or even visited Rome at any time; from which he concludes that the pope has no right to issue encyclicals as his successor. [Footnote 83]

The Liberal Christian, with a kind of audacious valor, backs him up, and declares that "the whole claim of the bishop of Rome is an absurdity." Suppose it to be so to the superior and enlightened minds of this editor and his compeers; the assertion of it carries no weight, and can have no effect upon any other person's mind. Another Unitarian, the Rev. Samuel Johnson, of Massachusetts, says: "If I believed in his (Christ's) authority even as Matthew presents it, not to say Paul or John, I should regard the principles of the papacy as in substance right, whatsoever I might think of the conduct of its representatives." [Footnote 84] Considering the very great importance of the subject, the great learning and number of those who differ from our enlightened friends, and the curious circumstance that almost every person thinks that no opinion or sect but his own can uphold itself against the claims of Rome, would it not be in better taste to have patience a little longer, and speak with a little more moderation?

The Christian Quarterly, which is a ferocious young Campbellite periodical published at Cincinnati, thus addresses the Protestant community:

"Are you able to feel the sting in the following words of 'Pius, sovereign pontiff, ninth of the name, to all Protestants and non-Catholics?' In speaking of the multitudinous sects of the Protestant world, and of the restlessness, instability, and uncertainty that everywhere characterizes Protestantism, he says," etc. "The very fact that the Pope of Rome should, in the last half of the nineteenth century, have occasion to pen such a paragraph, ought to call the blush of shame to every Protestant cheek! Protestantism has been experimenting for three hundred years, and the pope of Rome has summed up the result! Let Protestantism try the force of its logic upon this papal dilemma!" [Footnote 85]

"There are signs around us that a movement is beginning. The Diplomatic Review, a peculiar and certainly a remarkable journal, published the first Wednesday of every month, in London, contains a Protestant address to the pope, and notifies to its readers in town and country that it will lie for signature at its office till the end of the month. The purport of the address is to implore the pope to proclaim again, by his own authority or by that of the council, the observance of the laws of natural justice by Christian and civilized nations in their relations with the heathen and the uncivilized. In an article written in French this same journal says: 'We pronounce the words of the pope like texts, we draw our deduction from his maxims, and we see in the accomplishment of his work the only hope for the preservation of European society.' … 'The strength of the pope is the law:' our duty is to announce explicitly this truth, Christianity must be preached anew.' In addition to this remarkable declaration, we have the public expression of the Rev. E. W. Urquhart, at a meeting of the 'English Church Union,' presided over by the Hon. and Rev. C. L. Courtenay, in South-Devonshire. He said that the separation of church and state is not far distant, and suggested that the Anglican party should seek reunion with the Church of Rome, and that representatives should be sent to the council, to stipulate the conditions of their submission to the see of Rome. This language may sound startling in the mouth of an Anglican clergyman; but we expect the courage of Mr. Urquhart's utterance will unloose many a tongue. Of course, the only stipulation that can be made is that of unqualified submission to the holy see. To a human and fallible authority you may bring conditions; to one that is divine and infallible, you can bring only faith and docility."

The comments of the secular press upon the council, in many cases, would seem as if their authors were aiming to carry burlesque to its most farcical extreme. Their spirit is that of the mocking ridicule of Voltairian infidelity without its show of argument, together with the grossest materialism and the systematic disavowal of any principle higher than self-interest or political expediency. It is sufficiently absurd when such writers attempt to express, under the protection of their anonymous cloak, any opinions whatever in religious matters. Much more, when they offer their ludicrous advice to the prelates and theologians of the Catholic Church, and pretend to understand the true nature of Christianity and its mission upon earth better than the church herself. In itself the matter is only laughable, and of course the really intelligent and well-informed would only receive with a smile of derision the notion that any serious meaning or value could be ascribed to such lucubrations. But it becomes serious and lamentable when we reflect how small this class really is. The proofs are continually forced upon us of the fact, that a large proportion of those who are intelligent enough to make money, to keep the run of politics and the exchange, to dress well, and to make a show, really read nothing but the daily papers, look to them for their ideas of religion as well as every other topic, and are actually possessed by the grossest ignorance, and the most dense and stolid prejudice, in regard to everything relating to the Catholic Church and to all Catholic nations. Any convert to the Catholic Church, who mixes with ordinary men of business or with general society, will testify to the fact that they are frequently accosted with expressions of surprise that persons intelligent and reputable, such as they are, can possibly be Catholics, and with the assertion, as of a truism, that only the ignorant, the degraded, and the vicious, which with Americans is generally a synonym for poor people or foreigners, believe in the doctrines of the Catholic Church. Those who read the sectarian newspapers suffer themselves to be swept along by the lying current which runs through them, like the filthy stream of a sewer. We happen to have just read a description from a London paper of a visit to the sewers of that city which presents an apt and forcible illustration of what we are saying: "Under Farrington street west," says the writer, "the Fleet Ditch was running in two swift, black streams; almost below the footway upon each side, some three feet six inches deep, and with so strong a current that we were assured it would be impossible to save the life of any one who stepped or slipped into them. These foul streams recalled the ancient Styx and made one hold back with something like a shudder."

The following extract from the Boston Traveller has just fallen into our hands in good time to serve as an instance in point:

"Mr. Editor: Sabbath evening, April 4th, Father I. T. Hecker, editor of the Catholic World, delivered a lecture in the Music Hall on 'The Religious Condition of the Country.' As it has been reported by the press, it would seem to be little more than a tissue of misrepresentations of New England in particular, and of Protestantism in general. It would be a sufficient reply to the exaggeration and conceit of the reverend padre to say, that if Protestantism had done nothing more than to enable him to rail for an hour and a half at the most cherished and sacred feelings of our people, its mission would not be in vain. And herein is its eminent superiority to that cast-iron system which holds the reviler of our faith. Can Catholicism do what Protestantism did on Sunday week? Will Rome, or any other Catholic city, permit a Protestant minister, placarded and advertised days in advance, in a public hall, to burlesque and hold up to contempt the Catholic faith? This lecturer knows that Rome is mean enough to forbid the exercise of Protestant worship to travellers, or visitors from Protestant lands sojourning temporarily within her walls. {364} And yet he comes to the largest hall in the capital of New England and has the impudence to undertake to tell our people that they are adrift on two tides, one of which is to Rome and the other to infidelity. And if his statements are reliable, infidelity makes altogether the better stand. But we insist that he is either wilfully false or wilfully ignorant, or he would not have said that 'not one in ten of the people of New England accepts as fundamental, the truths which his forefathers held.'

"Father Hecker knows, if he knows anything, that the evangelical churches of New England hold for substance the same doctrines that their fathers held; and he knows, too, that there is not a doctrine held or advocated in any Protestant Church in Christendom which does not have its advocates in the bosom of the Catholic Church. He must be aware that biblical criticism has made sound progress within two hundred and fifty years; and we can hardly believe that even he would be narrow enough to deny that certain doctrines may be re-stated and re-explained without plunging into infidelity, least of all pushing for Rome.

"But as he has chosen to attack New England in particular, it is no more than fair, perhaps, that New England should have the privilege of being compared with the most favored Catholic countries. He certainly will not object to France, which has always been overwhelmingly Catholic, not one in ten of her population being Protestant. And yet scarcely fifty years have passed since the whole nation voted God out of existence, and deified reason in the person of a harlot. The Romish priests, he knows, were among the foremost in this carnival of infidelity and blood. Nor need he be told that the men of France, to-day, are infidels. Italy, too, the seat of this boasting church, is overshadowed, as Father Hecker knows, by a sneering, malignant infidelity. And Spain—blessed, so recently, with the most Catholic queen to whom the Pope sent the golden rose, which enjoyed for generations the blessings of the Inquisition, and for many years committed the entire education of her people into the hands of the Jesuits—what shall we say of her? The best thing we can say of her is, that she drove from her borders that nasty woman, and sent the Jesuits after her. And this is the fruit of Catholicism, and not of Protestantism.

"In only a single country where the Catholic Church has been supreme has the result been the Catholic faith—that country is Ireland. And if Father Hecker is willing to compare the Irish, who are the best fruits of the Catholic Church, with the people of New England, who are the best fruits of Protestantism, we are entirely content. But it is not a little singular that these best children of the Catholic Church should have immigrated to this country by the million, and are still coming, to improve their condition? And we think that Father Hecker himself will not deny that these favorite sons of Rome have wonderfully improved in intelligence, morals, and thrift in this infidel New England.

"But what would this reviling priest have? Would he make of New England another Ireland or Spain, another infidel France or Italy? What would he have us do? Blot out our public schools, take the Bible from the hands of our people, subject their consciences to the priests, establish the inquisition, raise up a generation of Christians like those of his church who hung the negroes to the lamp-posts in New York, and roll back this land into the old night of the middle ages, when Rome sat like a nightmare upon all the peoples of Christendom? Does this priest suppose that our people will swallow such stuff as was offered them at the Music Hall? The common school has not diffused general intelligence here for two hundred and fifty years, that our people should need to go to a Catholic schoolmaster to learn their own history, or the history of that church which has made an Ireland and a Spain.

We do not expect that such a dense darkness of ignorance and prejudice as that which exists in the Protestant world will be immediately dispelled by the light which will radiate from the city of God through the council of bishops assembled about their august chief, the vicar of Jesus Christ. We have reason to expect a great number of conversions, among those who are already partially enlightened, as its immediate result, and the more zealous and successful prosecution of the work of bringing back all nations to the fold of truth and grace as its effect during a long period to come. {365} But, no doubt, the greater number of those who are thoroughly committed to the anti-Catholic cause will persevere to the last in their hostility, and retain for a long time a multitude of followers under their influence. It is useless to argue with such men in the hope of convincing or converting them. They will be forced, however, to meet the Catholic question fairly and squarely, and no longer be able to hide themselves behind vague platitudes and unmeaning generalities. They will be obliged, also, to give account of their own systems, whatever they may be, which they put forward as substitutes for the Catholic religion, and thus undergo the crucial tests of logic, history, and critical science. For ourselves, we cannot doubt for a moment that, as the ultimate result, everything like orthodox or positive Protestantism will be ground into dust between the two opposing forces of Catholicity and infidelity, leaving the great contest to be waged between these two. In regard to this last great issue we venture to make no prognostics. There are reasons both for fear and for hope; but the only course for us to pursue is to aim for as much good as possible, leaving the rest with God. That a crisis approaches in the conflict between the universal divine order and universal lawlessness, between the church and the world, that is, the wicked world or concrete mass of all false and wicked principles, the mundus positus in malignos, of which the apostle speaks; and that this crisis will be hastened and materially affected by the council, cannot be doubted. We desire to impress, therefore, upon all the really sincere and upright lovers of truth and Christianity, the importance of their paying careful attention to the doings of this council and of looking to correct sources for their information.

All Catholics must look forward to the council with sentiments of the most profound veneration and ardent expectation of the incalculable good which it will produce in the bosom of the church. An ecumenical council is the representative Catholic Church, the entire episcopate with its head and supreme bishop, the highest tribunal on earth, with plenary authority to define doctrines and enact laws, with the spiritual presence of Jesus Christ in the midst of it, and the plenitude of the Holy Spirit to enlighten and assist its deliberations and judgments; infallible in all its decrees respecting faith and morals, sovereign in all its enactments, with full power to bind all minds and consciences to an implicit and unreserved obedience in the name of God. The church is always infallible, and is perpetually teaching the faith and the rule of morals; the holy see is always invested with authority to decide controversies and make laws; and is competent to make even definitions of faith, to which the assent of the dispersed bishops gives the same force of concurrent judgment which their conciliar action possesses. Nevertheless, the pope with the episcopate assembled in ecumenical council can do more than when they are dispersed. The gift of active infallibility is in a higher and more intense exercise, because the common intellect and will of the church is prepared by common counsel and communion to receive a more abundant illumination and vivification of the Holy Spirit. It is by the councils, from that of Nice to that of Trent, that heretics have been condemned, and the clear, explicit definitions of the faith once delivered to the saints have been made. The council of the Vatican will possess the same infallible authority with that which met at Jerusalem under St. Peter, or that which at under the presidency of the legates of St. Sylvester, condemned the Arian heresy and defined the Son to be consubstantial with the Father. {366} This august tribunal will therefore have full power to terminate all controversies and differences among Catholics in regard to which it shall judge that the interests of the faith and the well-being of the church require a definite judgment to be made. The result will be both a more perfect concordance in doctrine and principles of action, regarding all the matters which will be decided, and a more perfect recognition of liberty in reference to all opinions which are left as open questions. That this will be a great gain no truly loyal Catholic can doubt. Another result to be expected is a more precise, definite, and uniform system of ecclesiastical law and administration, providing a more perfect adjustment of all the multiform relations of the church and her hierarchy. Those portions of the church which are in an apathetic and torpid state we may hope will be roused up; a multitude of sluggish and unfaithful Catholics become reanimated with the spirit of faith; and the unity, sanctity, catholicity, and apostolicity of the church—the immortality of her life, the divine authority of her teaching, the irresistible and universal power of that spirit which is in her—be manifested with a brightness which will make for ever glorious the close of the nineteenth century, whose opening was so very dark and inauspicious.

St. Mary's.

If there is one spot in our country to which the American Catholic turns with special interest, it is certainly to the landing-place of Lord Baltimore's colony in Maryland and the site of St. Mary's City. New Englanders are never weary of boasting of "our pilgrim forefathers," who landed on Plymouth Rock to obtain freedom to worship God according to their own peculiar notions. To have an ancestor who came over in the Mayflower is equivalent to a patent of nobility—it sets the fortunate individual above his fellows, and makes him a member of a caste truly Brahminical.

The Catholic can turn with far greater pride to those spiritual forefathers who, with no self-righteousness, sought in the new world not only liberty of conscience, but allowed it to others; who were so just in their dealings with the natives that they never took an inch of land without paying for it; and who, by their Christian kindness, won over so many of the Indians to genuine Christianity. We truly have reason to say,

  "Ay, call it holy ground
   The soil where first they trod!"

I had always wished to visit this consecrated spot so dear to the Catholic heart, and embraced the first convenient opportunity of doing so. I rode down from Leonardtown during the pleasant Indian summer time. {367} My most vivid remembrance of the ride is of passing over a frequent succession of what my Aunt Pilcher used to call "sarvent-madams."—a sudden depression, as if be tween two logs, which unceremoniously pitched you forward in the carriage and then brought you up with a sudden jerk, thus forcing you to make an impromptu bow which gave point to the pleasant name of "sarvent-madams." This sort of exercise may be novel, but a continuation of it is not at all amusing, and I was glad when, after a ride of about twenty miles, we emerged from a woody path, crossed a stream, and found ourselves on the high plain where once stood the city of St. Mary. One is surprised—pained—to find not one stone left upon another of that settlement. When the seat of government was removed, nature resumed her sway and avenged herself for the ravages of man by obliterating most of his traces and reclothing the place with her own freshness and beauty. There are now a few dwellings belonging to the farmer who owns this historic site, a barnlike church belonging to the Episcopalians, said to have been built of the ruins of the old state-house, and a large brick building that stands dreary and treeless, looking like a factory, but which is really a seminary for young ladies, the monument erected by the Maryland legislature to commemorate the landing of the first colonists! It would be an excellent place for a convent of Carthusians; but to banish lively girls to this lonely region, lovely though it be, so far from any town, several miles from the post-office, and with no literary advantages, must have been the conception of some malicious and dyspeptic old bachelor. The young are rarely lovers of nature. Those whose souls have been chastened and weaned from the world alone find a balm therein. It is a great defect in the training of our youth that they are not made more observant of natural objects. Insects, vegetation, the very stones beneath the feet, are a source of unceasing pleasure to the heart in sympathy with nature in all her infinite variety. But this requires teachers who are capable of opening to youth the great treasure-house of nature. It is not always the most intellectual people who are the most fond of the country. Madame de Staël preferred living in the fourth story of a house on the Rue du Bac in Paris to a villa on the enchanted shores of Lake Geneva. And Dr. Johnson thought there was no view that equalled the high tide of human beings at Charing Cross.

This seminary is intended to educate the young ladies of prevailing religious sects of the country, each of which is represented by a teacher. I have understood that at times there have been serious conflicts between those who were for Paul and those who were for Apollos; but this is not at all surprising in a place where they must be driven to desperation for a little excitement. The only church near is the Episcopal, where the services are very intermittent indeed, which obliges the teachers to play the part of chaplain.

This uninviting church is in a yard full of old graves, shaded by clumps of hollies and gloomy cedars. There is a venerable old mulberry-tree in the midst, now quite decayed, but still putting forth a few leafy branches, said to have been planted (a twig from old England) by Leonard Calvert's own hands. There is a tradition that he was buried in this yard—perhaps near his tree, familiarly known as Lord Baltimore's tree—but there is nothing to indicate the precise spot. It is more probable that he was buried near the Catholic church, which was about a quarter of a mile farther down. {368} Relic lovers have nearly killed this venerable tree, by cutting out pieces for canes, crosses, etc. Passing through the grassy graveyard, and descending a steep bank, you come to a narrow line of sand, a miniature beach on the shore of St. Mary's River, the place where the colony landed. The water is as salt as the sea, and the broad river deep enough for the Dove and the Ark to anchor. A gentle ripple came up over the yellow sand and crystalline pebbles. The broad expanse of water lay like a lake, with undulating hills in the background all covered with woods in their gorgeous autumn foliage. The whole scene was as calm and peaceful as if these waters had never been disturbed by Indian canoe or white man's craft.

A quarter of a mile south of the seminary was a turnip-field, where once stood the church the colonists hastened to build. You would not imagine you stood on consecrated ground where holy rites were once performed. This was not the place where the holy sacrifice was first offered. Their first chapel was an Indian wigwam, which a friendly native gave up to Father White; for the colonists founded an Indian village here which owned the pacific rule of King Yaocomico, and established themselves in peace beside it. Opposite the place where the church stood, and east of it, are some traces of the lord proprietary's residence. The old cellar is nearly filled with rubbish, in which are found fragments of crockery and bricks—bricks brought from the old country. There were grand doings here once. Hilarity and merriment had their hours in that miniature court, amid those of grave deliberations. But, at last, Pallida Mors, "that at every door knocks," came in the train, and brought mourning to all the settlers; for here died Leonard Calvert. He was nursed in his last moments by his relatives Margaret and Mary Brent. He died on the 9th of June, 1647. The place of his burial is not known. In these days of woman's rights, it may not be amiss to recall the first woman in this country, perhaps, who asserted her claim to share the privileges of the stronger sex. Margaret Brent was appointed by Governor Calvert his sole administratrix, which is certainly a proof of her capacity for business. By virtue of this appointment she claimed to be the attorney of the lord proprietor. Her claims were admitted by the council. She then appeared in the general assembly, and claimed the right to vote as Lord Baltimore's representative. This was not permitted. She was a large land-owner, and displayed her energy in laying out her estates; and she quelled a mutiny among some Virginia soldiers who had served under Leonard Calvert. It is surprising the strong-minded women of this day have not brought forward this fine precedent, who has been ranked with the famous Margaret of Parma, regent of the Netherlands. Let us hope, with all her fine abilities, that she retained her sweet womanly ways and that modesty which is the charm of her sex. I fancy she did, or she would never have subdued those early representatives of the gallant Virginia chivalry.

Close by the lord proprietary's place is a spot charming enough for Egeria. It is a spring of delicious water bubbling up from the rocks, that flows off in a streamlet, over tufts of the thickest and greenest moss. It is shaded by a dense clump of cedars and holly bushes—-a fit haunt for the dryades and all the sylvan deities. The warm noontide air was fanned into this cool and leafy bower, where the birds still sang and insects floated, bringing with it a certain aroma from the crushed leaves of the wood. {369} From a distance came the measured cadence of some negro song, snatched up at the hour of noonday rest, which harmonized with the spot and the atmosphere. There is always an undertone of melancholy in the gayest songs of the colored race which lulls the heart, as sorrow underlies all gayety in the heart of man. It was a place to be alone with nature, poetry, God, and just the spot for an old hermit to set up his cell, and pass his days in sympathy with nature and in communion with nature's God.

With all its beauty, this plain of St. Mary's is full of melancholy, especially in the fall of the year. Haunted with memories, its loneliness is in such contrast with its past history that it touches the spring of regret. The autumn winds, the slight veil of haze that hangs over the landscape, are full of sadness. One seems to hear the wail of the forsaken lares whose altars have so long been levelled with the rest.

      "In consecrated earth,
       And on the holy hearth,
  The lares and lemures moan with midnight plaint."

The wailings of Jeremiah come to mind as we wander over the site of the city that was once full of people, but now sitteth solitary. "The city of thy sanctuary is become a desert, and the house of thy holiness and our glory, wherein thou wert praised, is laid desolate." Perhaps, after all, the melancholy was in my own heart; for the sky was clear, the earth smiling, and before us lay, glad and gleaming, the bright waters of the St. Mary's river,

  "Like any fair lake that the breeze is upon,
   When it breaks into dimples and laughs in the sun."

There is this peculiarity about the river: its windings are so abrupt that from certain points there seems to be no outlet, and it has the appearance of a succession of lakelets; pellucid gems set at this autumn time in bosses enamelled with every shade of crimson and gold, which I loved to think a bright rosary strung by nature in honor of Our Lady.

Two or three miles from St. Mary's is Rose Croft, a charming old place at the very point between St. Inigoes Creek and St. Mary's River. In old colonial times it was the residence of the collector of the port of St. Mary's, and here lived the heroine of Kennedy's Rob of the Bowl. As I rode up to it, I half expected to see the fair Blanche peeping out of the window to see if the carriage did not contain the secretary.

The house is a low, broad one, with verandas and porches, and large, airy rooms, which look out upon a lovely water view. There is a good deal of wainscoting about it, and some carvings in the large parlor that witnessed the birthday festivities. The lady of the house told me that, in making some repairs, a few years ago, a ring and a pair of velvet slippers were found, perhaps once worn by Blanche. All around the yard grows spontaneously the passion flower, winding over every shrub and tree, and trailing along the ground. Everything was left very much to nature, and she had thrown over the grounds a certain sad grace of her own, which harmonized with the antiquity of the house, and the echo of past times that lingered in its rooms. A spruce garden and well-trimmed trees and shrubbery would have ill accorded with such a spot. And there was a certain melancholy in the large, sad eyes of the mistress of this charming place that spoke more of the past than of the present, as if she had imbibed something of its spirit.

On the point between the river and creek, opposite Rose Croft, is St. Inigoes manor-house, belonging to the Jesuit fathers. St. Inigo, or St. Ignatius, was considered, from the first, as one of the patrons of the colony. This house is built of brick brought from the old country, perhaps two hundred years ago or more. It has quite a foreign look, with its high pitched roof and dormer windows. I have seen similar houses in the valley of the Loire. At a distance it looks, as Kennedy says, like a chateau with its dependencies around it. There is a huge windmill at the very point, around which are washed up fine black sand and some spiral shells. On the gable of the southern porch of the mansion is the holy name of Jesus, in large black letters—the cognizance of the Jesuits. The yard is a garden of roses. They grow in bushes, cover the cottages, and climb the trees, blooming often as late as Christmas tide. And the whole place is like an aviary—a rendezvous of all the martins, wrens, whippoorwills, etc., of the country—the very place for poor Miss Flite, who would never have found names enough for them. There are martin-houses, dove-cotes, and trees full of the American mocking-birds. When the windows of the chapel are open in the morning, it is filled with their musical variations, and with the perfume of the roses and honeysuckles. That chapel always seemed to me a little corner of heaven itself, full of the divine presence of which one never wearies. I often betook myself to that sweet solitude. There were memories that haunted me, an image between me and God, which I sought there to consecrate to him. I loved to think the little lamp could be seen all night from the very Potomac and miles up the St. Mary's River; perhaps lighting up in some dark and sinful soul some sweet thought of him before whom it burned.

A religious air prevails at St. Inigoes. Everything is quiet and subdued, and favorable to meditation. The day commences with Mass in the chapel. The Angelus is rung three times a day, which every one kneels to say. Even Nimrod, the dog, howls while it is ringing, as if infected by devotion. And they told me his predecessor would pull at the bell till it sounded, if it was not rung at the moment. Such devotional dogs certainly deserve a place—if it is not profane to say so—among those fine little dogs whom Luther declared would be among our companions in heaven, whose every hair would be tipped with precious stones and whose collars be of diamonds.[Footnote 86]

Everything about the house is extremely tidy and well preserved, the garden trim, the walks swept, the whole house a temple of purity and cleanliness. One could sit for ever in that southern porch reading and dreaming life away. Thought would flow on for ever with that current whose waters are as changeable in their aspect as our own varied moods. When so many live merely for the body, why should not some live for the imagination and fancy? This is the very place for Mr. Skimpole, who had no idea of time, no idea of money; who only wished to live, to have a little sun and air, and float about like a butterfly from flower to flower; who loved to see the sun shine, hear the wind blow, watch the changing lights and shadows, and hear the birds sing. He asked of society only to feed him, to give him a landscape, music, papers, mutton, coffee, and to leave him at peace from the sordid realities of the world.

In the dining-room is a large oval table of solid oak which once belonged to the house of the lord proprietary. It is not misplaced in this hospitable house. Daniel Webster, when at Piney Point, used to sail over to St. Inigoes and sit at Leonard Calvert's table. And he taught the cook how to make a genuine New England chowder.

There is, hung up in one of the rooms, a picture of the famous Prince Hohenlohe which interested me. I could not account for its being there till I learned that Father Carberry, a former incumbent, was a brother to Mrs. Mattingly, of Washington, who so many years ago was miraculously cured by the prayers of the holy prince—an occurrence that caused a great excitement at the time.

The parish church is about a half a mile from the manor-house. On Sundays and other festivals you can see boats full of people sailing up the creek. Others come flocking in on horseback or in carriages. A graveyard surrounds the church, which is so hid among the trees that it is not perceived till you are close upon it. The yard is filled before service with the country-people, who fasten their horses around the enclosure, and stand talking in groups, or go wandering around among the grassy mounds, reminding you of the English country church-yards. Our northern churches are almost so exclusively filled up with foreigners that it seemed strange to worship in a congregation almost wholly American. A gallery was appropriated to the colored people, and it was crowded. They seemed quite devout and kept up a great rattling with their large rosaries. I noticed that the father, in preaching, was careful to make them feel that his sermon was addressed as particularly to them as to the others. I was especially interested to see the number that came filing down the aisle to receive holy communion. Sunday after Sunday it was the same, and I was always affected to see these "images of God carved in ebony," as old Fuller calls them, at the holy table to receive Him who is no respecter of persons. In talking with the father about their devotional tendencies, he told me there was one saintly old negro who walked fifteen miles every Sunday to worship the Word made flesh. What an example to the cold and lukewarm in cities who daily pass our churches with scarcely a thought of the Presence within! This little church is a substantial one of brick, with arched windows, but no pretension as to architecture. When the services were over, the ladies all followed the priest into the sacristy to pay their respects to him, and there is a pleasant exchange of greetings which is pleasing and family-like. And many of the men, too, stroll around the building to the rear door to take part in it.

Wandering off into the churchyard, I came upon a large cross around which were clustered the graves of several priests. There is a large monument to the memory of Father Carberry, a genial old priest renowned throughout the country for his hospitality. Among those buried here is Mr. Daniel Barber, of New Hampshire, who became a convert to the Catholic Church, together with his son's whole family, at a time when converts were more rare than at the present time. The son, Rev. Virgil Barber, who was an Episcopal minister, with his wife and five children, embraced the religious life. One of the latter took the white veil at Mount Benedict, near Boston, and was remarkable for her beauty and accomplishments. She made her profession in Quebec, where she died young. {372} I have heard a nun of that house tell, and with great feeling, of her descending every morning to the chapel before the rest of the community, even in the rigorous winter of that latitude, to make the Way of the Cross, that touching devotion to the suffering Saviour.

The grandfather, Mr. Daniel Barber, who was also a minister, only took deacons' orders in the church on account of his age. He loved to visit the old Catholic families of St. Mary's, but was ill pleased when he did not find the cross—the sign of our salvation—in the apartment. "Where's your sign?" he would abruptly ask. He rests in peace in this quiet country church-yard.

The father at St. Inigoes has to possess a variety of accomplishments not acquired in the theological seminary. Priest, farmer, horseman, and boatman must all be combined to form the fine specimen of muscular Christianity required in this extensive mission. The place is no sinecure.

Good Father Thomas, obliged to visit a sick person at the very head of St. Mary's River, invited me to accompany him, and I gladly did so. Two colored servants went to manage the sail, or to row if necessary. The boat was black as a gondola of Venice. Sailing over these waters, where passed the Dove and the Ark, reminded me of the Père Jean and the novice René on the St. Lawrence. The whole country was, as we set out, glorified by the setting sun. The long points of land around which the river wound were bathed on one side by a golden mist, and on the other in a faint lilac. Over the gorgeous woods hung a purple haze that faded every instant. The amber clouds grew crimson, and then faded away into grey. The father said his breviary, leaving me to my own reflections a part of the way. There was not a ripple on the broad sheet save the receding ones left by our boat. Now and then we would stop to drink in the beauty of the scene—the sky, the water which reflected it, the lights and shadows on the banks, the melancholy cry of the whippoorwill, and the gay sounds of the laborers just through with their day's work. As it grew darker, the deep coves were filled with mysterious shades; the ripples left behind seemed tipped with a phosphorescent light. We glided at last into a sheltered cove just as the moon came out, giving enchantment to the whole scene. In such bright waters bathed Diana when Actaeon beheld her and was punished for his presumption. One of us repeated the beautiful lines of Shelley:

  "My soul is an enchanted boat,
   Which, like a sleeping swan, doth float
   Upon the silver waves of thy sweet singing;
     And thine doth like an angel sit
     Beside the helm conducting it,
   Whilst all the winds with melody are ringing.
     It seems to float ever, for ever
     Upon that many winding river,
     Between mountains, woods, abysses,
     A paradise of wildernesses!
   Till, like one in slumber bound,
   Borne to the ocean, I float down, around,
   Into a sea profound, of ever-spreading sound."

A May Carol.

  She hid her face from Joseph's blame,
    The Spirit's glory-shrouded bride.
  The Sword comes next; but first the Shame:
    Meekly she bore, and naught replied.

  For mutual sympathies we live:
    The outraged heart forgives, but dies:
  To her, that wound was sanative,
    For life to her was sacrifice.

  At us no random shaft is thrown
    When charged with crimes by us unwrought;
  For sins unchallenged, sins unknown,
    Too oft have stained us—act and thought.

  In past or present she could find
    No sin to weep for; yet, no less,
  Deeplier that hour the sense was shrined,
    In her, of her own nothingness.

  That hour foundations deeper yet
    God sank in her; that so more high
  Her greatness—spire and parapet—
    Might rise, and nearer to the sky:

  That, wholly overbuilt by grace,
    Nature might vanish, like some isle
  In great towers lost—the buried base
    Of some surpassing fortress pile.

                            Aubrey De Vere.

St. Peter, First Bishop of Rome.

The question of which we purpose to treat in this article is one of those that are sure to receive prominence whenever the claims of the Roman see are discussed with more than ordinary interest and warmth. Just now the "Anglo-Catholic" mind is exercised to find some way of establishing the existence of a one holy catholic and apostolic church, without admitting the supremacy of the bishop of Rome; besides, the approaching ecumenical council directs men's attention to the eternal city, and the high prerogatives of its pontiffs. Not unfrequently we meet with a broad denial that St. Peter ever was at Rome at all, or at least that he was ever bishop of Rome. This is not, indeed, the course pursued by the most learned or thoughtful amongst our opponents; they know history too well to stake their reputation for erudition or fairness on any such denial; but it is in favor with a lower or less instructed class of minds, and is adopted in text-books for theological seminaries, as well as in some popular works intended chiefly for the perusal of persons who, in all likelihood, may never have the opportunity, even should they have the inclination, of recurring to those more learned authorities by consulting whom the imposture would soon be detected. Thus it has come to pass that in popular works, lectures, magazine and newspaper articles, and the like, one frequently meets with the flippant assertion that it is very doubtful whether St. Peter ever was at Rome, that the place of his death is uncertain; all that we know for certain being that, shortly before his demise, he was in Babylon, whence he wrote his first letter. We shall endeavor to establish as a historical truth beyond all reasonable doubt, supported by evidence that must be admitted as sufficient by any unprejudiced critic, that St. Peter visited Rome, dwelt there, was first bishop of the Roman church, and there, together with St. Paul, laid down his life for his Master, in fulfilment of the latter's prophecy, "When thou wilt be old, thou wilt stretch forth thy hands, and another will gird thee, and lead thee whither thou wouldst not;" words which, as the inspired writer tells us, signified "by what death he should glorify God." [Footnote 87]

The question has been so fully discussed, that we may not hope to say anything that will be considered new; to the learned reader, indeed, we can but repeat a "thrice-told tale;" but, as the adversaries of the holy see do not disdain to furbish up the arms which have already been stricken from the hands of their predecessors, we shall be content to draw from the same arsenals whence our fathers drew the weapons that they knew how to wield so skilfully and successfully. All that we ask of the non-Catholic reader is, that he approach the question as a merely historical one, to be judged on the ordinary rules of historical evidence. All dogmatical preoccupations against the supremacy of the Roman pontiffs should be laid aside. {375} This is demanded by fairness and a sincere love of truth; besides, although we acknowledge that to establish St. Peter's Roman bishopric is, if not an indispensable, at least a very important, preliminary to the successful assertion of the Roman primacy, yet the ablest amongst Protestant theologians have thought that, even admitting the historical fact, they could successfully refute the dogma. Our inquiry, then, shall be purely historical, to be decided on purely historical grounds. At the beginning of this century, no one having any pretensions to historical learning attempted to deny that St. Peter had really lived and died at Rome. Such high names in the Anglican Church as Cave, Pearson, and Dodwell had given their unbiassed and positive testimony to the truth. Whiston had said: "That St. Peter was at Rome is so clear in Christian antiquity, that it is a shame for a Protestant to confess that any Protestant ever denied it." But, about this period, the rage for the new system of biblical interpretation raised doubts about the accepted meaning of the word Babylon in the thirteenth verse of the fifth chapter of the first epistle of St. Peter, and the question whether the apostle ever was at Rome again came up for discussion. Very little new has been said, so that little remains to be confuted. We repeat, we have merely to sum up what has been well and conclusively said before. We have before us a work entitled An Exposition of the Thirty-nine Articles, Historical and Doctrinal, by Edward Harold Browne, lord bishop of Ely, in which [Footnote 88] the author endeavors to confute "the position of the Roman Church, that St. Peter was bishop of Rome."

As this work is used as a text-book in the New York Protestant Episcopal Seminary, and may, therefore, be supposed to furnish ideas and facts on church questions to the average Episcopalian clerical mind, we shall follow the author in his argument, and show how a plain tale can put down all his ingenious explanations and evasions.

The plain statement is as follows: The earliest and most reliable documents of Christian antiquity, with a clearness and unanimity that leave no room for doubt or cavil, state that St. Peter was at Rome, took a special care of the Roman Church, and died there. The bishops of Rome are always represented as his successors, not merely in that inheritance which has come down to all bishops from the apostles, but as his successors in his Cathedra, or episcopal chair. Our witnesses are numerous; their knowledge and fidelity are unimpeachable; their statements cannot be evaded or explained away; and thus the Roman bishopric of St. Peter is as undoubted a fact of ecclesiastical history as any other in the earlier ages. We shall give the proofs one by one, confining ourselves to the first three centuries.

St. Clement, who was certainly bishop of Rome, and who, according to Tertullian was ordained by Peter, in his epistle to the Corinthians—admitted as genuine by the best authorities—referring to the late persecution of the Roman Church under Nero, mentions among other troubles the recent martyrdom of SS. Peter and Paul, alleging them as noble examples of patience under tribulation. We have here a witness on the spot, who had seen the apostles, and been a special disciple of St. Peter.

We have next another apostolic father, St. Ignatius of Antioch, who suffered martyrdom about A.D. 107, and in a letter to the Romans speaks of SS. Peter and Paul as their special preceptors and masters: "I do not command you as Peter and Paul; I am a condemned man." {376} It is to be remarked that no one attempts to deny that St. Paul was at Rome, as one of his journeys thither is related in the last chapter of the Acts, and he speaks of himself as in that city; [Footnote 89] the union of St. Peter's name with his, as both commanding the Romans, shows that the former apostle had been with them in person as well as Paul.

[Footnote 89: 2 Tim. i. 17. This letter would seem to have been written not long before the apostle's death. See ch. iv. 6,7.]

Papias, Bishop of Hierapolis, probably a disciple of St. John the Apostle, as quoted by Eusebius, says that St. Mark wrote his gospel from the preaching of St. Peter at Rome, [Footnote 90] and that the apostle wrote his first letter from the same place, calling it Babylon. [Footnote 91]

[Footnote 90: Eus. Hist. Eccl. lib. iii. c..39.]

[Footnote 91: Ibid. lib. iii. c. I.]

St. Dionysius of Corinth wrote a letter to the Roman Church under the pontificate of Soter, (A.D. 151-170,) which is also quoted by Eusebius, [Footnote 92] in which he says that SS. Peter and Paul, after planting the faith at Corinth, went into Italy, planted the faith amongst the Romans, and there sealed their testimony with their blood.

St. Irenaeus, (Bishop of Lyons A.D. 178,) a disciple of Polycarp, who was himself a hearer of the Apostle John, speaks of the Roman Church as "the greatest and most ancient church, known to all, founded and established at Rome by the two most glorious apostles, Peter and Paul. [Footnote 93]

He adds: "The blessed apostles having founded and arranged the church, delivered its bishopric and administration to Linus. To him succeeded Anacletus, after him Clement, to him Evaristus, and to Evaristus, Alexander. The sixth from the apostles was Sixtus, after him Telesphorus, next Hyginus; then Pius, after whom came Anicetus. Soter succeeded Anicetus, and now the bishopric is held by Eleutherius, the twelfth from the apostles." This is an authentic list of the bishops of Rome from the apostles to the writer's time, placing the date of his work between A.D. 170 and 185, the fifteen years of the pontificate of Eleutherius.

Cajus, a priest of Rome under Zephyrinus, who governed the church during the first seventeen years of the third century, says, in a work quoted by Eusebius, [Footnote 94] but now lost: "I can show you the trophies of the apostles; for whether we go to the Vatican or the Ostian way, we shall meet with the trophies of the founders of this church." This is remarkable testimony to the accuracy of the tradition that prevails to this day of the places where the apostles were buried—St. Peter at the Vatican, St. Paul in the Ostian way, which now are marked by "trophies," greater in splendor and magnificence, but raised by the same spirit of reverence and love as those which this Roman priest pointed out in the third century.

Tertullian flourished about the same period, for he died A.D. 216. Speaking in his great work On Prescriptions [Footnote 95] of apostolic churches, he says: "If you are near Italy, you have Rome, whence we also [the African Church] derive our origin. How happy is this church on which the apostles poured forth their whole doctrine with their blood; where Peter by his martyrdom is made like the Lord; where Paul is crowned with a wreath like that of John!" Again: "Let us see … what the Romans proclaim in our ears, they to whom Peter and Paul left the Gospel sealed with their blood." [Footnote 96]

And speaking in the book On Prescriptions of the origin of apostolic churches, he calls on heretics to "unfold the series of their bishops, coming down from the beginning in succession, so that the first bishop was appointed and preceded by any one of the apostles, or apostolic men in communion with the apostles. [Footnote 97] For in this way the apostolic churches exhibit their origin; … as the Church of Rome relates that Clement was ordained by Peter." [Footnote 98] Clement of Alexandria (who died A.D. 222) states that St. Paul wrote his gospel at the request of the Romans, who wished to have a written record of what they had heard from St. Peter. [Footnote 99]

[Footnote 97: "Ut primus ille episcopus aliquem ex Apostolis habuerit auctorum et antecessorem." ]

[Footnote 98: Ch. 32.]

[Footnote 99: Eus. Hist. Eccl. lib. vi. c. 14. ]

Origen, (A.D. 185-255,) who visited Rome under the pontificate of Zephyrinus, says that St. Peter having preached to the Jews in Pontus, Galatia, Bithynia, Cappadocia, and Asia, toward the end of his life [Footnote 100] came to Rome, and was crucified with his head downward. [Footnote 101]

[Footnote 100: [Greek text

]

[Footnote 101: Quoted by Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. lib. iii. C. II.]

St. Cyprian, (Bishop of Carthage A.D. 248, put to death for the faith A.D. 258,) speaking of the irregular proceedings of some local schismatics who had appealed to Pope Cornelius, says: "They venture to set sail, and carry letters from schismatical and profane men to the chair of Peter, and to the principal church, whence sacerdotal unity has arisen." [Footnote 102] And in another letter he speaks of the election of Cornelius, "when the place of Fabian, that is, the place of Peter, and the rank of the priestly chair, was vacant." [Footnote 103] Even Bishop Hopkins, whom his friends cannot blame for too great facility in his concessions, admits that St. Cyprian acknowledged that St. Peter was bishop of Rome.

[Footnote 102: Epist. 59, ad Cornel.]

[Footnote 103: Epist. 52, ad Antonianum.]

We do not wish to go beyond the three hundred years immediately following the death of the apostle, and shall therefore omit here the clear and unmistakable statements of Optatus, Jerome, Epiphanius, Augustine, and others, closing with the account given by Eusebius of Caesarea, (bishop A.D. 315-340,) who is justly regarded as the father of ecclesiastical history, and of the greatest weight in historical matters. His accuracy and research are universally acknowledged, and his authority alone is generally regarded as conclusive. [Footnote 104] He says that Simon Magus went to Rome, and that "against this bane of mankind, the most merciful and kind Providence conducted to Rome Peter, the most courageous and the greatest among the apostles, who on account of his virtue was leader of all." [Footnote 105] He adds in his chronicle: "Having first founded the Church of Antioch, he goes to Rome, where, preaching the gospel, he continues twenty-five years bishop of the same city."

[Footnote 104: "In questions of critical investigation regarding the early church, no writer bears with him greater authority than that of the learned Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea. Removed only by two hundred years from the apostolic times, and being attached to the imperial court, and having at his command all the literary treasures of the Caesarean library, he ever displays a profound knowledge of the earlier Christian writers, and at the same time a truly refined critical acumen in discriminating between their genuine productions and those falsely assigned to them." —Dublin Review, June,1858, art. vii.]

[Footnote 105: Hist. Eccl. lib. ii. c. xiv.]

We have here a continuous series of witnesses, from those who had seen and conversed with the Apostle St. Peter to the date of the first work on ecclesiastical history now extant, all of whom clearly testify to the fact that he visited Rome, took special charge of the Roman Church, and there died a martyr, as our Lord had foretold he would die. After the apostolic writers, who, from the proximity of the events to their own time, could not be mistaken, the most important witnesses are Irenaeus and Origen, Tertullian and Cyprian. {378} The two former had visited Rome, and are competent witnesses of the tradition of the Roman Church, the most important of all in this matter; the two latter can testify to the same tradition, both because missionaries from Rome planted the faith in Africa, and because the constant intercourse, as well in ecclesiastical as in civil affairs, between the capital of the empire and Carthage, must necessarily have brought about a community of traditions between the two churches. The whole ancient church thus bears witness to what some Protestants now vainly affect to deny. Greece, Asia Minor, Syria, Egypt, Northern Africa, Gaul, Palestine, repeat what Clement, ordained by Peter, tells. The second century takes up the fact from those who had seen the apostles; the third learns it from the second, and the father of ecclesiastical history relates it as a matter beyond doubt, found by him in those ancient records, for the greater part since lost, the gist of which he has fortunately preserved to posterity. Scarcely any matter of fact—and this is a mere matter of fact—connected with the early age of the church, leaving out those recorded in the sacred pages, is better attested.

To these written records we must add the expressive testimony of the catacombs. It is impossible to visit them without feeling that the Roman Christians looked on the apostles Peter and Paul as the founders of their local church. Eusebius was struck by the "monuments marked with the names of Peter and Paul," which he saw in the cemeteries at Rome, and these have been discovered, in modern times, by the indefatigable industry of Christian antiquarians; they are a living testimony to the fact that St. Peter, as well as St. Paul, labored in Rome. The illustrious Cardinal Borgia has traced the tradition in regard to the presence of St. Peter's body in the Vatican from the beginning of the third century, [Footnote 106] when, as we have seen, Cajus, a priest of Rome, in a work against heretics, [Footnote 107] spoke of the trophy of Peter in the Vatican, down to the days of Pope Urban VIII. And thus the most splendid monument Christianity has erected to the worship of the living God is also an authentic record of the fact that the chief of the apostles selected the city of Rome, in a special manner, as the scene of his labors, and there consummated his glorious career in the service of his Master. No wonder learned Protestants are ashamed to join with their more ignorant brethren. One learned German writer of this century says: "There is, perhaps, no event in ancient (church) history so clearly placed beyond doubt by the consenting testimony of ancient Christian writers as that of Peter having been at Rome." [Footnote 108] Another more forcibly, if possible, remarks: "Nothing but the polemics of faction have induced some Protestants, especially Spanheim, in imitation of some mediaeval opponents of the popes, to deny that Peter ever was at Rome." [Footnote 109]

[Footnote 106: In the work Vaticana Confessio B. Petri.]

[Footnote 107: The Montanists.]

[Footnote 108: Berthold, Historisch-Krit. Inlet. in A. und N. T. apud Perrone.]

[Footnote 109: Gieseler, Lehrbuch der Kirchengesch. Ibid.]

A caviller may, indeed, say that all these witnesses prove, at most, that Peter was at Rome, not that he was bishop of Rome. And this is the point made by Bishop Browne, in the work to which we have referred.

"It is not to be doubted," he says, "that a tradition did exist in early times that St. Peter was bishop of Rome. But if that tradition be submitted, like others of the same kind, to the test of historical investigation, it will be found to rest on a very slender foundation. {379} In the first place, Scripture is silent about his having been at Rome—a remarkable silence, if his having been bishop there was a fact of such vital importance to the church as Roman divines have made it to be. Then, the first tradition of his having been at Rome at all does not appear for more than a century after his death. It is nearly two centuries after that event that we meet with anything like the opinion that the Roman bishops were his successors. It is three centuries before we find him spoken of as bishop of Rome. But when we reach three centuries and a half, we are told that he not only was bishop of Rome, but that he resided five and twenty years at Rome; a statement utterly irreconcilable with the history of the New Testament." [Footnote 110]

There is, indeed, no good reason to doubt that St. Peter was at Rome; that he assisted St. Paul to order and establish the church there; that, in conjunction with Paul, he ordained one or more of its earliest bishops, and that there he suffered death for the sake of Christ. But there is no reason to believe that he was ever, in any proper or local sense, bishop of Rome." [Footnote 111]

We leave aside for the present the alleged silence of the New Testament. In the first place, it is not true that "the first tradition of Peter's having been at Rome does not appear for more than a century after his death." Clement of Rome, Ignatius of Antioch, Papias, Dionysius of Corinth, belong to this period, and all unmistakably testify to Peter's having been at Rome. Irenaeus may be fairly counted also, as he was sent from Lyons to Rome in A.D. 177. Of these, Bishop Browne mentions only Papias and Irenaeus. He quotes Papias's opinion about the word Babylon in St. Peter's first Epistle, and tries to set it aside. But, whatever the exegetical value of the opinion, it is proof that Papias held it as an undoubted fact that St. Peter was at Rome; besides, he also states that Mark wrote his gospel at Rome, under the eye of Peter. Nor is it at all pertinent to say that Eusebius tells us that Papias was a narrow-minded man, and an enthusiast about the Apocalypse. Neither narrow-mindedness nor enthusiasm prevents men from being competent witnesses to simple facts, and the one about which we are now inquiring is a simple fact. The only question is—Could Papias have known for certain whether St. Peter was at Rome or not? He lived in the apostolic age, not half a century after the death of the apostle. This is a sufficient answer, and his views about either Babylon or the Apocalypse cannot impair its sufficiency. As to Irenaeus, our lord bishop quibbles in a way that is not handsome. He tries to break down his and other writers' testimony by alleging, first, that they disagree as to the first bishop of Rome after St. Peter; second, that they disagree about the time St. Peter came to Rome.

We are almost ashamed to have to answer such quibbling. Neither disagreement at all touches the substantial part of the narrative. Neither is as great as our expounder of the articles, in his despair, tries to make it. Neither could ever have been alleged in ordinary controversy. All authors, save Tertullian, mention Linus as first bishop of Rome after Peter. The African father in reality says only that Clement was ordained by Peter; the context, however, would suggest that he supposed he was the immediate successor of the apostle. The truth appears to be that Linus, Cletus, and Clement were consecrated bishops by one or the other of the apostles. This was commonly done in the first age; only one person in every city possessed episcopal jurisdiction, but more clergymen than one were frequently invested with the episcopal order. This was done in the Roman Church. St. Peter was its first bishop; after his death, Linus, Cletus, Clement governed it in succession, all three having been ordained by the apostles. {380} There is nothing in this supposition at all at variance with what is known to have been the common practice of the first age, a practice which it is not ingenuous in the lord bishop of Ely to suppress. As to the discrepancy about the time of the apostle's coming to Rome, it is easily explained on the commonly received hypothesis that St. Peter twice visited Rome. Eusebius says that he went first under Claudius. He was obliged to leave Italy in consequence of that emperor's decree banishing thence the Jews. He returned thither, toward the end of his life, and there suffered martyrdom. But it is plain that such discrepancies cannot affect the substance, namely, that Peter was at Rome; indeed, they are intelligible only on the supposition that all the authors quoted held the main fact as certain. It is plain also that there is not the slightest foundation for the lord bishop's assertion that "at whatever time St. Peter came to Rome, there was some one else bishop of Rome then." The courage required for this assertion can be measured from another statement, just four lines above: "All (the early writers) agree in saying that the first bishop of the see was Linus." This is simply shameful. Put after "see" the words after Peter, and the quotation will be correct. But then what becomes of the bishop's argument? He says Linus was bishop of Rome when Peter went thither; and he also admits that "some (early writers) say that St. Paul, others that St. Peter and St. Paul, ordained him." These latter writers surely did not suppose that St. Peter ordained a man in Rome before he himself ever went to Rome. The bishop clearly does not stick at trifles. His chronology is also entirely at fault. He says that it "is three centuries (after St. Peter's death) before we find him spoken of as bishop of Rome." But St. Cyprian, whom even Bishop Hopkins admits spoke thus of the apostle, was put to death before the end of the second century from St. Peter's martyrdom. He sneers at the statement that St. Peter was five-and-twenty years bishop of Rome; yet he admits that it is based on the authority of that eminent and judicious critic, St. Jerome, who, from his high position under Pope Damasus, had abundant opportunity for an accurate examination of the then extant records. In reality, it is based on an earlier authority, the great historian Eusebius. It is plain that his polemic system is simply factious; he ignores some authorities, misconstrues others, miscalculates dates, and mistakes mere accessories for the principal fact; such a course is not only a crime against historical truth, it is also a blunder, for it can mislead only the unlearned or the unwary reader.

The writers of the first age do not, it is true, assert in so many words that St. Peter was bishop of Rome. The reason is obvious. Treating of other matters, their allusions are merely incidental, such as we might expect immediately after the death of SS. Peter and Paul, and relating chiefly to the fact of the apostle's connection with the Roman Church, or his martyrdom there. For these facts they are unanswerable authority. These are a necessary preliminary to the assertion of St. Peter's Roman bishopric. This fact is broadly stated as soon as we meet with the polemical development of the doctrine of apostolic succession. Tertullian, in the text we have quoted from the book On Prescriptons, where he accurately defines in what this succession consists, namely, that the first bishop was appointed and preceded by an apostle or an apostolic man, (Apostolum … habuerit auctorem et antecessorem,) says that in the Roman Church Clement was ordained by Peter. {381} Tracing thus the succession in Rome from Peter, not from Paul, whose death in the imperial city he mentions, he shows that he knew Peter was the bishop of the see. St. Cyprian uses unmistakable language on the same subject, and Eusebius asserts positively that St. Peter was bishop of Rome. We might quote other catalogues, but, though of great authority, they are of a more recent date. But we shall give two more authorities which can be connected with the period to which we have confined ourselves. St. Jerome [Footnote 112] positively states that St. Peter held the episcopal chair (cathedram sacerdotalem) of Rome for twenty-five years. His historical knowledge and critical acumen give to his words the authority of a statement based on the very best records of the early age. No one can deny that in the latter half of the fourth century there were such records at Rome. St. Optatus of Millevi, in Africa, (A.D. 370,) in a controversial work against the Donatists, speaks of St. Peter's Roman bishopric as a matter of notoriety, which no one would dare deny. "You ought to know," says he to the Donatist leader, Parmenian, "and you dare not deny, that Peter established at Rome an episcopal chair, which he was the first to occupy, in order that through (communion with) this one chair all might preserve unity." [Footnote 113]

A statement made so positively, so unhesitatingly, so boldly, must have been founded on the very best historical evidence. And the nineteenth century must accept the judgment of competent writers of the fourth on such a subject. Unless, then, we wish to deny all authority to authentic record of the early age of the church, we must conclude, with the good leave of the lord bishop of Ely, that there is excellent reason to believe that St. Peter was bishop of Rome. Nor is there any force in the bishop's remark that all the apostles had the world for their diocese, and were not confined to any particular city. We do not, of course mean to say that St. Peter confined his preaching to Rome. He was apostle as well as head of the church. As apostle, he preached chiefly to the Jews. As head of the church, he chose for his episcopal see the capital of the world, in order that there might be no doubts about the legitimate heir of his great dignity. For this reason we find him in Rome among the Gentiles, though St. Paul had a special mission to them. Dr. Browne says Peter was St. Paul's assistant at Rome; and this, in the face of the facts that every writer, from Clement down, puts him before the great vessel of election, and that St. Paul himself, as we shall see, speaks of his ministry to the Romans as one merely of mutual consolation, a tone he never adopted toward a church which he himself had founded. We have purposely left to the last the argument based on the alleged silence of the New Testament, because we wished to clear an historical question of all purely exegetical difficulties. We have established our thesis on indubitable evidence; we might rest here and simply say that, inasmuch as no one pretends that the New Testament contains the entire history of the apostles, its silence cannot affect the certainty of our proposition. This silence may puzzle the curious reader; it may be variously interpreted, according to the theological bent of the student; but it cannot disprove facts which are proved by historical authority. {382} Bishop Browne feels the force of this, and does not insist much on the silence of the New Testament. He merely remarks that this silence is strange, if St. Peter's Roman bishopric be as important as Roman divines make it out to be. Strictly speaking, we might let this pass, as we are not now concerned in establishing the supremacy of the Roman pontiffs, but merely treating the historical question, Who was first bishop of Rome? We may observe, however, that no believer in the doctrine of apostolical succession can consistently urge this silence. How does Dr. Browne trace his succession in the office of bishop from the apostles? Is it from St. Peter? Then he has to meet the same objection about the silence of the New Testament on what, from his point of view, is a vital matter. Is it from St. Paul? But there is no scriptural evidence that St. Paul ever ordained a bishop in Rome, or anywhere in the west. Is it from any other apostle? The same remark holds good. No claim to apostolical succession can be established for any see in the western church unless on the evidence of tradition. This is virtually admitted by Dr. Browne himself.

Since, however, the silence of the New Testament is commonly urged as affording presumptive evidence that St. Peter never was at Rome, we shall examine all that Protestants have to say on the subject. The principal text—the only one having direct reference to the subject—is I Peter v. 13: "The church which is in Babylon, elected together with you, saluteth you, and so doth Mark, my son." Nearly all ancient writers, commencing with Papias, say that this letter was written at Rome, which city St. Peter designates under the name of Babylon. Our Protestant opponents, of course, reject this interpretation. Now, we wish it to be understood that we do not allege this text to prove that St. Peter wrote from Rome. We admit that, taken in itself, apart from tradition, it is obscure, and can afford, at best, ground but for conjecture. But, having established beyond all doubt the fact that St. Peter was at Rome, we follow the interpretation of the respectable ancient writers whom we have quoted. When the letter was written, old Babylon of Assyria was in ruins, according to Strabo and Pliny; and the Jews, to whom St. Peter wrote, had been banished from Assyria, according to Josephus; and, though Seleucia was afterward called Babylon, it had not received the name at this early period. Some think that the Babylon referred to was in Egypt, the place now called Cairo. But it was then but a fort, or fortified village, (castellum,) and the Christian church of Egypt has always looked on Alexandria as its birthplace. St. Peter, moreover, warns the Christians of the approaching persecution, and exhorts them to be subject to the emperor and his subordinates. These allusions come very naturally from the pen of one writing at Rome, but are almost unintelligible if we suppose the writer in Babylon of Assyria, out of the Roman empire. The opinion that the letter was written at Rome, called Babylon by St. Peter for some reason which we can only conjecture, is based on excellent ancient authority, agrees with well-known facts of history, and with the internal evidence of the letter itself. Leaving aside its bearings on the main question we are discussing, it is by far the most probable view, and, in any other case, would be accepted without difficulty. [Footnote 114]

[Footnote 114: Occasionally the love of novelty induces some Catholic writer to differ from his brethren. This is the case with Hug, who holds that we cannot admit mystical names in the letters of the apostles, as there is no instance of their use, save in this disputed case. This is criticism based on internal evidence run mad. One would suppose that there was a perfect course of sacred epistolary literature in the New Testament, based on fixed rules, instead of a few detached letters, written by different authors at different times, without any communication or agreement with one another about literary style. There is nothing more fallacious than the interpretation of any of the letters of the apostles on mere internal evidence. Hug's remark at most shows that internal evidence does not afford any proof that St. Peter meant Rome, which no one will deny.]

Protestants, moreover, commonly allege the absence of any mention of St. Peter's voyage to Rome in the Acts of the Apostles, and the absence of any reference to him, either in St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans or in those he wrote from Rome. The silence of the Acts is easily explained. After the council of Jerusalem, the writer relates only the missionary labors of St. Paul, so that we could not expect any mention of St. Peter's voyages. Dr. Browne infers from Acts xxviii. 22, that "the Jews of Rome had had no communication with any chief teacher among the Christians." This inference is not borne out by the text, "We desire to hear from thee what thou thinkest; or as concerning this sect, we know that it is everywhere opposed." The obvious meaning is that the Jews of Rome knowing that Paul was a Pharisee learned in the law, wished to hear what he had to say in favor of the new religion. They must have looked on St. Peter as a Galilean fisherman, who had no right to attempt to expound the law and the prophets. It is puerile for Dr. Browne to allege that they should have heard him with respect because he was the apostle of the circumcision; for, of what importance could this title be in their eyes, if they did not believe in Him who sent the apostles?

If St. Peter went to Rome in the reign of Claudius, he certainly was afterward absent from the city, as we find him after this period at the council of Jerusalem. His absence from Rome accounts for the fact that St. Paul does not salute him in his Epistle to the Romans, a straw at which some Protestant writers clutch with great avidity. The great respect with which St. Paul speaks of the Roman Church, whose faith, he says, was spoken of in the whole world, agrees with the supposition that St. Peter had already preached there. On these words, [Footnote 115] "For I long to see you, that I may impart to you some spiritual gift, that ye may be strengthened; that is, I may be comforted together with you, by that which is common to us both, your faith and mine." Theodoret remarks as follows: "Because the great Peter had first given them the doctrine of the gospel, he said merely,'that ye may be strengthened.' I do not wish, he says, to bring a new doctrine to you, but to confirm that which you have received, and to water the trees which have already been planted." [Footnote 116]

The words certainly indicate that the faith had already been firmly established by some teacher of high rank, and are a very apposite commentary on Dr. Browne's reason why the Jews, some years afterward, were anxious to hear St. Paul. We cannot really understand what hallucination led him to quote these words to show that St. Paul writes much as "if no apostle had ever been amongst the Romans." But we admire his prudence in giving purely a reference, not the words of the text. His other reference to Rom. xv. 15-24 is even more unlucky. St. Paul therein says plainly that he generally preached, "not where Christ was named," lest he should build on another man's foundation. {384} "For which cause," he adds, "I have been much hindered from coming to you." Therefore some other apostle had preached to the Romans. He even goes on to say that he hoped to be gratified in his desire of seeing them, when on his way to Spain, so that it is plain that he, though apostle of the Gentiles, considered there was no necessity for his making a journey to Rome on purpose to instruct the Roman Church. St. Paul, then, writes very much as if an apostle had been with the Romans. Whatever else Dr. Browne does, he ought to quote Scripture fairly. St. Paul's allusions, obscure though they may be to us, were, of course, clear to those to whom they were written. No familiar letter can be fully understood without taking into account the facts which, being well known to those to whom he writes, the author merely alludes to in a passing way.

The letters which St. Paul wrote from Rome were all written during his first stay there, with the probable exception of the second to Timothy. Colossians iv. II, and 2 Timothy iv. 16, are quoted to show that St. Peter was not at Rome, else he would have stood by St. Paul. But the epistle to the Colossians was written during St. Paul's first imprisonment, when St. Peter, as we have seen, must have been absent, and in the second to Timothy he speaks expressly of his "first defence." Most writers think he refers to his first imprisonment. Others suppose him to speak of a preliminary hearing before Nero, during his second imprisonment. Admitting this interpretation, he cannot include St. Peter, who was his fellow-prisoner, in the list of those who had forsaken him. The words apply to persons at large, who had influence with the authorities, which they did not use.

We have thus fully examined all that Protestants allege concerning the silence of the New Testament. The candid reader will see that there is nothing in the sacred pages to contradict the historical facts we have established; the allusions of St. Paul to the instruction of the Romans in the faith by a teacher of high rank, and the interpretation of the word Babylon in St. Peter's first letter, which has come down to us from the apostolic age, must be counted in their favor.

It is on historical evidence that the case must rest; and on it, as we have rehearsed it, we are satisfied to submit it to unprejudiced criticism. The testimony of the apostolic age, and the two immediately following, is conclusive; it cannot be explained away; much less can it be impeached. We must give up all belief in well-authenticated history, or else admit that St. Peter went to Rome, founded the church there, and was its first bishop, and there died a martyr of Christ.

  "O Roma felix, quae duorum principum
     Es consecrata glorioso sanguine
   Horum cruore purpurata ceteras
     Excellis orbis una pulchritudines."

  "O happy Rome! whom the great Apostles' blood
     For ever consecrates while ages flow:
   Thou, thus empurpled, art more beautiful
     Than all that doth appear most beautiful below."

Eusebius says that St. Peter established his see at Antioch in the last year of Tiberius, who died March fifteenth, A.D. 37. It was probably, therefore, in the year 36; and St. Ignatius, the second successor of St. Peter in that see; St. John Chrysostom, who had been a priest there; Origen and St. Jerome, as well as Eusebius, state that he governed that church seven years; which probably means, not that his episcopate was just of that length, but, that seven calendar years were included (the first and the last partially) in it. {385} At any rate, this would make the establishment of his see in Rome in A.D. 42 or 43; and the day celebrated by the church is January 18th. Now, Eusebius, St. Jerome, Cassiodorus, and others say that SS. Peter and Paul were put to death in the fourteenth year of Nero, that is, in A.D. 67; and their martyrdom is celebrated on June 29th. This gives twenty-four and a half or twenty-five and a half years for St. Peter's Roman episcopate, or twenty-five years in the sense that the Antiochan was seven, if he came to Rome in 43; in which case he may even have established his see at Antioch in 37.

St. John Chrysostom says that St. Paul's life after his conversion was thirty-five years; which would make that event to have occurred in A.D. 32 or 33. He himself says (Gal. i.) that three years afterward he went to Jerusalem, and thence to Tarsus, as is also stated in Acts ix. From this place he was called to preach to the church at Antioch, as mentioned in Acts xi.; and this visit, which could not have much preceded the establishment of St. Peter's see there, may well have been in A.D. 35 or 36, agreeing with the chronology given above.

These dates do not agree with that commonly assigned for the crucifixion; but numerous evidences show that this occurred in the year 29. As late a date as A.D. 31 might, however, be allowed.

A Ruined Life.

She stood before the stove in my front office, on that dark December day, and the steam from her wet, heated garments almost concealed her from my sight. Yet the first glimpse I caught of her, through the partition door, excited my interest to an unusual degree; and, though I saw her not again for a half hour, that one glance fixed her features in my memory as indelibly as they are printed there to-day.

It was term time, and the second return-day of the term. For ten days my eyes and brain had both been crowded with all that varied detail of business which sessions aggregate upon the hands and conscience of a rising lawyer; and the musty retinue of assumpsit, ejectment, and scire-facias had nearly vexed and worn out the little life I had at the beginning. But the criminal week, which was my peculiar sphere, was close at hand, and I looked to its exciting, riskful cases as a relief from the dull, dreary current of civil forms and practice.

The little room I dignified with the name of "front office" was filled, as far as seats went, with rough backwoodsmen, witnesses on behalf of a gentleman who occupied with me the snugly carpeted "sanctum" in the rear. While we discussed together the points of strength or weakness to be tested at the impending trial, the voices of the rude laborers reached us brokenly, and more than once words fell upon my ear which made me tremble for the sensibilities of the lonely woman who was with them. {386} They meant no harm, those bluff, hearty men. A tear from her drooping eyes would have unmanned them. But they were not well-bred, nor tender to the weakness of the other sex. My poor client, as she afterward became, stood while they sat, kept silence while they laughed and jeered each other. It was not their fault that they never minded her. They were not hypocrites, that's all.

At length I had the happiness to see the door close on the last of them, and, after arranging the maps and diagrams which would be needed on the morrow, I called to the stranger to come in. She obeyed, hesitatingly, and then, for the first time, I saw that she belonged to that most forlorn and pitiable of all the many classes who throng around our mining districts, the recent Irish emigrant. The very clothes she wore were the same with which she dressed herself in the green isle far away, and her voice and manner had not yet caught that flippancy and pertness which pass among the longer landed for tokens of American independence and equality. She was certainly very poor, or the rough, wintry winds would not have been permitted to toss her long, black hair in tangled masses around her shoulders, or drop their melting snowflakes on her uncovered head. My chivalric interest died without time to groan, and whatever thought of profit or romance in assisting her I might have had, at the first sight of her, perished at the same instant. But I saw poverty and sorrow, and I determined in my heart, before she told her errand, that my life of legal labor should embrace at least one act done thoroughly and for nothing.

Her story was a short one. Her husband and herself had lived in a neighboring village. Others of their own people dwelt around them, and among these was an old woman and her son. No difficulty, that she knew of, had ever risen between her family and theirs. But, a few days before, as her husband was gathering fuel by the roadside, these two had rushed out on him, and in cold blood murdered him. The son had fled, and the murderer's mother, with barred doors and windows, forbade the vicinage of friend or foe. The broken-hearted wife, urged on to take such vengeance as the law afforded, had come to me and asked my counsel and assistance.

It was of little use to question her. Like most of her peculiar class, her mind could entertain but one idea, and that, in some form or other, recurred in answer to every inquiry I could make. Satisfying myself, however, that a murder had really been committed, and taking down such names and dates as were necessary for the initial steps of prosecution, I sent her home, with the assurance that justice should be done her, and her dead husband's ghost avenged.

The warrant was issued, the arrest made, the indictment found, the trial finished. There was no doubt of guilt. The murder was committed in the broad light of day, and many eyes had seen it. The counsel for the defence had felt the untenability of his position before a tithe of the evidence was in, and slipped down from innocence to justifiability, until his last hope for the prisoner was in the allegation of insanity, late suggested and faintly urged. It was useless. The twelve inexorable men brought in their verdict of "wilful murder," and Bridget Davanagh was sentenced to be hanged by the neck till she was dead.

It has never been my custom to follow cases, on which the solemn judgment of the law has been pronounced, beyond those immediate consequences of that judgment which the connection between a lawyer and his client has compelled me to superintend. But there was something in this case which both attracted and disquieted me, and one day in vacation I found myself at the grated prison-door, seeking admission to the cell of the condemned. The old woman received me quietly. She seemed to have forgotten me, or, at least, how active a part I had taken in the proceedings which had ended in dooming her to a shameful death. She was taciturn and moody; and, the longer I remained, the more satisfied I became that her mind was now unsettled, if it had not been before. I went several times after that, and gradually, by kind words and the gift of such simple comforts as aged matrons most desire, I won her confidence so far that, in her faltering, disconnected way, she told me all that sad history of woe and wrong and suffering which had brought an untimely grave to Michael Herican, and a felon's fate to her. It was one of those tales of falsity and sorrow which we cannot hear too often, and whose moral none of us can learn too well.

The little village of Easky, in the County Sligo, was, when this present century was young, one of those lonesome, scanty-peopled hamlets whose very loneliness and isolation render them more dear and homelike to their few inhabitants. The waters of the Northern Ocean foamed about the rocks where its fisher-boats were moored. The feet of its rambling children trod the rough paths and crumpled the grey masses of the wild Slieve-Gamph hills. Thus hemmed in between the mountains and the sea, it was almost separated from the world. The white sails that now and then flitted across the far horizon, and the slow, lazy car that twice a month brought over his majesty's mail-bags from Dromore, were all that Easky ever had to tell it that there were nations and kingdoms on the earth, or that its own precipices on the one side, and its weed-strewn rocks upon the other, did not embrace the whole of human joys and sorrows.

In this solitary village the forefathers of Patrick Carrol had dwelt for immemorial years. So far back as tradition went they had been fishermen, and the last remaining scion now followed the ancestral calling. He was a sort of hero among his fellow-villagers. True, he was as poor as the poorest of them all, and had no personal boast save of his vigorous arms and honest heart. But his father, contrary to the custom of his race, had refused to lay his bones within an ocean bed, and had died fighting in the bloody streets of Killala. All victims of '98 were canonized by those rude freemen, and the mantle of honor fell from the father upon the children, and gave to Patrick Carrol a deserved and well-maintained pre-eminence. And so, when Bridget Deery became his wife, the whole hamlet agreed that the village favorite had found her proper husband, and, when the little Mary saw the light, the christening holiday was kept by every neighbor, old or young.

Four years of perfect happiness flew by. Death or misfortune came to other families, but not to theirs. The little hoarded wealth, hid away in the dark corner, grew yearly greater. Health and affection dwelt unremittingly upon the hearthstone, and the hearts of the father and mother were as full of gratitude as the heart of the child was of merriment and glee. But the four years had an end, and carried with them, into the trackless past, the sunshine of their lives. {388} One long, long summer day the wife sat among the rocks, watching for her husband's boat, and playing with the prattler at her side. The boat came not. The sun went down. The gathering clouds in the offing loomed up threateningly. The hoarse northwesters felt their way across the waters, and whistled in her ears, as she clasped the child to her bosom and hurried home out of the storm. As the gale strengthened with the darkness, she fell upon her knees, and all that wakeful night besought the Mother and the saints to keep her baby's father from the awful danger. In vain; for when the morning dawned, the waves washed up his oars and helm upon the beach, and an hour later his drowned corse was found beneath the broken crags of Anghris Head.

For the first few years after that fatal shock the widowed mother lived she knew not how. One by one the treasured silver pieces went, till destitution stared her in the face. The charity of her neighbors outdid their means, but even that could not keep her from actual suffering, and work for the lone woman there was absolutely none. What wonder was it, then, that, when the flowers had bloomed three times above the peaceful bed of Patrick Carrol, his widow, more for her child's sake than her own, consented to violate the sanctity of her broken heart, and become the wife of Bernard Davanagh?

Bernard was a bold, reckless, wilful man, and both the mother and the child soon felt the difference between the dead father and the living. As time passed on, and the boy Bernard was born, the passions of the man grew stronger, and cruel words, and still more cruel blows, became the daily portion of the helpless three. Oh! how often did the widow yearn to lie down with her children by her dead husband's side, in the drear churchyard, and be at peace for ever. But not without them. No, not even to be united with the lost, could she have left them, and so they clung together, closer and closer, as the years rolled on—knowing little of life except its dark page of sorrow.

There never yet was a life without some ray of joy, and, even in the midnight darkness which hung around the childhood of Mary Carrol, there were faint gleams of happiness. Next door but one to their poor cot lived James Herican. He too was a fisherman, and, in better days, had been Patrick Carrol's most intimate and faithful friend. He had remained such to the widow and the fatherless, and, but for him, the family of Bernard Davanagh also might sometimes have perished from want and cold. He was the father of one child, the boy Michael, older by two years than Mary, and doubly endeared to his heart by the mother's early death. The gossips of Easky had wondered, in their simple way, why James Herican and Bridget Carrol did not marry, but the memory of his dead wife and his dead friend forbade the one ever to entertain the thought, and the poor widow was as far from wishing it as he. They were happier as they were; he, by his kindness and true Christian charity, laying up heavenly treasures, which, as the second husband of a second wife, he never could accumulate; she, keeping ever fresh and pure the one love of her maiden's heart, the one hope of reunion in the skies. What, and how different, the end had been, if they had married, the eye of the Eternal can alone discern.

The friendship of these parents descended to the children. In all their sports, their rambles, their labors, (for in that toiling hamlet even tender childhood labored,) Michael Herican and Mary Carrol were together. When her half-brother, eight years younger than herself, grew into boyhood, Michael was his champion against the impositions of larger boys, and taught him all those arts of wood and water craft which village youth so ardently aspire to, and so aptly learn. It could not happen otherwise than that these constantly recurring kindnesses should beget firm and fast affection, and knit together these young hearts in bonds difficult, if not impossible, to sunder.

It may have been the law of nature, it may have been the chastening of God, that Michael Herican and Mary Carrol should come, in later years, to love each other. It was simply fitting, to all human sight, that it should be so; and it was so. The father and the mother thanked God for it, day by day, and bestowed upon them such tokens of encouragement as the bashful lovers could comfortably receive. The boy Bernard, when he heard of it, (and there could be no secrets in Easky,) threw up his cap for joy, and the old village crones for once smiled on the prospects of a happiness they had never known. Only Davanagh appeared displeased, but his abuse of the poor girl had been so extreme for years that it could scarcely suffer any increase, and all the influence he exerted over her or them was by his ruthless fist and cursing tongue. This at last ceased; for ears less patient than her own received his stinging insults, and a blow, quicker than his drunken arm could parry, stretched him upon the ground to rise no more.

Mary Carrol reached her twentieth birthday. She was a frail, delicate girl, below the middle height, and with that beautiful but strange union of large blue eyes and pearly complexion with jet black hair and lashes which tells at once of the pure Irish blood. We should not have called her handsome; perhaps no one would, except those who loved her, and in whose sight no disfigurement or disease could have made her homely. But she was one of those superior natures which solitude and suffering must unite with Christian culture to produce; and the whole neighborhood, for this, and not for her beauty, claimed her as its favorite and charm. Michael had grown to be a stalwart man, half a head taller than his sire, and his fellows said that none among them promised better for diligence and success than he. His devotion to Mary Carrol knew no bounds, and she, in turn, cherished scarcely a thought apart from him. Her mother had rapidly grown old and broken. Grief, and that yearning for the dead which is stronger than any sorrow, had made her an aged woman long before her time, and the fond daughter, between her and the one hope of her young life, had no third wish or joy. Her only trouble was for her brother. The wild elements of his father's nature became more apparent in him every day, and, though he loved his mother and half-sister with an almost inhuman passionateness, they frequently found it impossible to restrain his turbulent and curbless will. The stern control of a seafaring life seemed to be their only chance of saving him, and so, at little more than twelve years old, he was torn away from home and friends and sent out on a coasting merchantman to be subdued. This parting nearly broke his mothers's heart, but her discipline of suffering had been borne too long and patiently for her to rebel now. It was only another drop to her full cup of bitterness, when, a few months later, news came, by word of mouth from a sailor in Dromore, that the merchantman had foundered in the stormy Irish Sea.

It would be beyond the power of human pen to describe how these lone women now clung to Michael Herican. His father went down to the grave in peace, and he had none but them, as they had none but him. Already the one looked on him as a husband and the other as a son. When a few more successful voyages were over, and when the humble necessaries, which even an Easky maid could not become a wife without providing, were completed, the benediction of the church was to fulfil the promise of their hearts, and give them irrevocably to each other in the sight of God and man.

It was an ill-starred day for Michael Herican and the Carrols when the Widow Moran and her daughter came to live in Easky. Pierre Moran, deceased, had been a small shopkeeper in Sligo, where he had amassed a little competence, and, now that he was dead, his widow returned to her native village to pass her remaining life among her former neighbors. There were few among them who had not known more or less about the reckless girl who ran away with the half-French half-Irish shopman, twenty years ago, and her name and memory was none of the best among those virtuous villagers. But she cared less for this because she had enough of filthy lucre to command exterior respect, and it was better, so she thought, to be highest among the lowly than to be low among the high. In coming to Easky she had had two ends in view: to queen it over her former associates, and to secure a steady and good husband for her daughter. Kitty Moran was like her mother, but without her mother's faults. She was a girl of dash and spirit, and with a pride as quick and a nature as impressible as her mother was emotionless. She was a thorough brunette, with a brunette's violence and passion, with a brunette's power to love and power to hate. In actual beauty no maiden of the neighborhood could vie with her, and she had just enough of city polish and refinement to give her an appearance of superiority to those around her. Between her and Mary Carrol the angels would not have hesitated in choosing—unless, indeed, they were those ancient sons of God who took wives from among the daughters of men because they saw that they were fair, and then, like men, they would have chosen wrongly.

It was not many days before the Widow Moran heard of Michael Herican, or many weeks before she had decided that he should be the husband of her child. True, she knew of his betrothal, for his name was rarely spoken unconnected with the name of Mary Carrol, but this made no difference. The pale-faced step-daughter of the drunken Davanagh was of no consequence to her, and to the right or wrong of her designs she never gave a thought. Whatever she wished, she determined to have. Whatever she determined to have, she set herself industriously to secure. So when she marketed, it was Michael's boat from which she purchased. When there was a message to send to Sligo, or packages from thence to be brought home to her, it was Michael's boat that carried it. When she had work to be done around her cottage, it waited until Michael had an idle day, and then he was hired to do it. Well skilled, as every woman is, in arts like these, she used her knowledge and her chances all too well.

It is but just to say that Kitty Moran had no share in her mother's wicked plans. She was young and gay. Michael Herican was the finest young man in the village. It was not disagreeable to her to watch him and to talk with him, as he worked by her directions in the little garden, or to sit beside him at their noontide meal. Unconsciously, she grew to miss him when he was away at sea, to have a welcome for him in her heart when he came home, to look for him with impatience when she knew that his vocation brought him back to her. Before she was aware of it, she loved him; and when she realized her love, she threw herself into it, as her one absorbing passion, without a dream of its results or a suspicion of her error. She would not, for an empire, have deliberately wronged the patient girl whom, by the stern law of contraries, she had already learned to cherish, but to her love there was no limit, no moderation. She could not help loving Michael Herican, and no more could she mete out or restrain her love. So, when it mastered her, it was her master, and her reason and her conscience were whirled away before the rushing tide of passion like bubbles on the bosom of a cataract.

How Michael Herican came to love this new maiden not even he himself could tell. Rochefoucault says, "It is in man's power neither to love nor to refrain from loving." And false as this may be as a general law of life, there are cases in which it appears almost divinely true. It was so in his. He simply could not help it. When he compared the calm, deep, tried affection of the heart that had been his for years with the tumultuous outburst of this impetuous soul, his judgment taught him there ought to be no such comparison between them. He never had one doubt as to his duty. He fought nobly and manfully against the spell that seemed to be upon him. He would gladly have left Easky, and have stretched his voyages beyond the northern seas; but he could not leave Mary and her mother there alone. He thought of hastening his marriage, thereby to put an end to all possibility of faithlessness, (and this is what he should have done,) but he had no reason for it that he dared to give. It was a fearful trial for him, and would have bred despair in stronger hearts than his, if such there be. He became lax and careless in his business, harsh and moody in his intercourse with others. A few tattling croakers, here and there, wiser than the rest, laid the evil at the Widow Moran's door; but they could give no proof when asked for it, and the frowns and chidings of the neighborhood soon put them down.

In this way things went on for months. The day drew near when the wedding-feast should usher in a new life to the waiting pair. It was a drawing near of doom to him. The enchantment had not weakened by indulgence. The siren's song was as soft and seductive as when its first notes took possession of his soul. Feeling as he did toward Kathleen Moran, he would not marry Mary Carrol, although from his heart of hearts he could have sworn that his love for her had known no change or diminution. Nor did he dare to tell her that the fascinations of the stranger had enchained him; for he knew that he was all she had, and all she loved. But it could not go on thus always, and he knew it. Something must be done. Had it been the mere sacrifice of himself, he would not have hesitated for a moment. As little did he hesitate between marrying where he did not love supremely, and not marrying at all. {392} He had a conscience, and when his conscience decided between these, and told him that he must not marry Mary Carrol, it compelled him also to go to her and in plain words tell her so.

It almost killed her. The shock was so great, at the moment, mightily though she strove to command herself, that her life was in immediate danger. After a while she rallied again, a very ghost to what she had been, though little else before. Her mother bore the blow less calmly. She could not understand the powerlessness of the one to save himself, or the self-sacrifice of the other, which gave up her life's last greatest hope without a murmur. She felt the disappointment keenly, but the injury more. Dispositions, that through all her sorrows had never been apparent in her character, began to show themselves. She grew stem and vengeful in place of her old meekness and submission, and brooded over their cruel wrong until it became a second nature with her to impute to Michael Herican all her troubles, and curse him in her heart as the destroyer of her child.

Of course all Easky soon knew the grief that had come to Bridget Davanagh's household; and, not unnaturally, most of them sided with her in her condemnation of Michael Herican. They could not understand, they would not have believed, that he was under the dominion of a passion which he could neither escape nor resist. To them there was no fascination in the Widow Moran's daughter, and they loved the mother too little for them to suppose that any one could love the child. It was a hard lot for her, poor girl, to hear their cutting censures passed upon her as the cause of Mary Carrol's sufferings; for the people of that uncultivated neighborhood did not care to conceal their bitterness beneath soft-spoken words, and did not hesitate to tell her to her face all that they felt concerning her. Nor spared they Michael Herican. Old men and young greeted him now with looks askance and cold, instead of the warm welcomes which every hearth had had for him a month before. And every woman in Easky, except the few old crones who grudgingly had wished him well when all was well with him, went by him on the other side, and prayed the saints to deliver their young maidens from such faithless lovers as he.

Intolerable as all this was to him, and unjust as it would have been, even in their sight who did it, could they have known how he had fought against his destiny, it still had its inevitable effect upon him. As there was but one house in Easky where he met a cordial greeting, that house became his continual resort. As there was but one heart into which he could look and find responsive love, he sought his consolation in that heart alone. To Mary Carrol he would gladly have continued to be a friend and brother, but her mother would not suffer him to come inside the doors, and if the broken-hearted maiden could have received his kindnesses, they would have been to her a mockery worse than death. Thus Kathleen Moran's was sometimes the only voice he heard for days, her smile the only smile ever bestowed upon him, and she became, in time, as necessary to his existence as Eve to Adam. They were almost always together. He made longer voyages, and took longer rests; and, when on shore, rarely left the roof under which she dwelt. But he had no definite aim and purpose for which to earn, or to lay up his earnings. He never trusted himself to plan for, or look upon the future. {393} He never yet had dreamed of marrying Kitty Moran. The light had fallen out of his life as effectually as out of Mary Carrol's; and it would have seemed to him as bootless to have heaped together money as it would to her to have finished and arranged her bridal gear.

A year like this told terribly upon him. The indignation of the villagers did not abate with time, and more and more did Michael Herican become an outlaw. It was strange that an event which, in the swift whirl of our metropolitan career, we meet almost every day, should have made such an impression on the minds of sturdy men and women. But it was the first time, in the memory of man, that an Easky lover had proved faithless to an Easky maid, and these rude hearts were as honest in their hate as in their love. He bore it as long as he could, but he was only human; and when the Widow Moran, herself made most uncomfortable by the active hostility of her neighbors, determined to return to Sligo, he was only too willing to go with her. He sold the little cottage where his forefathers had lived and died for many generations, and bade farewell for ever to the home where he had known so many years of happiness, such months of weary suffering.

If Mary Carrol suffered less in conscience and in self-respect than Michael Herican, her suffering made far more fearful havoc with her bodily and mental health. The privations of her childhood had sown the seeds of premature decay; and, at her best and strongest, she was frail and weakly. The shock she had sustained when her life's hopes were shattered had partially unsettled her mind, and physical disease, now slowly developing, sank her into hopeless imbecility. She was not violent or peevish. She never needed any restraint, and, usually, but little care. She would sit all day in the sunlight, listening to the roaring of the sea, her hands folded in her lap, and her great blue eyes gazing out vacantly into the sky. She knew enough to keep herself from danger, and, at long intervals would go alone into the narrow street, and wander up and down, groping her way like a blind person, yet taking no notice of anything that passed around her. It was a sad sight, indeed, for any eyes to see, but, far more so to those who knew her history, and could repeat the story of the cruel wound she bore. There was not among them a heart that did not bleed for her, and scarce a hand that could not have been nerved to vengeance, if the blood of her destroyer could have put away her doom.

The old woman—God knows how old in sorrows!—became more firm and resolute as her daughter grew more helpless. She never wearied in doing all that a mother's heart could prompt, but it was gall and bitterness to her that Mary suffered so uncomplainingly. If she could once have heard her say one hateful word of Michael Herican, it would have satisfied her, but she never did. She learned that Michael had left his home, and had gone with the Morans, and she felt as if she were robbed of her prey. Not that she ever purposed ill to him, but she did wish it, and the scoffs and denunciations of his neighbors seemed to her so many weapons in her hands against him. Alas! for her that this should be the lot of Patrick Carrol's bride.

It might have been a half year since the widow and her victim left Easky, and the midsummer days had come. Mary Carrol had been so long an invalid, and, in her many wanderings, had been so singularly free from harm, that her absence from the cottage caused her mother no surprise or fear. The village children, as they met her rambling in the fields, would sometimes lead her home, and the seaward-going fishermen would often watch her footsteps on the beach with fond solicitude; but they became accustomed to it by and by, and let her have her way.

One cloudless day in July she had strayed out at early dawn while the dew was scarcely dry, and wandered off along the shore, beyond the furthest cottage. The matron of that house, as she went by, sent out her little boy to see that she came to no danger, but in a moment he returned to say that she was sitting on a broken rock out of the water's reach, and so for the time she was forgotten. The day wore on, and Bridget Davanagh grew lonely in her desolate home. A dread of coming evil fell upon her, and, though her cup already so ran over that she could hardly realize the possibility of further misfortune, she could not shake off the new shadow. Restless and uneasy, she started out to seek her child. She hurried past the village eastwardly along the sands. She peered into every crevice of the rocky coast that was large enough to hide a sea-gull's nest, and hunted behind every fallen fragment that might conceal the object of her quest. Slowly, for it was severest toil to her aged feet, she groped over one mile after another, until the lofty cap of Anghris Head rose up before her. She had never been so near it since that fearful day, long years ago, when she came out to see the mangled body of her young husband lying underneath its stormy crags. And now there came over her an impulse to go there once again; again to visit the place where the waves cast him in their murderous wrath; the place whither she event last to meet him when he last came home to her. So she climbed over the huge boulders, one by one, in the declining sunlight, till she stood directly underneath that ragged spire which Anghris lifts aloft above the waves, and there she saw the spot where her beloved had lain in his sad hour of death. There, too, she found her daughter, lying on the same rocky couch where her father lay before her, one arm beneath her head, her face turned up to heaven in the unbreaking slumber of the dead.

This same midsummer's day brought news, from Sligo to Easky, that Michael Herican had married Kitty Moran, and that the widow's heartless schemes had been accomplished.

The house of Bridget Davanagh was now desolate indeed. Her son lost for ever in the unknown waters. Her daughter sleeping in the village churchyard, bearing the burden of her cross no more. There was no cheer for her in the well-meant gossip of her neighbors. There was no comfort for her in the promise of a land, beyond this mortal, of perpetual rest. If her religious instincts and principles were still alive, they remained dumb and dormant. She could not read. She loved not company. Her few personal necessities rendered much bodily toil superfluous, and, when her work was done, she had no other occupation than to sit down and brood over her sorrows. The range of her thought was narrow. She had no future to look forward to. Her eyes were only on the past, and the past held for her but two figures—her murdered Mary and her Mary's murderer. It was in vain that the good parish priest sought to divert her mind and lead her to better things; for, though she said but little and that quietly, he could see, like all who now came intimately near her, that her faculties were clouded and her control over her will and imagination almost totally destroyed.

How long she might have lived thus without becoming fully crazed was, fortunately, never tested. A letter came to her one evening, bearing a foreign post-mark, and dotted over with the many colored stamps which tell of journeys upon sea and land. It was the first letter she had ever received. No relative or friend, no acquaintance except Michael Herican, has she out of Easky, and she was sorely puzzled, as she broke the seal and turned the pages up and down and sideways, in the useless attempt to tell from whence it came. She called in a passing school-child to decipher it, and, as he blundered through its weary lines, she sat with her face buried in her hands, rocking her body ceaselessly to and fro. He reached the end and read the signature of "Bernard Davanagh." The widow's boy still lived. She lifted her worn face out of her hands and the tears chased each other down her cheeks. They eased her throbbing brain, and she bade the child go over it again, for of its first reading she had scarcely heard a word except the name. And now she learned that he was in America. He had been left sick on shore, at the last voyage of his ill-fated vessel, and escaped alive. Since then he had been tossed on every sea which bears a name, till, tired of the toil and danger, he had settled in the far-off mining regions of the western continent. He now sent for her and Mary to come out to him, enclosing money and passage certificates for each, and saying that in two month's time he hoped to have them both with him in his new home. It was a long time before the old woman could comprehend the message; but, when she once really understood that Bernard was alive, she would have started on the instant to reach her boy. Her idea of the distance was, that America lay somewhere out beyond Dromore, as far, perhaps, as that was from Easky, and it was with difficulty that the neighbors, who came flocking in when the news went flitting up and down the street, could control her. Those who stayed with her through the night, and those who went back homeward, had settled it, however, before morning dawned, that, though the journey might be fearful and the chances few, it was better she should go and perish by the way, than stay at home to grieve, and craze, and die.

There was not much preparation. Her cottage sold, her furniture distributed among her friends, the other passage-paper given to a woman in Dromore, who eagerly grasped the chance of going out to seek her husband, and Bridget Davanagh left Easky and its graves for ever. The emigrant best knows the weariness and hardship of a steerage passage in a crowded ship, and this old and worn-out woman endured them as a thousand others, old and feeble, have done since then and before. But the long voyage had an end some time, and, in a day after the ship was moored at New York wharves, the mother had found her son. He had a cabin built and furnished, deep in the wild gorge of a mountain, out of whose sides the glittering anthracite was torn by hundreds of tons a day; and here he took her to live and care for him. Not a face around her that she ever saw before; the dialect of their language so differing from her own that she could only here and there make out a word; Bernard himself grown up into a tall, stout, burly man, black with dust and reeking with soot and oil, she longed almost fiercely for her home by the green sea, and wished herself back again a score of times a day. {396} When her homesickness wore off, as it slowly did, and she formed new acquaintances, and grew familiar with the scenes around her; above all, when she began to realize the comforts which the new world gave beyond the old—she became reconciled to her strange life, and seemed almost herself again. Only when, now and then, her spite and hatred to the name of Herican broke out again did her mind reel with its fury; otherwise, she was more like Bridget Davanagh in her early days of second widowhood than she had been for years.

Meanwhile, of Michael Herican. He had married Kitty Moran, as the Easky story said. It was, on his part, an act of sheer despair. Not that he did not love her. His passion had grown stronger and more absorbing every hour, and she well returned it. But it was no calm conclusion of his judgment that led him to unite his life with hers. It was more like the suicide of a felon who sees his fate before him, but would rather die by his own free act, to-day, than anticipate inevitable death to-morrow. When the Widow Moran "went to her own place," her fortune fell to them. He opened a little store, and, for a while, life, cheered by business, seemed more bearable; but misfortune followed him and, by one loss and another, both his credit and his stock were sacrificed. Honest to the last farthing, he stripped himself of everything to pay his debts, and turned himself and his young wife, to whom privation had ever been a stranger, into the streets—to work, or beg, or starve. Then, for a time, he went to sea; but the lone hours of watchful idleness upon the deep gave him too many opportunities for recollection, and he could not endure it. As a common hireling he worked about the docks, and earned by this chance toil a meagre pittance for the bare necessities of life. But he could not settle permanently to anything. Of good abilities, with strong arms and a willing heart, it was this mental burden only which unmanned him, and this pursued him everywhere and always, like an avenging ghost. Then he began to wander. From Sligo they went to Ballina, and thence to Galway, and thence to Dublin, living awhile in each, but evermore a restless, wavering, aimless man. His poor wife suffered fearfully. Deprived of all the comforts she had ever known, and cut down sometimes to a mere apology for food and clothing, she rued the day when she was born; but she never blamed her husband. Through all, she clung to him faithfully; and when she found herself, at last, in the lowest portion of the capital, and living among those whose touch in other days would have been infection, however else she murmured, it was never against him. They stayed in Dublin for a year and more. A child was born there, but it soon died from exposure and insufficient food, and this made the mother's heart uneasy, and she longed to move. A berth fell in his way on board a homeward-bound Canadian timber-ship, and he agreed to go. He also paid the passage of his wife with labor, and, in due time, their weary feet were standing on the shores of a new world, ready for other journeys and, perhaps, better paths.

But it did not so eventuate. He was the same man still, though under other skies. There was a doom upon him. His family grew on his hands and opened in his heart new chambers of affection, but they could give no ballast to his brain. He could not anchor anywhere. The weird ship that sails up and down antarctic seas in an eternal voyage is no more harborless than was he. He fought the forests, axe in hand, and smote down many pillars of the olden fane. He toiled on board the river-craft that drift to and fro upon the broad St. Lawrence. He was a stevedore in Quebec, a laborer in Montreal. So he worked on from one town to another, fretting away his own existence, wearing out the health and strength of his devoted wife, until he reached the "States," and, by some mysterious fatality, came into the very village where Bernard Davanagh and his mother lived. Here he found work congenial to his tastes. The dark gloom of the long tunnels underground, the ghastly lamps, and, more than all, the exciting danger of the labor, kept his mind on the stretch and drowned his memory more effectually than it had ever been before. He did not know the nearness of Mary Carrol's mother. He would as soon have dreamed of meeting his dead children in the street as her, and his work late and early kept him out of sight, so that they did not hear of him.

But it happened on one Sunday morning, as he went to Mass in the great town, two miles away, that he heard the name of "Bernard" called by some one in the throng. He looked anxiously around him, and had no difficulty in recognizing, in the features of the man addressed, the son of the detested Bernard Davanagh of his youth. Had he not known the contrary, he might have thought it that very father stepped out of his grave. The recognition was not mutual, but the unquiet heart of Michael Herican reeked little of the sacrifice that day, for thinking where this new phase of his life would end. He feared no bodily injury. He had not lost his animal courage by his sufferings. But he felt like Orestes at the banquet, when he dispels with wine the knowledge of the ever-present furies, and then suddenly beholds the gorgon face pressed closely up to his. He saw in this an omen that, go where he would, the wrongs of Mary Carrol must live on outside him, as they did within.

How Bridget Davanagh and her son became aware that Michael Herican and his family were near them, it is of little consequence to know. When they did find it out, however, it was an evil greater in its results to them than to their enemy. Bernard had warmly espoused his mother's hatred, and added to it the natural fierceness of his own disposition. The discovery of her child's betrayer, and an occasional glimpse of him as he went by, revived all the old woman's vengefulness, and aggravated it beyond control. If Kathleen Herican had known all this, sick of her wandering life as she might be, she would not have stayed near them for a single hour. But she did not know it. Bernard and Bridget she had never seen in Easky, and Michael never told her they were here. Thus she, at least, lived on unconsciously, while vengeance sharpened its relentless sword for retribution, and hung it by an ever-weakening hair over the head of him she loved most of all.

Up to the morning of the fatal day no word or sign had passed between Michael Herican and either of the Davanaghs. But, as he went by to his work that morning, they both stood in their cabin door. The old woman could not resist the impulse to curse him as he passed her, and Bernard was as ready with his malison as she. {398} Michael turned up the path that led toward them, and tried to speak in friendliness, but they would not hear him. At last, exasperated by their violence and abuse, he told the mother she was mad—mad as her daughter had been before her. It was a cruel word for him to speak, cruel for them to hear; but he did not mean it. It smote upon him as he hurried off to his work, and the image of the dead Mary came back and upbraided him many times that day. He left his work early, and went home. There was a strange look in his eye which made the timid heart of Kathleen beat faster when she saw it, and he was more than usually kind and tender to her and his child. His half-eaten supper over, he took his woodman's basket, and went out to gather fagots for the morning's fire. On his way home with others who had been on the like errand, as he came opposite the Davanagh cottage, the mother and the son came out and rushed upon him. One struck him with a stone, and felled him to the earth. The other smote him with an axe, and cleft his skull. It was all over in an instant. Not a word was said. The horror-stricken neighbors stood aghast a moment. When they came to their senses, Bernard Davanagh was climbing up the mountain on the further side of the ravine, and Bridget Davanagh, with bolted doors, kept ward in her devoted house alone.

They would have lifted Michael Herican from the roadside where he lay, but he was dead. The red blood oozed out of the gaping wound. It trickled on in narrow streamlets down the path. It clotted on the feet of men and women who came to gaze upon the mangled corpse. It stained the hands, and face, and garments of his wife and baby as they lay sobbing and shrieking on his pulseless breast. It dried up in the purple sunlight of the dying day, and soaked away into the dust and ashes of the trampled street.

I have little else to tell. The circumstances of the story, as I heard them, piece by piece, left on my mind an impression which would not let me stand by and do nothing. I was satisfied that, if not absolutely crazed, the murderess had acted in a moment of exceeding passion, no doubt resulting from the rankling words her victim spoke to her on the morning of that day; and, in her unsettled state of mind, the ordinary presumptions of the law, that passion cannot last, were not reliable. It seemed unjust, to me, that she should suffer the highest penalty known to our law, when probably her guilt was actually less than that of hundreds whom a few years in the state prison give their due. I therefore drew up a petition which the presiding judge and nearly all of the convicting jury signed, praying a commutation of her sentence to imprisonment for life. The prayer was granted, and Bridget Davanagh lives and will die an inmate of the Eastern Penitentiary of Pennsylvania.

The Philosophy Of Immigration.

It is strange that while so many of the most enlightened minds of the country are engaged in the investigation of the mysteries of social and physical sciences, so few, if any, appear to give the least attention to the phenomenon of American immigration; a study which is equal in importance to any that can come within the purview of the economist, and of much more practical value to us, nationally, than most of the developments of nature, considered in her material aspect.

The researches of geologists and astronomers often supply us with curious and pleasing discoveries, and the laws which regulate commerce and labor, manufactures and capital, are doubtless well worth the attention of intelligent public men; but not more so than the habits, qualifications, and destiny of the millions of foreigners who of late years have made their homes among us, and who are still annually coming in myriads to our shores.

It may safely be said that neither ancient nor modern history presents a parallel to this American immigration. The emigration from the plains of Shinar was a dispersion of one people over the surface of the globe, a disintegration of a nation into several fragments, each particle the nucleus of a separate and independent race, speaking a peculiar tongue, and destined to establish distinct laws and forms of religion. Ours is the convergence of many peoples to one common centre, silently arraying themselves under a uniform system of public polity, yielding up their own political predilections, and to a certain extent their creeds and language, and destined eventually to profess one faith and speak one language. Subsequent migrations in the old world offer points as strikingly dissimilar as the first great exodus. Those were nothing else than succeeding waves of population borne from one portion of the earth to the other, generally preceded and heralded by fire and sword, and ending in the subjugation and spoliation of the inhabitants of that country over which they swept with irresistible violence. Our immigrants, on the contrary, come to us in detail, peaceably to enjoy the benefits of our laws and to respect our institutions, with no thought of conquest but such as may be suggested by our yet untilled fields of the west and our comparatively undeveloped mineral treasures.

Viewed in this light, our knowledge of the past gives no rules of guidance in our relations with this new and very important element of our population, and it becomes the duty of every patriot jealous of the welfare and reputation of his land to draw lessons of wisdom from every-day, experience, in order to help direct this perennial flood of life into the most proper and useful channels. A country's true wealth lies primarily in its population; the product of its soil is its surest and most permanent concomitant. To give a helping hand and a word of cheer and advice to those future citizens and parents of citizens is the common duty of humanity and patriotism; to protect them until sufficiently domiciled to be able to protect themselves, is the absolute duty of our legislators.

The city of New York, being the centre of the commerce of the country, is necessarily the objective point of European emigration, though many of our neighboring seaports receive their proportionate share of the precious human freight. It will be scarcely credited that in the space of twenty-one years, ending with 1867, there arrived at this city alone no less than three million eight hundred and thirty-two thousand four hundred and four immigrants, or a number almost equal in amount to the entire white population of the country at the time of the Revolution. [Footnote 117] Those arrivals included natives of every country in Europe, China, Turkey, Arabia, East and West Indies, South America, Mexico, and the lower British Provinces. Emigrants from Ireland and Germany were of course largely in excess of all others. Until 1861, these two countries were nearly equally represented, the numbers from them for fourteen years previously being respectively 1,107,034 and 979,575, or nearly four fifths of the whole arrivals. Since that year the German element has largely preponderated, and is now equal to one half the entire immigration. England, Scotland, France, and Switzerland follow next in rotation, the northern countries of Europe supplying a respectable number in proportion to their sparse population, and the southern countries, like Spain and Portugal, comparatively few.

[Footnote 117: We are indebted to Bernard Casserly, Esq., the efficient General Superintendent under the Commissioners of Emigration, for the following official report of arrivals at Castle Garden:

1847 129,062

1848 189,176

1849 220,791

1850 212,603

1851 289,601

1852 300,992

1853 284,945

1854 319,223

1855 136,233

1856 142,342

1857 183,773

1858 78,589

1859 79,322

1860 105,162

1861 65,539

1862 76,306

1863 167,844

1864 182,396

1865 196,352

1866 233,418

1867 242,730

Total 3,832,404

]

It were beyond the scope of this article to enter into an extended inquiry as to the cause of this unequal abandonment of nationality on the part of our new denizens. The misgovernment of Ireland, which culminated in the terrible famine of 1846-7-8, and the natural affinity of the people of that country for the advantages afforded by free governments, will easily account for the immensity of their numbers who have sought political and social independence in this republic; while the low rewards of labor and the heavy burdens of taxation experienced by the German in his own home, form powerful incentives in his economical mind to change his condition and abandon the fatherland of which he is so justly proud. The same reasons, to a lesser extent perhaps, operate on Englishmen and Scotchmen, with the additional one of the rapid growth of our infant manufactures requiring the experience of the workmen of Leeds, Birmingham, and Glasgow. Spain and Portugal, the pioneers of immigration in former ages, though now not essentially an emigrant people, as a general rule prefer Central and South America, where their languages are spoken and their religion universally established; while France, of all European countries the least disposed to colonization, has, on account of political troubles, sent us many of her best mechanics, and Italy some of her finest artists.

With the influx of such vast unorganized masses of strangers, representing all conditions, ages, and degrees, into one port, and considering the unusual trials and dangers of a long sea-voyage, it is not to be wondered at that a great amount of sickness and distress should be developed; but we are glad to know that all that private benevolence and judicious legislation could do has been done for the unfortunate. {401} Refuges for the destitute and hospitals for the sick have been established in this neighborhood. Employment for the idle, food for the hungry, and transportation for the penniless have been provided by the Commissioners of Emigration with a free and even profuse liberality. Nearly thirty per centumof the total arrivals, each year, have been thus benefited without any cost whatever to the state, the money required being derived from a fund created mainly by a small commutation-tax on each emigrant passenger. Though this fund, as we have said, is especially intended for the protection and support of immigrants, a portion of it has necessarily been expended in the erection or purchase of valuable buildings, requisite for the purposes of the commission, all of which will revert to the state when no longer required for their original objects.[Footnote 118]

[Footnote 118: This property, besides some on Staten Island, consists of one hundred and eight acres of land with water rights, etc., on Ward's Island, in the East River, upon which the commissioners have built very spacious and substantial structures, such as five hospitals capable of accommodating eight hundred patients; four houses of refuge for destitute males and females; a nursery, lunatic asylum, and two chapels, besides a number of residences for the officers of these institutions, out-offices, etc.—See Commissioners' Report, 1868.]

But this is not the only direct pecuniary advantage which we derive from immigration. In 1856 it was ascertained that the average cash means of every person landing at Castle Garden was about sixty-eight dollars, a sum which, considering the improved condition of those who have since arrived, must amount to much more per capita, still, taking the standard of that year, we find that in twenty-one years over three hundred and twenty millions of dollars have been brought to the country and put into direct circulation. Its effect on our shipping interest will be appreciated when we learn that during 1867 there were engaged in the passenger business alone, at this port, two hundred and forty-five sailing vessels and four hundred and four steamships, requiring large investments of capital and employing thousands of men.

It would be impossible to estimate the indirect stimulus given to the general interests of the Union by the acquisition of so much skilled labor and brawny muscle. We can see its developments, however, in the rapid rise of our towns and cities, the superior condition of arts and manufactures, and the extraordinary increase of our agricultural productions. Coming from so many lands, each heretofore celebrated for some peculiar excellence, the European artisan, while he does not necessarily excel his American fellow-workmen in the aggregate, contributes his special knowledge to the general stock of industrial information. The Swede brings his knowledge of metallurgy, the Englishman of woolens, the Italian of silk; the German, of grape culture, and the Frenchman, of those finer fabrics and arts of design for which his country has been so long famous. When the ancient Grecian sculptor designed to make a representation of the human form in all its perfection, he selected, it is said, six beautiful living models, copying from each some member more perfect than the rest, and thus, by the combination of several excellences, modelled a perfect and harmonious whole, in which were combined grace, beauty, and harmony. So the republic, availing itself of the genius and skill which every country sends us so superabundantly, may attain that general superiority in the arts of peace which was formerly divided among many nations.

The destination of this flood of knowledge and strength forms not the least interesting phase of this subject. From the data before us, we find that the State of New York retains about forty-four per cent; the Western States receive over twenty five; the Middle States, eleven; the New England States, eight; the Pacific slope, two, and the Southern States a little less than two per cent, the residue being scattered among various portions of the continent outside of our jurisdiction. The comparatively small number who have sought homes in the South may be accounted for partly by the occurrence of our late civil war, but principally by the peculiar organization of labor in that section before the abolition of slavery. In [the] future we may expect a much greater percentage of people, particularly from Southern Europe, to assist in developing the almost inexhaustible wealth of such states as Georgia and Tennessee. It is to be regretted that no record has been kept of the nationalities and occupations of those who so instinctively choose their favorite sections of our country; but our own everyday experience, and the laws of labor and climate, enable us to form a sufficiently accurate general opinion. Irishmen, though not adverse to agricultural pursuits, generally prefer large cities and towns, like those of New England, where skilled labor is least required in the production of fabrics. The Germans, on the contrary, though quite numerous in New York, Philadelphia, and St. Louis, avoid New England, and prefer farming in the Western States, in some of which they already form a majority of the rural population. Englishmen are to be met with either in the Eastern factories or in the Atlantic cities, keeping up a business connection with their countrymen at home. Frenchmen find a market for their superior mechanical skill amid the luxury of large cities, and are seldom tillers of the soil, while a Welsh miner (if he do[es] not find his way to Salt Lake) goes as naturally to Pennsylvania, and the slate quarries of New York and Vermont, as the Swede and Norwegian do to the northern parts of Michigan and Wisconsin. The mode of emigration may have something to do with these selections. The continental nations, particularly the Germans, understand migration better than their insular neighbors, always leaving home in families and groups, and settling down in small colonies where, as in all new countries, union is strength; but the inhabitants of Ireland and the other islands of the United Kingdom too frequently emigrate, one member of a family at a time, without system or organization, to the great disruption of those ties of relationship which are always a bond of unity and a source of comfort, amid the hardships attendant on great changes of habitation.

Considering the various manners, habits, and opinions of so many nationalities, some of them, if not repugnant, at least strange to the native-born of America, the power of absorption possessed by the people of the United States is astonishing. Columbia, taking to her ample bosom the fiery Celt and the phlegmatic Teuton, the self-asserting Briton and the débonnaire Gaul, smiles complacently at their peculiarities, or, remembering the good qualities which underlie such eccentricities, waits patiently for time and example to cure them; and we venture to assert that the German feels himself as free to indulge in his national games and festivals in New York or Buffalo as if he were in Vienna or Berlin, and the Irishman can dance as lively and attend a wake or a wedding with as light a heart, and as free from hindrance as if he had never left his own green isle. {403} In justice, also, to the immigrant, it must be said that, once settled in America, he gives to its government his hearty and unqualified allegiance, notwithstanding the occasional spasmodic attempts of a despicable few to subject him to ridicule and social ostracism. How many instances do we find of worthy men who, having gained a competency here, acting upon that natural and beautiful love of native land, return to the homes of their childhood to end their days, but who almost invariably return to us and the scenes of their manhood's toils and triumphs!

There are two other sources of accession to our population, independent of that of acquisition of territory, which are worthy of notice. The first, of present importance, is the passage of our borders by natives of Lower Canada, and which, though now more than usually remarkable, has been going on quietly but steadily for at least a hundred years. [Footnote 119]

[Footnote 119: Five hundred French Canadians took passage at Montreal, C. E., for the United States, in one week, during March, 1869.]

The French Canadians are a decidedly unique people. Originally from Normandy, early deprived of the protection of France, and practically cut off from their fellow-countrymen by the cessation of emigration, they have still retained all the primitive simplicity, keenness, and hardiness of their ancestors. Increasing in numbers with extraordinary rapidity, they have tenaciously adhered to their faith, language, and manners of life, in face of the opposition of a dominant and intolerant master. They have not only, so far, held their own against English laws and customs; but, despite the increase of British colonists among them, they have nearly, if not altogether, kept pace in numbers with the English-speaking inhabitants of the two Canadas. They have likewise constantly shot forth numerous hardy offshoots which have taken root and flourished in the far west. Detroit, La Salle, Dubuque, St. Louis, St. Paul, Sault Ste. Marie, and many other western centres of wealth and population, were first selected and settled by those enterprising followers of Jacques Cartier and the missionary fathers, and their names are still honored in those places. Many of the later immigrants from Canada find employment in our seaboard cities, but the majority either still seek the northwest, as being more congenial in climate, and offering more opportunities for that spirit of adventure which distinguishes the race, or go directly to California, where so many of the French people have already settled.

The Chinese immigration to the Pacific coast is one of the most unaccountable events in the history of that section of our country, and one which may well attract serious public attention. Those people, remarkable for centuries for their ingenuity and industry, as well as for their exclusiveness and dislike to foreigners, have at last crossed the Rubicon that confined them within the limits of the Celestial empire, and when we reflect that that empire contains within itself nearly half the population of the world, we can readily suppose that a few millions, more or less, transplanted to the new world would not very perceptibly diminish its influence or strength. The Chinamen are represented as quiet and docile, economical in their way of living, and working for small wages, and as being eminently adapted for the building of railroads, and the development of the mineral wealth with which nature has so lavishly enriched the territory on both slopes of the Rocky Mountains, and, being as yet only a moiety of the population, are easily controlled. But, should the tide of Asiatic emigration commence to flow freely eastward, the gravest fears are entertained by many that it would lead either to the systematic oppression or even partial enslavement of the Chinese themselves, or to the deterioration of the Caucasians of that beautiful region, soon destined to become the garden of America.

Taking into account, however, the great adaptability of all classes of immigrants in this country to the condition of affairs by which they find themselves surrounded, the fears of even a Chinese invasion appear groundless. Every day and year bring with them large accessions of energetic and healthy minds to the ranks of the native-born Americans—some the children of the sons of the soil; others, of adopted citizens; but all American in spirit and purpose, no matter what their parentage. Even this uniformity extends to their physique, and it has been remarked by visitors to our shores that the native-born boy or girl, however dissimilar the peculiar physical traits of their progenitors, presents strong points of resemblance in figure and face to each other. Something of this may be accounted for by food and climate, training and association, but much more by the fact of the admixture of races constantly going forward. The heavy features of the northern European are more or less elongated and brightened into thoughtful cheerfulness in his American child, while the angularity and pugnacity supposed to be characteristic of the Celtic countenance are reduced to finer lines of grace and repose in their cis-Atlantic descendants.

Taking American character as it stood at the beginning of this century, we cannot deny our admiration of its essential features, though many of its details were susceptible of improvement. Our stateliness had a tendency to what is now generally called Puritanism, and our simplicity was apt to degenerate into parsimoniousness. Our ancestors wanted a little more breadth of view, a little leaven of the poetry of life to mix with its stern realities, and a great deal more love for innocent amusements, and taste for the fine arts, which make man feel more kindly to his fellow, and raise him so high above irrational animals. Immigration has done much for us in this way, and we have done something for ourselves. If we have extended to the strangers within our gates hospitality, protection, and the rewards of labor, they have paid us with the sculpture of Italy, the music of Germany, the melodies of Ireland, and the fashions of France. It has not only done this, but it has reproduced and naturalized the love for them, and made them "racy of the soil." But what is of more importance than all, it has efficiently helped the spread of true religious faith over this portion of the continent. True, there were Catholics and very good ones here, even in colonial times; but they were few in number, and so scattered over the country that they were in constant danger either of losing their faith for want of spiritual ministration or were powerless to assert their proper position before the opposing sects. We have now not only numbers, but the influence that flows from numbers, and generously and judiciously has our immigrant population used the power inherent in it. During the late civil strife which so afflicted our country, and endangered the Union, citizens by adoption vied with citizens by birth in defence of our institutions, and in their contributions to works of piety, charity, and education they have been so profuse that to others the results of their charities seem little short of miraculous. {405} Even those who have come among us of a different creed, or no creed at all, have here a better opportunity of learning the truth than they have had in their own countries. Unfettered by statecraft or sectional laws, the Catholic priesthood have a field of labor in America such as the whole of Europe cannot present, and an audience composed of as many races as the sons of Adam represent. Realizing the great things done by our immigrants, and what may yet be expected from them, we hope to see their protection and welfare occupy a portion, at least, of the attention of our national and state authorities. But it is not enough that the law has so completely thrown its protecting shield over them. Individual charity can do much to supply the deficiencies which every general law presents. In the city of New York, especially, where a great deal has already been done by the commissioners to whose especial care the immigrants are entrusted by law, much remains still to be performed, in view of the hundreds of thousands of strangers who may annually be expected among us, for the next decade, at least.

Vigil.

                   I.

  Mournful night is dark around me,
    Hushed the world's conflicting din;
  All is still and all is tranquil—
    But this restless heart within!


                   II.

    Wakeful still I press my pillow,
      Watch the stars that float above,
    Think of One for me who suffered;
      Think, and weep for grief and love!

                   III.

  Flow, ye tears, though in your streaming
    Oft yon stars of his grow dim!
  Sweet the tender grief he wakens,
    Blest the tears that flow for him!'

                          Richard Storrs Willis.

The Geography of Roses.

Wherever man has found a dwelling-place, bounteous nature has conferred on him not only the necessaries of life, but a share also of its pleasures. From "sultry India to the pole," the useful and the beautiful are met with side by side. The bright poppy and the blue cornflower rise with the wheat-ear in the same broad field; the sweet-smelling amaryllis and the delicate iris unfold their variegated petals among the thick stalks of the African maize, while the marsh-rose and the water-lily float on the surface of the waters that inundate the rice-grounds of Egypt and India.

It is evident that nature regards these fair blossoms as indispensable to man's happiness as those other more substantial gifts are to his comfort and existence; and so, with lavish hand, she scatters them on the mountain and in the valley, amidst plains of burning sand, or half-buried in snow and ice.

  "Floral apostles! that in dewy splendor
      Weep without woe, and blush without a crime,
   Oh! may I deeply learn, and ne'er surrender,
                Your law sublime.

  "Not useless are ye, flowers! though made for pleasure.
      Blooming o'er field and wave, by day and night,
    From every source your sanction bids me treasure
                Harmless delight.

  "Ephemeral sages! what instructors hoary
      For such a world of thought could furnish scope?
   Each fading calyx a memento mori,
                Yet fount of hope."

The rose, fairest of the floral train, has been said by some botanists to take its birth in Asia. "The east, the cradle of the first man," writes a French author, "is also the native place of the rose; the flowery hillsides near the chain of the frowning Caucasus were the first spots on earth adorned with this charming shrub." We do not incline to this opinion, for the researches of science have proved that the lovely flower is found in every clime, from the arctic circle to the torrid zone, and that under every sun it seems to be endowed with some different grace. The same species is sometimes met with over a whole continent; another is unknown beyond the limits of a certain province; while another again never leaves the mountain or dale where it first shed its sweetness on the air. Thus Pollin's rose (rosa Pollinaria) is never found but at the foot of Monte Baldo in Italy, nor the Lyon rose (rosa Lyonii) out of the State of Tennessee; while the field-rose (rosa arvensis) trails its long branches and clusters of white flowers all over Europe, and the dog-rose (rosa canina) displays its pale pink petals and scarlet hips, not only throughout Europe, but also in northern Asia and a part of America.

So numerous, indeed, are the varieties of this favorite of nature, that we will not attempt to describe all that are peculiar to each country; we will confine our attention to those only most remarkable for their beauty, and most easy of culture.

First on the list of American roses, and far away among the eternal ice that covers the almost desert regions which lie between the seventieth and seventy-fifth degrees of north latitude, blooms rosa blanda, the charming soft-colored rose, which as soon as the sun has melted the snow in the valleys opens its large corolla, always solitary on its graceful stem, to the warm breathings from the south. {407} We can picture to ourselves the delight of the stunted, amphibious Greenlander, when, the long months of the fierce winter past, he suddenly meets the expanding blossom. He smiles as he remembers how his young wife mourned last year over the death of the flowers, and he plucks the first rose of Greenland's short summer to carry back to her as a proof that she must ever hope and trust.

  "Why must the flowers die?
         Prisoned they lie
   In the cold tomb, heedless of tears and rain.
         O doubting heart!
      They only sleep below
      The soft white ermine snow:
      While winter winds shall blow,
    To breathe and smile on you again!"

Rosa blanda's nearest neighbor is the pretty rosa rap of Hudson's Bay, whose slender, graceful branches are laden in the early summer with corymbs of pale pink double flowers. Nature herself has doubled rosa rapa's sweet corolla, as if she had foreseen that the wandering tribes of Esquimaux who inhabit those inclement shores would have too much to do in their never-ending struggle to pick up a precarious existence ever to busy themselves with the culture of the cold, unyielding soil.

Rosa blanda and rosa rapa are still at home in Labrador and Newfoundland, but with them two remarkable varieties—the ash-leaved rose, (rosa fraxinifolia,) with small red heart-shaped petals, and the lustrous rose, (rosa nitida,) which shelters its brilliant red cup-like flower and fruit beneath the scraggy trees that grow sparsely along the coast. The lustrous rose is a great favorite with the young Esquimaux maidens, who dress their black hair with its shining cups, and wear bunches of it, "embowered in its own green leaves," in the bosom of their seal-skin robes.

The United States possess a great number of different roses. At the foot of almost every rocky acclivity we meet the rose with diffuse branches, (rosa diffusa,) whose pink flowers, growing in couples on their stem, appear at the beginning of the summer. On the slopes of the Pennsylvanian hills blooms the small-flowered rose, (rosa parviflora,) an elegant little species bearing double flowers of the most delicate pink; it may fairly vie in beauty with all other American roses. In most of the Middle States, on the verge of the "mossy forests, by the bee-bird haunted," we find the straight-stemmed rose, (rosa stricta,) with light red petals, and the brier-leaved rose, (rosa rubifolia,) with small, pale red flowers, growing generally in clusters of three.

The silken rose (rosa setigera) opens its great red petals, shaped like an inverted heart, beneath the "cloistered boughs" of South Carolina's woods, and in Georgia the magnificent smooth-leaved rose, (rosa loevigata,) known in its native wilds as the Cherokee rose, climbs to the very summit of the great forest trees, then swings itself off in festoons of large white flowers glancing like stars amidst their glossy, dark green leaves.

When we leave the hills and woodlands, we find the marshes of the Carolinas gay with the rosa evratina, the rosa Carolina, and the rosa lucida, the resplendent rose, whose corymbs of brilliant red flowers overtop the reeds among which they love to blossom; while, nearer to the setting sun, we see the pink petals of Wood's rose (rosa Woodsii) reflected in the waters of the great Missouri.

The last American rose we shall note in this slight sketch is the rose of Montezuma, (rosa Montezumae,) a solitary, sweet-scented, pale red flower with defenceless branches. It was discovered by Humboldt and Bonpland on the elevated peaks of the Cerro Ventoso, in Mexico, and is perhaps the very rose of which the unhappy Guatimozin thought when writhing on his bed of burning charcoal.

These are some of the species yet known to belong peculiarly to the western hemisphere; but it is highly probable that many others remain still to be discovered. When we remember the prodigality with which nature lavishes her gifts, we cannot believe that while France alone possesses twenty-four varieties of roses, all described by De Candolle in his Flore Française, the great American continent owns but fifteen.

We will commence our European rose search in that most unpromising of all spots, Iceland; there, where volcanic fire and polar ice seem to dispute possession of the unhappy soil. So scarce is every kind of vegetation in this rude clime, that the miserable inhabitants are frequently compelled to feed their cows, sheep, and horses on dried fish. And yet even here, growing from the fissures of the barren rocks, a solitary cup-shaped rose opens its pale petals to the transient sunbeams of summer. This hardy little plant is, as its name, rosa spinosissima, indicates, covered all over with prickles. Its cream-colored flowers, numerous and solitary, are sometimes tinged with pink on the outside, and its fruit, at first red, becomes perfectly black when ripe.

In Lapland, too, a country almost as disinherited by nature as Iceland, the pretty little May rose (rosa maïalis) expands its bright red corolla even before the tardy sun has melted away all the snow that has covered it during nine long months. A little later on, in the full blush of the short summer, "when the pine has a fringe of softer green," the Lapp maidens gather the blood-red flowers of the rosa rubella among the stunted trees whose parasitical mosses and lichens afford a scanty nourishment to the flocks of reindeer, sole riches of the land.

The May rose is also found in Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Russia, together with the cinnamon rose (rosa cinnamomea,) and several other species.

England claims ten indigenous roses, many of them, however, exceedingly difficult to distinguish from each other. The most common is the dog-rose or Eglantine, found in every hedge and thicket, and very precious to rose-cultivators, its elegant, straight, vigorous stems being admirable for receiving grafts. The light pink corolla is slightly perfumed. In olden times the scarlet fruit was made into conserve, and highly esteemed in tarts, but it seems now to be abandoned to the birds. The rosa arvensis, a small shrub with long trailing branches and white flowers, and the burnet-leaved rose, which resembles the rosa spinosissima of Iceland, are also very frequently met. But the pride of the southern counties is the rosa rubiginosa, the true sweet-briar, with deep pink petals and leaves of the most delicious fragrance; a flower that seems to belong as peculiarly to the soft English spring as the primrose and violet, and like them to be emblematic of the English girl, delicate in her beauty, modest and retiring in her garb and manners, and diffusing around her an atmosphere of gentle sweetness. Such, at least, was the English girl five-and-twenty years ago; it is said that hoops and boots and croquet have produced strange changes. Alas! that simplicity and modesty and sweetness should ever go out of fashion.

In the Scotch fir-woods is found the rose with rolled petals, (rosa involuta.) The large flowers are red and white, and the remarkably sombre leaves when rubbed between the fingers give forth a strong smell of turpentine, an odor the plant has probably acquired from the resinous trees that shelter it. All the rugged mountains of Scotland possess their roses; the rosa sabini, with clustering flowers, and the villous or hairy rose, (rosa villosa,) with white or deep red, are the most worthy of notice.

It is only in the environs of Belfast that we encounter the Irish rose, (rosa hibernica,) a species somewhat resembling both the spinosissima and the canina. The other roses of beautiful Ireland are identical with those of England.

The fields and forests of France have been richly endowed with nature's favorite flower. Our now well-known friend canina flourishes there also in every hedge and by every wood-side, together with a pretty white rose, (rosa alba,) which has been very successfully cultivated in gardens. The smiling hill-sides around Dijon are gay with the lovely little crimson double flowers of the rose of Champagne, (rosa parviflora;) and, in the south, the yellow rose (rosa eglantaria) and its varieties surpass all others in the richness of their coloring; their petals sometimes gleaming with the brightest gold, sometimes deepening into a brilliant orange red, sometimes reproducing both hues in vivid flecks and streaks. The woods of Auvergne are bedecked with the small red solitary corollas of the cinnamon rose, (rosa cinnamomea,) so called from the color of its stalks; and in the department of the eastern Pyrenees the musk-rose blooms spontaneously in magnificent corymbs. This exquisitely scented species is also extensively cultivated for its aromatic essential oil; one of its kindred is the nutmeg rose, a pretty flower that smells of the spice.

The Province rose, so often remarkable for its variegated petals of white, crimson, and pink, is a variety of the rose of France, (rosa gallica,) a species that has given horticulturists a great number of beautiful offshoots.

Crossing the Pyrenean mountains, we again meet with the musk-rose, but this time in close companionship with the rose of Spain, (rosa hispanica,) whose bright red petals expand in the month of May.

In the Balearic Islands the climbing branches of the evergreen rose (rosa semper-virens,) are seen constantly arrayed in lustrous green leaves mingled with innumerable white perfumed flowers. This beautiful rose is also found in other parts of the south of Europe, and in Barbary.

We have already mentioned Polin's rose, a sweet Italian blossom which never strays from the foot of Monte Baldo, in the neighborhood of Verona. Its large crimson corollas open in handsome clusters.

Sicily and Greece possess the gluey rose, (rosa glutinosa,) a small, red, solitary flower, with glandular, viscous leaflets.

Germany is poorer in native roses than any other part of Europe; nevertheless nowhere do the blossoms of the field-rose display such beauty, unless, indeed, among the mountains of Switzerland. Nowhere else are they so large, so deeply tinted, and double. Germany also gives birth to the curious turbinated rose, (rosa turbinata,) whose double corolla rests on a top-shaped ovary.

The whole chain of the Alps abounds with roses. The field-rose, and the ruby-red Alpine rose, (rosa alpina,) an elegant shrub which has contributed many esteemed varieties to our gardens, bloom in admirable luxuriance in every forest glade and mountain dingle; while the red-leaved rose, (rosa rubrifolia,) with red stalks and dark red petals, stands out in the summer landscape, a charming contrast to the green foliage of the surrounding trees.

The leaves of another species growing among the pines and firs of these elevated regions, the rose with prickly leaflets, (rosa spinulifolia,) emit when rubbed the same odor of turpentine that we have already noticed in the rosa involutaof Scotland. It is singular to observe that the only two roses we know with this smell are both natives of pine-covered mountains.

The east has for ages been esteemed the home of flowers; almost as soon as we can lisp, we are taught that

  "In eastern lands they talk with flowers,
     And they tell in a garland their loves and cares;
   Each blossom that blooms in their garden bowers
     On its leaves a mystic language bears."

And in joyous youth who has not dreamed of that "bower of roses by Bendemeer's stream," so sweetly sung by the Irish bard? The very name of India reminds one of Nourmahal and of that most enchanting of all feasts, "the feast of roses."

It will then scarcely surprise any one to be told that Asia, the birthplace of the great human family, is also the birthplace of more varieties of roses than all the other parts of the world put together. Thirty-nine species have been discovered indigenous to this favored portion of the globe, fifteen of which belong to the Chinese empire.

One of the prettiest of these fifteen is the Lawrence rose, (rosa Lawrenceana,) a fairy-like bush, six inches high, with flowers not much larger than a silver dime, blooming all the year round. By the side of this pigmy tree, which we must not forget to observe is remarkable for the symmetry of its proportions, is often found the many-flowered rose, (rosa multiflora,) whose flexible branches, rising sometimes to the height of sixteen feet, are covered in the early summer with magnificent clusters of pale pink double flowers.

Among the many double Chinese roses, the small-leaved one (rosa microphylla) is highly prized and most assiduously cultivated in its native land. Its delicate foliage and pale pink very double flowers are well known also to the rose-fanciers of the United States. Another beautiful variety, the rosa Banksiae, climbs the rocky fells of China, hiding their rugged barrenness with a living curtain of verdure, enamelled with multitudes of little drooping flowers of a yellowish white, which exhale the sweet odor of violets.

Cochin-China, with these same species, lays claim to two others that we must notice; the very thorny rose, (rosa spinosissima,) with scentless flesh-colored petals, and the white rose, (rosa alba,) which we also find indigenous in France, Lombardy, and other parts of Europe. Japan, besides the roses of China, possesses the rosa rugosa, the only one peculiar to the clime.

Passing on to Hindostan, we may believe that the tiger which prowls along the burning shores of the Bay of Bengal ofttimes crouches under the boughs blooming with the lovely white corollas of the many-bracted rose (rosa involucrata) to make his deadly spring, and that the crocodiles of the Ganges find secure hiding-places to lie in wait for their prey, beneath the ever-succeeding red blossoms and never-fading luxuriant foliage of the rosa semperflorens. How often, all the world over, are sweetest things but lurking-places for pain and death!

Among the hills of the peninsula we meet the large-leaved rose, (rosa macrophylla,) the tips of whose white petals are each stained with a small bright red spot; and on the margin of the sunny lakes of cool Cashmere, the milk-white flowers of Lyell's rose, (rosa Lyellii,) a beautiful species that has been successfully acclimatized in France.

In the gardens of Kandahar, Samarcand, and Ispahan the rose tree (rosa arborea) is cultivated; a real tree, with wide-spreading branches, covered in the spring with snowy flowers of the richest perfume, making fragrant the surrounding hill and dales. In Persia we also find the barberry-leaved rose, (rosa berberifolia,) a singular variety which displays a star-like yellow corolla marked in the centre with a deep crimson stain. So unlike is this flower to all others of the family that one feels almost inclined to deny its claim to any relationship with the queen of flowers. Science, however, has decided that the rosa berberifolia is a true rose.

Further on to the west, beneath "the sultry blue of Syria's heaven," we encounter the lovely corymbs of the damask rose, (rosa damascena,) with crimson velvet or variegated petals and gold-colored stamens. It is said that the valiant knights who accompanied the French king Saint Louis to the Crusades brought back with them to France this beautiful flower, an ever-living witness of their prowess in the Holy Land. It is as beloved by the honey-bees of Europe as its wilder sisters on the sweet banks of Jordan have ever been by the blossom-rifling rovers of Palestine.

As the rose-seeker wanders forth from Syria toward the north he is arrested for a moment by the vivid yellow double flowers of the rosa sulfurea, but has scarcely time to admire them, graceful though they be, before he catches sight of the loveliest and most fragrant of all roses, the rosa centifolia, the hundred-leaved rose, the rose of the nightingale, the rose of the poet!

      "Rose! what dost thou here?
         Bridal, royal rose!
       How, 'midst grief and fear,
         Canst thou thus disclose
   That fervid hue of love which to thy heart-leaf glows?

      "Smilest thou, gorgeous flower?
         Oh! within the spells
       Of thy beauty's power
         Something dimly dwells
   At variance with a world of sorrows and farewells.

       "All the soul forth-flowing
          In that rich perfume,
        All the proud life glowing
	  In that radiant bloom,
   Have they no place but here, beneath th' o'ershadowing tomb?

       "Crown'st thou but the daughters
          Of our tearful race?
        Heaven's own purest waters
	  Well might wear the trace
   Of thy consummate form, melting to softer grace.

        "Will that clime enfold thee
           With immortal air?
	 Shall we not behold thee
	   Bright and deathless there?
   In spirit-lustre clothed, transcendently more fair!"

The valleys of Circassia and Georgia are the birthplace of this most beautiful of flowers, of whose exquisite form, color, and perfume even Mrs. Hemans's rapturous verses can give no idea.

The fierce rose (rosa ferox) is sometimes found mingling its great red flowers with those of rosa centifolia, and the pulverulent rose (rosa pulverulenta) dwells near them on the declivities of the Peak of Manzana.

As we hasten on through the dreary steppes of Russian Asia, we meet the sad-looking yellowish rose, dismal in aspect as the land it lives in, and more remarkable for its great pulpy hip than for its flower. A little nearer to the north, the handsome, large-flowered rose (rosa grandiflora) expands its elegant corolla in the form of an antique vase, and on the plains lying at the foot of the Ural mountains the reddish rose, (rosa rubella,) with petals sometimes rich and deep in color, but more often faint and faded-looking, gladdens for a moment the heart-sore Polish exile as he wends his weary way to his living grave, faint and faded-looking as the flower that reminds him of his distant home.

Despite the cold breath of the frozen ocean, the acicular rose (rosa acicularis) lives and thrives on its shores, and regularly opens its pale-red solitary blossoms at the first call of the short-lived Siberian summer. The icy breezes of the frigid zone may have done much, however, toward developing the ill-natured tendency to long, needle-like thorns to which this rose owes its uncouth name.

Omitting ten or twelve other varieties, we will conclude the list of the indigenous roses of Asia with the rose of Kamtschatka, (rosa Kamtschatica,) a beautiful solitary flower of a pinkish white color, and bearing some resemblance to the rosa rugosa of Japan.

The roses of Africa are still to be discovered; its vast unexplored regions perhaps contain many as beautiful as those we possess, but at present we are only acquainted with four or five species, one of which, the dog-rose, so common all over Europe, is a native of Egypt. Among the mountains of Abyssinia blooms a pretty red variety with evergreen foliage, and on the borders of that "wild expanse of lifeless sand," the great Sahara in Egypt, and on the plains of Tunis and of Morocco, the corymbs of the white musk-rose (rosa moschata) perfume the ambient air. This charming flower is also indigenous to the Island of Madeira.

We have thus taken a bird's-eye view of the rose's habitat, passing over much of interesting, much of curious that has been written about the favorite flower. We might go on and mention the singular and marvellous virtues attributed to it by the ancients; we might (were we learned) learnedly discourse on the Island of Rhodes, whose coins are found bearing the effigy of the rose; of the rose-noble, and the old English fashion of wearing a rose behind the ear; we might describe the gardens of Ghazipour and the whole process of extracting the delicious attar of roses; we might hint at the mysterious influence the scented blossom appears to exercise over some strangely organized individuals, who seem capable "of dying of a rose, in aromatic pain;" but we prefer to conclude here our sketch of the geography of roses.

Unlearned and superficial as we well know it is, it may show some pleasant meanings to the young lover of flowers, and awaken his curiosity to examine for himself the floral treasures that bloom in every field, garden, and grove. Such a study will do more toward filling his heart with a spirit of love and peace, and elevating his mind above purely material cares, than any other pursuit; for

  "Where does the Wisdom and the Power divine
   In a more bright and sweet reflection shine?"

"From nature up to nature's God" is the natural result of all scientific investigations which are carried on with a real capacity of observation and a sincere love of truth. Feeling and thought, purified and sanctified by constant intercourse with the high objects of life, with the enduring things of nature, fail not to recognize the "Wisdom and the Spirit of the universe" in his works.

   "Were I, O God! in churchless lands remaining,
      Far from all voice of teachers or divines,
    My soul would find, in flowers of thy ordaining,
      Priests, sermons, shrines!"

Spanish Life and Character.

[Footnote 120: Impressions of Spain. By Lady Herbert. New York: The Catholic Publication Society. 1869.

Letters from Spain. By William Cullen Bryant. 12mo. New York: D. Appleton & Co.

Voyage en Espagne. Par M. Eugène Poitou. 8vo, pp. 483. Tours: A. Mame et Fila. 1869.]

Lady Herbert strikes the key-note of her narrative of Spanish travel about the middle of the book. "Catholicism in Spain," she remarks, "is not merely the religion of the people: it is their life." Precisely because she feels this life, and, despite her English common sense, sympathizes with the Spanish people in their strong religious sentiment, she describes them with a rare fidelity, and gives us, if not a highly colored, a very vivid picture. No traveller who is not a Catholic can paint Spain as she is. Mr. Bryant looked at the people with a kindly eye; but he did not understand them. From him, as well as from the common run of English and American tourists, we get mere surface sketches—pleasant enough to read, perhaps, but that is all. Protestant travellers see no more of the popular life and character than if they sailed over the country in a balloon. They find the diligences marvels of antiquated discomfort; the railways, miracles of unpunctuality and slowness; travel, a hardship which there is little attempt to alleviate. They find that in Spain no Spaniard is ever in a hurry, and no stranger is allowed to be so either. If they are kept shivering at a roadside station three or four hours in the midst of the night, waiting for some lumbering railway train, on a seatless, unsheltered platform, they get no commiseration from the surly officials but an exhortation to "paciencia." If government is bad and robbers are bold, the Spaniard goes on sipping his sugared water and repeats, "Paciencia, paciencia!" If the country is two or three generations behind the rest of Europe in all the appliances of material comfort, why, "Paciencia, paciencia!" That is the great panacea for all the ills of human life. These peculiarities, the wretchedness and extravagant charges of all the hotels, and the horrors of the Spanish cuisine, fill most of the travellers' journals. But Lady Herbert found a plenty of religious beauty underneath this dilapidated exterior. God and the church are so near to the people's hearts that the mixture of religion with the language and business of every day shocks a stranger at first as something irreverent. Pious traditions are familiar to every Spaniard from his cradle. They come up every hour of the day. They color every man's conversation, they affect, more or less intimately, everybody's conduct; nay, it is difficult sometimes to separate them from the Spaniard's faith, for he clings to a pious legend almost as stoutly as he holds to an article of the creed. The peasant woman plants rosemary in her garden, because there is a story that when our Lord was an infant the Blessed Virgin hung out his clothes upon a rosemary bush to dry. Red roses get their color from a drop of the Saviour's blood which fell on them from the cross. A swallow tried to pluck the thorns from the head of the crucified Christ, and therefore no Spaniard will shoot a swallow. {414} The owl was present when our Lord expired, and since then has ceased to sing, his only cry being "Crux, crux!" Half the dogs in Spain are called Melampo, because that was the name of the dog of the shepherds who came to Bethlehem. Protestants may laugh at the credulity which listens to such legends, but to our minds there is the simplicity of real piety in the national belief, and we cannot think that God will be angry with the people if they believe a little too much in his honor. Protestants may sneer at the public reverence which is paid to sacred things, and call it a gross mark of superstition to show as much respect to the Blessed Sacrament as to a governor or a general in the army; but we confess our sympathies are with Lady Herbert when she describes the sentinels at San Sebastian presenting arms as he passes before the chapel door, or the shopkeeper who interrupts a bargain to rush out into the street and kneel down before the Viatacum, exclaiming "Sua maesta viene!" What a sweet flavor of real piety there is in the popular term for alms, "la bolsa de Dios," "God's purse!"—a purse, by the way, which is never empty. Beggars are treated with a tenderness that is felt for them nowhere else but in Ireland. The poor peasant may have little or nothing to give; but if he refuses, he begs pardon for doing so. There is no city without its charity hospitals, marvels of cleanliness, comfort, and order. There is hardly a town without its asylum, where religious mea or women tend the unfortunate, shelter the destitute, feed the hungry, and rear the orphan and the foundling. Convents have been depopulated and monastic orders banished throughout the kingdom, but the more active brotherhoods and sisterhoods are spared, and are doing magnificent work. The deserted convents, magnificent in their decay, speak eloquently of the zeal and piety of the people, whose greatest fault it is as a nation that they have trusted too much to weak and unworthy rulers. Every one of these religious monuments is the scene of some holy legend, and most of them are hallowed by incidents in the lives of saints, of whom Spain has been the birthplace and home of so many hundreds. Lady Herbert tells a significant story which shows how closely religion is bound up with the thoughts of the people. She was visiting the ancient palace of Toledo, when a peasant woman, sitting by the gate, asked the guide if the strange lady was an Englishwoman, "because she walked so fast." On being answered in the affirmative, she exclaimed, "Oh! what a pity. I liked her face, and yet she is an infidel!" The guide pointed to a little crucifix which hung from a rosary at Lady Herbert's side, whereat the peasant sprang from her seat and kissed both the cross and the visitor.

Spanish courtesy even has a religious flavor. Ask a Spaniard to point out the road, and nothing will do but he must go with you on your way, and pray God's blessing on your head when he leaves you. No matter how poor he may be, you must not offer money for such services; he will be either grieved or indignant, at what seems to him an insult. There is piety also in the Spanish reverence for age. If an old man passes the peasant's door at meal-time, he is offered a place at the table, and begged to ask a blessing on the repast.

There is, in fine, a lovable and engaging side to Spanish character from which we cannot but expect a great and beneficial influence upon the national destinies. Faith has its rewards even in this life, and we cannot believe that a nation which adhered so firmly to religion will be overthrown without some very grave offence of its own. {415} The reverential tendency of Spanish character has no doubt overpassed, in political affairs, its legitimate barriers, and loyalty has done some mischief as well as good. Respect for legitimate authority has not always been distinguished from a fanatical devotion to the persons of bad or incompetent rulers. There is a great deal of truth, albeit much falsehood likewise, in Mr. Buckle's explanation of the causes of Spanish greatness and Spanish decay. Give the kingdom a great sovereign, like Charles V., and with an obedient and devoted people the nation may be raised to the pinnacle of greatness and prosperity. But no people which has not been taught to depend upon itself can long keep in the van. Greatness is not inherited with titles and possessions; weak rulers are sure to come sooner or later, and then the country finds that it leans upon a broken reed. Spain discovers now that she has suffered her kings to monopolize the responsibilities which ought to have been divided among the whole people, and their duties have not been fulfilled. The nation has slept a sleep of centuries in the comfortable confidence that government would take care of everything, do all the thinking, make all the needed improvements, and educate the country as a father educates his children. It seems to have been forgotten that this was a task which only those mighty geniuses who appear once in a century are strong enough to perform. An indolent, weak, and careless ruler under the Spanish system allows his people to lag behind in the struggle for national preëminence; a bad ruler plunges them into misery and disgrace. Spain has suffered terribly from both these afflictions; we do not believe, however, that her case is desperate. While there is much in the present condition of the kingdom to fill all thoughtful men with alarm, there is promise in the awakened activity of national life, and in the very spirit of revolution which is driving the liberal party into such lamentable excesses. It is dirty work to clean up the dust of three or four centuries. Great political changes are almost always accompanied by disorder; but when the uproar subsides, and new parties crystallize out of the fragments of the present tumult, when the people feel that to be great and prosperous they must use their own power, and cease to be fed with a spoon, we believe that there is so much faith and piety at the bottom of the Spanish heart, and so much real nobleness in the national character, that a brighter destiny will be within their reach than has beamed upon them since the days of Charles and Philip.

We have wandered far away from the volume with which we began our remarks, and left ourselves little room to praise Lady Herbert's narrative as it deserves to be praised. We shall content ourselves here with citing a description of a man who has occupied a prominent place in the recent history of Spain. We mean Father Claret, the queen's confessor:

"One only visit was paid, which will ever remain in the memory of the lady who had the privilege. It was to Monsignor Claret, the confessor of the queen and Archbishop of Cuba, a man as remarkable for his great personal holiness and ascetic life as for the unjust accusations of which he is continually the object. On one occasion, these unfavorable reports having reached his ears, and being only anxious to retire into the obscurity which his humility makes him love so well, he went to Rome to implore for a release from his present post; but it was refused him. {416} Returning through France, he happened to travel with certain gentlemen, residents in Madrid, but unknown to him, as he was to them, who began to speak of all the evils, real or imaginary, which reigned in the Spanish court, the whole of which they unhesitatingly attributed to Monsignor Claret, very much in the spirit of the old ballad against Sir Robert Peel:

He listened without a word, never attempting either excuse or justification, or betraying his identity. Struck with his saint-like manner and appearance, and likewise very much charmed with his conversation during the couple of days' journey together, the strangers begged at parting to know his name, expressing an earnest hope of an increased acquaintance at Madrid. He gave them his card with a smile! Let us hope they will be less hasty and more charitable in their judgments, for the future. Monsignor Claret's room in Madrid is a fair type of himself. Simple even to severity in its fittings, with no furniture but his books, and some photographs of the queen and her children, it contains one only priceless object, and that is a wooden crucifix, of the very finest Spanish workmanship, which attracted at once the attention of his visitor. 'Yes, it is very beautiful,' he replied in answer to her words of admiration; 'and I like it because it expresses so wonderfully victory over suffering. Crucifixes generally represent only the painful and human, not the triumphant and divine view of the redemption. Here, he is truly victor over death and hell.'

"Contrary to the generally received idea, he never meddles in politics, and occupies himself entirely in devotional and literary works. One of his books, Camino recto y seguro para llegar al Cielo, would rank with Thomas a Kempis's Imitation in suggestive and practical devotion. He keeps a perpetual fast; and, when compelled by his position to dine at the palace, still keeps to his meagre fare of 'garbanzos,' or the like. He has a great gift of preaching; and when he accompanies the queen in any of her royal progresses, is generally met at each town when they arrive by earnest petitions to preach, which he does instantly, without rest or apparent preparation, sometimes delivering four or five sermons in one day. In truth, he is always 'prepared,' by a hidden life of perpetual prayer and realization of the unseen."

For the rest, it is only necessary to add a word upon the admirable manner in which the American publishers have presented Lady Herbert's book to their patrons. It is beautifully printed upon thick, rich paper, and illustrated with excellent wood-cuts, and will easily bear comparison with the choice productions of the secular press, as a book for the parlor table and for holiday presents as well as for the library.

From The German Of Baron Stolberg.

Filial Affection As Taught And Practised By The Chinese.

  "Honor thy father and thy mother,
  that thou mayest be long-lived in the land
  which the Lord thy God will give thee."

In a remarkable work, entitled Mémoires concernant l'histoire, les sciences, les arts, les moeurs, les usages, etc., etc., des Chinois, written by two natives of China who had spent their early years in Europe, and had there added the sciences of the west to the learning of the east, and hallowed their knowledge with "the love of Christ which surpasseth all knowledge," the greater part of a quarto volume is devoted to the "Teachings of the Chinese concerning filial affection."

What follows is taken from Li-ki, a very ancient Chinese work, written long before the time of the great Confucius. Confucius was born in the year of the world 3452, before Christ 551, in the twenty-eighth year of the lifetime of Cyrus.

"Be ever penetrated by religion and your exterior will bespeak a man whose regard is directed inward upon his soul; and your words will be the language of one who controls his passions." …

"Religion alone can render indissoluble the ties that attach the subject to his prince, the inferior to the superior, the son to the father, the younger brother to the elder."

"A son filled with filial affection hears the voice of his father and mother, even when they are not speaking with him, and he sees them even when he is not in their presence."

"A son had murdered his father in the kingdom of Tochu. The authorities reported the crime to King Ting-kong. He rose from his mat; sighed, Alas! the fault is mine! I know not how to govern! He issued an edict for the future. Such a murderer must be instantly put to death; the house must be razed, and the governor must abstain from wine during a month."

"The peace of the realm depends on the filial affection entertained for parents and the respect shown to elder brothers."

The following are extracts from a canonical book of the Chinese entitled Hiao-king, the last work of Confucius, written 480 years before the birth of Christ, during the time of Xerxes.

"Filial affection is the root of all virtues, and the fountain head of all teaching."

"Whosoever loves his parents can hate nobody; whosoever honors them can despise nobody. If a ruler evinces unlimited respect and affection to his parents, the virtue and wisdom of his people will be increased twofold. Even barbarians will submit to his decrees."

"If thou entertainest toward thy father the love thou hast for thy mother, and the respect thou hast for thy ruler, thou wilt serve thy ruler with filial affection."

"O immensity of filial affection! how wonderful thou art! What the revolutions of the planets are for the citadel of heaven, what fertility is for the fields of the earth, that, filial affection is for nations. Heaven and earth never deceive. Let nations follow their example, and the harmony of the world will be as indefectible as the light of heaven, and as the productions of the earth!"

"A prince who causes himself to be loved, and who improves the morals of men, is the father and mother of nations! How perfect must be the virtue which guides nations to that which is greatest of all, whilst they are following the inclinations of their hearts!"

The emperors of China have been giving examples of filial affection from time immemorial. It is an ordinance of the ancients that the new sovereign shall, during the first three years, make no changes in the administration of his father. The emperors of China, the mightiest potentates of the earth, show the most profound reverence to their mothers before the eyes of the whole people.

The great Emperor Kang-hi published, in 1689 of our chronology, a large work, in one hundred volumes, on filial affection. In the preface, written by himself, he says, amongst other things:

"In order to show how the filial affection of an emperor should be constituted, it is here shown to what tenderness for his people, interest in the public good, solicitude for health, contentment, and the happiness of his parents bind him. Everything in life is filial affection, for everything refers to respect and love."

Together with filial affection this comprises the corresponding love of parents for their children, and the reciprocal duties of both. From these are also deduced the reciprocal obligations of rulers and subjects.

  "Who is to be feared, who is to be served,
  and who is to be regarded as the Father
  and the Mother of all men."

China is the only empire in which public censors of the acts of the emperor are appointed. Their number, which originally was seven, has been increased to forty. Their office is to warn the emperor when he has transgressed or neglected his duty, and to admonish him. In a work composed by the Emperor Kang-hi, and published in 1733, several instances of these admonitions and remonstrances are mentioned:

  "It is the cry of all ages, O Sovereign!
  that it is the most imperative duty
  of the son to revere his parents!"

After explaining how one must prove himself concerning the fulfilment of this duty, and describing various evidences by which to judge, the sage continues:

"Such, O Sovereign! is the nature of genuine filial affection, of the filial affection of great souls, of the kind of filial affection that makes the world pleasant, gains all hearts, and secures the favor of heaven. … Thy subject, O Sovereign! has heard that a good ruler attributes to himself whatever disturbs good order in the realm; that he is made sad by the smallest misdemeanors of his subjects, and that he devotes the best days of his life to the sole object of obviating whatever might interfere with the public weal."

This remonstrance was presented in the year 1064, of our chronology, to the Emperor Ing-tsong by the Censor See-ma-kuang, one of the greatest statesmen China has ever had, who was at the same time a historian, a philosopher, and a poet. The people loved him so that after his death the entire realm was disposed to go in mourning. Another censor very boldly reprimanded the Emperor Kuang-tsong, because in a journey to his country chateau he had passed by the villa of his mother without calling to see her.

At a later period this censor upbraided the same emperor in terms of the deepest sorrow for not accompanying his mother's funeral and wearing mourning in her memory, notwithstanding that all the magnates of the empire had been plunged into the most profound grief by the death of that excellent woman. The censor accused him of having feigned indisposition on that occasion, whilst it was generally known that he was engaged in his customary pastimes.

Another emperor was reproached with a noble intrepidity, for having weakly permitted a favorite daughter to squander a part of the revenues of the state in embellishing her country residence and gardens.

The Emperor Kang-hi, one of the wisest and greatest rulers the world has ever seen, practised filial piety in a most perfect manner toward his grandmother and mother during their lifetime and after their death. When appointing one of his sons heir to the throne—a right accorded him by the constitution—he declared that he was guided in his choice by the wisdom of the two empresses, his mother and his grandmother.

When his grandmother was sick, this emperor wrote to one of the grandees of the realm, Hing-pu, who was probably minister of justice:

"My cares do not quit me, whether by day or by night. I have no relish for food or sleep; my only consolation lies in raising my thoughts to Tien, (Heaven, or the God of Heaven.) With tearful eyes I have prostrated myself on the ground, and buried myself in meditation on the manner of most surely obtaining his holy assistance; and it appeared to me that the preservation of men, the objects of his love, would be the surest means of obtaining, from his infinite goodness and mercy, the prolongation of a life that we would all be willing to purchase with our own."

Hereupon he reprieved all criminals not excluded from the favor by the laws of the state. He concluded with these words:

  "I pray Tien that
  he may be pleased to bless my wish."

He walked in solemn procession, accompanied by the nobles, and offered sacrifices for the empress. As her condition grew more alarming, he spent day and night at her bedside, where he slept upon a mat, in order to be always near to attend to her wants. To the remonstrances of his court and the requests of the invalid herself, he replied by answering them that he could not control his grief, and could find consolation only in nursing his beloved grandmother, who had nursed him in youth with so much wisdom and tenderness.

Many a reader may consider this intense and openly acknowledged sentiment of filial devotion as exaggerated; in China, men thought differently. And the man of whom it is related was one of the greatest princes that ever lived, a great savant, a philosopher upon a throne, an undaunted hero, and during the whole of his long reign the father of his country, the admiration and joy of his numerous people. When he was besought by the princes of the royal house and by the nobles of the realm to permit the sixtieth anniversary of his birthday to be solemnly commemorated, he replied:

"I have never had any taste for and have never found any pleasure in grand festivities and entertainments. Yet I feel reluctant to refuse what the love of the princes and nobles requests from me. But as these festivities would fall upon the days whereon my much revered father and mother died, their memory is too vividly present in my heart to suffer me to allow them to be converted into days of rejoicing."

At the Chinese court it is customary for the emperor, on New Year's day, to go in company with the princes and nobles to the palace of his mother. A master of ceremonies called a mandarin of Lizu, walks in front and reverently prays that it may be her serene pleasure to ascend her throne, in order that the emperor may throw himself at her feet. She then takes her place upon the throne. The emperor enters the hall and remains standing with his arms hanging down and his sleeves pulled over his hands—a mark of reverence amongst this people. The imperial retinue remain below in the ante-chamber. The musicians sound some thrilling notes, whereupon the mandarin cries in a loud voice, "Upon your knees!" The emperor and retinue fall upon their knees. "To the floor!" The emperor bows his head to the floor, as also the entire court. "Arise!" And all rise up together. After performing three prostrations in this manner, the mandarin again approaches the throne of the empress and reaches her a written request from the emperor to be pleased to return to her apartment.

During the ceremony the sound of the bell from the great tower announces to all the inhabitants of Pekin that the emperor of China, "the ruler of the thousand kingdoms," as they style him, is paying homage to humanity.

When the empress has returned to her apartment, the ringing of the bell ceases, and then the emperor receives the felicitations of the court in his own palace.

The idea of the relation between parents and children is, in fact, the soul of the constitution of China, a constitution that has continued unchanged for more than three thousand years. Through this idea the chains of despotism, so galling in other countries of the east, are rendered tolerable; by it a powerful influence is exercised over the rulers of the mightiest empire of the earth, so that most of them, even in modern times, devote themselves to their exalted duties with the greatest care, and look upon the empire not as their own possession, but as a trust committed to them as vicegerents of heaven. {420} This idea is so deeply rooted that even the victorious Tartars were forced to respect it and adopt it as their principle of government, as we are shown by the example mentioned of the great Kang-hi.

We subjoin some selections from a number of Chinese moral proverbs relating to this subject,

"Filial affection produces the same sentiment, the same solicitude, under every clime. The barbarian, compelled by want to wander through wildernesses, learns more easily from his own heart what a son owes to his father and mother than sages learn it from their books."

"The most invincible army is that in which fathers are most mindful of their children, sons of their parents, brothers of their brothers."

"The filial piety of the ruler is the inheritance of the aged, of widows, and of orphans."

"Whosoever raises the staff of his father with reverence, does not strike the father's hand. Whosoever yawns at the old man's oft-repeated tales, will hardly weep at his death."

"A good son never looks upon an enterprise as successful until it has received the approbation of his father."

"Rocks are converted into diamonds where father and son have but one heart; harmony between the elder and younger brothers changes the earth into gold."

"Subjects revere their parents in the person of the emperor; the emperor must revere his parents in the person of those of his subjects. The love of princes for their parents guarantees to them the love of their subjects."

"The Emperor Gin-tsong was counselled by his minister to declare war. What, replied the emperor, am I to answer fathers and mothers when they ask their sons of me? and to the widow who mourns her husband? and to fatherless orphans? and to so many disconsolate families? I would willingly sacrifice a province to save the life of one of my own children; all my subjects are my children."

"Whosoever cuts down the trees planted by his father, will sell the house that was built by him."

"It is not the threats, nor the reproaches, nor the violence of a father that are dreaded by a dutiful son. He fears his silence. A father is silent either because he has ceased to love or because he believes that he is no longer loved."

"Much to be pitied is the son who is displeasing to his parents; but the unhappiest of all is he who does not love them."

"A good son is a good brother, a good husband, a good father, a good cousin, a good friend, a good neighbor, a good citizen. A wicked son is simply—a wicked son."

"When brothers will not come to an agreement before the sentence of the judge, public morals have already deteriorated. If father and son go before the mandarin that he may decide between them, the state is in danger. If children plot against the life of their parents, and brothers against that of each other, all is lost."

This tender reverence for parents instils into the Chinese a similar regard for aged persons, for authorities, and for national customs. Their empire has been in existence for almost four thousand years!

The contrary disposition, which denies to old age its becoming deference, which impels youth to contemn the experience of the past, and to wish, in its immaturity of judgment, to pass sentence upon all subjects, destroys social relations and undermines and ultimately ruins empires. It robs youth of its true grace; destroys the modesty and thirst for knowledge of the young man as well as the blushing diffidence of the maiden; defrauds age of its dignity; renders customs and laws altogether powerless.

  Quid leges, sine moribus
    Vanae, proficiunt.

The young man trifles with the gaudy display of ever-changing fashion, a pest of our country from which the more serious east never languished. His philosophy is of the fashion as well as his clothes; and though, at present, he considers them as the very best, he is nevertheless ready to change them both and decry them as unsuitable, reserving the liberty, however, of resuming them as soon as the wand of the enchantress Fashion will have given the sign.

The religion of Jesus Christ confers a pure dignity upon the worthiest and most tender relations of nature. It teaches us to revere a father in the Being of all beings, to love him tenderly whose eternal Son did not disdain to become our brother, to become the Spouse of his church. It sanctifies every relation of nature, every relation of society. But in attempting to picture to ourselves a state of the world in which the great majority would be doing homage to the religion of Jesus Christ, not merely in words, but in spirit and in deed, a feeling of sadness takes possession of the soul like to that which might come upon a prisoner, highly gifted with musical genius, while reading with the eye the harmonies of Handel and Gluck, when his ear was denied the rapture of hearing their enchanting melodies.

New Publications.

Daily Meditations, by his Eminence, the late Cardinal Wiseman.
Vol. I.
Dublin, James Duffy, 1869.
For sale at the Catholic Publication House,
126 Nassau Street.

There is a peculiar charm about all the writings of Cardinal Wiseman. It is the touch of genius, and of a great genius, whose loss the world mourns. The present volume, now published for the first time, comprises a series of meditations useful for all classes of devout persons, but more especially designed for the clergy and students in our ecclesiastical seminaries. They were written, as the Most Rev. Archbishop of Westminster informs us in a short preface, when the cardinal entered upon his first responsible office as rector of the English college in Rome. The subjects for the first six months of the year are taken from and arranged under a certain number of heads, generally repeated each week. These are,

"The End of Man,"
"Last Things,"
"Mystery of our Saviour's Life,"
"Personal Duties,"
"The Passion,"
"Sin."
"Means of Sanctification,"
"Self-Examination,"
"The Decalogue,"
"The Blessed Eucharist,"
"The Blessed Virgin."

Each meditation consists of two or three reflections, and closes with an affective prayer. "Preparations" are given, after the method of St. Ignatius, before the meditations upon the mysteries of our Lord's life. As a book of meditations, or for spiritual reading, we could earnestly commend it to the laity, who will find the greater part of it eminently suitable for these purposes, while to the clergy it will be especially acceptable, furnishing, as it does, subjects sufficiently amplified to aid them in the ready preparation of a sermon or pious conference. We have few works in good English of this kind, and the reading of authors whose style is remarkable for purity and vigor cannot fail of improving the style of a speaker. The works of the great cardinal need no praise from us on these points, and we are sure that it is only necessary to call attention to a new work from his master hand to ensure its rapid sale.

We cannot refrain from transcribing one of the many beautiful affective prayers. The meditation is on the crowning with thorns.

"Jesus, King and Lord of my heart and soul, what crown shall I give thee to acknowledge thee as such? Alas! gold and silver in my poverty I have none: my gold hath been long since turned into dross, and my silver been alloyed. I have no roses like thy martyrs, who returned thee blood for blood; nor lilies, like thy virgins, who loved thee with an unsullied heart. My soul is barren, my heart is unfruitful, and I have placed thee to reign, as the Jewish kings of old, over a heap of ruins. Long since despoiled and ravaged by the enemy, every flower hath been ploughed up, and every green plant burned with fire, and thorns alone and brambles spring up there. Of these, then, alone can I make thee a crown, my dear and sovereign Jesus. Wilt thou accept it? I will pluck up my unruly affections, that they may no more have roots, and, weaving them together into a wreath, will lay them as a sacrifice at thy feet. I will gather the thorns of sincere repentance which there each day arise and prick my heart with a sharp but wholesome smart, and with these will I make a crown for thy head, if thou wilt vouchsafe to wear it. Or, rather, thou shalt take it from my hand, only to place it with thine around my heart, that it may daily and hourly be pricked with compunction. And may the thorns of thy crown be to my soul so many goads of love, to hasten it forward in its career toward thee."

False Definitions Of Faith,
And The True Definition.
By Rev. L. W. Bacon.
Reprinted from the New Englander for April, 1869.

Mr. Bacon defines faith to be trusting one's self for salvation to Jesus Christ. "The act of faith—of intrusting one's self for salvation to the Lord Jesus Christ—includes, not as a remote consequence, but in itself, repentance, obedience, holiness, and whatever things beside are demanded in the Scriptures as conditions of salvation." Dropping all dispute about terminology, we will take faith as defined by Mr. Bacon, and prove that it is inconceivable with out the act of intellectual assent to divine revelation, which the church requires. Jesus Christ must be accredited as the Messiah by God the Father in such a way as to give rational, credible evidence to the intellect, before a man can reasonably or conscientiously trust himself to him for salvation. When he is convinced that Christ is the Saviour, and trusts himself to him, he must receive from him certain and infallible instruction as to the method of repenting and obtaining pardon, as to the nature and extent of the obedience and holiness required, and as to whatever things beside are demanded as conditions of salvation. If his Master teaches him certain doctrines, and requires his assent, he must give it as a part of his obedience. If he prescribes sacraments and communion with one certain visible church as a condition of salvation, he must obey. The question with Mr. Bacon is, therefore, not respecting the indispensable obligation of believing what God has revealed respecting the way of salvation, but respecting the medium through which that revelation is communicated, and the actual subject-matter of its contents. Mr. Bacon very reasonably revolts at the tyranny of imposing mere human and probable opinions derived from private judgment on the Scriptures as necessary to be believed for salvation. He has an independent spirit and an active mind which will not suffer him to acquiesce tamely in the dominion which certain great names and traditional formulas have hitherto held among the orthodox Protestants. He thinks for himself and expresses his thoughts in a bold and manly way. In the brochure which he has reprinted from the New Englander, the defects of the old-fashioned Puritan theology respecting justification are pointed out with distinctness, and a far better and more reasonable view presented, which includes the moral element in the disposition of the soul for receiving grace, thus rejecting the most fundamental and destructive of all the errors of Luther.

The Relations And Reciprocal Obligations Between The Medical Profession And The Educated And Cultivated Classes.
An Oration delivered before the Alumni Association of the Medical Department of the University of the City of New York,
Feb. 23d, 1869.
By Henry S. Hewit, M.D.
Published by order of the Association.

This pamphlet contains a great deal of matter within a very short compass. It shows the relation of medicine to philosophy and intellectual culture, refutes the wretched materialism by which the profession has been too much infected, castigates with merciless severity that charlatanism by which some ignorant pretenders practise on the credulity of the public, and that criminal malpractice by which others more skilful, but equally without conscience, prostitute their science to complicity with licentiousness and child-murder. A higher standard of education in medical science, a more liberal preparatory culture, and a distinction in medical degrees are advocated. These are matters of the deepest moment to society, in which Catholics have especial reasons to be interested. The physician is next to the priest, and, in his sphere, very like the priest in the responsibilities of his office, his power of doing good or evil, and in the necessity of resorting to him under which all men are placed in those dangerous and painful crises of life where he alone can give effectual help. According to Catholic theology, no one can pretend to practise medicine or surgery, without grievous sin, who has not received a competent education, and who does not follow what, according to the judgment of learned and skilful men, are truly scientific methods. Ignorance, carelessness, rash empiricism, or violation of the laws of morality as laid down by the church, are all grievous sins. They are followed by the most fatal consequences to those who become their victims, causing even the loss of life and the privation of baptism, which involves the loss of eternal life, on a vast scale. It is of the utmost consequence that we should have a body of Catholic physicians whose scientific culture is the highest possible, and whose professional code of morals is strictly in conformity with the moral theology of the church. If we are ever so happy as to possess a a Catholic university, it is to be hoped that Dr. Hewit's suggestions in regard to medical education may be carried out. The author has rendered a great service to the profession and to the cause of morals and religion by the publication of this able and high-toned oration, and we trust it may receive a wide circulation, and exert an equally wide influence. Dr. Hewit served with great distinction as chief of medical staff to Generals C. F. Smith, Grant, and Schofield during the late war, and contributed some valuable papers to the medical journals. We are indebted to him for some of the best literary notices which have appeared in our columns, and the present oration not only shows scientific culture and sound principles, but also a capacity for producing literary composition of many varied and rare excellences, combining terse and close logical reasoning with a vivid play of the imagination. The closing sentence is remarkably beautiful, and speaks of the adventurous life which the author led during his military career.

"The sun has crossed the meridian, and tends toward the western horizon; the tops of the distant mountains are bathed in purple light, and the black shadows at their base begin to creep in a stealthy and hound-like manner over the plain; a rising murmur in the branches of the forest warns us to lift up again our burdens, and take our respective roads."

We should like to see a volume from the pen that wrote this sentence, in which the descriptive power of the author would have full scope, and another in which the sound principles of philosophy and morals contained in the oration in an aphoristic form would be fully developed.

Glimpses Of Pleasant Homes;
Or, Stories For The Young.
By the authoress of Mother McAuley.
Illustrated. 1 vol. 12mo, vellum cloth.
Catholic Publication Society,
126 Nassau Street. 1869.

No one can read a sentence of the preface to this volume without becoming deeply interested in the book itself. {424} Every line tells us that the author has something important to say, and that her whole soul is in the work of educating the moral faculties of children simultaneously with their physical and mental powers. Her aim is to enlist all heads of families in the work, by making their homes pleasant refuges from the troubles of busy life, in which their few leisure hours may be spent in "fitting all those under their charge for the duties of this earth, without unfitting them for heaven."

The responsibility of forming and directing the tastes of children is often thrown upon the school-teacher; and, while the father builds gorgeous business palaces for the benefit of his family, their future welfare is perilled and their whole life embittered by the system of education "which assumes the obligations of priest and parent, and is gradually driving filial piety from the face of the earth."

This book contains not only good examples of the practical working of kindness and love, but points out the manner in which the parents make many blunders in the management of young and boisterous children. Some regard their mechanical toys as causes of trouble, and wish their children would play outside, "and keep their noise, dust, and confusion out of sight and hearing of their seniors." Experience among families where such is the fact has taught the author to depict with truth the results:

"These parents who should have aided in developing and cultivating the tastes of their children, may possibly find, ere long, that there are no tastes to be developed save those acquired in the streets, where habits have been formed which it is now all but impossible to root out. Their children have, as the phrase is, got beyond them; not because, as is often falsely asserted, juvenile human nature is different now from what it was in other ages, or because its lot happens to be cast in the United States of America, but because parents have not done their part to multiply and strengthen the sweet and powerful ties that could and should bind their children indissolubly to them."

To warn parents against this evil, to cause them to be kind to their children, and to bind the child more closely to its home, the author has written these Glimpses of Pleasant Homes, in which mothers, fathers, sons, and daughters are made to speak and act in so natural a manner that every reader will be forced to love them.

In those happy homes, we find boys full of life and fun, but always eager to listen to interesting and useful instruction; girls who are not dolls, made to act and speak by machine; and fathers and mothers whose example will force every parent to give a little thought to the manner in which they treat their offspring. The story of little Frank will be long remembered by those who read it, and all will like the manly little fellow, who gravely says:

"'I should rather be whatever it is right to be,' returned the boy. 'The Catholics have the Blessed Virgin, and I think they must be right, for every one knows the Lord would not let his own mother stay in the wrong place. I asked Mr. Griffin was she a Calvinist or a Unitarian, and he said no, that she was a Catholic. Now, I want to be of her church, and I don't see why I cannot receive the sacraments as well as Tommy and Bernard. Please, mamma, allow me, and I'll be ever so good and steady.'" And immediately after tells us that John Griffin is a first-rate fellow, because "he gives me lots of fruit, and tells me pleasant stories about birds and angels."

Every story in this book will amuse the young, interest the old, and instruct all in the secret ways of showing kindness to those with whom they may come in contact. Kindness is the author's watchword; every line bears witness to her love of her fellow-beings; she fulfils her mission of kindness in a delightfully pleasant manner, and few will finish reading The Glimpses without wishing for many more such pictures, and hoping that the author may enjoy a little of that happiness on this earth, which she so lavishly bestows on her readers.

Black Forest.
Village Stories
by Berthold Auerbach.
Translated by Charles Goepp.
New York: Leypoldt & Holt.

This volume is a collection of stories from the German, filled with quaint illustrations of peasant life in the Black Forest. The representations are well drawn and life-like; but the tales, with two or three exceptions, fail to interest, except as illustrations of strange phases of human life, and odd customs retained from age to age by people who seldom left their own hamlets, or heard from the outer world.

Each story carries through some of the characters introduced before, so that there is an intimate connection between them all. In general, they have no special moral teaching, but there are two notable exceptions, in the story of "Ivo, the Gentleman," and "The Lauterbacher."

The first of these, "Ivo the Gentleman", professes to give the life of a Catholic family, and the story of a student in his preparation for the priesthood. We cannot fail to be interested in the home-life of the collegian, and anxiously watch the development of doubts and difficulties in his path; but there is a coldness and hardness in the analyzation of his perplexities and his religious footsteps that lead one to feel that there is little vitality in the creed of the author.

In the story of "The Lauterbacher," there are many striking thoughts brought out with such charming familiarity as to make one wonder why they have never before seen them on paper. The moral of this tale is clear and good. Now and then, however, one meets with a touch of the mystical transcendentalism with which many of the works of this author abound; but we find in this volume less of these fancies than in anything we have seen from his pen.

The stories are interspersed with grotesque wood-cuts as illustrations, with a sprinkling of fantastic rhymes, which remind us forcibly of our childhood's first introduction to the muses through the whimsical measures of Mother Goose's Melodies.

No one at all familiar with the mental characteristics and proclivities of Harriet Martineau could expect from her pen a more liberal view of the characters which she has here attempted to delineate than the volume before us actually presents. The ordinary reader, ignorant of or not fully appreciating the standpoint from which the authoress judges the dispositions and achievements of mankind will, however, experience a feeling of disappointment and dissatisfaction. The tone of many of her sketches is depreciatory. The time-honored maxim, "Nil de mortuis," etc., is rigidly ignored, and the shadows in the lives of the personages she notices are brought into striking contrast with the sunlight of their virtues and accomplishments. We remark this especially in regard to those whose work in the world was of a religious or charitable nature. It grates upon our inward reverence for men, whose toil and self-sacrifice have resulted even in a transient benefit to mankind, to be told that they were mere creatures of an ephemeral occasion, or the unconscious agents of political aspirants; that the seed which they sowed had no root, and the plant has withered away. It seems like an aspersion on the moral capabilities of the human race when those men who reach the highest ranks of ecclesiastical and religious preferment are represented as untrue to their convictions, and recreant to the principles confided to their propagating and protecting care. Miss Martineau does good morals and large charity no service, by showing that their outward exercise may coexist with hypocrisy, tergiversation, and sordid self-seeking. Nor is it absolute justice to the dead that, having during life received from her no admonition to correct their faults, they should at last, when such correction has become impossible, be held up to posterity as being, after all, but frail and failing specimens of human kind.

With this exception, we have found the work before us worthy of the encomiums bestowed upon it by the press both of this country and England. It is a handbook to read and remember, to take up with interest and lay down with pleasure, and, after the first reading, to consult, from time to time, as a gallery of portraits painted from subjects of unusual eminence by a skilful hand.

The Free-masons.
What they are—What they do—What they are aiming at.
From the French of Mgr. Sègur, author of Plain Talk.
Boston: Patrick Donahoe. 1869.

The best notice we can give of this book is to reproduce an extract from the translator's preface:

"This short treatise, written, not by the archbishop of Paris, as carelessly stated by some newspapers, but by Mgr. de Sègur, the author of the work lately translated and published under the title of Plain Talk, was composed to unveil and show Free-Masonry as it is in the old world. Its strictures, therefore, are not wholly applicable to Freemasonry as it is in the United States. Yet Masons here may read it with profit to themselves; and those who are not Masons, but might be tempted to join some lodge, will, it is hoped, abandon the idea if they read this book. Even here, Free-Masonry is a secret society, and to become a member of it, one must take at least an oath, and swear by the name of God to do so and so. Now, God's command is, 'Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.' And surely it is taken in vain by American Free-Masons, because they take it without any sufficient and justifiable cause. For, apart from other ends of their society, and especially that of affording members a chance never to want what assistance they may need in case of a momentary difficulty in their affairs or loss of means or health, the main object seems to be to meet at times, in order to spend an afternoon in a merry way, and to partake of banquets provided for the occasion. But where is the necessity to bind one's self by an oath, to gather now and then round a bountifully supplied table, or even to be charitable, and, for such purposes, to be a member of a secret society? We have many benevolent societies; there is no secret about them, no oath to be taken by those who wish to be members of them. Their object is to carry out the principles of Christian charity; to that they bind themselves simply by a promise, as also to contribute so much for the purposes of the society. There are other objections to joining Free-Masonry, even here; but this is not the place to discuss that subject."

The Dublin Review for April closes a notice of F. Weninger's late book on Papal Infallibility with the following sentence: "In the United States, no less than in these islands, a higher and more orthodox type of Catholic doctrine seems rapidly gaining the ascendant. To God be the praise!" This implies that hitherto a low and unorthodox type of doctrine has had the ascendant among us—an insinuation not very complimentary to our hierarchy, clergy, professors of theology, and Catholic writers. We deny the charge emphatically, and affirm positively that no type of doctrine, whatever, is now gaining the ascendant over any different one which has formerly had the ascendant. The maxims of that set of court canonists, who maintain the superiority of the episcopate in council over the pope, and deny the superiority of the pope over a general council, have never prevailed or been advocated in this country. The dogmatic decrees of the holy see have always been received here as binding on the interior assent to the full extent to which the holy see intends to impose them; and as for filial obedience to the pontifical authority in matters of discipline, Gregory XVI. expressed the true state of the case when he said that he was nowhere so completely pope as in the United States. The encyclical of Pius IX. was received without a whimper of opposition, and our college of bishops, in their steadfast loyalty to the holy father, amid his struggles with the assailants of his temporal authority, have represented the universal sentiment of their clergy and laity. The spirit of the theology which has always been taught in our seminaries, and prevalent among our clergy, may be seen in the works of that great prelate, one of the glories of both Ireland and the United States, the late Archbishop Kenrick. {427} A large number of our bishops and leading clergymen have been thoroughly educated and received the doctor's cap at Rome, and we are sure that they have never come into collision with any body of their brethren holding contrary opinions, or found it necessary to make any imputation on their orthodoxy. We esteem highly the great services which Dr. Ward has rendered to religion, and the many noble qualities of mind and heart which he has exhibited from the beginning of his Oxford career to the present moment. We think, however, that the impetuosity of his zeal needs a little curbing, and that if he were somewhat more sparing of reproofs and admonition to his brethren and fathers in the church, which savor more of the novice-master than the editor, his review would be much more useful, as well as more generally acceptable. We know that our opinion on this point is shared by some of our most distinguished prelates, who are as thoroughly Roman in their theology as Dr. Ward can profess to be, and we think there are few on this side the water who would dissent from it.

Church Embroidery, Ancient And Modern,
Practically Illustrated.
By Anastasia Dolby,
Late Embroideress to the Queen.

Church Vestments;
Their Origin, Use, And Ornament.
By the same.
For sale by the Catholic Publication Society,
126 Nassau St., New-York.

These two elegant volumes furnish a complete and practical description of every kind of ecclesiastical vestment, from the Roman collar to the Fanon, which, as Miss Dolby informs us, "appertains only to the vesture of the sovereign pontiff." The authoress is a "Ritualist," and, as will be seen, of the highest order of that formidable sect of the English Church, as by law established. Her books are full of costly engravings, the volume on church embroidery being adorned with a fine illuminated frontispiece—an antependium and frontal for high festivals—and the one on church vestments, with one representing a Pontifical High Mass, in which the deacon is a little out of place for such a mass, according to the rite as celebrated by the "Roman obedience," but which, we presume, is strictly in accordance with the "Anglican obedience." We smile at the pretty piece of assumption, but forgive Miss Dolby from our hearts, for we have derived the greatest pleasure and benefit from the use of her valuable books. Although the volumes are costly, yet the information they contain would be considered cheap at treble the price by those who are interested in furnishing the holy sanctuary with all things appertaining thereto, in good taste. The authoress is a practical workwoman, and not only tells us what to do, but also, what is of the highest moment to many of us, how to do it.

The Ark Of The Covenant;
or, a Series of Short Discourses upon the Joys, Sorrows, Glories, and Virtues of the Ever Blessed Mother of God.
By Rev. T. S. Preston.
New York: Robt. Coddington.

This is a new edition of a work already, we are sure, widely known and much admired. It is prepared by the reverend author to suit the beautiful devotion of the month of May, and we do not hesitate to say that it is the best one for that purpose yet written. It is truly refreshing to meet with a book like this, when one has had a surfeit (as who has not) of the many namby pamby Months of Mary, from whose pages we have been expected to cull flowers of piety for our spiritual enjoyment of the sweet season dedicated to the Blessed Virgin.

The General; Or, Twelve Nights In The Hunter's Camp.
A Narrative of Real Life.
Illustrated by G. G. White.
Boston: Lee & Shepard.

This is an account of the doings of the D—— Club, on one of its annual excursions. It is interspersed with stories told round the camp-fire, by "the general," of his own adventures in the west, when it was still the home of the Indian, and immigrants and land-surveyors were slowly finding their way through the forests and over the prairies.

The club were encamped near Swan Lake, two miles east of the Mississippi, and for twelve days gave themselves up to all the pleasure and excitement of hunting and fishing. They had a good time, and one almost envies them the fresh, pure air, the freedom, the invigorating sport, and enjoyment of nature. The author thinks that "more tents and less hotels in vacation would make our professional men more vigorous. Moosehead and the Adirondacks are better recuperators than Saratoga, Cape May, and the Rhine; and fishing-rods and fowling-pieces are among the very best gymnastic apparatus for a college." Summer is coming, and the advice could be tried. The adventures of the general, and of the hunters at Swan Lake, would while away most pleasantly the hours of a warm summer afternoon on the Adirondacks or Lake George.

Reminiscences Of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy.
A Social and Artistic Biography.
By Elise Polko.
Translated from the German by Lady Wallace.
New York: Leypoldt & Holt. 1869.

A woman's book in every page and line, charming for its simplicity and pleasant gossip. Madame Polko was a friend and enthusiastic admirer of the great musician. All that he ever did, said, or wrote she tells us with an air of pride and earnestness only equalled by the naïve recital of all baby's wonderful pranks and precocious intelligence peculiar to young mothers.

These reminiscences will do to beguile a dreamy summer hour, when the mind needs relaxation, and is not able to bear anything heavier than the innocent prattle of children, and the soothing sound of the seaside waves.

Ferncliffe is an interesting tale of "English country life." The author has been fortunate enough to give us scenes and characters which appear in all respects very natural, and therefore are exceedingly interesting. It is seldom we find a book containing so many characters, each possessing some peculiarity, and all kept in that complete subordination to the principal one which is so necessary to the full development of the plot.

The book is neatly printed on fine paper, and is a credit to the enterprising publisher who, we are glad to see, is accepting the "situation," and making his books in conformity with the improvements of the age in style and manner of getting up. We wish all our publishers would do the same; for it is high time that Catholic books appeared in as good a dress as non-Catholic books.

Salt-water Dick.
By May Mannering.
Boston: Lee & Shepard. Pp. 230. 1869.

The Ark Of Elm Island.
By Rev. Elijah Kellogg.
Boston: Lee & Shepard. Pp. 288. 1869.

In these volumes we have, in addition to the usual amount of amusing incident and startling adventure inseparable from sea voyages, a very full and interesting description of life at the Chincha Islands, the great guano depot; pleasant glimpses into Lima, Rio Janeiro, and Havana; graphic details of encounters with sea-lions, etc.; a dreadful storm in the Gulf of Mexico, with a wonderful escape from shipwreck by literally "pouring oil on the troubled waters," the whole agreeably diversified with numerous facts in natural history.

Combining amusement with instruction, books such as these have a great fascination for boys, and may, in most cases, be safely recommended.

Dotty Dimple Stories.
Dotty Dimple At School.
By Sophie May, Author of Little Prudy Stories.
Illustrated.
Boston: Lee & Shepard.

This story is one of a series, although quite complete in itself. They are all admirably written; for children's stories, they are almost perfect. They teach important lessons without making the children feel that they are taught them, or giving them an inclination to skip over those parts. If the little folks get hold of these books, they will be certain to read them, and ever afterward count Miss Dotty Dimple and dear little Prudy among their very best friends. Such a pen only needs to be guided by Catholic faith to make it perfect for children. We do not say this with any want of appreciation of what it is already, for its moral lessons are beautifully given; but what might they not be, enlightened by the truth, the holiness, and the beauty of Catholic faith!

Alice's Adventures In Wonder Land.
By Lewis Carroll.
With forty-two Illustrations by John Tenniel.
Boston: Lee & Shepard, 49 Washington Street. 1869.

These adventures are most wonderful, even for Wonderland. One cannot help regretting that children should be entertained in this way instead of by some probable or possible adventures. They are well written, and the illustrations are excellent.

Juliette; Or, Now And Forever.
By Mrs. Madeline Leslie.
Boston: Lee & Shepard. Pp.416. 1869.

A religious tale, strictly Protestant, plentifully besprinkled with scriptural texts, allusions, etc., which will, no doubt, prove deeply interesting to those for whose special delectation it is intended.

The Catholic Publication Society have purchased all the stereotype plates and book stock of Messrs. Lucas Brothers, Baltimore. Some of these books have been out of print for some years, or have not been kept constantly before the public. The society will soon issue new editions of all of them.

Messrs. Murphy & Co., Baltimore, have just issued an edition of Milner's End of Controversy, in paper covers, which is sold for seventy five cents a copy.

Mr. P. F. Cunningham, Philadelphia, will soon publish Catholic Doctrine, as defined by the Council of Trent, expounded in a series of conferences delivered in Geneva during the Jubilee of 1851, by Rev. Father Nampon, of the Society of Jesus; proposed as a means of reuniting all Christians. It will make an octavo volume of some 600 or 700 pages.

Handy-volume Series. Realities of Irish Life.

Little Women; or, Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy.
By Louisa M. Alcott.
2 Vols. Illustrated.

The Abbé Sire, Superior of the Seminary of St. Sulpice, some time since undertook to procure the translation of the bull "Ineffabilis" into all the written languages of the world. In this vast enterprise he has made great progress, and more than a year ago his zeal received the honoring recognition of the holy father in a letter addressed to him, beginning: "Hinc gratissimum nobis accidit, Dilecte Fili, consilium a Te susceptum curandi, ut Apostoliae Nostrae de dogmatica Immaculati ejusdem Dei Genitricis Conceptus Definitione Litterae e latino idiomate in omnes converteretur linguas."

Catholic Ireland has made a handsome contribution to M. Sire's work in a volume published in Dublin, containing the Bull and its translation into the French, Latin, and Irish languages. The Irish translation is by the Rev. Patrick J. Bourke, President of St. Jarlath's College, Tuam, where, alone in all Ireland, under the auspices, and, we may say, the national enthusiasm of the Rt. Rev. Dr. McHale, the language of Ireland is taught, and endeavored to be preserved. We say endeavored; for it seems that, excepting among the hills of Connaught, the mother tongue of the Celtic race has died, or is rapidly dying out in the green island. Dr. Bourke's volume, published in Dublin, is a fine specimen of typography.

We believe, although we have never seen any announcement of it, that Dr. Bourke is also the editor of the Keltic Journal and Indicator, a semi-monthly commenced at Manchester, (England,) in January last. Why it is called Keltic, instead of Gaelic or Irish, we do not know, nor can we understand why it should be published in England rather than in Ireland. Two other Gaelic races, the Welsh, and the Bretons of France, have periodicals in their native dialect; the latter, the Feiz he Breiz, and the former, several.

The dying out of the Irish language on the lips of a million of people who speak it, may be attributed mainly to two causes—emigration, and the indifference of its own race.

There is still another difficulty. Its pronunciation no longer accords with its received orthography, and, as written, it is encumbered with a quantity of unpronounced letters. If the language is to continue to exist as a written one, a radical reform similar to that effected by the Tcheks in the Bohemian dialect at the end of the last century is absolutely necessary. Meantime, Dr. Bourke is entitled to great praise for his unceasing efforts in the cause of Ireland's national literature.

The publishing house of Adrien Le Clerc (Paris) announces an important work in press. It is L'Histoire des Conciles, in ten volumes 8vo, (large,) of 640 pages each. The first volume appeared on the 31st of January. It is a translation, by the Abbés Goschler and Delarc, from the German of Dr. Ch. Jos. Hefele, Professor of Theology at the University of Tübingen. The Messrs. Clarke, of Edinburgh, have announced an English translation of the same work from the German.

The Femall Glory, or the Life and Death of our Blessed Lady, the Holy Virgin Mary, God's owne immaculate Mother, etc. etc. By Anthony Stafford, Gent. London, 1635. Reprinted in 1869. An exact typographical reproduction of the original, in all its quaintness of ancient characters and antiquity of English, preceded by the apology of the author (Stafford) and an essay on the cultus of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Edited by the Rev. Orby Shipley.

Independently of its intrinsic merit, this work has always attracted great attention, from the fact that it was written by a member of the English (Episcopal) Church, and approved by prelates of that denomination as distinguished as Laud and Juxon.

As a matter of course, such a book was found to be "egregiously scandalous" by the Puritans, who looked upon it as nothing short of a device of papacy. And Henry Burton, minister of Friday street, London, in a sermon, For God and the King, denounced "several extravagant and popish passages therein, and advised the people to be aware of it." This was the beginning of a controversial war concerning the "Femall Glory" that made it one of the most notable works of the day. That a papist should have written such a book might have passed without comment, but that a noble Stafford of Northamptonshire, a graduate of Oriel College Oxford, and a staunch Church of England man, should have done this thing was an irremissible sin in Puritanic eyes.

Stafford was distinguished as a man of letters, and wrote various other works, most of them with quaint titles, according to the taste of that day; as,

Niobe dissolved into a Nilus: or his Age drowned in her own tears. 1611.

Heavenly Dogge: a Life and Death of that Great Cynick Diogenes; whom Laertius styled Canis Caelestis, the Heavenly Dogge. 1615.

The attacks of Burton and others brought out A Short Apology, or Vindication of a book entitled Femall Glory, etc., which is republished in the fourth edition of 1869.

The Femall Glory is a book of genuine English growth, entirely free from imitation or adaptation of foreign words, and, beyond mere sketches of the most meagre character, the only full life of the Blessed Virgin. {431} It is valuable, in a controversial point of view, as contrasting, the clear and distinct acknowledgment of the dignity and sanctity of the mother of God, as recognized by English Protestants of that, with the Episcopal Low Church views of the present day. Citations might be made from such men as Jeremy Taylor, Bishop Bull, Bishop Pearson, Archdeacon Frank, and Archbishop Bramhall, to show this conclusively. Not the smallest charm about the book is the odor of its quaint seventeenth century tone of thought and expression. Thus, in the preface "To the Feminine Reader" she is told, "You are here presented, by an extreme honourer of your Sexe, with a Mirrour of Femall Perfection. … By this, you cannot curle your haires, fill up your wrinckles, and so alter your Looks, that Nature, who made you, knowes you no more, but utterly forgets her owne Workmanship. By this, you cannot lay spots on your faces; but take them out of your Soules, you may." Then there is "The Ghyrlond of the Blessed Virgin Marie."

  "There are five letters in this blessed Name,
    Which, chang'd, a five-fold Mysterie designe;
  The M, the Myrtle, A, the Almonds clame,
    R, Rose, I, Ivy, E, sweet Eglantine."

That such a book should not find favor in the eyes of the London Athenaeum, is not surprising. The author of Spiritual Wives and the recognizer of the Pope Joan fable as veritable history could scarcely be expected to recognize merit in such a work as the Femall Glory.

A Slavonian Version of the Bible is now in preparation at Rome. The original Slavonian text was the work of St. Cyril and St. Methodus, apostles to the Slavonians in the ninth century. In the lapse of years, the original text has been seriously tampered with by so-called emendators and incompetent copyists, so that it is now very difficult to determine several important questions concerning it. Was the translation made from the Latin, the Greek, or the Hebrew? What class of manuscripts were used by these apostles? Which of the Slavonian dialects was the vehicle of the translation? And, finally, was the original version written in glagolitic or cyrillic characters?

The Staple of Biographical Notices of Pope Sixtus V., is usually made up of a series of stories, to the effect that he was the son of ignorant parents and himself a swineherd; that he rose by his talents to the dignity of cardinal, and that, feigning extreme illness to the point of appearing to be on the verge of the grave from debility and disease, was no sooner elected to the papacy than he threw away his crutches and declared himself perfectly restored to health.

These stories have found such favor with compilers of historical books that they have been carefully preserved in spite of their want of confirmation by contemporary historians. M. A. I. Dumesnil has lately written a life of Felix Peretti, Pope Sixtus V., in which he shows that his origin was not low, and that he was allied to the best families, short of nobility, of his province. The stories of his illness, simulated feebleness, and affected use of crutches, he pronounces to be all fabulous, and quotes Tempesti, one of the historians of the conclave which elected Sixtus, thus: "In electing Montalto pope, still vigorous of years, since he had reached only sixty-four and enjoyed a robust and vigorous constitution, it was felt certain that he would live long enough to bury Farnese and his partisans." M. Dumesnil does not appear to have added anything by research or discovery to the materials already known to be in existence, but has simply used the matter furnished by Tempesti, Guerra, Fontana, and other Italian historians, with skill and judgment. He bears testimony to the extraordinary talent, judgment, and energy of the great pontiff, whose reign of less than five years was, unfortunately, too short to complete the extensive reforms commenced by him in the temporal government of his territory. Sixtus V. was remarkable for his energy in the suppression of abuses, order and economy in the public finances, and unbending severity toward criminals, encouragement of industry, an enlightened fondness for the arts, as shown by numerous monuments and his patronage of the great architect, Fontana, and an inflexible determination to raise the holy see from any dependence upon foreign princes.

There is another Life of Sixus in preparation by Baron Hübner, formerly Austrian Ambassador to France, in which he promises numerous documents, French, Spanish, and English, never yet published.

[Six paragraphs have been moved, three paragraphs toward the end, from this location according to the notice on page 711-2.]

Concilium Seleuciae et Ctesiphonti, habitum anno 410. Textum Syriacum edidit latine vertit notisque instruxit, T. J. Lamy. Lovanii, 1868.

From ancient Syrian literature, so rich in works relative to the church, its history, its discipline, and its dogmas, the Abbé Lamy, Professor at the University of Louvain, has here selected one of its most precious monuments for translation and comment. Not less remarkable for the charm of their antique simplicity of language than their fulness of doctrine, these few pages alone would almost suffice to establish the complete symbolism of the church. "Confitemur etiam"—thus testify the fathers of the Council of Seleucia—"Spiritum vivum et sanctum, Paracletum vivum, QUI EX PATRE ET FILIO in una Trinitate, in una essentia, in una voluntate, amplectentes fidem trecentorum decem et octo Episcoporum, quae definita fuit in urbe Nicea. Haec est confessio nostra et fides nostra, quam accepimus a Sanctis Patribus Nostris.

[The following six paragraphs have been moved to this location according to the notice on page 711-2.]

It will be remembered that in the fifth century the Priscillianists, in those countries infected with the Arian heresy, took unfair advantage of the special mention made by the Council of Constantinople of the first person of the Trinity and of the omitted mention of the Son, to maintain that the Son was not consubstantial with the Father.

Then followed the express insertion of the word FILIOQUE by decree of a general council.

The history of the Greek schism turns upon this point, and students of church history will find high interest and solid instruction in tracing the reasons and circumstances connected with the fact that, although this addition of filioque really made no change in the doctrine of the church, although in the ninth century the western churches used it, and yet Pope Leo III. insisted on the use in Rome of the form adopted by the fathers of Constantinople, and although between the Greek and the Latin churches there was no divergence on this doctrinal point, nevertheless it was not until after the consummation of the schism of Photius and of Michael Cerularius that the Greeks began to pretend that they had never professed this dogma.

Then follows the treatment of this question by the councils of fourth Lateran, (1215,) third Lyons, (1274,) and that of Florence, (1439.)

Of course it will be seen that the importance of the action of the Council of Seleucia lies in the fact that it was composed of forty bishops, of whom one, at least, was a member of the first ecumenical council of Constantinople, and that it was called at the instigation and through the initiative of the Greek Church herself.

So that, as the lawyers say, it does not lie in the mouth of the Greek Church, at the present day, to say that it is simply opposing a Latin innovation.

In almost immediate connection with what we here remark on the Rev. Mr. Lamy's book, we may mention that the Jacobi Episcopi Edessem Epistola ad Georgium Episcopum Sarugensem de Orthographia Syriaca, so well known, at least by reputation, to oriental scholars, has at last been published at Leipsic. Assemanni and Michaelis frequently urged its printing, and Cardinal Wiseman, who took a strong and appreciative interest in the work, speaks of it at length in the first volume of his Horae Syriacae, (Rome, 1828.)

Monsignor Giuliani, of Verona, has published a work on public libraries, in which he shows that the libraries of Italy possess a greater number of volumes than the libraries of any other nation in the world. The Italian libraries number 6,000,000 of volumes; France, 4,389,000; Austria, 2,400,000; Prussia, 2,040,000, Great Britain, 1,774,493; Bavaria, 1,268,000; Russia, 882,090; Belgium, 509,100. Collections of books are much scattered in Italy. Paris has one third of all the library books in France, and most of the European capitals are rich in almost as great a proportion. This is not the case in Italy. Milan has only 250,000 volumes in the Brera library, and 155,000 in the Ambrosian.

The Catholic World.

Vol. IX., No. 52.—July, 1869.

Columbus At Salamanca.

                      "——e di te solo
  Basti ai posteri tuoi ch'alquanto accume:
  Che quel poco darà lunga memoria
  Di poema dignissima e d'istoria." [Footnote 121]
         Gierusalemme Liberata, TASSO.

[Footnote 121: "Thy single name will pour diviner light O'er history's pages; and thy fame inspire Bards, who are yet unborn, with more celestial fire."

Some three years since, a large historical painting was exhibited at the gallery of the Artists' Fund Association in the city of New York. Its subject, as announced, was "Columbus before the Council of Salamanca." The picture was said to be a work of merit, and attracted much attention. It represented the great discoverer standing in the large hall of a convent, surrounded by monks and ecclesiastics, foremost among whom are three Dominican friars, who, having apparently worked themselves into a paroxysm of anger, face Columbus with gestures of violent denunciation. Grave, dignified, and majestic stands the great Genoese discoverer among them, apparently the only reasonable being in that assemblage of ignorance and bigotry, whose victim he is evidently about to become. The pictorial lesson sought to be conveyed was, clearly, that here was another Galileo business, a second e pur si muove sensation, a repetition of the favorite amusement of all churchmen, which every one knows to be the persecution of discoverers and the crushing out of knowledge. And the warrant for all this misrepresentation was said to be found in the pages of Washington Irving's History of Columbus.

Now, a perusal of those pages shows that, although Mr. Irving committed a grave historical blunder in describing a "council of Salamanca" that had no existence, he nevertheless expressly excepts from any charge of ignorance and intolerance that may be implied from his language these very Dominican monks who, in Mr. Kauffman's historical picture, are made the foremost and most violent in their denunciation of Columbus.

"When Columbus," says Irving, "began to state the grounds of his belief, the friars of St. Stephen's (Dominicans) alone paid attention to him, that convent being more learned in the sciences than the rest of the university. The others appear to have intrenched themselves behind one dogged proposition."

In the entire range of English art and literature so firmly have some of the most offensive forms of anti-Catholic prejudice become rooted, that, whenever any prominent historical character or incident comes in contact with the Catholic Church the occasion is seized, right or wrong, with or without authority, and often in the very teeth of history, to exemplify some phase of what people are pleased to call popish ignorance and persecution. Under the dark pall of bigotry that has so long overshadowed the genius of English literature, events which, in honest truth, should and do redound to the honor of the Catholic Church and its hierarchy as protectors of knowledge and promoters of noble enterprises have been, by a species of literary legerdemain, wrested into so many evidences of their intolerance.

More than any country, England has furnished astounding and repulsive proofs of the truth of Count De Maistre's assertion that "History is a vast conspiracy against truth." With uplifted hands, dripping with the blood of the innocent, she accuses other nations of murder. With a statute-book black with intolerance and suppression of knowledge, she talks complacently of the rights of conscience and the blessings of education.

In a lecture on Daniel O'Connell, delivered in Brooklyn on the fifth of March last, the distinguished orator, Wendell Phillips, of Boston, with all his eloquence, appeared almost at a loss fittingly to qualify, by description and illustration, the frightful tyranny of Protestant England against Catholic Ireland, as exemplified in the diabolical ingenuity of the means by which she sought to "stamp out" Irish nationality and annihilate Catholicity. And, Mr. Phillips might have added, she was as consistently bigoted at home as in Ireland. Here, the poor hedge schoolmaster if a Catholic, who taught a child its a b c, was, for the first offence, subject to banishment, and for the second, to be hanged as a felon. There, when the University of Oxford was asked to confer the honorary degree of A.M. on Alban Francis, a learned Benedictine, he was rudely thrust back, solely for the reason that he was a Catholic. And yet the same university had shortly before conferred the same degree on—a Mohammedan! The old distich is very trite, but on that occasion it was very true:

  "Turk, Jew, or atheist may enter here,
      But not a papist."

It is a memorable fact that Sir Isaac Newton particularly distinguished himself by active participation in this piece of bigotry. He actually suspended the preparation for the press of his Principia, and lent all the influence of his position and his great name in order that an Englishman, distinguished for his virtues and his learning, might not, because he was a Catholic, receive the cheap recognition of the honorary degree of a Protestant university. And Newton's English biographer coolly states that "it was this circumstance, perhaps, as much as the personal merit of Newton, that induced the university to select him, the following year, to serve as their representative in parliament."

But space fails us to dwell on this subject, and we desire merely to note the fact that, so thoroughly has a spirit of intolerant anti-Catholicity permeated English literature, that its expression, in some shape, is constantly found at the points of the pens of many who are personally unconscious of any such inspiration. {435} The spirit we refer to so thoroughly pervades every department of literature—history, biography, travels, poetry, philosophy—that from youth to old age it is unconsciously infiltrated into the mental processes of every one who uses the English language as a means of acquiring or communicating knowledge. Even as we write, an instance of this presents itself. Here is a passage from the editorial columns of a leading daily, published in Brooklyn, the third city of the Union:

"——the church so long deemed the enemy of human freedom and intellectual progress, which imprisoned Galileo, and tried to thwart Columbus in putting the girdle of her ancient faith around the world!"

And yet the article from which this extract is made is evidently written in a spirit that its author honestly supposes to be one of entire freedom from religious prejudice. The church tried to thwart Columbus! That is the main idea of the passage quoted, as it was also the inspiration of the Kauffman painting. Such ideas and such inspiration are the result of general prejudice and a foregone conclusion.

Of course we are aware of the accommodating pliability of the term "the church," as used by writers who have anything disagreeable or false to say of Catholicity. "The church" is, by turns, a council, the pope, the cardinals, the inquisition, a bishop or two, a knot of priests, sometimes only one, a king, a viceroy, a barefooted friar, a dying nun, or even a simple layman. It is really difficult and discouraging to deal with people who either cannot or will not abide by some standard of meaning for words whose proper acceptance is well defined and recognized.

In the case of Columbus these misrepresentations are the more remarkable for the reason that there is no history of the discovery of America, no biography of Columbus, how ever imperfect, however prejudiced it may be, from whose perusal the student can arise with any other conviction than that Columbus, so far from being thwarted, was, on the contrary, enabled to succeed in obtaining from Spain the means to fit out his expedition only, wholly, and solely by reason of the encouragement and aid he received from friars, priests, bishops, and cardinals!

From the moment he set foot on Spanish soil until he sailed from Palos the generous sympathy and brave advocacy of churchmen never forsook him. Never for a moment did they waver in their appreciation of his noble nature, his sincere piety, and the merit of his enterprise. From the Dominicans cloistered in St. Stephens to Luis de St. Angel, high treasurer at the royal court; from the saintly hermit of La Rabida to the grand Cardinal Mendoza, ("a man of sound judgment, quick intellect, eloquent and able," says Washington Irving,) in all are found the same generous enthusiasm and unwavering boldness in their support of the strange sailor's enterprise.

And now, should Mr. Kauffman, or any other artist, desirous of painting a great picture without pandering to a taste as false in art as in history, desire to select a striking incident from the history of Columbus, we beg leave to suggest that, without flying in the face of truth, he may find it among the following historical incidents:

First. Pedro Gonzalez de Mendoza, in appearance lofty and venerable, of generous and gentle deportment, pleading the cause of Columbus before the queen.

Second. The friar Diego de Deza aiding Columbus in sore necessity from his own scant purse.

Third. Juan Perez, prior of the convent of La Rabida, remonstrating with Columbus against abandoning his great enterprise and quitting Spain.

Fourth. The same prior saddling a mule at midnight to confront the dangers of mountain passes, and an enemy's country, in order to intercede for Columbus with the queen at Santa Fé.

Fifth. The same noble monk pleading the cause of Columbus before the queen with such chivalrous enthusiasm that "Isabella never heard the proposition urged with such honest zeal and impassioned eloquence."

Sixth. Another noble ecclesiastic, Luis de St. Angel, who, rivalling Isabella's magnanimity, met the queen's noble offer to pledge her crown jewels to raise the necessary funds for Columbus's expedition with the assurance that she need not, for he would advance the money.

But to return to the "council of Salamanca." The word council presents the idea of a solemn ecclesiastical assemblage: not a committee, not a board, not a junto; but something grand, elevated in dignity and large in numbers. When you say "council," every one, instinctively, imagines a crowd of mitres and episcopal croziers.

With that "fatal facility" which is the bane of historical composition Irving has given us an entire chapter of nine pages describing this famous "council," its debates, and its proceedings, and from this chapter has gradually, although—we must in justice to Mr. Irving say—unwarrantably, grown up a story that, by dint of thirty years' repetition, has almost acquired the dignity of an historical fact. That Prescott should have followed Irving is not surprising. That Lamartine should have disdained reference to historical sources and spoken of Spain of the fifteenth century with that wonderful sans gêne that improvises both form and substance, that writes an apotheosis of Robespierre and calls it a history of the Girondins, in which there is, of course, a florid description of "the last banquet," (which never took place,) is still less surprising. But that a Spaniard and a serious historian, Don Modesto Lafuente, should have written an important page in the history of his country on the word of an entire stranger is astounding.

The whole of chapter third and part of chapter fourth of Irving's Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus are devoted to "the council." Irving represents Ferdinand "determined to take the opinion of the most learned men in the kingdom, and be guided by their decision." Ferdinand de Talavera, "one of the most erudite men of Spain and high in the royal confidence," was commanded to consult the most learned astronomers, etc. After they had informed themselves fully on the subject, they were to consult together and make a report to the sovereign of their collective opinion. After a long disquisition on the condition of learning and science at that time, Irving goes on to say: "Such was the period when a council of clerical sages was convened in the collegiate convent of St. Stephen to investigate the new theory of Columbus. It was composed of professors of astronomy, geography, mathematics and other branches of science, together with various dignitaries of the church and learned friars. … Among the number who were convinced by the reasoning and warmed by the eloquence of Columbus was Diego de Deza, a worthy and learned friar of the order of St. Dominick. He obtained for Columbus a dispassionate if not an unprejudiced hearing." {437} Irving speaks of the assembled body as "this learned junto," and says that occasional conferences took place, but without producing any decision.

"Talavera, to whom the matter was specially entrusted, had too little esteem for it, and was too much occupied to press it to a conclusion, and thus the inquiry experienced continual procrastination and neglect."

So far the third chapter of Irving. It is a remarkable fact that, for all the important statements concerning the "council," Irving cites but one authority, Remesal, referring to book ii. chapter 27, and book xi. chapter 7. In an endeavor to verify these citations we find that book ii. has but twenty-two chapters, and the passage referred to in book xi. chapter 7 is not there, but in book ii. chapter 7. But it is more than singular that Irving should refer to Remesal at all on that subject. Remesal was a learned Dominican monk and his work is a History of the Provinces of Chiapa and Guatemala, (America.) His book was completed in 1609, and first published in 1619. Personally, he was separated from the events at Salamanca by a space of one hundred and twenty years. He was not writing the history of Spain in 1487, and what he says concerning Salamanca is merely incidental, unquestionably correct though it be. Thus, he states that, with the aid of the Dominicans, Columbus brought over the most learned men of the university, and among the numerous claims to greatness of the convent of St. Stephen was that of having been the principal cause of the discovery of the Indies. [Footnote 122]

[Footnote 122: "Y con el favor des los Religiosos reduxo a su opinion los mayores Letrados de la escuela. … Entre las muchas grundezas … una es aver sido la principal ocasion del descubrimiento de las Indias."]

To return to Irving. He relates in chapter 4 that the "consultations of the board (first it was the council, then "this learned junto") at Salamanca were interrupted by the Spanish campaign against Malaga, before that learned body could come to a decision, and for a long time Columbus was kept in suspense, vainly awaiting the report that was to decide the fate of his application." It thus appears that the opinion of the council was not sufficiently adverse to Columbus to report at once and unfavorably of his project. Then followed the spring campaign of 1487, the siege of Malaga, August, 1487. "In the spring of 1489," says Irving, "Columbus was summoned to attend a conference of learned men to be held at the city of Seville."

But if a fresh conference is to decide, what then was the value of the Salamanca council by whose decision, as Mr. Irving informed us a few pages back, King Ferdinand had resolved to be guided?

"In 1490, Ferdinand and Isabella entered Seville in triumph. Spring and summer wore away. At court was Fernando de Talavera, the procrastinating arbiter of the pretensions of Columbus." So then the arbiter was Talavera, not the council, which, so far from condemning, have not yet, at the end of four years, given any decision concerning the affair of Columbus.

The higher we remount with the authorities toward the epoch of "the council" the less do we find concerning it and concerning Salamanca. The chroniclers of their Catholic majesties, Hernando del Pulgar, Galindez, Carvajal, and others, make no mention of it, and Peter Martyr, Lucio Siculo, Gonzalez de Oviedo, Lopez de Gomara, and Sohs are equally silent on the subject.

It must be borne in mind, with regard to Columbus, that historical certainty begins really with the siege of Granada, in 1492. Everything preceding that epoch is traditional, often vague and uncertain, and seldom supported by documentary evidence. A council at Salamranca held by royal order would have been authorized by special edict or decree. There was none. Neither was there any regular delegation to the university, no commission officially installed, no interrogatories, nor registers, nor records, followed by a definitive decree. The college and convent of St. Stephen (Dominican) was only one college of the many at Salamanca constituting the university. If such a council as Irving describes had ever been held there, reference to recorded proceedings, and a final decision in its archives, or in those of St. Stephen, could long since have been made.

The truth is that the only authority for any statements concerning a committee of cosmographers is a passage in the life of the grand admiral, written by his son Fernando Columbus. As already remarked, the nearer we approach the period of the pretended "council" the less we hear about it. Herrera, whose sagacity, impartiality, and fidelity are universally recognized, thus relates the matter of the cosmographers, but not once does he mention "council" or "Salamanca." He says (1st Dec. book i, chap. vii.) "that Columbus's suit was so home pressed (y tanto se porfiò en ello) that their Catholic majesties, giving some attention to the affair, referred it to father Ferdinand de Talavera. He (Talavera) held a meeting of cosmographers who debated about it, (qui confirieron en ello,) but there being few then of that profession in Castile, and those none of the best in the world, and besides Columbus would not altogether explain himself, lest he should be served as he had been in Portugal, [Footnote 123] they came to a resolution nothing answerable to what he had expected."

[Footnote 123: During his negotiation at Lisbon with the king of Portugal, Columbus was requested to furnish for the consideration of the royal council a detailed plan of his proposed voyage, with charts and documents according to which he intended to shape his course. As soon as these were obtained, a well-manned vessel, under command of an able captain, was despatched with orders to sail west on the Atlantic according to the instructions of Columbus. Some few days out from the Cape Verd Islands, the crew became discouraged, and the vessel returned. The secret of its mission soon transpired, and Columbus, outraged at the treachery, left Portugal in disgust.]

Herrera follows Ferdinand Columbus very closely; adopting, in many passages, his very words. Fernando makes no mention of Salamanca, says expressly that the cosmographers were called altogether by Talavera, and that Columbus held back his most important proofs lest what had happened him in Portugal might also happen him in Spain, (nè lo ammiraglio si volea lasciar tanto intendere che gli avenisse quel, che in Portogallo gli avvenne et gli urbassero la beniditione.)

Fernando Columbus was a man of learning and ability, and his history is of great value. Unfortunately, the work, as he wrote it, is lost. It was, of course, in the Spanish language. It is said that a son of his brother Diego took the MS. to Genoa, where it was translated into Italian. The version now used in Spain is retranslated from the Italian, and abounds in errors. There is a very good copy of the Italian edition (Venice, 1685) in the Astor library.

Munoz, the Spanish national historian who followed Herrera and precedes Navarette, was a scholar of great merits, talents, and liberal acquisitions. He was indefatigable in research, and being royal historiographer had free access to all the records of Spain. He says that Talavera was commissioned to examine the enterprise with cosmographers, and give their opinion. {439} As the court happened that winter to be at Salamanca, they met there. It is to be regretted that no record exists of the conferences that took place in the Dominican convent of St. Stephen, from which to form an opinion of the condition of mathematics and astronomy in the university so famous in the fifteenth century. It is clear, nevertheless, that Columbus established his propositions, produced his proofs, and met every objection. [Footnote 124]

[Footnote 124: Talavera á quien los reyes encargaron la comision de juntar à los sujetis habiles in cosmografia, para examinar la empresa, y dar su pareceo. Formose la junta en Salamanca, quizá per el invierno estando alli la corte. Es lastima quo no hayan quidado documentis de las disputas que se tuvieron en el convento de los dominicanos de San Esteban para formar juicio del estado de las matematicas y astronomia en aquella universidad famosa en el siglo XV. Coustu que Colon sentaban sus proposisciones, exponfa sus fundamentos, y satisfaciá a' las dificultades.]

Munoz (Historia del Nuevo Mundo, pp. 57, 58, 59) continues: "Los dominicanos poner entre sus glorias el haber hospedado en San Esteban al descubridor de las Indias, dadole de comer y otros auxilios para seguir sus pretensiones; y sobra todo el haber estado por su opinion en equellas disputas, y atraido á su partido los primeros hombres de la escuela. En lo qual attribuyen la principal parte á Fray Diego Deza. … cuyo autoridad. … contribuyó mucho para los creditos y acceptacion de la empresa." [Footnote 125]

[Footnote 125: The Dominicans are justly proud of the hospitality extended by them in their convents to the discoverer of America, entertaining him, and providing him with all things necessary to pursue his projects; and still more of having declared for him in the argument, drawing over to his side the first men of the university. In all which the great merit is due to Diego de Deza, whose influence contributed greatly to the appreciation and adoption of the enterprise.]

Only a few years since, in 1858, Don Domingo Doncel y Ordar, of Salamanca, published a memoir in which he refutes the statements of Irving.

A conference of cosmographers doubtless was held, but it was not of the nature described by Irving and those who copy him, nor was it a "council" with which the university of Salamanca had any official connection whatever.

The archives, documents, and registers of the university have been searched with the most thorough diligence, and not a trace of the council is on record. The registers in particular, admirably kept and carefully preserved, were commenced in 1464 and record incidents almost insignificant in interest, but make no mention of such a meeting or council as Irving speaks of. In this connection it is matter of surprise that such writers as Rosselly De Lorgues and Cadoret should still be chasing the phantom of this Salamanca council. The latter says that its decree was rendered five years after its first meeting, and De Lorgues supposes it probable that its records may yet be found in the archives of Simancas. If there had been any decision against Columbus by a body at all approaching the dignity and importance of the university of Salamanca, he would have immediately quitted Spain, never to return. But we find him leaving Salamanca strong in the support of its first scholars, of the entire body of Dominicans, and of the papal nuncio.

That King Ferdinand should have directed Talavera to take the opinion of cosmographers is perfectly natural. This temporizing and shuffling treatment of Columbus would lead him to do anything that would gain time and put Columbus off. Even Isabella was evidently desirous of procrastinating until a successful termination of the siege of Granada should enable them to act in the matter.

Reference to a committee or a board for the sake of delay indefinite is not an invention of the nineteenth century. It is as old as, if not older than, the period of Columbus. {440} That Columbus should, as his son Fernando relates, have hesitated to explain himself fully, was natural, and indeed inevitable. And with that hesitation there must have been a shade of disdain in his manner. It looks very much as though he had reserved his best, most cogent reasons for the private ear of his special friends the Dominicans, who were enthusiastically the advocates of his enterprise.

We see Columbus leaving Salamanca not cast down and defeated, but serene and with all the courage of confirmed conviction. The noble Diego de Deza conducts him to the presence of Ferdinand and Isabella, and we soon afterward hear the hum of preparation at Palos.

The latest historian of Columbus, Mr. Arthur Helps, separated from Washington Irving by a period of some forty years, is credited with ability, and great industry and research. He certainly has the advantage of extensive and successful discoveries of documents concerning Columbus made in Spain within that period. It would be but reasonable, therefore, to look for the throwing of much additional light and interesting details on so capital an incident as "the council of Salamanca." Here is the account given of it by Mr. Helps in his Life of Columbus, published since the commencement of the present year:

"Amid the clang of arms and the bustle of warlike preparation, Columbus was not likely to obtain more than a slight and superficial attention to a matter which must have seemed remote and uncertain.

"Indeed, when it is considered that the most pressing internal affairs of kingdoms are neglected by the wisest rulers in times of war, it is wonderful that he succeeded in obtaining any audience at all. However, he was fortunate enough to find at once a friend in the treasurer of the household, Alonzo de Quintilla, a man who, like himself, took delight in great things, and who obtained a hearing for him from the Spanish monarchs. Ferdinand and Isabella did not dismiss him abruptly. On the contrary, it is said they listened kindly; and the conference ended by their referring the business to the queen's confessor, Fra Hernando de Talavera, who was afterwards archbishop of Granada. This important functionary summoned a junta of cosmographers (not a promising assemblage!) to consult about the affair, and this junta was convened at Salamanca in the summer of the year 1487.

"Here was a step gained; the cosmographers were to consider his scheme, and not merely to consider whether it was worth taking into consideration. But it was impossible for the jury to be unprejudiced. All inventors, to a certain extent, insult their contemporaries by accusing them of stupidity and ignorance. And the cosmographical pedants, accustomed to beaten tracks, resented the heresy by which this adventurer was attempting to overthrow the belief of centuries. They thought that so many persons, wise in nautical matters, as had preceded the Genoese mariner, never could have overlooked such an idea as this which had presented itself to his mind. Moreover, as the learning of the middle ages resided for the most part in the cloister, the members of the junta were principally clerical, and combined to crush Columbus with theological objections. … Las Casas displays his usual acuteness when he says that the great difficulty of Columbus was not that of teaching, but that of unteaching; not of promulgating his own theory, but of eradicating the erroneous convictions of the judges before whom he had to plead his cause. In fine, the junta decided that the project was 'vain and impossible, and that it did not belong to the majesty of such great princes to determine anything upon such weak grounds of information.'"

Slender material, all this, for another Kauffman painting! Here is our council sunk to a junta—a junta of cosmographers—not an assemblage of theologians to decide what the church thought about the project, but a junta of men supposed to know something of geography and the conformation of the globe! The "theological objections" referred to by Mr. Helps were precisely the opportunity of Columbus's greatest triumph in giving him occasion to reveal himself to friends and enemies in a capacity never suspected to exist in him. {441} Among the many traditions in Spain concerning "l'almirante" [Footnote 126] —traditions supported by his own writings and the testimony of such men as Las Casas—none are so well established as those that recount the eloquent inspiration of Columbus in citing or commenting the Scriptures. His perfect familiarity with them was not more admirable than his majesty of manner in declaiming their grandest passages.

[Footnote 126: Humboldt says that whenever a Spaniard mentions L'Almirante, he refers to but one, namely, Columbus. Just as the Mexicans, when they speak of El Marchese, mean Cortes, and the Florentines, when they name Il Segretario, mean Macchiavelli.]

Luther, as we learn from that remarkable book, D'Aubigné's History of the Reformation, discovered, unexpectedly discovered, to his great joy and surprise, a Bible chained to a window in the conventual library! Could not some modern D'Aubigné inform us how it was that an obscure Italian sailor could have happened upon a Bible in such countries as Italy, Portugal, and Spain, could have been permitted to read it—more than all that, could have had the temerity to quote it to the very face of monks, and priests, and, worse still, show them that he knew as much about it as they did? We commend the subject to the D'Aubigné editors.

In saying that, in our belief, the life of Columbus has yet to be written, we express no new opinion.

In this connection it is well remarked by the Marquis De Belloy, that the best history of Christopher Columbus would be the collection of his own writings accompanied by commentaries. Literary and bibliographical research and labor in Spain have succeeded in collecting nearly everything that Columbus wrote from the year 1492 up to the period of his death, and their publication is needed to show this truly grand character in his true light. Were Columbus simply a man of genius, an ordinary history would suffice to recount his life. But his soul was as great as his genius, and such a soul is its own best revelation. Next to the accomplishments of his great project, the discovery of a new world beyond the ocean, a world he distinctly saw, his dominant thought was—with the wealth that must necessarily be obtained from it—to reconquer and deliver from pagan hands the sepulchre of our Saviour!

Profane history and modern impiety instinctively smile at such simplicity. Mr. Rosselly De Lorgues is one of the very few who have rendered justice to the religious phase of the character of the great mariner, and he shows that in Columbus constancy, perseverance, bravery, and honor were not more marked than elevated Catholic piety.

To conclude with Salamanca, there is no more searching, truthful, and eloquent commentary on its results than the language of Columbus himself, for he has recorded it. We quote from Navarette (Madrid edition) vol. 1. p. xcii.:

"Diego de Deza"—the Dominican monk—"was his (Columbus's) special protector with Ferdinand and Isabella, and mainly contributed to the success of his enterprise; referring to this, Columbus himself said that from his coming into Castile that prelate (Deza) had protected him, had striven for his honor, and to him was it due that their majesties possessed the Indies." [Footnote 127]

[Footnote 127: "Por lo cual decia el mismo Colon que desde que vino á Castilla le habia favorecido aquel prelado y deseado su honora, y que el fue causa que SS. AA. tuviesen las Indias."]

For this passage Navarette quotes Remesal, Historia di Chiapa e Guatemala. A very characteristic performance in Navarette! It was impossible for him to avoid referring to what Columbus had said, and he weakens the force of it by not crediting it at once and directly to the proper authority, Las Casas—citing Las Casas's own words.

For Remesal expressly says that he takes it from Las Casas, (lib. i. al medio del cap. 29:) "Y assi (dize) en carta escrita de su mano de Christobal Colon vide que dezia al Rey: Que el suso dicho Maestro del Principe, Arcobispo de Sevilla D.F. Diego Deza avia fido causa que los Reyes abrassen las Indias."

It is one thing to be told that Remesal uses the language cited by Navarette, and quite another thing to learn from Las Casas that he had seen a letter written by Columbus himself, in which he told the king of Spain that their majesties owed their possession of the Indies to the Dominican monk Diego de Deza.

Nothing, however, need surprise us from a historian who undertook the desperate task of extenuating the notorious injustice of Ferdinand toward Columbus. In its execution Navarette has needlessly and shamefully outraged the truth of history and the memory of the Great Discoverer.

Daybreak

Chapter VIII.

The Lord Answered Job Out Of A Whirlwind.

Mr. Southard was perfectly confident in his expectation of being able to convince Miss Hamilton of her mistake. He knew her well enough to be sure that she would fearlessly acknowledge her error as soon as it should be made plain to her; and he did not doubt that the power to produce that conviction on her mind would be given him.

He would not allow that first twinge of wounded personal pride and dignity of office, with which he had seen how light she held his authority in matters of religion, to stand in the way of his endeavors. The first dignity of his office was to perform its duties. Exacting respect was secondary.

Mr. Southard had one confident: his journal. The day the books were left on his table he wrote in it: "Tonight I am to read Milner's End of Controversy. O my God! may I read it by the light of thy Gospel! May a ray of heavenly truth fall on each page, expose its hidden falsehood, and teach me how best to prove that falsehood to this stray lamb who has been lured from thy fold into the den of the wolf."

Two or three days passed, the book was read, and read again; but the refutation was not ready. Mr. Southard was too honest and too manly to think that personal abuse was a proper answer to theological argument. He remembered that when St. Michael set his foot upon the neck of Satan, and chained him to the rock, he did not use infernal weapons, or walk in loathsome ways; but his sword was tempered in heaven, and there was no mire upon his sandals.

"When I fight for the Lord," the minister said, "I will use the weapons of the Lord."

He laid aside the first book, and took another. Again a few days, and yet he was not prepared to undermine his adversary.

"I am astonished at the ingenuity and subtlety of these writers," was the record he made in those days. "All the resources of minds richly dowered by nature, highly cultivated by education, and inspired by some strange infatuation for what they call the church, have been brought to bear upon this question of polemics. How skilfully they mingle truth with falsehood! What beautiful, what touching, what sublime sentiments they drop in places where one would not go save so lured! It reminds me of my boyish days, when the scarlet blossom of a cardinal-flower would entice me down steep banks, and into dangerous waters, or some bloomy patch of ripe berries would draw my feet into a treacherous swamp. I begin to perceive the attraction which the Roman Church exercises on the unwary."

It will be perceived that Mr. Southard had the rare courtesy not to use the word "Romish." He was so much a gentleman that he could not call nicknames, not even in theological controversy.

But as his days of study lengthened into weeks, a change came over him. The obstacles in his way made him nervous, feverish, and, it must be owned, rather ill-tempered. His political opposition to Mr. Lewis was expressed with unusual asperity. He was very haughty with Miss Hamilton. He entirely absented himself from luncheon, and he sometimes dined out, rather than sit beside that smiling papist who was doubtless triumphing over him in her heart, taking his silence for defeat. He groaned as he heard her light step pass his door every morning on her way to early mass. That step was his réveil. Should he, the Gospel watchman, sleep while the foe was awake and at work?

"Why cannot truth inspire as much ardor as error awakens?" he wrote one morning. "Why cannot we bring back the old days of faith, when God was to man a power, and not a name; when the tables of the law were stone to the touch; when he who made flood, and fire, and death was more terrible than flood, fire, or death? The author of Ecce Homo is right; no virtue is safe that is not enthusiastic. A cold religion is a worthless religion. O Lord! have mercy on Zion; for it is time to have mercy on it."

But, angry as he was with her every morning, when Mr. Southard met Margaret coming in again from mass, her face smiling, her cheeks red from the cold, he could but forgive her. It is hard to frown on a bright face, happiness looks so much like goodness.

Mr. Granger took notice of these early walks, Mr. Lewis alternately scowled upon and laughed at them. Mrs. Lewis and Aurelia exclaimed, How dared she go out alone before light!

The wicked people, if there were any, were all asleep, Miss Hamilton said, sitting down to breakfast with a most unromantic appetite, and a general preponderance of rose-color and sparkle in her countenance. At six o'clock on winter mornings no one was abroad but papists and policemen. It was the safest hour of the twenty-four.

"My good angel and I just go about our business, and nobody molests us," she said with a spice of mischief; for the mention of anything peculiarly Catholic usually had the effect of producing a blank silence, and a general elongation of visage.

"But such a magnificent spectacle as I saw this morning! I came home round the Common. The sleet-storm of last evening had left all the trees crusted with ice to the very tips of their twigs, and set an ice-mitre on every individual arrow-head of the iron fence. There were the ghosts of all the bishops from Peter down. There wasn't any sky, but only a vast crystalline distance. I took my stand on the Beacon and Charles street corner. Every other person who was so happy as to be out looked also. Then the sun came up. Park street steeple caught fire at the ball, and flamed all the way down. There was a glimmer on the topmost twigs, then the trees all over the Common were in an instant transfigured into flashing diamonds. The malls were enough to put your eyes out—nothing but glitter from end to end. It was a grand display for the frost-people. The trees will talk about it all next summer."

The winter slipped away; and Mr. Southard had not fulfilled his promise to Miss Hamilton. Neither had he relinquished his studies. Shut up with his books hour after hour and day after day, in silence and solitude, he scarcely knew how the world fared without. For him the war had suddenly dwindled. Through long and weary vigils that wore his face thin and his eyes hollow, he studied, and thought, and prayed, not the humble petition of one who places himself before God, and passively awaits an inspiration, but the impassioned and fiery petition of one who will not doubt the justice of his cause, and will not be denied. Then, leaning from the window to cool his heated eyes and head in the fresh early dawning, a peace that was half exhaustion would settle upon him. Sleep came pitifully in those hours, and pressed on the throbbing brain too much expanded by thought, and for a little while soothed the tormented heart.

"I will resist the seduction! This is my time of trial; but I will conquer! In the name of God, I will yet confound the doctors of the Roman Church. O God! who didst nerve the arm of David against Goliath, strengthen thou me!"

At every step he was baffled. Catching at what appeared a mere theological weed, thinking to fling it out of his way, he found it rooted like an oak. Approaching dogmas with the expectation of cutting them down like men of straw, he was confronted by mailed giants.

He found himself among crowds and clouds of Catholic saints—shadows, he called them—that would fly from his path when he should hold up the torch of truth. But, looking in that light, he saw steadfast eyes, and shining foreheads, and palm-branches that brushed his shrinking, empty hands. And out from among them, with a look of gentle humility that smote him like a blow, and with a tremulous radiance gathering about her pure forehead, came one whom he had frowned upon, and striven to discrown. What was she saying? "All nations shall call me blessed!" Not great, not glorious, not even lovely, but blessed!

The next moment he started out of his chair, muttered some kind of exorcism, caught his hat, and went out for a walk. Though it was mid-April, a north wind was blowing thank heaven for that! Nothing murky about the north wind. {445} It would soon blow away all these pestilential vapors that came up from the sun-steeped lowlands of his soul; pagan places where, though his iconoclastic will had again and again gone about breaking images, no sooner did it rest than there they were again, Bacchus, and Hebe, and Diana, and the rest. Or from yet more dangerous because more deceptive regions, wide, bright solitudes of the soul, arid and dazzling, where the unobstructed sky seemed to lean upon the earth—the region of mirages, of New Jerusalems, that shone and crumbled—of sacred-seeming streams that fled from thirsty lips—of cool shadows that never were reached.

In one of these impetuous walks, Mr. Southard came across an old minister, and went into his study with him, and told him something of his difficulties. He was too well aware of his own excitement to venture on a full explanation. Moreover, there was something soothing and silencing in the look of this man, in his tranquil, rather sad expression, his noble face, and snowy hair.

The old doctor leaned back in his chair, and calmly listened while his younger brother spoke, smiling indulgently now and then at some vivid turn of expression, some flash of the eyes, some impatient gesture.

Elderly ministers were always pleased with Mr. Southard, who would ask advice and instruction of them with a docility that was almost childlike. Such respect was very pleasant to those who seemed to have fallen upon evil days, who saw the prestige of the ministry departing, to whom boys had ceased to take off their caps, to whom even women did not look up as of yore.

"My dear brother," said the doctor gently when the other had ceased speaking, "you have made a mistake in attempting this work. I tell you frankly, we can never argue down the Catholic Church. All the old theologians know that, and avoid the contest. For perfect consistency with itself, and for wonderful complexity yet harmony of structure, the world has not seen, and will not again see its equal. It is the masterwork of the arch-enemy."

"So much the more reason why we should attack it with all our might!" exclaimed the other.

"No," replied the doctor, "That does not follow. There are dangers which must be shunned, not met; and this is one. As with wine, so with Romanism, 'touch not, taste not, handle not!'"

"That might be said to the laity," Mr. Southard persisted. "But for us who teach theology, we ought to search, we ought to examine. It is essential that we know the weapons of our adversary in order to destroy them."

"Truth has many phases, and so has belief," was the quiet reply. "We begin by believing that the doctrines we hold are the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and that everything else is unmitigated falsehood. But after a while, according to the degree of candor of which we are capable, we begin to admit that every religion on earth has something reasonable to say for itself. There is a grain of good in Mohammedanism, in Brahminism, in Buddhism. We are now credibly assured that the old story of people throwing themselves under the wheels of Juggernaut is a myth. Hindu converts say that there were sometimes accidents at these religious celebrations, on account of the crowd, as we have accidents on the fourth of July; but that Juggernaut was a beneficent deity who took no pleasure in human pain, and whose attributes were a dim reflection of Christianity. {446} I used to tell that story in perfect good faith whenever a collection was wanted for the missionaries. I don't tell it now. At last we learn to choose what seems to us best, to present its advantages to others, but not to insist that all shall agree with us under pain of eternal loss. When I hear a man crying out violently against the purely religious opinions of others, I always set him down as a man of narrow heart and narrower head. The principal reason for my well-known hostility to Catholicism is a political one.

"The fact is, brother, God's light falling on the mind of man, is like sunlight falling on a prism. It is no longer the pure white, but is shattered into colors which each one catches according to his humor. We ministers are not like Moses coming from the mountain with the whole law in his two hands, and a dazzling face to testify for him that he had been with God, he alone. I wish we were, brother! I wish we were!"

"As the Catholic Church proves them. She holds the whole truth tangled in the midst of her errors, like a fly in a spider's web."

"Whithersoever a man goes, there is he called," said the doctor, sighing faintly. "We among the rest. We have a mission, too, and a noble one. We make people keep the Sabbath, which, without us, would fall into disuse; we remind them of their duties; we check immorality; we keep before the eyes of worldlings the fact that there is another world than this. In short, we spend our breath in keeping alive the sacred fire on the desecrated altar of the human soul. Is that nothing?"

In speaking, the doctor lifted his head, and drew up his stately form. His voice trembled with feeling, and his eyes were full of indignant tears. His look was proud, almost defiant; yet seemed directed less against his companion, than combating some voice in his own soul. All the enthusiastic dreams of his youth, though they had long since been subdued, as he thought, by common sense and necessity, stirred in their graves at sound of the imperious questioning, at sight of the clear, searching eyes of this young visionary who fancied that in the troubled spirit of man the full orb of truth was to be reflected unblurred.

"In short," Mr. Southard said, rising to go, "you believe that the spirit of evil can propose a problem which the Holy Spirit cannot solve."

"Not so!" was the reply; "but the spirit of evil may propose a problem which the Holy Spirit may not choose to solve for us till the end of time."

Chapter IX.

Noblesse Oblige

On his way home that day, the minister met Mr. Granger, and the two stopped to look at a Vermont regiment that was marching through the city from the Maine depot to the New York depot. As they stopped, the regiment also was stopped by some obstruction in the street.

The attention of the gentlemen was presently attracted to a boy in the rank nearest them, a bright, resolute-looking lad, with a ruddy face and smiling lips. {447} But it needed not a very keen observer to see in that smile the pathetic bravado of a boy who had just torn himself away from home, and was struggling to hide the grief with which his heart was swelling.

The young soldier looked up, his bright eyes bold with excitement. "When men won't go, the boys have got to go," he answered. "Do you want to take my place?"

Beside this boy stood a middle aged man who had an uncommonly good face. He was tall, somewhat awkward, and had that look of unsophisticated manliness, honest candor, and plain common sense, which is found only in the country. One could not fancy him a dweller among masked city faces, breathing air pent in narrow streets, walking daily on pavements, and knowing no shades but those of brick and stone. His place was tramping through wild forests, not with any romantic intent, but measuring with practised eyes the trunk of some tree in which he saw what woodsmen call a "good stick," and chopping steadily at it while the chips flew about him, and above him the spreading branches shivered at every stroke; or plodding slowly through still country roads beside his slow oxen; or, in the sultry summer days, swinging the scythe through thick grass and clover, mowing them down ankle deep at his feet. He had the flavor of all that about him. Now he had to wade through other than that fragrant summer sacrifice, to break through other ranks than serried clover and Mayweed, and those strong arms of his were to lay low something greater than pine or cedar. You could see that this thought was in his mind, that he never lost sight of it, but, also, that he would not shrink. Such men have not much to say; but in time of need they put into action the heroism which others exhale in glowing language.

This man had been looking straight before him; but at the sound of a childish voice he turned his head quickly. A little girl leaning from the curbstone was admiring the bunch of flowers on the soldier's bayonet, and stretching longing hands toward them.

The fixed look in the man's face broke up instantly. "Do you want them, little dear?" he asked.

He lowered his rifle, removed the flowers, and gave them to the child, looking at her with a yearning, homesick smile that was more pitiful than tears. At that moment the drums began to beat. The soldier laid his bronzed hand on the happy little head, then, with trembling lips and downcast eyes, marched on, and out of sight for ever.

Mr. Granger turned abruptly away. "I feel as if I were a great lazy coward!" he exclaimed. "I can't stand this any longer!"

The minister looked at him with a startled expression; but any reply was prevented; for just then they met Mrs. Lewis coming out of a flower-store, with her hands full of Mayflowers done up in solid pink bunches, without a sign of green.

"Poor things!" she said. "The sight of them always reminds me of the massacre of the Innocents. See! they look like so many pretty little pink and white heads cut off. Massed so, without any green, they are not at all like flowers. Are we going home to dinner? My husband will be late, and we are not to wait for him. He has gone to see who is drafted in our ward."

The family had nearly finished dinner when Mr. Lewis came in. "Our house is favored," he said immediately. "Granger, both you and I are drawn."

Mr. Granger looked up, but said nothing. "I got my substitute on the spot," Mr. Lewis continued. "He is a decent fellow whom I can depend on. I asked him if he knew of any one for you, and he thought he could get somebody."

Mr. Granger made no reply, seemed to be occupied in waiting on his little girl who sat beside him.

"How sober he is!" thought Miss Hamilton; but did not feel troubled, his gravity was so gentle.

Dora looked up in her father's face, and laughed, half with love, half with delight. "You nice papa!" she cried, and gave his arm an enthusiastic hug. He laid his hand on those sunny curls, as he had seen the soldier do in the street, but did not smile.

Glancing at Mr. Southard, Margaret met a look at once anxious and searching. His eyes were instantly averted, but his expression did not change. What could it mean? After dinner, he went directly to his room.

Mr. Granger sat apart in the parlor with Dora, petting her, and telling her stories. When her bed-time came, he went out with her, and was gone longer than usual. The evening was cool, and they had a fire in the grate. Mr. Lewis sat before it reading the evening paper, and the three ladies gathered in one corner, and talked in whispers.

"How sober and strange everything seems this evening!" Margaret said, shivering. "I feel cold. It isn't like spring, but like fall. Hold my hand, Aura dear. What does chill me so?"

"It is because Mr. Southard looked at you in such an odd way," Aurelia said gravely, holding Margaret's cold hand between her warm ones.

"I know what ails me," Mrs. Lewis said, in a tone of vexation. "It is that substitute. My husband will preach poverty for six months to come. Charles," raising her voice, "does your substitute look as if he had swallowed a new black silk dress with little ruffles all over it?"

"He has very much that expression of countenance," growled Mr. Lewis from behind his newspaper.

"O dear! And does he look as if Niagara Falls had disappeared down his throat, and as if he were just chewing up a little trip to the mountains?"

Mr. Granger came in presently, and stood awhile by one of the windows, looking out into the twilight. Then he took a seat by the fire.

It was getting too dark to read without a light, and Mr. Lewis laid his paper aside. "I will see about your substitute to-morrow," he said, "and send him up to the bank, if you wish."

"Thank you," Mr. Granger replied. "And as soon as I get a substitute, I shall immediately volunteer."

There was an exclamation from the ladies, and a sound as if one caught her breath.

Mr. Lewis stared at the speaker, turned very red, then started up, and went out of the room, banging the door behind him. A minute later, he flung open the door of Mr. Southard's study, and marched in without the least ceremony. "What is the meaning of this nonsense of Mr. Granger's volunteering?" he demanded, stammering with anger.

Mr. Southard had been sitting with a Bible open before him, and his face bowed forward and resting on it. He rose with cold stateliness at this abrupt invasion. "Will you sit, sir?" he said, pointing to a chair.

"No, sir, I will not!" was the answer. "I want you to go down and put a stop to his making a fool of himself. I won't say a word to him; I haven't patience to."

"If Mr. Granger thinks it his duty to go, I shall not attempt to dissuade him," said the minister calmly, reseating himself. "He is his own master, and I am in no way responsible for his action in the matter."

"When a man plants an acorn, we hold him responsible for the oak," was the retort. "You have indirectly done all you could to make him ashamed of staying at home, and to make him believe that the more pieces a man gets cut into the more of a man he is. If you don't prevent his going, I shall hold you responsible for whatever may happen."

For a moment the minister's self-control deserted him, and a just perceptible curl touched his lip with scorn. "Can you see no nobler destiny for a man," he asked, "than to eat three meals a day, make money, and keep a whole skin?"

Mr. Lewis's face had been red: now his very hands blushed with anger. He opened the door to leave the room, and turned on the threshold. "Yes, sir, I can!" he replied with emphasis. "But it is not in staying at home and sending another man out to die, especially when that man may be in your way!"

Banging the door behind him, Mr. Lewis ran against his niece who was just coming up-stairs. She looked terrified. She had overheard her uncle's parting speech.

"Oh! how could you!" she exclaimed. "Aunt was afraid that you were going to say something to Mr. Southard, and she sent me to beg you to come down. How could you, uncle?"

"I could a good deal easier than I couldn't," he replied. "Come into the chamber here and talk to me. I don't want to be left alone a minute. I shan't go down-stairs again to-night; and I would advise you and your aunt to get out of the way, and give Miss Hamilton a chance to talk or cry a little common sense into Mr. Granger."

Meantime Mr. Granger had been explaining somewhat to the two ladies left with him, and exonerating Mr. Southard from all responsibility.

"I know that Mr. Lewis will blame him," he said; "but that is unjust to both of us. It is paying me a very poor compliment to say that in such a matter I would allow another person to think for me."

"You must remember that my husband's excitement will be in proportion to his regard for you," Mrs Lewis said, with tears in her eyes. "He has a rough way of showing affection; but he is fonder of you than of any other man in the world; and I'm sure we all—" Here her voice failed.

Mr. Granger turned hastily toward her as she got up to go out. "I don't forget that," he said. "I know he thinks a good deal of me, and so do I of him. We shan't quarrel. Don't be afraid. I found out long ago that he has a kind and true heart under that rough manner."

Mr. Granger had not dared to look at Miss Hamilton, or address her directly. After having spoken, the thought had first occurred to him that he should have been less abrupt in announcing his intention to her. She might be expected to feel his departure more keenly than the others would. He waited a moment to see if she would speak. She sat perfectly quiet in the dim light, her cheek supported by her hand, her elbow on the arm of her chair, and her eyes fixed on the fire. {450} There is an involuntary calmness with which we sometime receive the most terrible news, and which even an acute observer would take for perfect indifference, but which, though not assumed, is utterly deceptive. Perhaps it is incredulity; perhaps the sudden blow stuns. Whatever it may be, no human self-control can equal it. Fortunately, this phenomenon worked now for Miss Hamilton. She would scarcely have forgiven herself or Mr. Granger if she had lost her self-possession.

"Nothing will be changed here," he said presently, slightly embarrassed by the continued silence. "All will go on just as it has. In case of any uncertainty, when it would take too long to hear from me, you can consult Mr. Barton, who is my lawyer. He knows all my wishes and intentions. Of course you have full authority regarding Dora. I feel quite at ease in leaving her to you."

So Mr. Barton had known all about it, and so had Mr. Southard, and others, perhaps. Miss Hamilton recollected herself with an effort. She was in Mr. Granger's employment; he was, in some sort, her patron. She had made the mistake of thinking that they were friends. But that is not friendship where the confidence is all on one side.

"I shall try to do my duty by Dora," she said rather coldly. "But what does 'full authority' mean?"

"She is too young to learn theology," he replied; "but everything else is free. I spoke lest some one might interfere during my absence, though that isn't likely."

Margaret waited a moment, then said, "Dora tells me that you hear her say the Our Father every night and morning. Of course, I shall hear it when you are gone. If you are willing, I would like to teach her to bless herself before praying, and to say a little prayer to the Mother of Christ for your safety. I won't make her say 'Mother of God.'"

Mr. Granger was touched. "That cannot hurt her nor me," he said. "Do as you please."

Presently he spoke again, "I received yesterday a letter which my cousin Sinclair wrote me the day before he was killed. It was given to a soldier who was taken prisoner, and is only just exchanged. That letter surprised and affected me; and if I had a lingering doubt as to my own course, it was dispelled then. He was driving to the steamer, it seems, when he met the Seventh Regiment marching through Broadway to take the cars south. As they marched, they sang 'Glory Hallelujah' with a sound like a torrent. He was electrified. There he was on the point of going abroad for distraction when here at home was the centre toward which the eyes of the whole civilized world were turned. He blushed for the slothful ease and aimlessness of his life. Here was manly employment. He took no thought for the causes of the war, since he was not responsible for them; and circumstances had decided which side he was to take. To him it was a great gymnasium in which men enervated by wealth, or cramped by petty aims, were to wake up their nobler powers, string anew their courage, 'ventilate their souls,' as he expressed it, and, finding what they were themselves capable of achieving, take back thus their faith in others. When he saw those gallant fellows march singing off to battle, the dusty, stale old life broke open for him, and a new golden age bloomed out. He did not feel that they were rejoicing over the shedding of blood, or the winning of victories; but they sang their emancipation from littleness, they sang because they caught breath of a higher air, they sang because they had found out that their souls were greater than their bodies. {451} Then first it seemed credible to him that the Son of God took flesh and died for man; for then he first perceived that man at his best is a glorious creature. 'I am happy,' he added. 'It is like getting out of a close room into the fresh air. I am going through a picture-gallery more magnificent than any in the old world, and listening to strains of an epic grander than Homer's. I feel as if I were just made new.'"

This recital was to Margaret like some reviving essence to a fainting person. Her heart, drooping inward on itself, expanded again.

"Here is something that will interest you," Mr. Granger added; "I will read it from the letter."

He lighted the gas and read: "The last time I was in Washington, I went to see Lieut. A——, who is laid up in one of the hospitals in charge of the Sisters of Charity. Everything was quiet and orderly. A. was enthusiastic about the sisters, calls them doves of peace and charity, says their bonnets look like wings of great white birds. I talked with one of them when I went out.

"'How can you, who are the children of peace, bear to come among us who are the sons of strife?' I asked.

"'Where can the children of peace more fitly go than among the sons of strife?' she returned.

"'But we must seem to you cruel, and unworthy of gentle ministrations,' I said. 'You must think that we deserve our pains.'"

"A swift, almost childlike smile just touched her lips, 'We cannot be everything,' she replied. 'Each has his place; and the judgment-seat belongs to God. I am only the nurse.'

"'God permits it,' she replied tranquilly. 'And the thought has occurred to me that it may be some times a preparation for religion. In the army men learn to suffer, and to sacrifice, and to be patient and obedient—lessons which perhaps they would not learn in any humbler school. And having acquired these virtues, they may use them in nobler ways, perhaps in preventing war. But,' she added hastily, 'it is not for me to explain the designs of the Almighty. Here is my mission!'

"She bowed, and glided away. A minute later I saw her raising the head of a dying soldier, and as his eyes grew dim, repeating for him, 'Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!'

As Mr. Granger finished reading, the door opened, and Mr. Southard came in, but stopped on seeing the two alone.

"I am glad you have, come," Miss Hamilton said quickly, "I want you to assure Mr. Granger that, though we shall miss him, and be anxious about him, we will not let our weakness stand in the way of his strength."

No matter if she had been slighted! No matter if the confidence had been all on one side!

"I have asked, and am likely to receive, a year's leave of absence from my congregation," he said. "I do not know how it will be; but I hope to go in the same regiment with Mr. Granger."

"Well," Margaret sighed as she climbed wearily up-stairs, "I have had one happy year. But could I have dreamed that Maurice Sinclair would be the one to reprove my weakness at such a time?".

Chapter X.

A Broken Circle.

Having made up his mind to go, Mr. Granger lost no time. He who had been the most leisurely of men, whose composure and deliberateness of manner had often given him the appearance of haughtiness, was now possessed by a spirit of ceaseless activity. His slow and dignified step became prompt, he spoke more quickly, his misty eyes cleared up, and a color glowed in his swarthy cheeks.

There was no more lounging on a sofa, and reading; no more theatre nor concert; no more lingering in picture-galleries, and looking about with that fastidious, dissatisfied expression of his till his eyes lit sparkling on something that pleased him; no more dreaming along, with a cigar in his mouth, under the trees at twilight. He was busy, happy, and full of life.

It did not take long to complete his arrangements. Like Madame Swetchine, he thought those obstacles trifling which were not insurmountable.

The family found themselves infected by his cheerfulness. Mr. Lewis's lugubrious visions of wooden arms and legs, and patches over the eye, he swept away with a laugh. The wistful glances, often dim with tears, with which the ladies looked at him, following his every step, listening to his every word, he chid more gently, and also more earnestly.

"How women can weaken men with a tear or a glance!" he said. "It will be hard for me to leave you. I love you all. I have been very happy here, and hope to be as happy here again. But I must go. I can't see poor men leaving their families, and boys torn away from their homes, and not go. I should never again respect myself if I staid at home. But there is something else. The feeling that draws me is something that I cannot explain. It is irresistible. The breeze has caught me, and I must move. Margaret has a smile for me, I know. It's in her. She comes of a Spartan stock."

Could she disappoint his expectation? No. Henceforth, at whatever cost to her, he should see no sign of weakness. But, oh! she thought, sometimes those who stay at home fight harder battles than those who go.

"And my little girl," said the father. "She wants me to have beautiful gold straps on my shoulders, and splendid large gilt buttons on my coat."

Dora was enchanted. Soldiers were to her the most magnificent of beings. "Yes, papa! And little gold cuffs to your sleeves, and stripes on your pantaloons."

"Precisely. And a sword, and a belt, and spurs at my heels, and a feather in my hat. Papa will be as fine as a play-actor. And in order to have all these things, my pet is willing that I should go away awhile?"

The child said nothing, but looked steadily at her father. The smile still lingered on her lips, but large, slow tears were filling her eyes.

"Not for a very great while," he added. "You know we must pay in some way for all we get. You pay money for your dresses, and study for your education, and for these shoulder-straps of mine you must pay by letting me go a little while."

The child struggled hard to keep down the swelling in her throat, and dropped her eyes to hide the tears in them.

"I guess, papa," she said, nervously twisting his watch-chain as she leaned against him, "I guess it's no matter about the shoulder-straps. I'd rather have you without' em."

He tried to laugh. "And the feather, and the sash, and the sword, and the spurs, do you forget them?"

She broke down completely at that. "I don't want 'em; I'd rather have you than everything else in the world!"

He was to do staff duty till the bloom of his ignorance should be rubbed off, Mr. Granger said. One whose sole idea of a wheel was that it was something round with spokes in it, whose only forward had been learned of the dancing-master, and who knew no worse charge than the grocer's—such a person could scarcely be expected to lead men in battle array. He was going down there to get some of the little boys to teach him drill.

"If ever the doing of a thing could be forgiven for the sake of the manner in which it is done," he said, "then I could forgive you. But I can't promise to turn back all at once from bonny-clabber to new milk."

"Oh! scold away," was the laughing reply. "I begin to think that there is a certain pleasure in being abused in a discriminating manner."

"Your going to Fortress Monroe helps to reconcile me," Mr. Lewis continued. "It's a pleasant place, and a strong place. My wife calls it Fortissimo. I supposed that you would insist on going straight to the front to do picket-duty, or post yourself in a tree as a sharpshooter. I'm glad to see that you've got a little ballast left aboard. I wish that Mr. Southard were to be with you, instead of going to New Orleans at this time of year. I spent a year at New Orleans when I was a young man, and I know all about it. It isn't a city, it's a deposit. You have to hold on with hands and feet to keep from being melted away by the heat, or washed away by the water."

Almost before they knew, Mr. Granger was gone. They had heard his last pleasant word, met his last smile, and seen the carriage that bore him away disappear down the street. Both Mr. Southard and Mr. Lewis accompanied him as far as New York.

When they had seen him off, the three ladies returned to the parlor, and the servants went sorrowfully back to their places. The neighbors who waved him away left their windows, and the friends grouped on the steps and the walk went each his way.

Dora, repulsed by Miss Hamilton, went to Aurelia for comfort. Margaret walked uneasily about the room, putting books in their places, pushing intrusive vine-leaves out the windows, arranging and rearranging the curtains. Then she seated her self by a table, and began cutting the leaves of a new magazine.

Presently Mrs. Lewis approached her, and after leaning on the arm of her chair a moment without being noticed, touched her on the shoulder.

"Margaret," she said, "why will you be so terribly proud? I think you might be willing to shed tears when Aurelia and I do. Why shouldn't you grieve over the absence of your friend? He is a kind and true friend to you."

Margaret persisted a moment longer in her silence and her leaf-cutting. But the book and the knife shook in her hand, and presently dropped from her grasp. Turning impulsively, she hid her face in that kind bosom, and sobbed without control.

"He will soon come back, I am sure of it," Mrs. Lewis said soothingly. "And you know we shall hear from him constantly. We all feel bad. Mr. Lewis choked up whenever he thought of it, and the only way he had of turning off his emotion was in scolding. I dare say his last word to Mr. Granger will be an abusive one. And you are almost as bad."

"I can't bear to be misunderstood, and watched, and commented on," Margaret said, trying to control herself. "Most people seem to think hate more respectable than affection, and if they see that you care about a person, they sneer."

"I know all about it, dear," Mrs. Lewis said. "You can't tell me anything new about meanness and malice. I have suffered too much from them in my life. But we are friends, real friends, here. We respect each other's reserve. But too much reserve is not good nor wholesome."

Margaret looked up, and wiped her tears away. "How you help me!" she said. "I don't feel very bad now," with a faint smile. "It is suppression that kills me. If we could say just what we think and feel, and act with perfect openness, how good it would be! Looking back, my life seems to me a cemetery of stifled emotions. My heart is full of their bones and ashes. It's an awful weight! You are very good, Mrs. Lewis. You do beautiful things sometimes. I grow fonder of you every day. By and by," smiling again, "I shall not be able to do without you. And now, that poor child! I must go to her. Wasn't I cruel to put her away? But it is very hard to have to comfort others when you are yourself in need of comfort."

The next day the two gentlemen came home with the last news of Mr. Granger, and they spent the evening more cheerfully than they could have expected. Mr. Lewis had apologized for his rudeness to the minister, and had begun to perceive that Mr. Southard had, as he said, some grit in him. So they were all harmonious enough.

"Mr. Granger's generosity of disposition would lead him to danger unnecessarily, if he were not warned," Mr. Southard said, as they sat together that evening. "I talked to him very plainly about it. There is sometimes an unconscious selfishness under those impulses. Exulting in the sense of their own fearlessness, men put themselves in peril, without thinking what others may suffer in their loss, and that the real good to be attained does not, perhaps, counterbalance the evil done. All that is accomplished is a generous deed."

"It is something to accomplish a generous deed," said Miss Hamilton. "I own, I have not the highest admiration for that 'rascally virtue' of discretion."

"But when the real cost of that 'sublime indiscretion' falls on some other than the hero, then I object to it," said the minister firmly. "And Mr. Granger agreed with me."

There are times when to hear those dear to us praised is painful. It oppresses the heart, by placing the beloved object too far above us. But a gentle blame, which hints at no serious fault, while it does not wound our feelings, soothes our sense of unworthiness, and, without lowering the friend, brings him within our reach. Listening to such gentle censure, we get a comfortable human feeling toward one whom we were, perhaps, in danger of apotheosizing.

Speaking of the much that they would hear from these soldier friends of theirs, both Margaret and Mr. Southard urged Mrs. Lewis to resume her long unused pen. It seemed that every one who had the talent to do it ought to preserve thus some of the many incidents of the war. But she was resolute in refusal.

"Of writing many books there is no end," she said. "And I have a terrible vision of a coming deluge of war-literature. Everybody will write, soldiers, nurses, chaplains, (all but you, Mr. Southard!) philanthropists, novelists, rhymsters—all will write without mercy. The dilemma of the old rhyme will seem to be on the point of realization:

  'If all the earth were paper,
      And all the sea were ink,
   And all the trees were bread and cheese,
      What should we do for drink?'

"No, don't ask me to join in that rout. Besides, no one but a scribbler knows a scribbler's afflictions. No 'Heavenly Goddess' has yet sung those direful woes. First, there is the printer. You spend all your powers on a certain passage which is to immortalize you, and under his hands, by the addition, or the abstraction, or the changing of a word, that passage has taken the one step more which carries it from the sublime to the ridiculous. Put in a fine bit of color; he changes your umber to amber, and the picture is spoilt. Refer to the well-known fact that Washington Allston put a great deal of character into the hands and feet he painted, and this fell patriot drops the Allston, and gives the credit to the father of his country. Then there are your dear friends. They know all your virtues, so their sole effort is now to find out your defects. It won't do to praise you, lest you should become vain; so, with a noble regard for your truest good, they dissect your writings before your eyes, and prove clearly their utter worthlessness. Then, there are your gushing acquaintances who want you to write about them, and tell you their histories, insisting that they shall be put into print. As if you should carry cherry-stones to a cherry-tree, and say, Here, grow cherries round these! If you should answer ever so humbly, Thank you! but I grow stones to my own cherries, such as they are, people would be disgusted. Of course, if I had a great genius, it would scorch up all these little annoyances. But I have only a pretty talent. Perhaps the worst is, that they will apply your characters. When I was a girl, I wrote a rhymed story, and everybody pointed out the hero. I stared, I bethought myself, I re-read my romance. Imagine my horror when I found that the description fitted the man perfectly, even to the wart on his nose. Then, not long ago, I wrote a little idyl addressed to my first love, and my husband came home with the face of an Othello. You know you did, Charles. The fact was, I never had a first love!"

Mr. Lewis laughed. "And she twitted me with Diana. Diana was a tall, superb, serene woman whom I got acquainted with in Washington, before I was married. I admired her excessively. I didn't know that she was a goose. I would talk, and she would listen, and smile at all my jokes; and I thought that she was very witty. {456} I spoke of books, and she smiled and said 'Yes!' and I was sure that she was a well-read person. I ranted about music, and she smiled and said 'Yes!' and I was positive that she was a fine musician. Presently I began to grow bashful in the society of such a superior woman. I couldn't talk, so she had to. Well, at first I admired her simplicity, then I stared at her simplicity. And at last I saw that there was

"One day I'd been there, up in the parlor, and when I left, she went down to the door with me. There was a large hat on the entry-table, and we heard a man's voice in the sitting-room.

"Daniel Webster was my hero. If our hats had been of the same size, I would have swapped fervently, though mine was new, and Daniel's a little shabby. I remembered what somebody had said of Samuel Johnson; and pointing to the table, I exclaimed with enthusiasm, 'That hat covers a kingdom!'

"Diana looked at it with a mild, idiotic perplexity, and stretched her long neck to see on the other side. 'Hat covers a kingdom,' she repeated vaguely to herself, as if it were a conundrum.

"I bounced out of the house, and I never went to see Diana again. Shortly after, I met that little woman, and I married her because she is smart."

Chapter XI.

The Mountains Whence Help Cometh.

Mr. Granger was one of those persons whom we miss more than we expect to, their influence is so quiet, their stability has so little of hardness. As has been beautifully said, such characters are "like the water-lily, fixed yet floating." We do not know how much we rest on them till the support is withdrawn.

They heard from him constantly, the letters being directed to Mr. Lewis, but intended for all the family.

Evidently his good spirits had not deserted him. Never before had he been so much alive, he wrote. The excitement, the uncertainty, the very restraints which reminded of power, and of great interests at stake, all kept his thoughts in a brisk circulation, and threw the bile off his mind.

Miss Dora had, however, her separate correspondence, letters directed to herself, which Miss Hamilton read to her, and answered from her dictation.

In those days the child learned a new prayer: "O Mother in heaven, take pity on me who have no mother on earth, and whose father has gone to the wars. Watch over him, that I may not be left an orphan. Pray for him, and for me, and for whoever loves us best. Do not forget me, O Mother! for if you do, my heart will break."

"Who is it that loves us best?" the child asked the first time she said this prayer.

"I do not know," was the reply. "We can never be sure who loves us best. But God knows, and the good Mother can find out."

"I thought it was you," said Dora. Margaret's voice sank to a whisper. "Perhaps it is, dear."

In a few weeks Mr. Southard also left then, not cheerfully, but with a gloom which he took no pains to conceal.

And the few weeks grew to many weeks, and months multiplied. The summer was gone, and the autumn was gone, and winter melted like a snow-flake on the mantle of time. When our eyes are fixed in anxious longing on some future day, the intermediate days slip through our fingers like sands through an hour-glass, and keep no trace of their passage.

If, when the spring campaign opened, and both the absent ones were in active service, our friends watched with some sinking of the heart for news, it was no more than happened in tens of thousands of other homes. Heart-sickness was by no means a rare disease in those days.

The soldier in charge of the soldier's news-room on Kneeland street became very much interested in one of the few visitors who used to go there that summer. Nearly every say, surely every day when there had been a battle, a pale-faced young lady would open the door, enter quickly, and without looking to right or left go directly to the frames that held the lists of killed and wounded, and read them through from end to end. The soldier got to have an anxious feeling about this lady. Unnoticed by her, he watched her face while she read, and hushed his breath till he saw that terrible look go out of her eyes. The lists finished, she would pull her veil down, sigh wearily, and go out as quietly as she had entered.

But Margaret did not drop, though often enough she was in danger of it, as her eyes fell on some blurred name, or some name very like the one she dreaded to see.

It was too wearing. Both flesh and spirit were sinking under this constant strain. Where was the help that religion was to give her? Leave everything to God, trust all to him, she was told. But how? Her thoughts were clenched in these interests; and, in spite of faith, it seemed as though, if she should let go her hold, they would fall. She found that her religion was only of the surface. It had grown in the sunshine, and was not rooted against the storm. She tried to put into practice the precepts she listened to, but the daily distractions of life constantly neutralized her efforts. There was but one way, and for the first time Margaret made a retreat.

Here in this secluded asylum was all that her soul needed for its restoring; quiet, leisure, the society of those whose lives are devoted to God, and, to crown all, the presence of the blessed sacrament of the altar.

One feels very near heaven when one hears only praying voices, sees only happy, peaceful faces, is looked upon only by kind eyes, and can at any hour go before the altar, alone, undisturbed by those distractions which constantly environ our ordinary worship. How still we become! In that presence how our little troubles and sorrows exhale, as mists lift from the rivers at sunrise, and leave all clear and bright! How cramped and feverish all our past life has been! Everything settles into its true place. Sorrow and death lose their sting. We are safe, for we partake of the omnipotence of God. To think that the same roof that shelters our heads when we lie down to sleep shelters also the sacred head of the Son of God—that drives every other thought from the mind. {458} It is marvellous, it seems incredible, and yet the wonder of it is lost in the sweetness. The moonlight coming in at the window lies white and silent on the bare white floor. You rise to kiss that luminous spot, for just beneath is the altar. Peace rises to exultation, for you perceive more and more that the Father holds us all in his hands, those near and those afar, and that we have but to lift our eyes, and we shall behold the mountains whence help cometh. We want to run out and tell everybody. It seems as if we have just discovered all this, and that no one ever knew it before. We forget that we are sinners. It isn't much matter about us any way. We will think of that afterward. We will make acts of contrition when we get away from here. Now we can make only acts of adoration and of joy.

The superior of the convent directed Margaret's retreat, and on the last morning of it she and all the nuns received communion, and there was the benediction after mass.

The others had gone out, but Margaret still lingered before the altar. Out in the early sunshine, the trees rustled softly, and the breeze waved the curtains of the chapel windows. Occasionally, one of the nuns would come to the door, look in, and go away again smiling, though Miss Hamilton's breakfast was spoiling over the fire, and there was a gentleman waiting in the parlor for her.

Margaret was not praying, was not thinking; her soul was silent, lost in God, like a star in the day.

Presently she came out, and, meeting one of the nuns in the hall, embraced her tenderly. "Sister," she said, "this is the most beautiful world that ever was made."

The gentleman had been waiting some time when he heard a step, and in the door there stood a slight, black-robed lady with a veil thrown over her head, a bright face, and a smell of incense lingering about her. She lifted both hands when she saw him.

"And now," he said, delighted to see her so happy, "if you are ready, we will go home. I have only a few days' furlough, and I want to make the most of it."

Margaret went to take a hasty leave of the nuns, and also to step into the chapel for one moment.

Then she went out from under that happy portal, and down the steps to the carriage that was waiting for them. One of the sisters stood in the door looking after her, and others here and there in the grounds looked up with a pleasant word of farewell as she passed. She stooped to gather from the lower terrace a humble souvenir, two or three grass-blades and a clover-leaf, then stepped into the carriage. As they drove slowly down the avenue, she looked up into the overhanging branches and repeated:

  "'Above him the boughs of the hemlock trees
    Waved, and made the sign of the cross,
    And whispered their Benedicitis.'"

The family were in raptures over Mr. Granger's return. They could not look at him enough, listen to him enough, do enough for him. "And how nice you look in your uniform!" said Margaret, feeling as if she were about six years old.

"And how nice you look in anything!" he retorted, at which they all laughed. It took but little to make them laugh in those days.

Mr. Granger, on his part, was as merry as a boy. He was full of adventures to tell them, glad to be at home, happy in their confidence and affection, and hopeful of the future.

Margaret could scarcely believe her own happiness. She would turn away, shut her eyes, and think, "I have imagined it all. He is hundreds of miles away, I do not know whether he is sick or well. He may be in peril. He may be dead. O my friend! come home, come home! Are we never to see you again?"

Then, when she had succeeded in tormenting herself sufficiently, when her heart was sinking, and her eyes overflowing with tears, she would turn quickly, trembling between dream and reality, and see him there alive and well, and at home.

And so every day she renewed in her vivid imagination the pain of his absence and the delight of his return, till too soon the day came when she no longer dared to play such tricks with herself, for he was again gone out of their sight. But the lessons of the retreat were not forgotten, and every morning brought refreshment.

Sauntering

Saunterer, (from saint terre,)
a pilgrim to holy lands or places.—Thoreau.

Would that I were, if not like the king of Ava—lord of the twenty-four umbrellas—at least the owner of one, was my thought. I was in Paris, that paradise of many good Americans who are not defunct. Three thousand and odd miles from home, in the streets of a strange city, with an imperfect knowledge of any foreign tongue, not daring to say parapluie to the most obsequious shopman, and the rain was pouring down like a douche.

I had no devotion to St. Swithin—not a particle. I respected him in a vague way as a successor of the apostles, whose name is in the calendar; but I was always inclined to mention him with a smile on account of his hydropathic propensities. I am a perfect Oriental as far as a warm bath is concerned, but I never could endure the gentlest shower-bath, and the thought of St. Swithin, in his wet grave under a waterspout, always made me shudder. This peculiar sensitiveness always made me suspicious of the lightest summer cloudlet, and led me to make for years a series of minute observations on the weather, till I became deeply versed in mackerel clouds, mare's tails, and such sinister prognostics. I used to imagine myself so sensitive to the dryness and moisture of the atmosphere, and to its density and rarity, that I was quite above barometers. I was a barometer to myself. A foreknowledge of the weather was my strong point, or one of my strong points, when at home in the new world. There I had a full view of the heavens that bend over us all, down to the very horizon on every side. The rarity of the American atmosphere, its lofty heavens, with its luminous spheres, are full of skyey influences, which tell not only upon the very plants, if we observe them, but upon ourselves, if we heed the silent lesson. {460} I always knew what those clouds meant, gathering over the far-off north-wood hills at the west, and I felt the very mist as it began to rise around Mount Agamenticus, in the east, like sacrificial clouds around that altar of the renowned St. Aspinquid. I seldom made a false prediction, and was consequently approached with considerable deference by provident neighbors, especially before a storm. But somehow, I lost this prestige as soon as my foot was off my native heath. Here, in a compact city, with the tall houses and narrow streets shutting the great blue eye of heaven till it became a mere line, like a cat's eye at mid-day, I felt myself utterly at the mercy of nature; I gave myself humbly up to St. Swithin, to whom of old I was rather defiant. A haughty spirit goes before a fall. Humiliations are good for the soul. I think I must consider mine a case of special providence; for there is nothing more soothing to mortified vanity or spiritual pride, or even in dire calamity, than the conviction that ours is an instance of special providence.

On one of those doubtful days in October, when the air is murky and a light mist from the Seine pervades every part of the city, but which were not always, as I had found, indicative of rain, I sallied forth from the Hotel Meurice to wander around the French capital with no special object in view. I discarded my guide-book, tired of being the victim of square and compass. To be told to admire, whether an object appealed to my peculiar tastes or not, was quite opposed to my notions of American independence, and sure to rouse a certain spirit of contradiction in me—a bad trait, I fear, but a fault acknowledged is half cured; so I make a clean breast of it to test the truth of the old saying. I turned, therefore, a blind eye to all the palaces, and gardens, and fountains, and went around feasting my eyes on the forbidden vanities of the world which my god-parents had renounced for me at baptism, but which were glittering delightfully in the booths of this Vanity Fair; not that I cared much for them, to tell the truth, but from a sheer feeling of perversity. There must be some powerful charm in them, or they would not be put down in every religious chart as quicksands to be avoided. Perhaps I was in danger of being stranded among them, and it was, after all, a case of special providence, when, as I was pursuing my way, or rather any way in my ignorance of the city, and moralizing on these things, or demoralizing, of a sudden it began to pour. For an old weather-wise like me to be thus caught, was very humiliating; and in my consternation, I found myself enjoying one of the high and mighty prerogatives of the king of Ava, as aforesaid. Que faire? I should have said, being in France. Looking around, I saw the open door of a church, in which I gladly took refuge. In benighted, "popish" lands, mother church often affords a place of bodily refuge, as well as moral. It was the church of St. Germain l'Auxerrois, to which I had wandered back, and which from this time became my favorite church in spite of the bad repute of the bells. Passing from the gay streets into these cool shades is like passing for a moment, as it were, from time into eternity. All light and frivolous thoughts—all vanity and littleness die away with the noise of the world, at the very entrance. The mind is elevated. We partake of the grandeur of the edifice, and, for a few moments at least, our nature is ennobled. {461} Only great and lofty ideas should wander beneath such arches. Only souls full of noble and magnificent ideas could have designed them. There are truly sermons in these stones, of which one never grows weary—sermons in the grand old vitraux, rich with saintly forms, and in the gloom, inspiring sweet and solemn reverie.

  "I love the gloom; I love the white-robed throng;
   I love the flood of most religious song
   That tosses all its choric waves afar
   To seek and search each quaint-carved crevice there.
   The music surges to each singing star,
   And bears the soul to heaven's own upper air,
   Sweet crushed to happy tears; but chiefly where
   Peace, dove-like, broods above clasped hands of prayer."

The Catholic is no longer in a foreign land when he enters a church. The altar, the cross, the Madonna, above all, the tabernacle, with it twinkling lamp of olive oil, are his old familiar friends, and all there, and his heart is at home. He feels a bond of universal brotherhood with all these worshippers before the altar. And then the dear old Latin service! I never thoroughly realized at home the advantage of a universal language in which the whole church could lift up her voice, as with one accord, throughout the world. That language—one of those which were consecrated above the head of the dying Saviour—is associated with all the holiest and tenderest memories of a Catholic. He cannot remember when he first heard it from the lips of holy mother church. It is one of his mother tongues. Each word has a new significance in this foreign land, and the whole service a new meaning. I have heard people exclaim at the rapidity of the opening service of mass, not knowing its significance. Every act and word in our sublime ritual has its meaning to him that enters into its spirit. Dr. Newman says, in his own beautiful way:

"I declare nothing is so consoling, so piercing, so thrilling, so overcoming, as the mass, said as it is among us. I could attend masses for ever and not be tired. It is not a mere form of words; it is a great action, the greatest action there can be on earth. It is not the invocation, merely, but, if I dare use the word, the evocation, of the Eternal. He becomes present on the altar in flesh and blood, before whom angels bow and devils tremble. This is that awful event which is the end and is the interpretation of every part of the solemnity. Words are necessary, not as means, but as ends. They are not mere addresses to the throne of grace; they are instruments of what is far higher, of consecration, of sacrifice. They hurry on as if impatient to fulfil their mission. Quickly they go; the whole is quick, for they are all parts of one integral action. Quickly they go, for they are awful words of sacrifice; they are a work too great to delay upon, as when it was said in the beginning, 'What thou doest, do quickly.' Quickly they pass, for the Lord Jesus goes with them, as he passed along the lake in the days of his flesh, quickly calling first one and then another. Quickly they pass, because, as the lightning which shineth from one part of the heaven unto the other so is the coming of the Son of Man. Quickly they pass, for they are as the words of Moses, when the Lord came down in a cloud, calling on the name of the Lord as he passed by, 'The Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, long-suffering and abundant in goodness and truth.'

"And as Moses on the mountain, so do we too 'make haste and bow our heads to the earth and adore.' So we all around, each in his place, look out for the great advent, 'waiting for the moving of the water.' Each in his place, with his own heart, with his own wants, with his own thoughts, with his own intention, with his own prayers, separate but concordant, watching what is going on, watching its progress, uniting in its consummation; not painfully and hopelessly following a hard form of prayer from beginning to end, but, like a concert of musical instruments, each different, but concurring in a sweet harmony, we take our part with God's priest, supporting him, yet guided by him."

The words being, then, only used as means, as instruments of consecration, it is not at all necessary for the people to follow the words of the priest; but, entering into the spirit and meaning of each part of the sacrifice, abandon themselves each one to his own devotions. {462} While the church is exceedingly particular about the exact following of the liturgy by the clergy, it allows the greatest latitude to the devotions of laymen. All the sects that have a form of prayer, or extempore prayers, afford far less liberty to those who join therein than the church. Their service is nothing to you unless you join in its forms, which leave no liberty of soul. Whereas at mass, while some use a prayer-book with a variety of beautiful and touching devotions in harmony with the service going on at the altar, others simply say the rosary, and others again use no form whatever, but, following the celebrant in spirit, abandon their hearts in holy meditation and mental prayer according to the inspiration of the moment. Thus our holy services never become a mere form. They are always new, new and varied as our daily wants, as our fresh conceptions of what worship is due Almighty God, and of the nature of the holy oblation in which we are participating.

The church of St. Germain l'Auxerrois was once the frequent recipient of royal munificence, being for a long time the royal parish, and it was the most sumptuously adorned in Paris. Sculptors and painters vied in filling it with the choicest works of art. It was not much injured at the revolution, but narrowly escaped destruction in 1831. The anniversary of the death of the Duc de Berri was to be commemorated by services for the repose of his soul; but a mob surrounded the church, and destroyed everything in it. It was afterward closed till 1838, when it was reopened for public worship.

It has some poetical associations as well as historical; for here M. de Lamartine is said to have hung up the long locks that Graziella had shorn from her beautiful head, and sent to be suspended in one of the churches of his belle France. And perhaps this was the one to which he referred in the following words:

"When the last hour of the day has sounded from thy lofty towers, when the last beam has faded away from the dome, when the sigh of the distant organ dies away with the light, and the nave is deserted by all but the Levite attentive to the lamps of the holy place, then I come to glide under thy obscure arches, and to seek, while nature sleeps, Him who never slumbers! The air which the soul breathes in thy aisles is full of mystery and peace. Let love and anxious cares seek shade and solitude under the green shelter of groves to soothe their secret wounds. O darkness of the sanctuary! the eye of religion prefers thee to the wood which the breeze disturbs. Nothing disturbs thy foliage. Thy still shade is the image of eternal peace."

I loved to think the poet found here the source of the inspirations which are embodied in his Harmonies Religieuses which are the delight of every tender and religious soul.

There is in one of the transepts a beautiful font of pure white marble, executed by M. Jouffroy from a model by Madame de Lamartine and presented by her to this church. The basin is surmounted by three expressive figures, Faith, Hope, and Charity, supporting a cross.

This church with its perfumed air, its subdued light, and its quiet recesses incentive to piety, so charmed me by its contrast with the gay world without, and revived all the fervor of early religious impressions, that I did not leave it till I had resolved to commence each remaining day of my stay at Paris, by going to a different church till I had visited them all, like Horace Walpole. And should I even visit them like him as a mere amateur of art, I could not fail to receive some inspiration that would leave me better for the rest of the day. {463} The hours thus passed in the churches seemed to consecrate the day, and left a perfume in my heart that nothing in the world could wholly dissipate. They became the happiest and most profitable of my life, both morally and intellectually.

  "For thou dost soothe the heart, thou Church of Rome,
      By thy unwearied watch, and varied round
   Of service, in thy Saviour's holy home.
      I cannot walk the city's sultry streets,
      But the wide porch invites to still retreats,
   Where passion's thirst is calmed, and care's unthankful gloom."

   "There, on a foreign shore,
      The homesick solitary finds a friend:
    Thoughts, prisoned long for lack of speech, outpour
      Their tears, and doubts in resignation end."

One morning I went to St. Merri's, where St. Edmund, Archbishop of Canterbury, when a young student at Paris, used to go to assist at the midnight office. A friend had given me his practical little book entitled The Mirror of the Church, and I took it with me to read in a place he had loved. In reading it I was struck by what he says of the Lord's Prayer, the great prayer of the middle ages, and the prominence he would have us give it in our devotions. He says:

"The Pater Noster surpasses all other prayers in excellence, dignity, and utility. It was made by God himself; hence the injury done to Jesus Christ the Son of God when curious or rhymed prayers are preferred to that composed by him who knows the will of the Father, and better than we what prayer is most acceptable to him, and what we most need. How many deceive themselves in multiplying the forms of prayer! They think they are devout, but they are only carnal in their affections, for every carnally-minded person naturally delights in the vain curiosity of words. Be then prudent and discreet in this respect. I know you will bring forward St. Augustin, St. Gregory, and other saints to oppose me, who prayed according to the affections of their hearts. I am certainly far from blaming them. I only blame the practice of those who, from a spirit of pride or curiosity abandon the prayer made by the Lord himself for those which the saints have composed. Our Lord himself says, And when you are praying, speak not much as the heathen do, for they think they are heard for their much speaking. You therefore shall pray in this manner, Our Father, etc."

We Catholics are often accused of elevating the creature above the Creator, and reproached for saying ten Hail Marys to one Our Father in the beautiful devotion of the Rosary, as if we had no other. This extract from St. Edmund does not support the accusation, and he was a prelate of the dark ages—the thirteenth century. But then he was an Englishman, and we all know the Anglo-Saxon race did not fall in Adam, and only a little way in Peter!

In justice to St. Edmund I will add that he was so devout to Our Lady that, early in life, he consecrated himself to her, and wore, in memory of this consecration, a ring with Ave Maria upon it. He related this on his death-bed, that his example might be followed by others, and was buried with the ring on his finger.

There is an interesting chapel in St. Merri's Church, dedicated to St. Mary of Egypt, which is beautifully frescoed by Chasserian, depicting the touching old legend, with its deep moral significance, of

  "That Egyptian penitent whose tears
   Fretted the rock, and moistened round her cave
   The thirsty desert."

The poet tells of a miraculous drop which fell in Egypt on St. John's day, and was supposed to have the effect of stopping the plague. Such a drop fell on the soul of this renowned penitent.

  "There's a drop, says the Peri, that down from the moon
   Falls through the withering airs of June
   Upon Egypt's land, of so healing a power,
   So balmy a virtue, that even in the hour
   That drop descends, contagion dies,
   And health reanimates earth and skies!
   Oh! is it not thus, thou man of sin,
     The precious tears of repentance fall.
   Though foul the fiery plagues within,
     One heavenly drop hath dispelled them all!"

St. Mary of Egypt is one of a long line of penitents who, after the example of Magdalen, have given proofs of their repentance in proportion to their sins and to the depth of their sorrow, and thus rendered the very scars on their souls so many rays of light.

Le Brun painted one whose frailties are "linked to fame" as Magdalen, and at her own request. The universal interest felt in her story, and the sympathy it always excites, induced me to visit a place that cannot be disconnected from her memory—the chapel of the Carmelites in the Rue d'Enfer, where she took the veil. I refer to Madame de la Vallière, whom Madame de Sevigné calls "la petite violette qui se cachait sous l'herbe."

A priest was just commencing mass when I entered the chapel. I knelt down by the tomb of the Cardinal de Bérulle, who used to come here to pray in the chapel of St. Magdalen, having a great devotion to that saint. It was difficult to resist the distractions that were inevitable in such a spot, but in which I would not indulge till the holy sacrifice was over. The choir of nuns was separated from the chancel by a grating which was closely curtained. There is always a certain charm in everything that savors of mystery. Whatever is hidden excites our curiosity and interest. That forbidding grate, that curtain of appalling blackness, were tantalizing. They concealed a world in which we had no part. Behind them were hearts which had aims and aspirations and holy ambitions, perhaps, we know not of. They led a life which is almost inexplicable to the world—hidden indeed in God. The chapel was so still, save the murmur of the officiating priest, that you might have supposed no one else there. But after the Agnus Dei, came out from that mysterious recess a murmur from unseen lips like a voice from another world. It was that of the nuns all saying the Confiteor together before going to holy communion. That murmur of mea culpâ, mea culpâ, seemed like the voice of penitence from La Sainte Beaume, or the voice of past times repeating the accents of the repentant La Vallière. There she lived and prayed and did penance for thirty-six years, longer than Magdalen in her cave, "son coeur ne respirant que du côté du ciel," thus displaying a remarkable strength of volition, and therefore of character; for "What is character but a perfectly formed will?" says Novalis. Before that altar she used to come two hours before the rest of the community to pray, and in cold weather she, that had been brought up in luxury, was often found senseless on the pavement of the choir when the rest of the nuns came to the chapel.

We read that the tears of Eve falling into the water brought forth pearls, and we cannot doubt that the tears through which our penitent viewed her past life helped obtain for her the pearl of great price. One instance of her austerity is well known. One Good-Friday, meditating in the refectory, during the meagre repast of the day, on the vinegar and gall given to the dying Saviour when he was athirst, she recalled the pleasures of her past life and particularly of the time when, returning with the court from the chase, being thirsty, she drank with pleasure of some delicious beverage which was brought her. This immortification, so in contrast with the vinegar and gall of the Saviour, filled her with lively sentiments of repentance and humiliation, and she resolved never to drink again. {465} For three weeks she did not taste even a drop of water, and for three years she only drank half a glass day. This severe penance, which was unsuspected, brought on a fit of illness and caused violent spasms in the stomach, which reduced her to a state of great feebleness. Besides that, she suffered greatly from rheumatism, but she never ceased to share in the labors in the community. She died in 1710, aged nearly sixty-six years, having passed thirty-six years in the convent. Her life here was one long Miserere which was surely heard in heaven. Her soul had to pass through the deep waters; but she took fast hold of that "last plank after shipwreck"—repentance. Everything went to feed the stream of her sorrow. Every new grace gave her a new conception of the guilt of sin and awoke new regrets for lost glory. So she shut herself up in the garden of myrrh. She sheltered herself in the creux du rocher from the waves of memory that swept over her soul. In that dark night of her soul she looked tremblingly out over the wide sea of her sorrows with a heart like the double-faced Janus, looking into the past and toward the future, memory and hope struggling in her heart. Over that dark sea rose the moonlight of Mary's face—our Lady of Mount Carmel—a narrow crescent at first, but growing larger and brighter every day. And the great luminous starry saints with their different degrees of glory studded the heavens that opened to her view. And so the morning came when the voice of Jesus spoke: Many sins are forgiven her because she hath loved much.

There is an accent of sincerity, with no savor of cant, in the well-known reply of Soeur Louise de la Misericorde when asked if she was happy in the convent: "I am not happy, but I am satisfied." How few in the world can even say with sincerity that they are satisfied. Dr. Johnson said, "No one is happy," but satisfaction is certainly reasonable happiness. Carlyle says, "There is in man a higher than love of happiness. He can do without happiness, and instead thereof find blessedness." That happiness alone is real which does not depend on contingencies. It is reasonably satisfied with the present, and has a constantly increasing hope in the future. Such was the happiness Madame de la Vallière found among the pale-eyed votaries of the cloister, a satisfaction of the soul which became perfect happiness when death came to her after so many years of dying.

I wonder if there was no perfume left in the dried rose leaves in her heart causing it to faint ofttimes by the way. A person of so much sensibility must have had a wonderful capacity for suffering. That her memory was ever alive to the past is evident from the unrelenting austerity of her life, from her well-known reply when informed of the death of her son, and from her requesting Le Brun to paint her as Magdalen.

Remembering so many proofs of her conversion, we, too, say, Neither do I condemn thee. No stone will I cast on thy grave; no reproach on thy memory: for repentance effaced every earthly stain, and thou art now sharing the joy there is in heaven over one sinner that repenteth. Tears of penitent love mingled with those of virgin innocence at the foot of the cross. Let them still mingle there; we will not regard them with distrust or disdain. We too have need to cry:

  "Drop, drop, slow tears
     I And bathe those beauteous feet.
   Which brought from heaven
     The news and Prince of peace.
   Cease not, wet eyes,
     For mercy to entreat:
{466}
   To cry for vengeance
     Sin doth never cease.
   In your deep floods
     Drown all my faults and fears:
   Nor let his eye
     See sin but through my tears."

Every one who looks deeply into his own heart finds a motive of charity for the faults of others. A monk of Cluny hung up in his cell the picture of a famous debauchee under which he placed his own name. The surprised abbot asked the reason. It was to remind him what grace alone prevented him from becoming. We are all miracles of grace. It may be restraining or transforming. We are not the less in need of it than those who have apparently sunk to lower depths.

All these things passed through my mind while lingering in the chapel of the Carmelites. In that chapel had resounded the grand tones of the great Bossuet at the profession of Madame de la Vallière, with his usual refrain—the emptiness of all earthly things. "Away, earthly honors!" he said on that occasion, "all your splendor but ill conceals our weaknesses and our faults; conceals them from ourselves, but reveals them to others."—"There are two kinds of love," he added, "one is the love of ourselves, which leads to the contempt of God—that is the old life, the life of the world. The other is the love of God, which leads to the contempt of ourselves, and is the new life of Christianity, which, carried to perfection, constitutes the religious life. The soul, detached from the body by mortification, freed from the captivity of the senses, sees itself as it is—the source of all evil. It therefore turns then against itself. Having fallen through an ill use of liberty, it would be restrained on every side, by frightful grates, a profound solitude, an impenetrable cloister, perfect obedience, a rule for every action, a motive for every step, and a hundred observant eyes. Thus hemmed in on all sides, the soul can only fly heavenward. Elle ne peut plus respirer que du côté du ciel"—a beautiful expression, recalling the lines from an old manuscript poem in the Bibliothèque Royal:

  "Li cuers doit estre
   Semblans à l'encensoir
   Tous clos envers la terre
   Et overs vers le ciel."

The heart should be like a censer, closed toward earth and open toward heaven; and such is the heart of the real spouse of Christ.

When Bossuet had finished his discourse and the black veil was placed upon the head of La Vallière, the whole audience wept aloud. The Duchess de la Vallière was now Louise de la Miséricorde, vowed to the rigorous life of the Carmelites, to fasts and vigils, to sackcloth and ashes.

Philosophers say no motion is ever lost, and that every act is photographed somewhere in the universe. Think of swelling the choral song that will go on vibrating in the air for ever; of sighs of penitence that go on sighing through space for ever in the ears of a merciful God; of attitudes of adoring praise and love, which are somewhere imaged, to be revealed at the last day as a page in the great book that will decide our eternal fate. How much better to be thus perpetuated than idle words, vain songs, and all the graces of fashion only intended to please the eye of a fellow-mortal.

After all, there is something in such a life that appeals to the instincts of our nature. Even those who condemn it cannot but admire. At least, they find it poetical. Who does not feel an increased sentiment of respect for Dr. Johnson as he stands with bared head, in the rain, where his father's book-stall was, in the market place at Uttoxeter, to expiate an act of early disobedience to his father? {467} "The picture of Samuel Johnson," says Carlyle, "standing bare-headed in the market-place is one of the grandest and saddest we can paint. The memory of old Michael Johnson rising from the far distance, sad, beckoning in the moonlight of memory. Repentance! repentance! he proclaims as with passionate sobs—but only to the ear of heaven, if heaven will give him audience."

  "O heavy laden soul! kneel down and hear
      Thy penance in calm fear;
   With thine own lips to sentence all thy sin;
      Then, by the judge within
   Absolved, in thankful sacrifice to part
      For ever with thy sullen heart!"

The Physical Basis Of Life.

[Footnote 128: New Theory of Life. Identity of the Powers and Faculties of all Living Matter. A Lecture by Professor T. H. Huxley. New York World, Feb. 18th, 1869.]

We know this rather remarkable discourse only as republished in the columns of The New York World, where it had a sensational title which we have abridged. Professor Huxley's name stands high among English physicists or scientists, and his discourse indicates considerable natural ability, and familiarity with the modern school of science which seeks the explanation of the universe and its phenomena without recognizing a creator, or any existence but ordinary matter and its various combinations. The immediate purpose of the professor is to prove the physical or material basis of life, and that life in all organisms is identical, originating in and depending on what he calls the protoplasm.

The protoplasm is formed of ordinary matter; say, carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. These elements combined in some unknown way give rise to protoplasm; the protoplasm gives rise to the plant, and, through the plant, to the animal; and hence all life, feeling, thought, and reason originate in the peculiar combination of the molecules of ordinary, inorganic matter. The plant differs from the animal, and the animal from man, only in the different combinations of the molecules of the protoplasm. We see nothing in this theory that is new, or not as old as the physics of the ancient Ionian school.

The only novelty that can be pretended is the assumption that all matter, even inorganic, is, in a certain sense, plastic, and therefore, in a rudimentary way, living. The same law governs the inorganic and the organic world. But even this is not new. Many years ago, Ralph Waldo Emerson asserted the identity of gravitation and purity of heart, and we ourselves are by no means disposed to deny that there is more or less analogy between the formation of the crystal or the diamond and the growth of the plant. It is not, perhaps, too much to say that the law of creation is one law, and we have never yet been convinced of the existence of absolutely inert matter. Whatever exists is, in its order and degree, a vis activa, or an active force. Matter, as the potentia nuda of the schoolmen, is simple possibility, and no real existence at all. {468} There is and can be no pure passivity in nature, or purely passive existences. We would not therefore deny a certain rudimentary plasticity to minerals, or what is called brute matter, though we are not prepared to accept the plastic soul, asserted by Plato, and revived and explained in the posthumous and unfinished works of Gioberti under the term methexis, which is copied or imitated by the mimesis, or the individual and the sensible. Yet since, as the professor tells us, the animal can take the protoplasm only as prepared by the plant, must there not be in inorganic matter a preparation or elaboration of the protoplasm for the use of the plant?

The professor speaks of the difficulty of determining the line of demarcation between the animal and the plant; but is it difficult to draw the line between the mineral and the plant, or between the plant and the inorganic matter from which it assimilates its food or nourishment? Pope sings,

"See through this air, this ocean, and this earth,
All matter quick, and bursting into birth;"

but we would like to have the professor explain how ordinary matter, even if quick, becomes protoplasm, and how the protoplasm becomes the origin and basis of the life of the plant. Every plant is an organism with its central life within. Virchow and Cl. Bernard by their late discoveries have proved that every organism proceeds from an organite, ovule, or central cell, which produces, directs, and controls or governs the whole organism, even in its abnormal developments. They have also proved that this ovule or central cell exists only as generated by a pre-existing organism, or parent, of the same kind. The later physiologists are agreed that there is no well authenticated instance of spontaneous generation. Now this organite must exist, live, before it can avail itself of the protoplasm formed of ordinary matter, which is exterior to it, not within it, and cannot be its life, for that moves from within outward, from the centre to the circumference. Concede, then, all the facts the professor alleges, they only go to prove that the organism already living sustains its life by assimilating fitting elements from ordinary matter. But they do not show at all that it derives its life from them; or that the so-called protoplasm is the origin, source, basis, or matter of organic life; or that it generates, produces, or gives rise to the organite or central cell; nor that it has anything to do with vitalizing it. Hence the professor fails to throw any light on the origin, matter, or basis of life itself.

It may or it may not be difficult in the lower organisms to draw the line between the plant and the animal, and we shall urge no objections to what the professor says on that point; we will only say here that the animal organism, like the vegetable, is produced, directed, and controlled by the central cell, and that this cell or ovule is generated by animal parents. There is no spontaneous generation, and no well authenticated instance of metagenesis. Like generates like, and even Darwin's doctrine of natural selection confirms rather than denies it. It is certain that the vegetable organism has never, as far as science goes, generated an animal organism. Arguments based on our ignorance prove nothing. The protoplasm can no more produce or vitalize the central animal than it can the central vegetable cell, and, indeed, still less; for the animal cannot, as the professor himself asserts, sustain its life by the protoplastic elements till they have been prepared by the vegetable organism. {469} Whence, then, the animal germ, organite, or ovule? What vitalizes it and gives it the power of assimilating the protoplasm as its food, without which the organism dies and disappears?

Giving the professor the fullest credit for exact science in all his statements, he does not, as far as we can see, prove his protoplasm is the physical basis of life, or that there is for life any physical basis at all. He only proves that matter is so far plastic as to afford sustenance to a generated organic life, which every farmer who has ever manured a field of corn or grass, or reared a flock of sheep or a herd of cattle, knows, and always has known, as well as the illustrious professor.

We can find a clear statement of several of the conditions of life, both vegetable and animal, but no demonstration of the principle of life, in the professor's very elaborate discourse. Indeed, if we examine it closely, we shall find that he does not even pretend to demonstrate anything of the sort. He denies all means of science except sensible experience, and maintains with Hume that we have no sensible experience of causes or principles, all science, he asserts, is restricted to empirical facts with their law, which, in his system, is itself only a fact or a classification of facts. The conditions of life, as we observe them, are for him the essential principle of life in the only sense in which the word principle has, or can have, for him, an intelligible meaning. He proves, then, the physical basis of life, by denying that it has any intelligible basis at all. He proves, indeed, that the protoplasm, which he shows, or endeavors to show, is universal—one and the same, always and everywhere —is present in the already existing life of both the plant and the animal; but that, whatever it be, in the plant or animal, which gives it the power to take up the protoplasm and assimilate it to its own organism, which is properly the life or vital power, he does not explain, account for, or even recognize. With him, power is an empty word. He nowhere proves that life is produced, furnished, or generated by the protoplasm, or has a material origin. Hence, the protoplasm, by his own showing, is simply no protoplasm at all. He proves, if anything, that in inorganic matter there are elements which the living plant or animal assimilates, and into which, when dead, it is resolved. This is all he does, and in fact, all he professes to do.

The professor makes light of the very grave objection, that chemical analysis can throw no light on the principle or basis of life, because it is or can be made only on the dead subject. He of course concedes that chemical analysis is not made on the living subject; but this, he contends, amounts to nothing. We think it amounts to a great deal. The very thing sought, to wit, life, is wanting in the dead subject, and of course cannot by any possible analysis be detected in it. If all that constituted the living subject is present in the dead body, why is the body dead, or why has it ceased to perform its vital functions? The protoplasm, or what you so call, is as present in the corpse as in the living organism. If it is the basis of life, why is the organism no longer living? The fact is, that life, while it continues, resists chemical action and death, by a higher and subtler chemistry of its own, and it is only the dead body that falls under the action of the ordinary chemical laws. There is, then, no concluding the principle or basis of life from any possible dissection of the dead body.

"Objectors of this class," he says, "do not seem to reflect … that we know nothing about the composition of any body as it is. The statement that a crystal of calcspar consists of carbonate of lime is quite true, if we only mean that, by appropriate processes, it may be resolved into carbonic acid and quicklime. If you pass the same carbonic acid over the very quicklime thus obtained, you will obtain carbonate of lime again; but it will not be calc-spar, nor anything like it. Can it therefore be said that chemical analysis teaches nothing about the chemical composition of calc-spar? Such a statement would be absurd; but it is hardly more so than the talk one occasionally hears about the uselessness of applying the results of chemical analysis to the living bodies which have yielded them. One fact, at any rate, is out of reach of such refinements and this is, that all the forms of protoplasm which have yet been examined contain the four elements, carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, in very complex union, and that they behave similarly toward several reagents. To this complex combination, the nature of which has never been determined with exactness, the name of protein has been applied. And if we use this term with such caution as may properly arise out of comparative ignorance of the things for which it stands, it may be truly said that all protoplasm is proteinaceous; or, as the white, or albumen, of an egg is one of the commonest examples of a nearly pure proteine matter, we may say that all living matter is more or less albuminoid. Perhaps it would not yet be safe to say that all forms of protoplasm are affected by the direct action of electric shocks; and yet the number of cases in, which the contraction of protoplasm is shown to be effected by this agency increases every day. Nor can it be affirmed with perfect confidence that all forms of protoplasm are liable to undergo that peculiar coagulation at a temperature of 40 degrees—50 degrees centigrade, which has been called "heat-stiffening," though Kuhne's beautiful researches have proved this occurrence to take place in so many and such diverse living beings, that it is hardly rash to expect that the law holds good for all."

This long extract proves admirably how long, how learnedly, how scientifically, a great man can talk without saying anything. All that is here said amounts only to this: the conclusions obtained by the analysis of the dead body cannot be denied to be applicable to the living body, because we know nothing of the composition of any body organic or inorganic, as it is. Therefore all life has a physical basis! Take the whole extract, and all it tells you is, that we know nothing of the subject it professes to treat. "All the forms of protoplasm, which have yet been examined contain the four elements, carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen in very complex union." When chemically resolved into these four elements, is it protoplasm still? Can you by a chemical process reconvert them into protoplasm? No. Then what does the analysis show of the nature of your physical basis of life? "To this complex union, the nature of which has never yet been determined, the name of protein has been applied." Very important to know that. Yet this name protein names not something known, but something the nature of which is unknown. What then does it tell us? "If we use this term [protein] with such caution as may properly arise out of our comparative ignorance of the things for which it stands, it may truly be said that all protoplasm is proteinaceous." Be it so, what advance in knowledge, since we are ignorant of what protein is? It is wonderful what a magnificent structure our scientists are able to erect on ignorance as the foundation.

The professor, after having confessed his ignorance of what the alleged protoplasm really is, continues:

"Enough has, perhaps, been said to prove the existence of a general uniformity in the character of the protoplasm, or physical basis of life, in whatever group of living beings it may be studied. But it will be understood that this general uniformity by no means excludes any amount of special modifications of the fundamental substance. The mineral, carbonate of lime, assumes an immense diversity of characters, though {471} no one doubts that under all these protean changes it is one and the same thing. And now, what is the ultimate fate, and what the origin, of the matter of life? Is it, as some of the older naturalists supposed, diffused throughout the universe in molecules, which are indestructible and unchangeable in themselves; but, in endless transmigration, unite in innumerable permutations, into the diversified forms of life we know? Or is the matter of life composed of ordinary matter, differing from it only in the manner in which its atoms are aggregated. Is it built up of ordinary matter, and again resolved into ordinary matter when its work is done? Modern science does not hesitate a moment between these alternatives. Physiology writes over the portals of life,

with a profounder meaning than the Roman poet attached to that melancholy line. Under whatever disguise it takes refuge, whether fungus or oak, worm or man, the living protoplasm not only ultimately dies and is resolved into its mineral and lifeless constituents, but is always dying, and, strange as the paradox may sound, could not live unless it died."

Suppose all this to be precisely as asserted, it only proves that there is diffused through the whole material world elements which in certain unknown and inexplicable combinations, afford sustenance to plants, and through plants to animals, or from which the living organism repairs its waste and sustains its life. It does not tell us how carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen are or must be combined to form the alleged protoplasm, whence is the living organism, nor the origin or principle of its life. It, in fact, shows us neither the origin nor the matter of life, for it is only an actually living organism that uses or assimilates the alleged protoplasm. There is evidently at work in the organism a vital force that is distinguishable from the irritability or contractility of the protoplasm, and not derived from or originated by it. Undoubtedly, every organism that falls under our observation, whether vegetable or animal, has its physical conditions, and lives by virtue of a physical law; but this, even when we have determined the law and ascertained the conditions, throws no light on the life itself. The life escapes all observation, and science is impotent, if it leaves out the creative act of God, to explain it, or to bring us a step nearer its secret. Professor Huxley tells us no more, with all his science and hard words, than any cultivator of the soil, any shepherd or herdsman, can tell us, and knows as well as he, as we have already said.

In the last extract, the professor evidently prefers, of the two alternatives he suggests, the one that asserts that "the matter of life [protoplasm] is composed of ordinary matter, is built up of ordinary matter, and resolved again into ordinary matter when its work is done." This the professor applies to man as well as to plants and animals. Hence, he cites the Roman poet,

But we have conceded the professor more than he asks. We have conceded that all matter is, in a certain sense, plastic, and living, in the sense of being active, not passive. But the professor does not ask so much. We inferred from some things in the beginning of his discourse that he intended to maintain that his protoplasm is itself elemental, and pervading all nature. But this is not the case; he merely holds it to be a chemical compound formed by the peculiar chemical combination of lifeless components. Thus he says:

"But it will be observed that the existence of the matter of life depends on the pre-existence of certain compounds, namely, carbonic acid, water, and ammonia. Withdraw any one of these three from the world, and all vital phenomena come to an end. They are related to the protoplasm of the plant, as the protoplasm of the plant is to that of the animal. Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen are all lifeless bodies. Of these, carbon and oxygen unite in certain proportions and under certain conditions, to give rise to carbonic acid; hydrogen and oxygen produce water; nitrogen and hydrogen give rise to ammonia. These new compounds, like the elementary bodies of which they are composed, are lifeless. But when they are brought together, under certain conditions they give rise to the still more complex body, protoplasm, and this protoplasm exhibits the phenomena of life. I see no break in this series of steps in my secular complication, and I am unable to understand why the language which is applicable to any one term of the series may not be used to any of the others."

But here is a break or a bold leap from a lifeless to a living compound. No matter how different are the several chemical compounds known from the simple components, the new compound is always, as far as known, as lifeless as were the several components themselves. Hydrogen and oxygen compounded give rise to water, but water is lifeless. Hydrogen and nitrogen, brought together in certain proportions, give rise to ammonia, still a lifeless compound. No chemist has yet, by any combination of the minerals, carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, the constituents of protoplasm, been able to produce a living plant or a living organism of any sort. How then conclude that their combination produces the matter of life, or gives rise to the living organism? There seems to us to be a great gulf between the premises and the conclusion. Certain combinations of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen produce certain lifeless compounds different from themselves, therefore a certain other combination of these same elements produces the living organism, plant, or animal, or originates the matter, and forms the physical basis of life. If the professor had in his school days reasoned in this way, his logic-master, we suspect, would have set a black mark against his name, or, more likely, have rapped him over the knuckles, if not over his head, and told him that an argument that has no middle term, is no argument at all, and that "Transitio a genere ad genus," as from the lifeless to the living, is a sophism.

The professor is misled by his supposing that what is true of the dead body must be true of the living. Because chemical analysis resolves the dead body into certain lifeless elements, he concludes that the living body is, while living, only a compound of these same lifeless elements. That is, from what is true of death, he concludes what must be true of life. But for this fallacy, he could never have fallen into the other fallacy of concluding life is only the result of a certain aggregate or amalgam of lifeless minerals. Our scientists are seldom good logicians, and we have rarely found them able, when leaving traditional science, to draw even a logical induction from the facts before them. This is wherefore they receive so little respect from philosophers and theologians, who are always ready to accept their facts, but, for the most part, unable to accept their inductions. The professor has given us some valuable facts, though very well known before; but his logical ineptness is the best argument he has as yet offered in support of his favorite theory that man is only a monkey developed.

In the extract next before the last, the professor revives an old doctrine long since abandoned, that life is generated from corruption. "Under whatever disguise it takes refuge, whether fungus or oak, worm or man, the living protoplasm not only ultimately dies and is resolved into its mineral and lifeless constituents, but is always dying, and, strange as the paradox may sound, could not live unless it died." {473} We know that some physiologists regard the waste of the body, which in life is constantly going on, and which is repaired by the food we take, as incipient death; but this is only because they confound the particles or molecules of matter of which the body is externally built up, and which change many times during an ordinary life, with the body itself, and suppose the life of the body is simply the resultant of the aggregation of these innumerable molecules or particles. But the life of the organism, we have seen, is within it, and its action from the centre, and it is only its life, not its death, that throws off or exudes as well as assimilates the material particles. The exudation as well as the assimilation is interrupted by death. Why the protoplasm could not live unless it died is what we do not understand.

The professor, of course, not only denies the immortality of the soul, but the existence of soul itself. There is for him no soul but the protoplasm formed of ordinary matter. All this we understand very well. We understand, too, that on his theory the protoplasm assimilated by the organism to repair its waste, renews literally, not figuratively, the life of the organism. But how he extracts life from death, and concludes that the protoplasm must die, as the condition of living, passeth our comprehension. We suppose, however, the professor found it necessary to assert it in order to be able to reason from the dead subject to the living. If the protoplasm were not dead, he could not by chemical analysis determine its constituents; and if the death of the protoplasm were not essential to its life, he could not conclude the constituents of the living protoplasm from what he finds to be the constituents of the dead protoplasm. But this does not help him. In the first place, the waste of the living organism is not death nor dying, though death may result from it. And the supply of protoplasm in the shape of food does not originate new life, nor replenish a life that is gone, but supplies what is needed to sustain and invigorate a life that is already life. In the second place, the vital force is not built up by protoplastic accretions, but operates from within the organism, from the organite or central cell, without which there could be no accretions or secretions. The food does not give life; it only ministers sustenance to an organism already living. No chemical analysis of the food can disclose or throw any light on the origin, nature, or constitution of the organic life itself.

It is this fact that prevents us from having much confidence in chemical physiology, which is still insisted on by our most eminent physiologists. In every organism there is something that transcends the reach of chemical analysis, and which no chemical synthesis can reproduce. Take the professor's protoplasm itself. He resolves it into the minerals, carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen: but no chemist can by any possible recombination of them reproduce protoplasm. How then can one say that these minerals are its sole constituents, or that there are not other elements entering it which escape all chemical tests and, indeed, are not subject to chemical laws? Chemistry is limited, and cannot penetrate the essence of the material substance any more than the eye can. It never does and never can go beyond the sensible properties of matter. Life has its own laws, and every physiologist knows that he meets in the living organism phenomena or facts which it is impossible to reduce to any of the laws which are obtainable from the analysis of inorganic or lifeless matter. {474} It is necessary then to conclude that there is in the living organism present and active some element which, though using lifeless matter, cannot be derived from it, or explained by physical laws, be they mechanical, chemical, or electrical. The law of life is a law sui generis, and not resolvable into any other. We must even go beyond the physical laws themselves, if we would find their principle.

As far as human science goes, there is, where the nucleus of life is wanting, no conversion of lifeless matter into living matter. The attempt to prove that living organisms, plants, animals, or man are developed from inorganic and lifeless matter, though made as long ago as Leucippus and Democritus, systematized by Epicurus, sung in rich Latin verse by Lucretius, and defended by the ablest of modern British physico-philosophers, Mr. Herbert Spencer, in his Biology, has by the sane part of the human race in all times and everywhere been held to be foolish and absurd. It has no scientific basis, is supported by no known facts, and is simply an unfounded, at least, an unsupported hypothesis. Life to the scientist is an insolvable mystery. We know no explanation of this mystery or of anything else in the universe, unless we accept the creative act of God; for the origin and cause of nature are not in nature herself. We have no other explanation of the origin of living organisms or of the matter of life. God created plants, animals, and man, created them living organisms, male and female created he them, and thus gave them the power to propagate and multiply each its own kind, by natural generation. The scientist will of course smile superciliously at this old solution, insisted on by priests and accepted by the vulgar; but though not a scientist, we know enough of science to say from even a scientific point of view that there is no alternative: either this or no solution at all. The ablest men of ancient or modern times, when they reject it, only fall into endless sophisms and self-contradictions.

Professor Huxley admits none but material existences, concedes that the terms of his proposition are unquestionably materialistic, and yet denies that he is individually a materialist.

"It may seem a small thing to admit that the dull vital actions of a fungus, or a foraminifer, are the properties of their protoplasm, and are the direct results of the nature of the matter of which they are composed. But if, as I have endeavored to prove to you, their protoplasm is essentially identical with, and most readily converted into, that of any animal, I can discover no logical halting place between the admission that such is the case, and the further concession that all vital action may, with equal propriety, be said to be the result of the molecular forces of the protoplasm which displays it. And if so, it must be true, in the same sense and to the same extent, that the thoughts to which I am now giving utterance, and your thoughts regarding them, are the expression of molecular changes in the matter of life which is the source of other vital phenomena. Past experience leads me to be tolerably certain that, when the propositions I have just placed before you are accessible to public comment and criticism, they will be condemned by many zealous persons, and perhaps by some of the wise and thoughtful. I should not wonder if 'gross and brutal materialism' were the mildest phrase applied to them in certain quarters. And most undoubtedly the terms of the propositions are distinctly materialistic. Nevertheless, two things are certain: the one, that I hold the statement to be substantially true; the other, that I, individually, am no materialist, but on the contrary believe materialism to involve grave philosophical error."

If what he has been from the first endeavoring to prove, and here distinctly asserts, is not materialism and consequently by his own confession, "a grave philosophical error," we know not what would be. "This union of materialistic terminology with the repudiation of the materialistic philosophy," he says, further on, "I share with some of the most thoughtful men with whom I am acquainted." His terminology is, then, better fitted to conceal his thought than to express it. He may repudiate this or that materialistic system; he may repudiate all philosophy, which he, of course does, yet not his terminology only, but his thought, as far as thought he has, is materialistic. Nothing can be more materialistic than the conception of life, sense, sentiment, affection, thought, reasoning, all the sensible, intellectual, and moral phenomena we are conscious of, as the product of the peculiar arrangement or combination of the molecules of the protoplasm, itself resolvable into the minerals, carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen.

The scientific professor defends himself from materialism, by asserting that both materialism and spiritualism lie without the limits of human science, and by denying the necessity of a substance, whether spirit or matter, to underlie and sustain—we should say, produce—the phenomena, and the necessary relation of cause and effect, or that we do or can know things under any relation but that of juxtaposition in space and time. He falls back on the skepticism of Hume, and takes refuge behind his ignorance. He is too ignorant either to assert or to deny the existence of spirit, and though he may not be able to prove the phenomena in question are the product of material forces, nobody knows enough of the nature and essence of matter to say that they are not; and in fine, he in the first part of his discourse is only stating the direction in which physiology has for some time been moving. After all, what is the difference, or rather, what matters "the difference between the conception of life as the product of a certain disposition of material molecules, and the old notion of an Archaeus governing and directing blind matter within each living body?"

But if matter lies out of the limits of science, and the professor is unable to say whether it exists or not, what right has he to call anything material, to speak of a material basis of life, or to represent life and its phenomena as the product of "a certain disposition of material molecules"? What, indeed, has he been laboring to prove through his whole discourse, but that the phenomena of life are the product of ordinary matter? After this, it will hardly answer to plead ignorance of the existence and properties of matter. If matter be relegated to the region of the unknowable, his whole thesis, terminology and all, must be banished with it, for it retains, and can retain, no meaning.

Nor will it answer for the professor to take refuge in Hume's skepticism, and say he is not a materialist, because he admits no necessary relation between cause and effect, or that there is within the limits of science, any power or force, or vis activa, which men in their ignorance call "cause," actually producing something which men call "effect." If he says this, what becomes of his thesis, that life and even mind are the product of a certain disposition of material molecules, or of "the peculiar combination of the molecules of the protoplasm"? If he denies the existence, or even the knowledge of causative, that is, productive force, his thesis has no meaning, and all his alleged proofs of a physical basis of the vital and mental phenomena must count for nothing. {476} Every proof, every argument, presupposes the relation of cause and effect. When that relation is denied, and the two things are assumed to have with each other only the relation of juxtaposition, no proposition can be either proved or disproved. The professor, after having asserted and attempted to prove his materialistic thesis, cannot, without gross self-contradiction, plead the skepticism of Hume in his defence. If he holds with Hume, he should have kept his mouth shut, and never stated or attempted to prove his thesis.

Whether we are or are not able to prove that life, sense, and reason do not originate in the peculiar "combination of the molecules of the protoplasm," is nothing to the purpose. It is for the professor to prove that they do. He must not base his science on our ignorance, any more than on his own.

But our space is exhausted and we must close. Taken, as we have taken him, on what he must concede to be purely scientific ground, and brought to a strictly scientific test, the professor's thesis must be declared not proven, and to be destitute of all scientific value. We have met him on his own ground, and have urged no arguments against him drawn from religion or metaphysics; we have simply corrected one or two mistakes in his science, and assailed his inductions with pure logic. If he has not reasoned logically, that is his fault, not ours, and neither he nor his friends have any right to complain of us for showing that his inductions are illogical, and therefore unscientific. Yet we are bound to say that the professor reasons as well as any of his class of scientists that we have met with. No man can reason logically who rejects the [Greek text]

, that is, logic itself, and nothing better than Professor Huxley's discourse can be expected from a scientist who discards all causes and seeks to explain the existence and phenomena or facts of the universe, without rising from second causes to the first and final cause of all.

Two questions are raised by this discourse, of great and vital importance. The one as to the nexus between cause and effect, in answer to Hume's skepticism, and the other as to spirit and matter, and their reciprocal relation. We have not attempted the discussion of either in this article; but should a favorable occasion offer, we may hereafter treat them both at some length.

Two Months In Spain
During The Late Revolution.

At an early hour yesterday we left Cadiz, which did indeed look like a "silver cup floating on the water," as the Spaniards say of it. As the steamer bore us away, the rising sun upon its white towers and cathedral dome, the belvideres which adorn the roof of every house, (making each look like a church,) the lovely green alameda, the distant mountains, the pretty white towns on the shore, the hundreds of vessels in the sparkling bay, all made an enchanting scene, from which we were recalled to the miseries of sea-sickness! From time to time, we crept upon deck to see the fine sea view, and when we came to Tarifa, near the straits, the scene was magnificent. On one side, the mountains of Africa, Tangier in the distance; on the other, the mountains of Spain and the Moorish-looking town of Tarifa, with an island on which is the lighthouse and defences standing directly in the mouth of the straits; so that it seemed as if a long line of vessels with their white sails spread were encompassing the island. In sight, at one time, were eighty sail. Every nation under the sun seemed represented, as they saluted one another with their flags. Among the rest, Sweden and Norway. We landed at Gibraltar under a glorious sunset. The farewell beams lighted the mountains with a tint of gilded bronze. Gibraltar, opposite these, was like a huge gray mountain, and behind it the sky was of the palest rose color, melting into blue where it touched the water. The town is on the side and at the foot of the "Rock," (a place of sixteen or twenty thousand inhabitants,) and above it are the famous galleries cut through the rock, from which we could see the noses of the great guns peeping from the port-holes, range after range, one above another, till the top is reached, where is the Signal.

The Rock of Gibraltar is 1430 feet high, and about three miles long—a great gray sphinx jutting into the water. It is joined to the mainland by a narrow slip of sand, capable of being submerged if necessary. Upon this neck of land is the "neutral ground," (a narrow strip,) where, side by side, the fair British sentinel and the sunburned Spaniard keep their "lonely round." We mount upon donkeys to ascend the "Rock," passing through the wonderful "galleries" which, at an immense expense, have been cut into the solid rock, where, with the guns, are depositories for powder, balls, etc. Some of these galleries are over a mile and a quarter long, lighted by the port-holes, which, in passing, gave us glimpses of the loveliest of landscapes. Leaving the galleries, we ascend by zigzag paths to the Signal; at every turn feasting our eyes upon the wonderful panorama spread out below us, which is seen in perfection from the summit. Here we looked down upon two seas, the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, and two worlds, Europe and Africa! Spain on one side, with the snowy heights of the Alpujarras and Sierra Nevada; at our feet, the town of Gibraltar, with the lovely alameda, its green trees and bright gardens, the glorious bay crowded with shipping—men-of-war, school ships, steamers, and every small craft; and, seemingly, but a stone's throw across lay Ceuta, at the foot of that other "Pillar of Hercules" which rises 2200 feet, and looks like a mountain of bronze, while Gibraltar is of gray granite. {478} These two great pillars were considered in the olden time the end of the world—the Tarshish of the Bible; the Calpe of the Phoenicians, who erected here Calpe (carved mountain) and Abyla.

Tarik, the one-eyed Berber chief, took Gibraltar in 711, and called it after his own name, Ghebal Tarik, from whence comes Gibraltar.

While upon the "Signal," we signalize the event by taking a lunch of delicious English cheese, bread and butter, (the first butter we have had in Spain,) and such ale! And while thus agreeably engaged, we hear that an American man-of-war is coming into port, which proves to be the flagship of Admiral Farragut; so we repair to the rampart to see the ship saluted by the town, and then by the British frigate Bristol, to both of which the Yankee replied in gallant style. It was a fine sight, and, altogether, the scene a most remarkable one. Down by the neutral ground, some English officers playing cricket looked like ants in the sunshine; the blue guard-tents of the English sentinels, and the white ones of the Spaniards, were little specks, and the Christian and Jewish cemeteries were like checker work on the greensward.

How longingly we looked toward the purple mountains of Africa, and that beautiful city of Tangier which we had hoped to visit! but the quarantine, still in force, obliged us to abandon the idea. It would have been something to set foot in another continent! Ceuta, which belongs to Spain, and is but a prison-house, could not tempt us. Tearing ourselves from this wonderful scene, we descended by the other side of the mountain and entered the city by beautiful gardens near the alameda, seeing below us the government houses, store-houses, magazines, and many fine residences embowered in gardens of tropical trees and plants; whole hedges of geraniums and cactus lined the roadside, and almond trees, dates, and oranges. We passed a convent-school with beautiful and extensive gardens. In the evening there is music on the alameda, where are trees and statues, and marble benches, on which sit the motley population of this strange place; Moors in turbans, bare-legged Highlanders, officers in scarlet, Andalusians in the red faja, Irishmen fresh from their native isle, ladies in French bonnets and English round hats next the Spanish mantilla and ever-moving fan. Gibraltar is a free port, and every people and kindred meet here for trade. The garrison is very large, about three thousand men in time of peace; for the Spaniards see the occupation of this important point in their country with great jealousy, and would gladly seek occasion to win it back. And every now and then the subject is mooted in the English parliament of giving it up, as it is a most expensive appendage to the English people, and can bring little benefit save to their pride.

Leaving Gibraltar at an early hour, and passing the forest of ships in the bay, we soon see the last of the pillars of Hercules and the African coast. The sea is calm, and the coast of Spain along which we come is most beautiful. There is something peculiarly interesting in the mountains of Spain; they seem to rise hill upon hill till they grow to be mountains, and instead of the blue of most southern countries they are of a mulberry hue—seldom with trees, and reminding one of the purple moors of Scotland. The steamer is crowded with families returning from Gibraltar, whither they had fled to get out of the way of the revolution.

We find a busy, crowded city, a lovely bay with mountains in the background, an old Moorish castle overlooking the city, and a beautiful alameda, with trees, and statues, and marble seats, upon which we look from the windows of our delightful hotel.

The first thing to-day is to drive to a lovely villa, (that of the Marquis de Casa Loring,) in whose garden we see every fruit and flower and tree of the tropics. Bananas and mangoes, the coffee-tree, the magnolia and India-rubber trees, and among all these we found, and ate, ripe persimmons!—that homely fruit of old Virginia, found amidst all these oriental splendors; and sweeter were they than even the oranges which we gathered from their overladen trees. Returning, we paused to see another villa, from whence is a more extensive and beautiful view of the mountains, the city and the sea, and the fertile plateau upon which Malaga lies, and which is said to rival even the famous huertas of Valencia and Murcia in variety and luxuriance of vegetation. The cemetery gives another favorite point of view, and the old Moorish castle (Gibralfaro) has even a finer one; but the day is too warm to attempt the ascent. The castle dates from 1279, and the lower portion, (the Alcazaba,) which is connected with it, is supposed to be of Phoenician origin; Malaga having been first a Phoenician colony, and afterwards Roman. Of the remains of the Roman period, we saw two interesting bronze slabs in a pavilion of the Villa Loring this morning, one of them containing the municipal laws of Malaga under Domitian, and the other those of a city (Salpense) now unknown.

The interior of the cathedral, which rises upon the site of an ancient mosque, is not at all remarkable. It was begun in 1528. The church of "El Cristo del Victoria" is interesting, from the circumstance of its being built on the spot where stood the tents of the Catholic kings during the siege of 1487. On the right of the altar hangs the royal standard of Ferdinand, and on the left the one taken from the Moors. When the city surrendered, the former was hoisted on the castle, or alcazaba. Opposite this church is a small church, San Roque, the first Christian edifice built here by Ferdinand and Isabella. The crucifix which was formerly here was the one brought by their majesties, is highly revered, and is now over the high altar of Santa Victoria.

Malaga is famed for its climate, the best in Spain. It is considered drier, warmer, and more equable than that of Rome, Pau, Naples, or Nice, even superior to Madeira. Invalids flock here, and it will soon be as crowded as Nice. The extreme dryness of the air is its marked feature, and it is said that there are not ten days in the whole year when an invalid may not take out-door exercise. The evaporation is so great, the rain has no influence on the air. During nine years, it has rained only two hundred and sixty times. The "oldest inhabitant" does not remember to have seen snow, and the cold winds from the Sierra Nevada are kept off by the mountains immediately surrounding the city. {480} To show the longevity of the inhabitants, in the year 1860, twenty-nine out of five thousand deaths were of people who had lived to the ages of ninety or a hundred.

This morning we leave Malaga at an early hour by rail, the road being cut through extraordinary mountain passes to Antiquera, an old Roman and Moorish town; from thence by diligence to Loja, where we again take the railway. The journey is altogether delightful, the day being cool and bright, and the mountain scenery on either side grand and beautiful. Loja is in a narrow valley, through which runs the Genil river, on one side the Periquete Hills (Sierra Ronda) and the Hacho. The Manzanil unites here with the Genil, both rapid and clear mountain streams fertilizing a lovely valley. Soon after leaving Loja, we reach Santa Fé, (Holy Faith,) built by Queen Isabella to shelter her army in winter during the siege of Granada in 1492, and called "Santa Fé" because she looked upon the war as a struggle for the faith, and believed piously in its happy issue. This little town has been the scene of many important operations and political acts. It witnessed the signing of the capitulation of Granada, and it was to this town that Columbus was recalled by Isabella when he had already reached the bridge of Piños, behind the mountains, determining to ask aid elsewhere for his great undertaking.

Darkness now fell upon us, and except one exquisite view which the setting sun gave of the snow mountains over Granada, we saw nothing till we reached this last stronghold of the Moors in Spain, and found lodgings inside the Alhambra grounds in the Hotel Washington Irving.

We go first to the Cathedral, to hear the high mass, and pay our respects to the remains of Ferdinand and Isabella, which rest there. Driving through beautiful ornamental grounds out of the Alhambra gate, down a steep hill in the old Moorish looking city, we find the cathedral, like that of Malaga, greatly ornamented, (in the Greco-Roman style,) built in 1529. Within the sanctuary are eleven pictures by Alonzo Caño, and two of his most celebrated pieces of sculpture—the heads of Adam and Eve carved in cork. Caño was a native of Granada, and is buried in the Cathedral Bocanegra. Another of the celebrated artists of Spain was also a native here, and the cathedral has several of his pictures. But everything connected with the church sinks into insignificance when one enters into the royal chapel, where all that can perish of the great Ferdinand and Isabella lies (a small space for so much greatness, as Charles V. said.) In a crypt, below the chapel, in plain leaden coffins, with but the simple initial of each king and queen upon them, are the coffins of Ferdinand and Isabella and their daughter Joanna, with her husband Philip I. (the handsome)—the last—that very coffin which the poor crazed Joanna carried about with her for forty-seven years, embraced with such frantic grief, and would never be parted from. Nothing was so affecting as the sight of this—not even the remembrance of all Isabella's glories and goodness! So does an instance of heart devotion touch one more than even the sight of greatness. Above the vault are the four beautiful alabaster monuments, made by order of Charles V. to the memory of his father and mother and his grandparents. {481} Ferdinand and Isabella, with their statues, lie side by side; and poor Joanne la Folle looks lovely and placid (all her jealousies over) beside the husband she adored, as if at last sure that she could not be divided from him. Isabella died at Medina del Campo, (near Segovia, about thirty miles from Madrid,) but desired to be buried here in the bright jewel which she had won as well for her crown as for her God. Her body was taken to Granada in December, journeying over trackless moors amidst storms and torrents, of which the faithful and learned Peter Martyr gives account, who accompanied his beloved mistress to her last home.

The inscription which runs around the cornice tells: "This chapel was founded by their most Catholic Majesties, Don Fernando and Doña Isabel, king and queen of las Españas of Naples, of Sicily—of Jerusalem—who conquered this kingdom, and brought it back to our faith; who acquired the Canary Islands and Indies, as well as the cities of Oran, Tripoli, and Bugia; who crushed heresy, expelled the Moors and Jews from their realms, and reformed religion. The queen died Tuesday, November 26, 1504; the king died January 23, 1516. The building was completed in 1517."

The bassi relievi on the altar in this chapel are very interesting, from the scenes they represent—Ferdinand and Isabella receiving the keys of Granada from Boabdil, etc. At each end of the altar are figures of the king and queen in the costume of the day, the banner of Castile behind the king. In the sacristy is the crown of Isabella, the sword of Ferdinand, the casket in which she gave the jewels to Columbus, some vestments embroidered by her own hand, and the tabernacle used on the altar where they heard mass, on which is a picture of the adoration of the Magi, by that wonderful old painter Hemling of Bruges. Lord Bacon has said of Isabella: "In all her relations of queen or woman, she was an honor to her sex, and the corner-stone of the greatness of Spain—one of the most faultless characters in history—the purest sovereign by whom the female sceptre was ever wielded."

We hear mass in the chapel of the Sagrario, a beautiful church in itself. It was on one of its three doors that the Spanish knight Hernan Perez del Pulgar (during the siege of Granada) nailed the words, "Ave Maria;" to accomplish which feat, he entered the town at dusk, and left it unharmed—nay, even amidst the plaudits of the Arabs, who appreciated the deed. He is buried in one of the chapels called "Del Pulgar."

From the Cathedral we visit the "Cartuja," once a wealthy Carthusian convent, built upon grounds given to the monks by Gonzales de Cordova—"El gran Capitan." In the refectory is shown a cross, painted on the wall by Cotan, which so well imitates wood that the very birds fly to it, and try to perch there. The church has a beautiful statue of St. Bruno upon the altar; and a larger one in the chapel of the Sagrario, by Alonzo Caño, is especially fine. The sacristy is rich in marbles from the Sierra Nevada, and the doors and other wood-work of the church and chapel are made of the most curious and beautiful inlaid work—tortoise-shell, ebony, silver, and mother of pearl—all done by one monk, who took forty-two years to accomplish it; and after so adorning this chapel, behold! the monks are driven from it.

In the church are several lovely pictures—a head of our Lord by Murillo; a copy, by Alonzo Caño, of the Viergo del Rosario in the Madrid gallery, and a copy of one of the "Conceptions" of Murillo —that one with the fair flowing hair, so very lovely.

Returning home, we have our first view of the snow mountains, (Sierra Nevada.) How strange and how charming to be beneath a tropical sun, and with all the beautiful vegetation of Africa and the Indies, with people all eastern in dress and manners, and see above one snow-capped mountains like the glaciers of Switzerland! Owing to the proximity of these glaciers, the heat is never intolerable here, and yet the winters are so mild they seldom need fire in their sitting-rooms or parlors.

To-day is made memorable by our first visit to the Alhambra. Situated on a high hill, on either side of which flows the Darro and the Genil, this space, which occupies several hundred acres, was formerly surrounded by walls and towers, and contained within it the palaces and villas of the Kalifs of Granada; and so numerous were these that it was called a city, Medina Alhambra. Of all these, there now remains but that portion of the Alhambra known as the summer-palace, (the winter-palace having been torn down by Charles V. to make room for a palace which he never finished.) Besides this summer-palace, there is the "Generalife," (a summer-palace built—later than the Alhambra—in 1319;) the remains of the Alcazabar, (fortress,) the Torre de la Vega, where the bell strikes the hours in the same manner as in the Moorish days, to signify upon whom devolves the duty of irrigating the "vega," the beautiful and fertile plain below; the tower of the captive; tower of the princesses; the tower of the "Siete Suetos," (seven stories;) and the Torres Bermujas, (Red Towers.) The last named are outside the Alhambra walls, but are on the same hill, and claim to belong to an older date than even the Moors or the Goths—supposed to be of Phoenician origin. The walls are entered by several gates, some Arabic, and others more modern. From these gates, you wander among stately avenues of trees, with flowers and shrubs and charming paths, through which now and then is seen a glimpse of the yellow towers, or some picturesque ruin, altogether a scene of enchanting beauty. And when upon one of the "miradors" (look-outs) or terraces which crown these towers and palaces, there lies the Moorish city at your feet, the grand snow mountains on the east, the beautiful vega stretching to the mountains on the west, down which marched the conquering Christians; and on the south lies that mountain so poetically called "the last sigh of the Moor," from which Boabdil looked his last upon the kingdom he was leaving for ever, and where his mother made him the famous reproach which has passed into history, that he did well to weep as a woman over that kingdom he could not defend as a man.

And how venture to describe the Alhambra, which has been written of by such men as Prescott and Irving! how give to any one an idea of that which is unique in the world, of the grace and beauty and wonderful variety of its adornments—the carvings like lace, the bright colored mosaics and azuelos, (tiles,) the transparent stucco work and filagree, the inlaid cedar-wood roofs, the pillars, the domes and fountains, the courts, the beautiful arches! We enter first the Court of the Myrtles, in which a large square pool, filled by a fountain at either end, is surrounded by a hedge of fragrant myrtle, and this in turn by a marble colonnade, over which is a second gallery, with jalousies, through which we could imagine the dark eyed beauties to have peeped. {483} The roofs of these galleries are of cedar-wood inlaid, and the arches and sides of exquisite wreaths and vines in stucco, with shields of the Moorish kings, mottoes and verses from the Koran, etc. This court was a place of ablutions for the kalifs.

From the Court of the Myrtles, one sees the Tower of Comares, (called from the name of its Persian architect;) and within this tower, opening from the Court of Myrtles, and preceded by its "antesala" is the Hall of the Ambassadors, the largest, highest, and most beautifully adorned of all the Alhambra. Here was the sultan's throne and reception room. On three sides, arched windows look down into the deep ravine from which the tower rises; and, beyond, upon an enchanting prospect, the old Moorish city and the verdant hills and mountains. The roof of this hall is a sort of imitation of the vault of heaven, and that of the "antesala" (called "La Barca," from being shaped like a boat) is also very elegant.

On another side the Court of Myrtles is the famous Court of the Lions, with its one hundred and thirty-six pillars of white marble, its twelve lions in the centre, supporting an alabaster basin, (a fountain.) At each end, a pavilion projects into the court, with arabesque patterns so light and graceful that the very daylight is seen through the stucco.

Opening from the Court of the Lions is the Hall of the Abencerrages, deriving its name from the legend according to which Boabdil invited the chiefs of the illustrious family of that name to a feast, and had them taken out one by one and beheaded. Others assert that they were murdered in this hall, and show the stains of blood in the marble of the fountain. As they had been mainly instrumental in placing him upon the throne, this act of ingratitude helped to his ruin. This story is generally believed, but Washington Irving has rescued the name of this "unlucky" one (el chico) from this unjust aspersion. His investigations prove that the crimes laid to the charge of Boabdil were in reality committed by his father, Aben Hassin. He it was who murdered the thirty-six Abencerrages upon suspicion of having conspired against him, and it was he who confined his queen in the "tower of the captive," etc.

On the east side of the Court of the Lions is the "Sale del Tribunal," (the hall of justice,) where the kalifs gave audience on state affairs. Three arches in the centre and two at either end lead into this hall, which is ninety feet long by sixteen wide, with a dome thirty-eight feet high. This is divided by arches into seven rooms, all profusely ornamented, and in the ceilings of several recesses are paintings of Moors, with cimeters, castles, etc. In one of these rooms is the famous Alhambra vase of porcelain, four feet three inches high, which was found full of gold. In another small room are three tombstones, one of Mohammed II., and one of Yusef III., found in the tomb-house of the Moorish kings, near the Court of the Lions, in 1574. They have long and elaborate inscriptions, one of which reads thus:

"Gentle showers from heaven come down on this tomb, and give it freshness, and the orchard spread its perfume upon it. What this tomb contains is wine without admixture, and myrtles. Reward and pardon be granted to him who lies within.

"Those that inhabit those happy regions come forth to meet him with palms in their hands.

"If thou wouldst know the story of him who lies in the tomb, listen. He was a prince above all in excellence. May God give him sanctity!

"Oh! how great was his fame. His excellence, how high! and unbounded his virtues!

"For Abul Hadjaj was like the moon that points out the road to take, and when the sun went down its brightness beamed no less from his eyes.

"Abul Hadjaj showered down tokens of his liberality. But drought is come; his liberality has ceased; his crops are gathered.

"His generosity is forgotten; his halls are lonesome; his ministers silent, and his rooms deserted.

"But it was God's pleasure, the merciful one, (may he be glorified,) to take him into the eternal dwelling when he deprived him of life.

"Here lies he softly, within this narrow tomb, but his real dwelling is the heart of every man.

"Why should I not pray God that the rain should moisten his tomb with its abundant dew? for the rain of his liberality showered down upon all without ceasing.

"Was he not filled with the fear of God, with gentleness and wisdom? Amongst his qualities, were not virtue, liberality, and magnificence one part?

"Was not poetry one of his attributes, and did he not deck his throne with verses like strings of pearl?

"But Ebn Nasr, his successor, is certainly the greatest among all monarchs of the earth.

"For he is most generous and victorious; besides, he distributes rewards generously. He has saved the kingdom from ruin, and restored it to its former greatness."

The Hall of the Two Sisters takes its name from two white slabs of equal size in the pavement. Here are beautiful arches, windows with painted jalousies, a fountain, and a wonderful roof, composed of three thousand pieces in little miniature domes and vaults, all colored in delicate blue and red with white and gold. From this hall, indeed quite from the Court of the Lions, one sees through a series of arched entrances into the "Corredor de Lindaraja," in which room are thirteen little cupolas, and the Mirador de Lindaraja (a boudoir of the sultana) looks upon the garden of Lindaraja, with flowers, and fountains, and orange-trees.

On the opposite of this lovely garden, and looking into it, are the rooms occupied by Washington Irving, those built by Philip V. for his beautiful queen, Elizabeth of Parma, whom the Spanish call "Isabel Farnese." Several corridors here lead to modernized parts of the building—" the queen's boudoir," a chapel made by Charles V. out of the mosque, and a lofty tower, used by the Arabs as an oratory for the evening prayer, and from which the view is superb—the "Generalife" with its white towers, the woods of the Alhambra, the Darro far below in the deep gorge, and, beyond and above all, the snow-capped Sierra Nevada.

The "Patio de la Mosquita" (the court of the mosque) has only the remains of its beautiful roof.

From this to the baths is a long corridor leading to the Chamber of Rest, which has just been restored by Sig. Contreras, the able architect who is repairing the whole building, by order of the queen. This has a fountain in the centre, marble pillars all round, a gallery above, where the musicians played and sung while the bather inclined upon the cushions below; within were the marble baths of the sultan, the sultana, etc.

"Generalife" means garden of pleasure, and here garden above garden rises upon the mountain side, through which the Darro rushes noisily, being brought by a little canal quite through the mountain. In one of the rooms are some interesting portraits of the kings and queens of Spain. Ferdinand and Isabella, Philip the handsome, Jeanne la Folle, Charles V. and Isabella, Don John of Austria, etc.; and in a second room a series of portraits of the Dukes of Granada, whose descendant, now married to an Italian nobleman of Genoa, owns this lovely place. The founder of this house was a converted Moor, and to his descendants (the houses of Venegas and Granada) Philip IV. made this a perpetual grant. In one of the many gardens are some cypress-trees planted by the Moors, seven hundred years old. Under one of these, a love story is said to have been enacted, of which the beautiful Sultana Zorayda is the heroine. Amongst the portraits in the picture gallery is one of Boabdil, fair and handsome, with yellow hair, and a gentle, amiable look. He may not have had the qualities fitted to the terrible emergency in which he was placed, when domestic contention and misrule had so weakened his empire as to make it difficult to struggle against the growing greatness of Ferdinand and Isabella; but he must have possessed qualities which won for him the love of his people, for many years after his time, the Moors who still lingered about Granada sung the plaintive song said to have been composed by Boabdil himself, relating his misfortunes and his sorrows, spoke of him reverently, and lamented his fate.

It is said he lived to see his children begging their bread at the door of the mosques in Fez. He was killed in Africa, fighting the battles of the prince who gave him shelter.

We hasten from the Generalife to see the sunset from the Torre de la Vega, which is the finest view we have had of the city—the Vega with the lovely rivers winding through it, and the grand mountains beyond. As the sun declined, from the many church bells came the "Ave Maria," soft and musical from the great distance below.

The guide points out the hospital founded by St. John of God, (a Portuguese saint,) the founder of the brothers of charity now spread all over Europe. According to the guide, the saint asked the king for as much land, on which to build this hospital, as he could enclose in a certain number of hours. Of course he was miraculously assisted; and by working all night, he took in so great a space that the king became alarmed. Here he built this hospital and the church in which he is buried. He lost his life rescuing a drowning man, and died blessing Granada.

Spent the whole morning in the Alhambra, wandering amid its beauties, feasting upon its romantic memories, and reading at intervals the charming legends connected with every spot so delightfully told by Washington Irving. In the hall of the tribunal, we read his account of the entrance of the triumphant Ferdinand and Isabella, and fancy the scene when Cardinal Mendoza celebrated the first mass here.

Seated in the Court of the Lions, we meditate upon the cruel death of the noble Abencerrages, and lean from the window of the Tower of Comares, down which the good Ayesha let her infant son Boabdil escape, to save him from the jealous fury of her rival Zorayda.

And then, in the later days of the beautiful Elizabetta of Parma, we recall the scene where the hypochondriac Philip persists in being laid out for dead, and can only be brought to life by the voice and lute of the fair maiden, "the Rose of the Alhambra."

In contrast to the Alhambra are the remains of the palace begun with such magnificence by Charles V., of which only the walls remain. Within their vast area and amongst its marble pillars, muleteers were depositing their billets of wood, and burdens of dirt and ashes! Sic transit gloria mundi.

We go to look at that which has lasted longer, the church built by him near by, and called Sta. Maria del Alhambra. Wandering on, we find ourselves amongst the ruins of the Franciscan convent (still within the Alhambra walls) which was destroyed by the French in 1809-11, when so much of the Alhambra was injured.

Led by a little boy, and following the wall, we come upon a plantation of cactus, with its red and yellow fruit, which a man is gathering with great scissors, to prevent its prickings. A woman politely cuts and pares some for us to taste. It is sweet and juicy; is much eaten by the poor, who call it "Tuños." They also make from it a palatable drink—a sort of beer. Hans Andersen has written a pretty sonnet to the cactus, which seems especially applicable to this time and occasion.

  "Yes, yellow and red are the colors of Spain;
     In banners and flags they are waving on high;
   And the cactus flower has adopted them too,
     In the warm sunshine to dazzle the eye.
   Thou symbol of Spain, thou flower of the sun,
     When the Moors of old were driven away,
   Thou didst not, like them, abandon thy home.
     But stayed with thy fruit and thy flowers so gay.
   The thousand daggers that hide in thy leaves
     Cannot rescue thee from the love of gain;
   Too often it is thy fate to be sold,
     Thou sunny fruit with the colors of Spain."

Here we find ourselves at the tower of the "Siete Suelos," through which Boabdil passed when he left the Alhambra for ever. It is said that he asked of Isabella that the door might be walled up, so that no one should ever pass through it after him, and his conquerors acceded to his request. Returning through one of the many beautiful paths leading to our hotel, we diverge to look at a view which presented itself, and find we are near the villa of Señora Calderon. Here, terrace above terrace rises in view of the mountains, and on the summit is an artificial lake, with bridges and boats, and winding walks, and flowers and fruits, and statues and fountains—everything to make a perfect paradise.

At night, we have a gypsy-dance. The chief of his troop is the finest guitar player in Spain—there can be no better in the world—a tall, dark, grave man, who received our plaudits with kingly grace; he looked as if in sorrow over the degradation of his people, who are here in great numbers, living in wretched quarters on a hillside, in holes or caves in the ground.

The dancers were four lovely, graceful girls, modestly dressed, and several men, all dark, with large, soft eyes and white teeth. A youth in short jacket, with broad red faja (sash) and the peculiar Andalusian hat, danced a solo of strange fashion, with many movements of the body, and the extraordinary gestures which belong to all. The feet move in short steps—a sort of "heel and toe"—while the body sways to and fro, and the hands and arms move gracefully and expressively. The men had tambourines and the women castanets, and the wild airs to which they danced were accompanied with their voices. The variety of dances and songs was curious and interesting, and often descriptive. At the end of each dance, the girls came round and saluted all, gentlemen and ladies, by passing one arm over the neck.

Drive about the city, the public squares, etc., and visit the remains of the old Moorish bazaar which occupies a square intersected by narrow lanes, every one of which is beautifully ornamented with pillars and arabesque work.

The alameda, planted in long avenues of trees which meet overhead, beyond which one catches a view of the Snow mountains, and beside which flows the Genil river, can not be excelled in beauty.

The church and hospital of St. John of God is most interesting. Over the door are these words of the saint, "Labor, without intermission, to do all the good works in your power while time is allowed you." The hospital is built round a large court, with fountains and gardens, and a double row of corridors in which sat the sick poor, clean and comfortable. It communicates with the church, which has several good pictures, and a head of St. John the Baptist, carved by Caño.

In a richly ornamented chapel behind the great altar is the body of the saint in a silver casket. The remains of St. Feliciana are also here, as well as many other relics. In an adjoining room is seen the identical basket in which the saint carried provisions to the poor.

The church was built by contributions sent by one of the order from South America. The cedar-wood doors are said to be made from the logs in which the concealed treasures were brought over.

We climb to the top of the "Torres Bermujas," outside the Alhambra walls, from whence is another splendid view—a curious old ruin, dating from the time of the Phoenicians. It is said to have been a stronghold of the Jews, who made a colony here during their persecutions by the Romans; and being treated with equal cruelty by their Gothic conquerors, they invited in the Moors, betrayed the city to them, made terms for themselves, and thus brought upon themselves the eternal enmity of the Spaniards, who treated them with great rigor after the conquest, and finally banished them. In the story of the three beautiful princesses, this tower plays an important rôle; here were confined the captive Spanish knights who eloped with the Infantas, (daughters of Mohammed the left-handed,) and beyond, rising above the deep, romantic ravine, is the Tower of the Princesses, beneath which the knights sang their tales of love.

Yesterday (my feast) and the feast of the great Spanish Saint Teresa was celebrated by our most sorrowful departure from Grenada! At three o'clock in the morning, we descend the hill of the Alhambra, and ruefully mount to the top of a Spanish diligence, and squeeze into what they call the "coupe"—an exalted place behind the coach-box, from whence one looks down upon the ten mules who drag this lumbering vehicle, see all their antics, observe the rash manner in which they tear down precipitous heights, and mount steep ascents, having the comfortable certainty that in no event of danger could we possibly descend from this lofty perch and save ourselves!

A "special providence," however, guards the Spanish diligence, to say nothing of the three "conductors"—the postillion who rides in front, the individual who sits on the box with gold lace and red on his cap, and who smokes leisurely, let what will happen, only occasionally speaking to the mules, calling them by name, and urging them on with a sound like "ayah!" and the boy who runs alongside shouting, screaming, and plying the whip, now jumping on the front of the diligence to rest a moment, now hanging on by one hand to the side doors or behind; active as a cat he springs up and down while the vehicle is at full speed, keeping one all the while in terror for his safety.

Such is the Spanish diligence from the "coupé." In the interior, shut out from the front view, one only hears the united voices of the "conductors," and it is less exciting. We who are above, however, have the advantage of a fine view of the mountains, (the Sierra Morena,) over which we pass by a smooth and beautiful road.

Jaen is the only place of importance which we see, an old Moorish town with histories and legends, a fine cathedral, and a Moorish castle on the height above. From this, a few hours brings us to Menjibar, where we take the railway at six P.M., and reach Madrid about eight the next morning. At Menjibar, we bid adieu to our young American friend, who had journeyed with us since leaving Cordova, and parted with the Scotch and German ladies whom we had encountered at various points.

Madrid is filled with people. General Prim is in this hotel, is modestly refusing to be made dictator, and proposing that Spain shall have, as heretofore, a king. We shall see how long it will be before (like Caesar) he is overpersuaded, and reluctantly assumes power.

Topete (the admiral who, at Cadiz, brought over the fleet) is also in Madrid; and Serrano, the prince of the traitors, is president of the provisional government. The table d'hôte is crowded with men of the press, (letter-writers of all nations,) giving their several impressions of matters to the gullible "public," and interpreting events to suit the taste of their readers. We ask one of these (a witty Frenchman) if he writes for Le Monde. "Oui, Madame, pour tout le monde." Amongst the motley crowd, we distinguish the letter-writer of the London Times, and him of the New York Times, with whom we make acquaintance, and who having lived a long time in France, and being of Irish extraction, is very little of an American in appearance and manner.

Madrid is a modern city with fine buildings and shops, many handsome streets and squares, and a beautiful promenade, called the Prado, (meadow.) The principal of these squares is the "Puerta del Sol," upon which this hotel opens, and which is always thronged with people, and is all life and bustle. This being the head and front of the revolution, and General Prim being in the house, the doors are besieged by beggars and revolutionists. As we walk the streets, in many shop-windows are vulgar caricatures of the queen and the priests. This is adding insult to injury, and the very essence of meanness—to take away her throne, and then aim at her character as a woman. It is refreshing to find that the best people we see—the best born, the best bred, and the best educated—defend her from these aspersions, and are loyal to her, and to the throne.

We hear high mass in the church of the "Calatrava," (an ancient order of knighthood,) where are crowds of pious looking men. Certainly it will be difficult for the revolution to rob these people of their religion. For a time they may be intoxicated with the excitement of the change, but the reaction must come, when the sober second thought will bring them back to their true friends. {489} Now, the banishment of the Jesuits, the best and most learned teachers, the confiscation of church property, and the destruction of churches initiates the new order of things. Yesterday, an English gentleman (one of the noisiest supporters of the revolution) told us how the junta had given two places of great trust and importance into the hands of two of the lowest and most vulgar and ignorant of the bull fighters; and thus this class of people who have helped on the revolution must be rewarded. We hear, to-day, that General Prim has offered to promote, one grade, every officer of the army lately opposed to him. To their honor be it spoken, every one refused such promotion.

Translated From The French.

Sister Aloyse's Bequest.

How delightful it is to sit under the grand old trees of the courtyard on this charming mid-summer evening! The light breeze is redolent with the fragrance of the new-mown hay, and the leaves seem to quiver with joy in an atmosphere heavy with sunshine. The swallows pursue each other in play with short, wild cries, and in the foliage of the linden-tree that brown bird, the nightingale, tries her brilliant cadences, drowned at times by the shouts of the children at their sports answering her in the silences, whom without doubt they understood and admired. The children, happy as the birds, dance and whirl about, just like those motes one frequently sees rising up in a sunbeam. The nuns, sombre and silent figures, watch them, contemplating life in its flower and carelessness. This court-yard where the children play and the birds sing belonged formerly to a monastery of the order of St. Benoit; but now to a cloister built out of its ruins, where the virtues of ancient days flourish under the shelter of modern walls, which are hallowed by the memories of the past.

Some young girls, no less pleased with the gambols of the children, were walking in groups to and fro under the vaulted arches which encircled the court, talking and laughing merrily; but whenever they approached a nun reclining in an easy chair, by an involuntary impulse they lowered their voices. She was a poor invalid, who had been brought out to enjoy the sweet odors and the pleasant warmth of the evening. She appeared to be nearing the end of life, though still young. For the paleness of her cheeks, the emaciation of her body, and the transparent whiteness of her hands, all proclaimed the ravages of a long and incurable illness. There was no more sand in the hourglass, no more oil in the lamp, and her heart—like a timepiece about to stop—was slacking its pulsations. One could not help but see that Sister Aloyse retained a very powerful fascination in the beauty which her terrible illness had not been able to efface. Her dark blue eyes had not lost their almond-shape or sapphire hue. {490} Her figure was still elegant, seen under the loose robe which wrapped her like a winding-sheet; and her voice was as sweet and agreeable as in former days.

At first she felt a little better upon being brought into the garden; but she still suffered, and neither the pure air nor the mildness of the beautiful evening had revived her. She sat in silence, absorbed, perhaps, in those last thoughts, which she did not confide even to herself, and which, to one who is about departing, seem to give a glimpse of those unknown shores which are yet so near to her who waits them.

What is she thinking of? Of her past without remorse; of her future without terror? Does she regret anything which she has renounced for her God? Does one last thread hold captive this celestial bird? I cannot say. She appears sad; yet her companions, always so affectionately attentive, do not seem to be surprised. For Sister Aloyse had always been characterized, even in the more beautiful days of her youth, by a kind of melancholy. She resembled an angel of peace, but yet an angel who weeps.

One young girl, who was walking under the arches, regarded her with great interest; and finally, leaving the group by whom she was surrounded, approached the nun, dropped on her knees in the grass before her, and, looking in her face, said earnestly:

Sister Aloyse blushed slightly, just as porcelain is tinged with a faint rose-color when a flame is passed behind it, and answered in a voice sweet and low:

"Thank you, Camille, I am not well, and I shall never be any better till I come into the presence of our Lord. Look! does it not seem indeed as if the gates of heaven were opening yonder?"

She pointed to the west, then filled with the glory and splendor of purple and gold and flame colors.

"Oh! yes; provided the great God will receive us. And something warns me that I shall shortly go to him."

Both now became silent, Camille sadly regarding her companion. Educated in this convent, she had always been accustomed to see Sister Aloyse there, where she was much beloved. She would like to have given her some pleasure, but what could she give, or what could she say, to a person so detached from earthly things, and whose aspirations were fixed on joys eternal?

"Camille, you must come and see me some time before I go away from here. But now good-night, dear!"

Two nuns now came forward to help the sister into the house, while Camille, who had gathered some white roses, carried them to Aloyse, saying,

"They are from my own little garden, my sister; therefore take them, I pray you."

"Willingly," said Aloyse, "and I will offer them to the Holy Virgin. And, Camille, do not forget to remember me in your prayers tonight."

"Go, my child," said the old abbess to Camille, "go to the infirmary and see Sister Aloyse; she has something to say to you."

"She will go to her eternal home soon, but not to-day. Have no fear, child, but go and listen carefully to what she tells you."

Camille with agitated heart (for this poor heart is so quickly stirred at sixteen years!) ascended the staircase which led to the cells of the nuns. She passed through a long corridor out of which opened the little doors, all of which, instead of a number or design, bore some holy image or pious inscription. At the end of this corridor she found the infirmary, a large room, quiet and retired, whose windows opened upon the court and garden below. At this moment it was almost vacant; she found only one bed occupied, that of Sister Aloyse, who, as she had no fever, had been left by the infirmarian while she attended vespers in the chapel. Camille noiselessly approached the bed, the curtains of which were half drawn so that Aloyse could see out. She was sitting up supported by her pillows, and her hands were joined before her on the cross of her rosary. She smiled on the young girl, who timidly embraced her; and then Camille very earnestly asked her why she had sent for her to come to her bedside instead of any other of the girls, or her friends or companions; for she was afraid, as one naturally dreads what is unknown. The nun fixed upon her those searching eyes which seemed to look through and beyond anything present, and said with much sweetness,

"Sit down, Camille; I have something to say to you." She hesitated, but finally said, "You have never heard any one of your family speak of me?"

"Never," answered the child, somewhat surprised. "I have known something of your family—your father," she said with an effort. "But it was a long time ago, a very long time—before you were born. I was related to your grandmother, Madame Reville."

"Yes, it hangs in the red drawing-room, does it not?" asked Sister Aloyse with a sad smile. "Ah! well. Madame Reville received me into her family as a lady's companion—a reader—for I was poor, and needed some home. Your father did not live at home with his mother, but he came there very frequently."

"He wished to marry me; Madame Reville was opposed to it; he insisted. I saw he would disobey his mother; I was afraid for him; I was afraid for myself. So I prayed to the good God. He did not reject my afflicted and desolate heart, but he—the Divine Consoler—called me into this home, and placed this holy veil as a barrier between the world and myself. Here I found peace, purchased sometimes with bitter suffering, but real; for it filled the depths of my heart; it was the price of my sacrifice. And I was able to see, in the clear light which streamed from the cross, how all joy is deceitful, and all pleasure empty and false. After two years had passed, I came to consecrate myself with irrevocable vows to God's service, when the friends who now and then came to see me, and public report, which in our day finds its way even into the cloister, told me of the only thing which had still power to afflict me. For, Camille, your father—but what can I say to you who bear his name! M. Reville, angry at my departure, and grieving for the loss of the poor creature that I am, sought forgetfulness in dissipation. Undoubtedly, he forgot me—I trust and hope he did—but he also forgot his God! {492} Your father is not a Christian; nay, he is an enemy to Christianity! Ah! since the day when I first knew that our prayers did not meet in the pathway to heaven, how have I wept, how have I prayed, how have I done penance! Alas! my tears, my blood, my vigils, my sufferings—all have not prevailed, and I am pierced to the depths of my heart with the terrible reflection."

She was unable to continue; her voice died upon her lips, while tears, clear and burning, rolled down her cheeks. Camille, kneeling by her bedside, wept too; for she began to see what this self-denying heart had suffered.

"My child," finally said the sister after a long silence, "I shall soon die, and there will then be no one to pray for him, since your mother, who ought especially so to do, is dead. You love your father, don't you?"

"Well, then, promise me that you will unceasingly pray for his conversion—that you will offer for him your every action and your every pain; promise me that there shall always be a suppliant voice to take the place of poor Aloyse's, which will soon be hushed in death—to cry 'mercy!' Think of what it is to have a soul and an eternity, and that soul your father's!"

She had seized the hands of the child in both her own, and fixed upon her a look in which the last forces of her life were concentrated. "Promise!" said she. Camille thought a moment—her young face wore a grave and stern expression. Finally, raising one arm toward the crucifix, she said in a distinct voice: "I solemnly promise you, my sister, I will continue what you have commenced. I will pray, I will labor all my life for his conversion." A ray of heavenly light illumined Sister Aloyse's countenance, and she sank back upon her pillows, murmuring, "I can die now."

Two days later she passed away, with a peace and serenity worthy of the blamelessness of her whole life, though in breathing her last she cried, "Have mercy!"

Many years have passed away. The grass grows thick and green upon the bed of clay where sleeps Aloyse. Camille, grown into a fine young woman, keeps house for her father. She has travelled with him, she has seen the world, its balls and its routs, but she has never forgotten the promise made to Sister Aloyse. This promise has banished the strength of her limbs and of her youth. She has become serious all at once. She has given to her life but one aim, and that sublime and difficult, and from that moment when the struggle which had animated the life of Aloyse passed into her own all her actions, all her thoughts, had been devoted to the redemption of one soul. At first overflowing with the thoughtless and enthusiastic zeal of youth, she would talk to him of that religion whose arguments her heart found so natural, and which seemed to her so irresistible. Her father would laugh at her, and she would cry; she would persist, however, until he became so angry that she was frightened. Finally she decided to be more quiet in the future, and to leave to God the conduct of her cause. But with what vigils, with what prayers, what sighs, what agony of heart, and with what fervent desire did she ask God for that precious soul! And what vows did she make to the Blessed Mother! What flowers she offered upon her altar! {493} What prayers, in which she thanked God for the kindness that had given mortals this all-powerful Mediatrix! Her father's guardian angel, what careful conversation did she hold with him! How she labored and prayed for that of which he never thought!

As years pass, Camille's piety becomes more rigid; self-denial joins itself to acts of earnest charity, in their turn supplemented by generous alms!

One would naturally ask why Camille, rich and young, charming and admired, should rise so early in the morning, should spend so many hours upon her knees in church? Why she went with the Sisters of Charity to visit the sick, why her attire was so plain and simple, why her room was so little ornamented, why she labored without any relaxation, and finally, why with so interesting an appearance and conversation she preferred so severe a life? No one upon earth could answer these questions except the guardian angel who writes down these noble acts to the account of their forgetful subject, her unrepentant father.

But she accomplished nothing, although the rigors were not for herself, though she maintained, for her father, this piety united with a tenderness which only made her more sweet and affectionate. His hard heart did not open to the rays of divine grace, nor to the timid smiles of his child. The taste for amusement, born of a desire for forgetfulness, had chased from his heart, at the same time with a pure love, the belief in holy things. The heavenly flame had been quickly extinguished beneath the ashes of pleasure; and, like many other children of his age, he had neglected to believe through fear of being compelled to be good. Bad society and bad literature had completed the work of headlong dissipation; and neither marriage nor paternity had reclaimed him. His birth, fortune, and indisputable talents raised him to public offices. And, to be consistent with his principles, and congenial to his friends, he had to be inimical to all religion. The seminaries; the Brothers of the Christian Doctrine; the Sisters, hospitallers or teachers; the free establishments; the Carmelites, who ask nothing of a person; the Clarisses, who ask only a piece of bread; the Little Sisters of the Poor, who gathered food for their old men; the foreign missions; the sermons in Lent in the parish; the general indulgences granted by the pope; the cardinals in the senate; and the Capuchins who went barefooted—were all equally the objects of his strong aversion. He read continually the Journal des Débats, the Revue des Deux Mondes, and the liberal journal of his department—of that department in which he played a prominent part. Shall we say, in excuse for him, that his impiety had never been tried by adversity; and that he had found the world so delightful that he had wished to live for ever in it? In youth he had lived in the midst of noisy pleasures. In more advanced life he lived for comfort, for his house—cool in summer, warm in winter, splendid at all times—for his grand dinners, his good wine, his fine horses and elegant equipages. He enjoyed exquisitely those excellent things which the public generally esteem, but in which divine grace does not much appear. The memories of youth he did not often recall. He now scarcely recollected the name of that poor cousin whom he had once loved so passionately, but who had never forgotten him, who, even in the arms of death, had displayed an angelic love. One day Camille spoke of Sister Aloyse, and added,

"Yes, yes—a romantic affair! She threw herself into a convent; she became weary even there!"

He took several turns through the room with a preoccupied air, and finally stopping before the great picture of his mother—a withered and haughty figure—he said,

"My mother did not love this poor Aloyse much! Poor girl! What a charming voice she had! A voice which ought to astonish the convent when she chants the Miserere! She will sing no more; she has a pain in her chest. Zounds! The discipline of the convent! What a pity for this pretty Aloyse to be buried alive! On the stage she would equal Malibran!"

And this was all! The remembrance of Aloyse was only that of a young girl who could sing charmingly, and who, perhaps, might have commanded a situation in a theatre!

He loved his daughter; but, for all that, she troubled him, and he was anxious that she should marry, so that he might be relieved from the care and responsibility. She did not oppose his wishes, for she did not feel that God appointed her to lead the life of a nun; but she wished her husband to be a Christian, and said so to her father. He only shrugged his shoulders and cried,

The Christian, however, presented himself, and at twenty-two Camille Reville became Madame de Laval.

Camille is now no longer twenty. Her youth has passed on swift wings, and white is beginning to streak her dark hair; but her pleasant face preserves the repose of former days. She has been blessed with mixed and imperfect happiness, such as every one tastes in this world. For in this life the black squares are never far distant from the white ones; and in its tangled skein the dark threads are woven in by the side of brighter colors. She had lived most happily with her husband. Together they had laughed over their little children's gambols, and together wept over them in sickness. They had brought them up with the labor and care which, in our day especially, accompanies all true Christian education. Their eldest daughter, Amelia, had been married about a year; and they were now very happy in expectation of her approaching maternity. The second daughter was finishing her education in the same convent of Benedictines where her mother had been in her youthful days. Their son André was in a polytechnic school, and their youngest, Maurice, was pursuing his Latin studies in his native village.

Through the disappointments and joy of her life, through days of rain and days of sunshine, Camille had pursued one thought faithfully—the grand aim which she had proposed to herself in early life, her father's conversion. As a young wife she had prayed with her husband, for his heart beat in unison with hers. As a young mother, she had taught her children to pray with her. And now, having reached the autumn of life, she still prayed—prayed constantly; but as yet her prayers had received no answer.

The old man lived with her; and every moment she surrounded him with care and tenderness. She watched him and brooded over him more like a mother than like a daughter. And it was hard indeed for her, that this old man of sixty-six years would not listen to any serious conversation, would only rail at holy things, and would learn no lesson from either life or death. And she was ever obliged to turn his words from their real meaning, and interpret his jeers and sarcasms so that they would not shock her innocent little children. {495} At this moment we find Camille in the drawing-room with her father, who is half asleep before a great fire, with the Débats at his feet. She is sewing on some linen for the coming baby; but twice stops to read two short letters received that morning from two of her absent children. After a thousand details about boarding, upon the compositions in history, upon the new piece of tapestry which Clotilde had just begun, upon the sermons delivered by a new father whose name she did not know, she went on to say: "I never forget, dear mother, to pray with you—you know why! It seems to me that the moment is approaching when the gentle God will answer us—as if grandpapa was going to be astonished that he had been able to live so long without thinking of God!"

The second letter was from André, and would have been unintelligible to any one who did not possess the key to a school-boy's language. But at the end there was a passage which Camille kissed again and again: "Dear mamma, I love you, and I always pray with you, just like you." A stick of wood which just now rolled down with a great noise awoke M. Reville, who, after rubbing his eyes, asked his daughter, "Where is Maurice?"

"He is skating. Do you wish me to take his place, and do anything to amuse you?"

"No, thank you. But stop, you may read instead; read this discussion in the Chambers upon the military law."

Camille took the paper and read slowly; and the old man's eyes were still closed when the violent ringing of the door-bell woke him up completely, and made Madame de Laval start.

She jumped up and ran into the hall, and at the same instant her husband entered from the street. She moved toward him, but suddenly stopped, frozen with an inexplicable horror. M. de Laval's face was of an ashy paleness; he tried to speak, he stammered—the words died upon his lips, and his wife, in one of those quick transitions which thought makes, believed he was going to fall dead at her feet.

"What ails you?" she cried, reaching out her arms toward him. "Do not be frightened, Camille," said he; "but Maurice—"

"Maurice!" she echoed. "Where is he? Why does he not come home? O great God! he is dead. He is drowned!"

M. de Laval had now somewhat recovered himself, and he explained: "He rescued a child who was drowning, and was wounded in the head. They are bringing him home. My dear Camille, keep up heart! He lives! God will restore him to us!"

The servants, already called together by the sad news, had opened the gates to the relatives and the friends who were coming in every direction, and also to those who were bringing Maurice. They bore him on a litter, covered with a mattress, and his head, all bloody, with eyes wide open, rested upon a pillow made of the coats of the brave men; while behind the litter walked a man all covered with blood. He was the father of the child whom Maurice had saved at the price of his own life.

The boy was quickly placed upon the bed, and the physicians were soon by his side, followed by the parish priest. Camille, kneeling beside him, saw, as in an evil dream, the surgeon dress the wound which Maurice had in the temple, and afterward talk in a serious manner to the other physicians behind the curtain. She saw the priest go up to Maurice, and, after talking to him in a low voice, bend over him and raise his hands in the benediction of the dying, and immediately after give him the holy oils. As in a dream she heard her husband's voice saying, "Dear wife, the good God wants him! Look at our Maurice."

She then looked at him. Maurice, aroused by the words of the priest, had regained complete consciousness, and knew that he was dying. He seemed more than tranquil—happy; and, looking around on all present, said,

He then discovered the father of the rescued child, who had concealed himself behind M. de Laval. "Give my love to your little boy," said he.

His eyes then sought for his mother. She got up, and, bending over him, took him in her arms. "Dear mamma, make me an offering for dear grandpapa's conversion. Say to him—" He stopped. His mother saw the light fade from his eyes, and knew that his breath was hushed in death. For a long time she remained holding him in her arms, like that more desolate of mothers, bathing him with her tears, and unable to listen to the comforting words of either husband or father, both of whom were overwhelmed with grief. At last, her piety, those religious sentiments which had always animated her life, prevailed, and she said aloud,

"Yes, my God! I accept the sacrifice, and I sacrifice him for my father. Save him, Lord, save him!"

Two days later they buried poor Maurice, the whole village attending his funeral.

The same evening the priest, who had been with him in his last moments, presented himself to Madame de Laval, and said:

"You are afflicted, but your prayers are heard. Divine grace has pursued your father, and this very morning, when the body of your child was yet in the house, he called me to him and made his confession. He could hold out no longer, he said to me. Rejoice then, madam, in the midst of your grief."

"O Aloyse," said she, "and my dear Maurice! They are then taken away, but at what a price!" "Thank God!" cried the priest. "He separates a family here only to reunite them in eternity!"

From Les Etudes Religieuses

The Second Plenary Council Of Baltimore, And Ecclesiastical Discipline In The United States.

[Footnote 129: Concilii Plenarii Baltimorensis II. Acta et Decreta. Baltimorae, 1868.]

[Introductory Note—The periodical from which the following article has been translated is one of the highest character, published at Paris under the editorial supervision of the Jesuit fathers. The account which it renders of the late Council of Baltimore is made doubly valuable from the fact that it is the work of a foreign, and therefore an impartial, judge. We have been obliged to make a few corrections in the article. Several of these were suggested by the Most Rev. President of the Council, and the rest were required by obvious and quite natural inaccuracies of a writer living in a foreign country.]

The superior of the Grand Seminary of Baltimore has recently done us the honor of transmitting, in the name of his archbishop, [Footnote 130] a copy of the Acts of the Council held in that city in 1866. He asks us to make known the contents to the readers of the Etudes. It gives us pleasure to accede to this request.

[Footnote 130: Mgr. Spalding, Archbishop of Baltimore, is the author of several interesting publications on the religious history of the United States. He has published two essays concerning the legislation of the early Protestant colonies respecting divine worship. In their legislation is to be found intolerance running to the most cruel extremes, and this almost until the Revolution of 1776. Besides these, he is the author of Evidences of Catholicity, Sketches of Early Catholic Missions in Kentucky, and Spalding's Miscellanea.]

On the eve of the great event which the Catholic world expects at the close of this year, it seems to us that there are few subjects more interesting, or more worthy to be treated of, than the present. The very organization of the present council, at which forty-six bishops were present, will give us a fair idea of what is to be done when all the prelates of all countries and churches are convened. Moreover, the decisions made in such an imposing assembly will not fail to clear for us some obscure points. But, better than all, the collection of decrees will make us comprehend the situation of Catholicity in the immense territories of the new world, where it is called to such a lofty destiny.

On the 19th of March, 1866, the Feast of St. Joseph, Mgr. Spalding, using the powers received for this purpose from the sovereign pontiff, convoked at Baltimore a Plenary Council, [Footnote 131] to be opened on the second Sunday of October, in the same year.

[Footnote 131: A council is called plenary at which the bishops of several provinces are assembled. After a general or oecumenical council there is nothing more solemn. The present is the second of this character which has been held at Baltimore. The first took place in 1852.]

If any bishops were prevented from appearing personally, they were to be represented by proxies furnished with authentic powers. The day having come, after a preliminary congregation, held the evening before to clear up certain details, the council opened with a grand, solemn, and public procession; in which figured forty-four archbishops and bishops, one administrator apostolic, two mitred abbots, together with the most distinguished of the American clergy. It was a spectacle alike new and imposing for that great city. More than forty thousand people met to witness it. {498} In the streets through which the procession passed, there was scarcely a house which was not decorated. This was undoubtedly one of the grandest and most beautiful Catholic demonstrations which has yet been seen in that land of liberty, where all sects and communions find a rendezvous. The council furnished one of those striking lessons which the good sense of Americans does not forget, and which by little and little will lead them to understand that where there is unity there is also life.

Every deliberative assembly has need of order; the fathers began by tracing a plan for themselves; these are its principal dispositions.

Every day the particular congregations of theologians were to meet together. These were to discuss among themselves and judge, in a preliminary manner, the measures proposed. The result of their deliberations, gathered by a notary, with the votes and motives alleged for or against, in case of a disagreement, was then to be transmitted to the bishops. These, again, held private congregations where they occupied themselves solely with questions already debated by the theologians. A procès verbal was made, by the secretaries, of what passed in these meetings. A new examination and judgment was made in this second instance; yet these preliminary discussions decided nothing; all was to be referred to the general congregations, and, finally, to the sessions of the council, where the decrees received their last form, and the sanction which makes them obligatory.

As to the order which was to reign in their deliberations, the bishops found nothing better fitted to their purpose than a small portion, clearly stated, and well defined, of the rules called parliamentary, and consecrated under that name in the public assemblies of their land. Each had the right of proposing whatever he would, provided he did so by writing and in the Latin tongue; but a motion made by a member could not become a matter of deliberation, unless another prelate joined the first in making the demand. None was at liberty to depart from the prearranged schedule, nor from the title which formed the object of present discussion. As to the rest, the greatest liberty of opinion was not only accorded, but counselled, as long as the orators confined themselves to the limits of propriety. If any one transgressed these, or prolonged his discourse uselessly, any member could demand a call to order; the promotor was charged with executing the laws of order, but, in cases of doubt, final decision belonged to the president.

Before publication in the sessions, the decrees were submitted to general congregations; when not only the bishops but also the theologians might set forth their opinions, with only this provision, namely, that those should be first heard who formed the commission on which had previously devolved the consideration of the subject then under discussion. Such are the simple and precise dispositions which served to maintain order in so great an assembly.

The apostolic delegate had by right four theologians; the archbishops, three; the bishops, two; some, however, contented themselves with only one. They were divided into seven congregations or bureaux, among which was divided the matter which was to occupy the attention of the council. [Footnote 132]

[Footnote 132: This matter comprised the following subjects.
1. De Fide Orthodoxa, deque erroribus serpentibus;
2. De Hierarchia et regimine Ecclesiae;
3. De Personis Ecclesiasticis;
4. De Ecclesiis bonisque ecclesiasticis tenendis tutandisque;
5. De Sacranentis;
6. De Cultu Divino;
7. De Disciplinae uniformitate promovenda;
8. De Regularibus et monialibus;
9. De Juventute instituenda pieque erudienda;
10. De Salute animarum efficacitis promovenda;
11. De Libris et ephemeribus;
12. De Societatibus Secretis.

Several congregations occupied themselves with two of these subjects at once because of their connection. In the council were added a thirteenth congregation, on the creation of new bishoprics, and a fourteenth, on the execution of the decrees.]

Each congregation was presided over by a bishop; it had, besides, a vice-president and an ecclesiastical notary, charged, as we have seen, with the care of transmitting to the prelates the result of these deliberations. For the council itself were chosen a chancellor archdeacon, a secretary with assistants, a notary, who was to assist those who discharged the same function in the particular congregations; two promotors, one a bishop, the other a priest, charged with maintaining order and observance of rule in the sessions and public meetings; finally, judges, who were to pronounce on motions of absence, or on differences which might arise. Severe penalties were laid on all who should leave before the work of the council should be finished.

This rapid glance at the organization of this assembly and at its plan of operations seems to us necessary, in order to understand the labor accomplished by it.

The chief task of the council was to fix, I had almost said to create, [Footnote 133] ecclesiastical discipline throughout the entire extent of the United States.

[Footnote 133: If the writer had said this, he would have made a great mistake. While the United States formed one province, many provincial councils were held at Baltimore; and since the creation of the other provinces they have been regularly held in each one, and the principal points of discipline have thus been long since effectually settled.—ED. C.W.]

Amid a population so diverse in origin, manners, character; amid the manifold influences produced by the heterogeneous mixture of conflicting sects in which each Catholic congregation is obliged to live, it would seem difficult to establish uniformity. Moreover, the spirit of modern times is in every respect so different from that of bygone ages, private and public institutions have undergone such modifications, that the application of the canon law meets on all sides obstacles apparently insurmountable. The prelates of North America have legislated with such prudence, with such a perfect union of ideas and sentiments, that their churches will hereafter possess in the collection of their decrees a complete code of laws. [Footnote 134] These "acts," printed in a convenient form, are to be used as a text-book in all the seminaries, and this text, with the comments of the professor will, we are assured, suffice for the entire course of canon law. Apart from some inconsiderable differences regarding days of fasting and feasts of obligation, [Footnote 135] all the churches will hereafter have a common law and the same customs. Assuredly, one can scarcely comprehend the vastness of this result, and we are undoubtedly convinced that the Second Plenary Council of Baltimore is destined to a memorable place in the history of Catholicity in the United States.

[Footnote 134: The present council had at heart to re-collect in its acts the legislation fixed by preceding councils. The decrees taken from these are recognized by a different style of print. An appendix gives in extenso all the important portions, above all, those which have come from Rome. Thus all the ecclesiastical legislation of the United States is to be found in a single volume.]

[Footnote 135: The prelates had addressed a petition to Rome that uniformity on this point might be established. The answer which had been returned was, that it was better to respect the existing customs of each diocese, and that, if modifications were to be made therein, each bishop might have separate recourse to the holy see. But the feast of the Immaculate Conception was declared a feast of patronage and obligation throughout the whole of the United States.]

The dogmatic part of the acts has not and could not have the same importance, since a national council, however numerous, generally does naught but state the faith already defined; nevertheless, on this very ground, we find declarations very interesting, and which deserve to command the attention of the Christians of Europe.

It is to the united fathers, and, after them, to the assisting theologians, that the merit of this great work is due. {500} Still, we cannot refrain from noticing Mgr. Spalding, Archbishop of Baltimore and apostolic delegate. Called to the presidency of the council by a special brief of the pope, dated February 16th, 1866, instructed, moreover, by the Propaganda, which recommended to his zeal several important points, he it is who has prepared the matter of the decrees, and has brought together in advance all the elements which have entered into this vast construction. Under his wise and prudent direction, his brethren in the episcopate have made their choice. With the assistance of the secretaries and other officers of the council the edifice rises, to which Rome gives the finishing touch, changing a small number of the materials, and consecrating it with her supreme authority.

Into this sanctuary, built with so much care, I invite the readers of the Etudes to enter, persuaded that we shall find therein much to admire and at the same time much to learn.

The first chapter is consecrated to dogma. It treats of the faith and of the errors which are contemporaneously opposed to it. The prelates here recall the precept, imposed on all, of embracing the truth, and entering the haven of the true church. No safety is to be hoped for outside of this ark which God guards and conducts. However, they add, as to those who are plunged invincibly in error, and who have not been able to see the light, that the Supreme Judge, who condemns no man, save for his own faults, will assuredly use mercy toward them, if, although strangers to the body of the church, they have, nevertheless, with the assistance of grace, fulfilled the divine commandments, and professed those Christian truths which they were able to know. [Footnote 136]

Such is the Catholic doctrine and the just principle to which all our pretended intolerance is reduced. The council recognizes the rights of reason as well as those of sound faith. It inserts at length in its decrees the four propositions formulated in 1855 by the Congregation of the Index, against traditionalism. At the same time it restates the condemnation pronounced by Gregory IX. against the system of Raymond Lulle, which expresses a thought too common in our day, namely, that faith is necessary to the masses, to vulgar and unlettered people, but that reason suffices for the intelligent man of study, and constitutes true Christianity.

We notice in this chapter the solicitude of the bishops to place in the hands of the faithful a version of the Bible in the vulgar tongue. To this end they recommend the Douay translation, already approved and circulated by their predecessors. Far from opposing these efforts, the Congregation of the Propaganda, in the response addressed to the Archbishop of Baltimore with the revision of the acts of the council, lays great stress on the necessity of doing this. The congregation directs the prelate to compare anew the different English editions, to avail himself of other Catholic translations, if there be any, in order that we may have in English a faithful and irreproachable text of all our sacred books, and that this version may be spread throughout all the dioceses of America. Here we have a peremptory answer to those Protestants who, at this late hour, reproach Catholics with interdicting the reading of the Holy Scriptures.

On the question of future life, the fathers declared against those who deny the eternal duration of punishment, or so mitigate its severity that there remains no longer any proportion between the chastisement and the gravity of the offence. Then they rapidly review that multitude of religious sects and errors, which are nowhere so numerous or so different as in that classic land of free thought. Indifferentism, which considers all religions as equal; Unitarianism, which rejects the divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ; Universalism, which denies the eternity of punishment after death; finally, pantheism and transcendentalism, which destroy the personality of God, such are the latest forms and last consequences of free inquiry. What a contrast to these is the spectacle which Catholic truth affords; that full, complete, and unchanging Christianity, affirming itself, with full consciousness of its truth, in the face of a thousand systems which cannot withstand it and a thousand communions that fail to comprehend what it really is! All serious hearts in America must be stuck by such a difference. The Council of Baltimore has again made manifest where lies the strength that will triumph over all, and what is to be the "church of the future." The excesses of "Magnetism" and "Spiritism" have been carried beyond what the fathers consider the limits of morality. With regard to the first, they undertake to promulgate the well-known decisions of the sacred congregation of the council. [Footnote 137]

[Footnote 137: Encycl ad omnes episcopos contra magnetismi abusus. August 4th, 1856. Decisions of July 28th, 1847.]

As to the second, not finding any explicit precedent in acts emanating from Rome, they express their own thought and doctrine thus: "It seems certain," they say, "that many of the astonishing phenomena which are said to be produced in the spiritual meetings are inventions; that others are the result of fraud, or are to be attributed to the imagination of the mediums and their assistants, or, possibly, to slight of hand. Nevertheless," they add, "it can scarcely be doubted that some of these facts imply a satanic interference; since it is almost impossible to explain them in any other way." Then, after a magnificent exposition of the action of good and bad angels, the prelates remark that, in a society of which so large a portion remains unbaptized, it is not surprising if the demon regains in part his ancient empire. They severely censure those Catholics who take part even indirectly in the spiritual "circles." Such is the decision of the council; and, for our part, we are happy to see what we have written on this subject [Footnote 138] fully confirmed by so imposing an authority.

[Footnote 138: Les Morts el les Vivants. Paris, Le Clere. Etudes 1862, p. 41.]

The second chapter treats of the hierarchy and government of the church. The fathers begin with a profession of filial loyalty to the holy see, whose privileges they recognize and enumerate with St. Irenaeus, St. Jerome, and St. Leo the Great. They protest with what respect and love they receive all the apostolical constitutions, likewise the instructions and decisions of the Roman congregations, given for the universal church or for their own special provinces. After Pius IX. they rebuke the manner of thought and action of those who count for nothing all that has not been expressly defined as of Catholic faith, and who, embracing opinions contrary to the common sentiment of Christians, fear not to shock their ears with scandalous propositions. The temporal power of the pope, its necessity under the present circumstances, in order to assure the independence of the head of the church, is also the subject of a solemn declaration.

Passing then to the bishops, the council affirms their double right of teaching and governing Christendom in union with the Roman pontiff, the successor of St. Peter and the vicar of Jesus Christ. According to the advice of the fathers of Trent, provincial councils are to be held every three years throughout the whole extent of the United States; for the bishops are persuaded that in these reunions are to be found the most efficacious remedies for the evils which afflict all parts of the church, when the pastors of dioceses, after having invoked the Holy Spirit, unite their wisdom to take measures most fitting to procure the salvation of souls. Accidental forms are ever changing. Formerly, the "synodal witnesses" [Footnote 139] were everywhere in use.

[Footnote 139: Ecclesiastics chosen in the provincial councils to observe the state of persons and things in their dioceses, and to make a report to the metropolitan.]

After the time of Benedict XIV. this function fell into disuse and was supplied by something else. The grave and learned pontiff makes use of these remarkable words, which the council has thought proper to reproduce:

"The customs of men are modified and circumstances are continually changing; that which is useful at one period may cease so to be, and may become even pernicious in another age. The duty of a prudent pastor, unless otherwise obliged by a higher law, is to accommodate himself to times and places, to lay aside many ancient usages, when by his judgment and the light of God he deems this to be for the greater good of the diocese with which he is entrusted." [Footnote 140]

As a natural corollary to provincial councils, the prelates recommend frequent holding of diocesan synods. If the extent of the diocese will not permit the priests who obey the same bishop to unite yearly, the bishop should at least convoke a synod after each provincial or plenary council, to promulgate the decrees and provide for their observance. In the meantime, ecclesiastical conferences, organized in districts, can supply, at least partly, the place of the synod. The fathers express a wish that such conferences should meet quarterly in cities, and at least yearly in rural districts, where pastors cannot easily assemble.

I pass hastily over some details to arrive immediately at a matter at once very delicate and important, that of ecclesiastical judgments. It is well known that the form required by canon law has become very difficult of application throughout the greater part of Christendom. The Council of Baltimore does not innovate. After an experience of ten years it feels bound to renew a decree made in the Council of St. Louis in 1855. [Footnote 141]

[Footnote 141: That is to say, the Plenary Council, by its enactment, extended this decree of the Provincial Council of St. Louis to the other provinces.—ED. C. W.]

"Priests suspended by sentence of the ordinary have no right to demand sustenance from him, since by their own fault they have been rendered incapable of exercising their ministry. But, in order to cut short all complaints, the fathers are of the opinion that it is more expedient, in the cases of priests and clerics, to adopt a form of trial approaching as nearly as possible the requirements of the Council of Trent. The bishop—or his vicar-general, by his order—shall choose in the episcopal council two members—not always the same—who shall serve him as counsellors, when the accused shall be called to answer before him and his secretary.

"Together, these assistants shall have but one voice, but either can range himself on the side of the prelate against his colleague. If, however, both are of a different mind from that of the bishop or his vicar, the latter may take into his counsel a third, and that judgment shall be rendered to which he shall incline. If it happen that all the consultors named by the ordinary hold an opinion contrary to his, the case is to be transferred to the tribunal of the metropolitan, who shall weigh the motives for and against, and himself deliver sentence. And if the process refers to a subject of the metropolitan, and all his assistants are opposed to him, the cause shall be evoked before the oldest bishop of the province, and he shall have the right to decide, saving always the privileges and authority of the Holy See."

Here we see reappearing the jurisdiction of metropolitans, which in many other churches is little exercised at the present day. On the question of their authority the council furnishes another subject worthy of remark.

In enumerating the rights of archbishops in reference to their ecclesiastical provinces, the fathers have designated but three:

1. To make known to the holy see such of their suffragans as do not observe the laws of residence.

2. To call the said suffragans to a provincial council, at least every three years.

3. To have their cross borne before them in their province, and to wear the pallium therein on the days when they can wear it in their metropolitan church.

The letter written from Rome for the correction of the acts orders two other privileges of metropolitans to be re-established:

1. To supply what is negligently omitted by their suffragans in the cases determined by law; and

2. to receive appeals from the sentence of their suffragans according to the canonical rules.

If we do not deceive ourselves, there is in this correction a significant tendency.

The manner of the election of bishops had already been determined by an instruction emanating from the Propaganda, dated March 18th, 1834. Since that time, at the desire of councils, several changes and modifications had been made. This is the practice consecrated and universally established since 1861: Every three years, each bishop sends to his metropolitan and the congregation of the Propaganda the list of subjects whom he judges worthy of the episcopate, with detailed information of the qualities which distinguish them.

A see becomes vacant, the bishops of the province meet in synod, or any other way, and discuss the aptitude of the candidates presented by each of them. After a secret examination, three names are sent to Rome with the procès verbal of this election. On the representation thus made, the sovereign pontiff designates the one to be promoted to the episcopal dignity.

This portion of Christendom, still so new, has not yet had time to settle itself into regularly divided parishes. If our memory is faithful, we think there is no such thing as a parish, properly so called, in the whole United States. The prelates of the council express a desire to establish some, especially in the great cities; but they add that, in conferring them on the priests who administer them, they would not exempt the latter from removal; this never having, been the custom in America.

Many of the dioceses have no seminaries. The fathers wish that, if they cannot be everywhere established, each province, at least, should have its own, for the formation of which the bishops will unite their resources. Following the custom adopted in France, they separate the Little Seminary, where boys who present the conditions required by the Council of Trent are received, from the Grand Seminary, where clerics study dogmatic and moral theology, canon law, hermeneutics, and sacred eloquence. {504} The council orders the greatest efforts to be made in order to secure eminent professors. If there is an establishment common to an entire province, it should not be confined to teaching the mere elementary ecclesiastical studies, but a thorough course of exegesis and oriental languages should be commenced; and the modern systems of philosophy should be explained in such a manner that graduates should be able to resolve all the difficulties and objections of the day.

"We have now to contend," say the fathers, "no longer with the often refuted heresies and errors of a bygone age, but with new adversaries, unbelievers of a pagan rather than a Christian character, with men who count as naught God and his divine promises—and yet are not thereby prevented from having cultivated minds. According to them, the things of heaven and earth have no other meaning or value than that which reason alone assigns them. Thus, they flatter pride, so deeply rooted in our nature, and seduce those who are not on their guard. If truth cannot persuade them, since they do not care to hear, it must, at least, close their mouths, lest their vain discourse and sounding words delude the simple." [Footnote 142]

Do not these sage reflections disclose the true plan for renewing ecclesiastical studies?

We will not enter on the details of the rules established for the general life and manners of the clergy, according to their different functions. We confine ourselves to remarking that the chapter on preaching alone contains a complete little treatise on the proper manner of announcing the word of God in our times.

Questions relating to church property attract the attention of the council. In order to comprehend the arrangements determined on in regard to this matter, we must form a correct idea of the situation in which the different Christian communions stand before the American civil law.

It is well known that the legislation of most of the States is willing to accord legal personality to associations, commercial or religious. A religious society represented by trustees easily obtains incorporation; that is to say, is recognized as a person having the right to own property, to receive gifts and legacies, to a certain amount, generally far superior to what is necessary. If this sum is ever exceeded, it is easy to fulfil the requirements of the law by creating a new centre, building a new church.

Nothing then would seem more favorable than these arrangements of American law. But, as they were conceived from a Protestant point of view, they recognize the parish only, and not the diocese, which is, nevertheless, the Catholic unit. Moreover, the trustees, invested with church property, have on several occasions made outrageous and extravagant pretensions. More than once, they have believed that they possessed the right of choosing their pastors, and dismissing them, if they did not suit; they have held that they at least have the right of presenting to the bishop a priest of their own choice, and thus forcing his consent. Hence, the frequent conflicts between the parochial element and the episcopal administration. The first Council of Baltimore formerly protested against this lay interference, which it declared contrary to the teaching of the church and the discipline of every age; it decided that the compensation assigned to members of the clergy, to be provided from the funds of the parish, or by the alms of the faithful, conferred on none the right of patronage. {505} Subsequent councils return incessantly to the same question; and it has even appeared before the civil tribunals. In the diocese of New York, particularly, the disputes between the Catholic trustees and the bishop were prolonged with various results, but without interruption, from 1840 to 1863. Finally, an arrangement was concluded, and on this model the prelates wish to organize all ecclesiastical property.

"Since, in the United States, it is permitted to every citizen and foreigner to live freely and without molestation, according to the precepts of the religion which he professes—for the laws recognize and proclaim this right—nothing seems to hinder us from observing, in all their rigor, the rules established by councils and the sovereign pontiffs for the acquisition and preservation of church property. The fathers, therefore, desire to expose and set clearly before the eyes of the state the true rights of the church with regard to accepting, possessing, and defending sacred property, as, for example the land on which a church is built, or presbyteries, schools, cemeteries, and other establishments, in order that it may be legally permitted to Catholic citizens to follow exactly the laws and requirements of their church." [Footnote 143]

Hence, one of the principal dispositions of this legislation is, that the administrators of ecclesiastical property in parishes shall do nothing without the consent of the bishop. In order that this law may be observed, and that nothing more may be feared from the intervention of the secular tribunals, there is no other plan than for the bishop to place himself before the civil power, as having the right to the full administration of all property belonging to his church as a corporation sole. Some of the states have recognized this right for the future. In others it is not yet recognized. Hence they provide the best means for avoiding, or, at least, diminishing the inconvenience resulting from this state of things.

This requires that mutual securities be taken on the part of the bishop and the trustees. As soon as appointed, the prelate will make a will, and place a duplicate in the hands of his metropolitan. Besides the property of which he is sole proprietor, he will be ex-officio president of all boards of trustees, who possess, in the eyes of the law, the parochial properties. Rules are established for the purpose of ensuring a conscientious choice of these, in order that they may not infringe on the rights of the parish priest, nor take any profit from the revenues of the church. Such are the principal measures relative to this important matter.

In the chapter entitled De Sacramentis we notice the prudence which the council wishes to be used in administering baptism to Protestants returning to the Catholic Church. Although the greater portion of the sects regard what transpires at the baptismal font as a mere ceremony, and frequently, through carelessness, baptize invalidly, nevertheless the priest must not proceed hap-hazard, nor decide on general principles, but must in each case examine carefully into particulars. Only when certain of the nullity or probable invalidity of the baptism, can he confer the sacrament, either absolutely or conditionally.

In France, discussions have lately arisen as to the proper age for administering the holy communion. Although the American child is much earlier developed than the European, the fathers of Baltimore establish as a rule that he shall not be urged at too early an age to present himself at the holy table. {506} Ten and fourteen years are the two extreme limits to which one must ordinarily be confined. Nevertheless, this rule leaves room for all legitimate exceptions, and particularly, in case of danger of death, it would be a grave fault in the pastor who would not administer the eucharist to a child capable of discerning the grace which it contains.

As their country is not a vine-growing land, and one can nowhere be fully certain of the purity of wines imported from Europe, the fathers express a desire to establish in Florida a community which shall be especially charged with the care of preparing the matter for the administration of the different sacraments, wine, oil, etc. This community can also keep swarms of bees, and furnish the different dioceses with pure waxen tapers. Meanwhile they caution priests to beware of using for the holy sacrifice the wines which are commonly sold under the names of port, sherry, Madeira, Malaga, and to choose, rather, Bordeaux, Sauterne, and others less subject to adulteration or fraudulent imitation. Moreover, as the culture of the vine progresses, it will be inexcusable to neglect having recourse to the products of the soil, or at least, not to have a moral certainty of the purity of the wines which are used.

In districts where a few Catholic families find themselves, as it were, lost in the midst of Protestants, the scarcity of priests causes many children to remain unbaptized [Footnote 144] until after marriage; an impedimentun dirimens which renders the marriage null in the eyes of God and the church.

[Footnote 144: The council referred not to unbaptized children of Catholics, for such are not to be found among us, but to unbaptized Protestants, or rather pagans, with whom Catholics have contracted a civil marriage.—ED. C. W.]

They live together in good faith, notwithstanding, and when the priest, discovering the radical fault, speaks to them of renewing their agreement, it frequently happens that the unbaptized party refuses to do it. The fathers unite in requesting from the holy see power to communicate to missionaries dispensations in radice, of which they can make use to rehabilitate such marriages.

As preceding councils have remarked, it is certain that, in most of the provinces of the United States, the decree of the Council of Trent regarding clandestine marriages has not yet been promulgated. In some districts its promulgation is doubtful. Besides, to require the presence of a certain priest for the validity of a marriage appears to the fathers a measure attended with great inconvenience. They demand, therefore, in order to reassure consciences, and establish uniformity, to return everywhere, except in the province of New Orleans, to the ancient discipline, already universally in force. But the holy see has not seen fit to accede to this request, as appears from the answer addressed by the Propaganda to the postulata of the council.

On other points uniformity is supremely desirable. For instance, the bishops earnestly desire it in that which pertains to Christian instruction and in prayer-books. A catechism is to be composed after that of Cardinal Bellarmine, adapted to the peculiar situation of Catholics in the United States. When this catechism has been approved by the holy see, it will be adopted in all the dioceses.

As to prayer-books which do not bear the express approbation of the ordinary, they ought not to be found in the hands of the faithful.

The solicitude of the council here extends to various classes of people. Following the example of the apostle, they recommend to God those who govern; but the formulas of the church are alone to be employed in these prayers, and no one is to imitate certain sects and temples, wherein political passions and partisan rancor utter accents which dishonor God rather than contribute to his worship.

No one will neglect any precaution to free Catholic soldiers and sailors from being obliged, against their conscience, to assist at the rites of dissenting sects. The orphans are an object of special solicitude. They must be gathered into the Catholic asylums which already exist or are yet to be built. This necessity is most pressing, and appeals to the charity of all who can provide against it.

An entire chapter is consecrated to regular orders of men and women. After recalling the immense advantages which their churches have derived from the labor of religious, the fathers state certain precautions which ought to be taken in order that foundations may be stable and not precarious. Circumstances do not always permit canonical erection or establishment in a permanent manner; hence, in the agreement made between the bishop and the religious community, this clause must hereafter be added, to wit, that the latter will not quit the parish, school, college, or congregation with which it is charged, without notifying the ordinary at least six months in advance. This relates only to diocesan work, properly so called, and not to that which the religious may take up of their own accord, without any obligation to continue.

Bishops shall conform to the canonical laws, defending the rights and privileges of the religious whom they find in the territory submitted to their jurisdiction, and they will avoid giving them subjects of complaint, or motives for going elsewhere. Regulars and seculars work toward the same ends namely, the glory of God and the salvation of souls; hence, no dissension ought ever to arise between them, but harmony, unity, and fraternal love should ever reign supreme.

The council passes a magnificent eulogium on those "sisters" who preserve, in their schools, the innocence of so many young virgins, and who, during the late war, have known how to turn public calamity to the glory of God and the advantage of religion.

Who of the dissenting sects has not admired their zeal, charity, and patience in the hospitals, and may not say, "the finger of God is here"?

Various measures were adopted to assure the observance of the rules of the church on the part of the religious. The fathers have heretofore consulted as to the nature of their sacred engagements. The answers received from Rome state that, in several specially designated monasteries of the Visitantines, the vows are solemn. [Footnote 145]

[Footnote 145: These are the monasteries of Georgetown, Mobile, Kaskaskia, St. Aloysius, and Baltimore. The solemnity of the vows is there preserved according to rescripts formerly obtained from Rome.]

Henceforth, after the novitiate, simple vows are to be made, and ten years later the solemn profession will be permitted. As to other monasteries and religious houses, simple vows alone are permitted, except by special rescript from the holy see; the same rule applying to all convents of women which may be hereafter erected in the various dioceses of the United States. The fathers severely censure those who leave their monasteries and travel through the country, under pretext of collecting money for houses pressed with debt or for new foundations; they declare this to be an intolerable abuse and contrary to the true character of the religious life.

Everywhere, to-day, but in no country more than in America, the question of schools appears most important, and claims the most lively solicitude on the part of the episcopate.

Here the council begins by firmly asserting the rights of the church. Jesus Christ said to his apostles, "Euntes docete," "Going, teach all nations." Since that time, this utterance has been understood in the sense of a mission, to be fulfilled by instruction and the exercise of spiritual maternity toward all, but especially toward youth. Frequenting such public schools as exist in the United States offers a thousand dangers. There indifferentism reigns: corruption of morals is engendered in early youth; the habit of reading and reciting authors who attack religion and heap insults on the memory of saintly personages weakens the faith in the souls of the young, while association with vicious companions stifles virtue in their hearts. The only remedy is to create other institutions, to open further opportunities to Catholic youth. Parochial schools are highly recommended, as well as the sodalities or congregations which devote themselves to the instruction of the youth of either sex.

While speaking of houses of refuge and correction, the fathers notice the numerous abductions of children which are daily made by the different sects. These are orphans, or disobedient children whom parents despair of managing. They are taken to places where their relatives can neither find nor hear from them, and their names are changed, so as not to recall them at some future day to their religion or family. Comfortably nourished, they are reared in the principles of heresy and in hatred of Catholicity. [Footnote 146] Moved with pity, several bishops have already opened houses to gather in these little unfortunates; the council desires them to be everywhere established; for if one ought to applaud the zeal of those who raise magnificent temples to God, much more should one praise those who prepare for him a spiritual dwelling of these precious and living stones.

[Footnote 146: Acts have recently been passed in the Legislature of New York which promise to be a very effectual check to the most nefarious arts of these kidnappers in this State.—ED. C. W.]

Here follows a tribute of recognition of the services rendered by the various colleges and academies which already exist in the United States. The American establishments at Rome, at Louvain, and in Ireland, are now furnishing priests and missionaries. When will it be granted to the bishops to found a grand Catholic university, which will complete all the good accomplished by these institutions? Yet this is not merely a desire; it is ardently expressed by the council; we hope the future may bring about its speedy realization. [Footnote 147]

The missions are one of the most efficacious means of procuring the salvation of souls. Regulars and seculars are alike called to this great work. The council demands that a house of missionaries be founded in each diocese, for giving spiritual exercises in the parishes, above all during Lent, Advent, at the time of first communions, and the episcopal visitations. The parish priests are to co-operate cordially with these auxiliaries, and if any refuse to do so, they will be constrained by their bishop. On the other hand, all precautions are taken to avoid any appearance of interestedness, and any interference in the parochial government on the part of the missionaries.

The idea of association, so popular at the present day, is essentially and originally Catholic. If some have used it against us, we know how to reclaim and avail ourselves of it. Hence, the fathers recommend the confraternities approved by the church, such as those of the Blessed Sacrament, the Sacred Heart, the Blessed Virgin Mary, St. Joseph, and the Holy Angels. They recommend the "Apostolate of Prayer," also, another pious association, which prays especially for the conversion of non-Catholics; they seek to develop the well-deserving undertakings of the "Propagation of the Faith" and "Holy Childhood;" they accord the highest praise to the arch-confraternity of St. Peter; finally, they add other works of piety and mercy, among them the "Society of St. Vincent de Paul," so well adapted to our times, and which has already produced such great results.

After this great encouragement, come restrictions no less called for. No new associations are to be created where ancient confraternities suffice. In case any priest desires to institute a new one, he must have a written permission from his bishop; the latter is forbidden to approve a new foundation unless he is sure that its means and aim are truly Catholic. It will be truly desirable to give such a character to the mutual aid societies to-day so numerous among the working classes.

The welfare of the negroes greatly interests the American episcopate. What a harvest is here to be gathered among these poor souls, purchased by the blood of Jesus Christ, and so well prepared by their emancipation to listen to the Gospel. Heresy spares no effort to assure herself of possessing them—another reason for earnestly seconding the desire expressed by the Congregation of the Propaganda in this respect. But the measures adopted for this end cannot be everywhere the same, and general rules are, therefore, hard to determine. The negroes must have churches either in common with or separate from the other faithful; they must have schools, missions, orphan asylums. Laborers are wanting to this harvest. The superiors of religious orders are requested to designate some of their subjects for this purpose, and secular priests, who feel this to be their vocation, to fly to the succor of this class, so destitute and so interesting. As to particular measures, provincial councils will determine in those regions where the negroes are more numerous.

Books and journals exercise such a great influence on society, both for evil and for good, that they could not fail to be the object of a special decree. After noticing the disastrous effects of an immoral press, the prelates call on all the servants of Jesus Christ, especially those who are fathers of families, to rid their houses of all noxious and dangerous books. They do not hesitate in this instance to employ the severe words of the apostle, "If any man have not care of his own, and especially of those of his house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel." I Tim. v. 8. School-books must be carefully revised, expurgated, when necessary, and submitted to episcopal approbation. A sort of permanent committee is created for this purpose, composed of the superiors of three colleges existing in the arch-diocese of Baltimore.

As to good books, their circulation should be favored as much as possible. It is desirable that associations should everywhere be formed, to employ themselves in this work. The fathers particularly recommend the "Catholic Publication Society" of New York, which has existed for some years, and has already done immense good. Committees in every city are to be formed, and affiliated to the central society, and collections are ordered to be made yearly for assisting this good work.

Prayer-books ought always to be examined by theologians, and none should be printed without the approbation of the ordinary. This has hitherto been only a wish; hereafter it shall be a law obliging all bishops.

Among current periodicals there are many impious and immoral, some more tolerable, but very few deserving eulogy and full recommendation to the faithful. The prelates continue:

"Journals edited or directed by Catholics indirectly contributing to the advantage of religion, must exist. But for fear lest the political opinions of the writers may be attributed to ecclesiastical authority, or to Christianity itself, as often happens, thanks to the bad faith of adversaries, we desire that all should be duly warned not to recognize any journal as Catholic unless it bears the express approbation of the ordinary.

"In several dioceses, there are journals furnished with this approbation, under one form or another, because the bishops require them as a means of conveying their orders or ideas to their clergy and people. Hence they are assumed to have an official character, as if the voice of the pastor were to be heard from every page and line. This is a misunderstanding, although quite general, chiefly propagated by sectarians. From it result grave and intolerable inconveniences. For, whatever may be written by these editors, who may often be controlled by passions private and political, is laid to the account of the bishop, and seems to form a part of his pastoral teaching.

"In order that such a responsibility may cease to weigh upon the episcopate, and in order clearly to set forth the relations between the ordinary and the ecclesiastical journals, the fathers declare that the approbation accorded by a bishop to a Catholic journal merely signifies that he has found in it nothing contrary to faith or morals; and that he hopes such will be the case in future; and moreover, that the editors are well-deserving men, and their writings useful and edifying. The bishop, then, is only responsible for what appears in the paper as his own teaching, counsel, exhortation or command; and for this, only when signed with his own hand." (Act. tit. xi. p. 256.)

They spoke of establishing a journal or review, solely devoted to the exposition and defence of Catholic dogma, of which the archbishops of Baltimore, New York, and perhaps other metropolitans with them, would have the ownership. The question was submitted by the council to the judgment of the ordinaries.

If the fathers wish to be free from a solidarity often compromising, they none the less recognize the services of Catholic writers. The felicitations which they address to them are borrowed from the pontifical allocution of April 20th, 1849, and from the letters apostolic of February 12th, 1866.

The church has frequently uttered severe condemnations of secret societies, engaged in acts forbidden by religion and justice. After having recalled to mind and published anew these condemnations, the fathers add that they do not see any reason for applying them to societies of artisans which have no other object than the mutual support and protection of people of the same calling.

These must not favor the practices of condemned sects, nor proceed contrary to equity and the rights of patrons. No one must regard as even tolerated, associations which demand of those entering an oath to do whatever the chiefs command, or which would maintain an inviolable secrecy in the face of lawful questioning. If there be doubt of the nature of an association, the holy see must be consulted. No person, however high his ecclesiastical dignity, ought to condemn any society which does not fall under the censures of the apostolical constitutions. [Footnote 148]

[Footnote 148: At the request of certain bishops, this decree was to be suppressed. It was re-established in acts according to directions from Rome.]

In the thirteenth chapter, the bishops request the erection of fifteen new episcopal sees; to wit, four in the province of Baltimore, seven in that of St. Louis, one in each of the provinces of Cincinnati, Oregon, San Francisco, and New York. They also desire the churches of Philadelphia and Milwaukee to be raised to metropolitan dignity. Excepting this last demand, this chapter has met favorable reception at Rome; and at the present moment, America counts twelve new bishoprics or vicarates apostolic.

We will not speak of the pastoral letter addressed by the bishops of the council to the faithful of their dioceses. It was published at the time in many French journals. Moreover, it merely recapitulates the measures and decrees which ought to be brought to the knowledge of all the Catholic populations. In it one perceives the accent of ardent zeal for the salvation of souls. Amid the felicitations which they address to their flock, the American prelates mingle cries of sorrow at the sight of the abuses which still exist and the souls which are lost. A warm appeal is made to families to favor the development of ecclesiastical vocations; in this country, more than in any other in the world, the harvest is immense, and arms alone are often wanting to gather it.

As to the relations between the church and the state, the fathers declare that, apart from a few brief instances of over-excitement and madness, the attitude taken by the civil power and its non-interference in religious matters is a matter for congratulation; they complain only of its not according the necessary guarantees for church property, according to ancient canons and discipline. But several States have already done what is reasonable in this respect; it is hoped that others will soon follow their example.

Such is the incomplete but at least faithful résumé of the decrees of this great assembly. In reading, one is struck with the wisdom and prudence which characterize them. After the divine assistance, certainly not denied to so holy an undertaking, one here finds something of that American good sense, eminently exact and practical, which, in dealing with lofty things, seizes them principally by their positive side, and, without losing sight of principles, adapts them always to times and circumstances.

If doctrine is greatly represented in this volume, pure theory occupies but a small space. Above everything else the council has wished to be a work of organization. No less remarkable for what it has not said than for what it has said, it seems to embody the device of the poet, "Semper ad eventum festinat;" no superfluous details, no useless erudition; all bears the seal of a legislation soberly but firmly motived, wherein nothing is omitted which can enlighten and convince the mind, and nothing allowed to lengthen a text by right short, or to complicate a simple matter; a majestic monument, of simple and severe proportions, art seems therein neglected, but is by no means wanting.

If it were permissible in presence of so great a work to recur to a secondary detail, we would say that pupils of the seminaries, in studying these acts, will find in them a model of that beautiful Latinity unfortunately too rare in theological treatises.

Their task ended, the prelates had only to congratulate themselves on the success obtained. After having announced to their children that they would be more fully notified of the result in provincial councils and diocesan synods, they have been able to add, with lawful pride, that they expect all manner of good from the practical organization given for the future to the churches of this vast continent.

The Legend of St. Thomas.

And it came to pass, in those days, that Thomas abode at Jerusalem. And in a dream the Lord appeared to him, and said, Behold, Gondaphorus, who ruleth in India, hath sent Abbas his servant into Syria, that he may find men skilful in the art of building. Go thou, therefore, and I will show thee unto him. But Thomas answered, and said, Lord, suffer me not to go into India. But the Lord answered, and said to him, Fear not, but rise up and depart; for behold, I am with thee, and when thou shalt have converted the nations of India, thou shalt come to me, and I will give unto thee the recompense of thy reward. And when Thomas heard this, he said, Thou art my Lord and I am thy servant. Let it be as thou hast said. And he went his way.

And it came to pass that as Abbas, the servant of Gondaphorus the king, stood in the market-place, the Lord met him, and said, Young man, what seekest thou? And Abbas answered, and said, Behold, my master hath sent me hither, that I might bring to him cunning workmen who shall build for him a palace like unto those that are in Rome. And when he had spoken these things, the Lord showed unto him Thomas, as that skilful and cunning workman whom he sought.

And straightway Thomas the apostle, and the servant of Gondaphorus the king, departed. And as they journeyed, the word of the Lord spake by the mouth of Thomas, and great multitudes of the Gentiles were converted and baptized. And when they came to Aden, which lieth at the going in of the Red Sea, they tarried many days.

And departing thence, they came into the coasts of India. And behold, there was a marriage in that city, and both Thomas and Abbas were called to the marriage. And the whole city was with them. And while they rejoiced together, behold, Thomas spake to the people the word of the Lord, and wrought many mighty works before them all, so that great multitudes believed and were baptized. And the daughter of the king, (whose feast it was,) and her husband, and the king also, were among them. And this was she, who, after a long time, was called Pelagia, and took the holy veil, and suffered martyrdom. But the bridegroom was called Denis, and became the bishop of that city.

And going from thence, they departed, and came to Gondaphorus the king. And to him was Thomas the apostle brought, as a cunning workman, skilled in all manner of building. And the king commanded him to build for him a royal palace, and gave him vast treasures wherewith to build it, and having done this, he went into another country.

And it came to pass, that when Thomas received the treasure of the king, he put not his hand to the palace of the king, but went his way throughout the kingdom, for the space of two years, preaching the Gospel, healing the sick, and giving his treasures to the poor.

And after the space of two years, Gondaphorus the king returned into his own city, and when he had asked concerning his palace, Thomas answered, and said, Behold, O king! the palace is builded; but thou shalt dwell therein only in the world that is to come. Then was the king exceeding wroth, when he had heard these things, and commanded his soldiers to cast Thomas into prison, and to flay him alive, and afterward to burn his body with fire.

And it came to pass, that in those days Syd, the brother of Gondaphorus, died, and the king commanded them to prepare for him a goodly sepulchre. And on the fourth day, as they made lamentation over him, behold, he that was dead sat up and began to speak. And they were sore affrighted and amazed. But he said to the king, Behold, O king! he whom thou hast commanded to be flayed and burned is the friend of God. For lo! the angels of God, who serve him, took me into paradise, and showed to me a palace adorned with gold and silver and precious stones. And when I was astonished at its beauty, one cried out to me, and said, Behold, this is the palace which Thomas has builded for the king, thy brother. But he has become unworthy; yet, if thou thyself wouldst dwell therein, we will beseech the Lord, that thou mayest live again and redeem it of thy brother by paying unto him the treasure he has lost.

And when Gondaphorus had heard these things, he was sore afraid. And he straightway ran to the prison, and came in unto the apostle, and smote off his chains. And bringing a royal robe, he would have put it on him. But Thomas answering, said, Knowest thou not, O king! that those who would have power in heavenly things care not for that which is carnal and earthly? And when he had said this, the king fell down at his feet, confessing his sins. And Thomas baptized both him, and his brother, and all his house, and said to them, In heaven there are many mansions, prepared from the foundation of the world. But these are purchased only by faith and almsgiving. Your riches are able to go before you into these heavenly habitations, but thither they can never follow you.

And after these things, Thomas arose and departed, and came into all the kingdoms of India, preaching the Gospel, and doing many mighty miracles. And all the nations of India believed and were baptized, hearing his words, and seeing the wonders which he did.

And it came to pass that Mesdeus the king heard thereof. And when Thomas came into his country, he laid hands upon him, and commanded him to adore his idols, even the images of the Sun, which he had made. And Thomas answered, and said, Let it be even as thou hast said, if at my word the idol bow not its head into the dust. And when he had said this, the idol fell down prostrate to the earth.

And there arose a great sedition among the people, and the greater part stood with Thomas. But the king was exceeding angry, and cast him into prison, and delivered him up to the soldiers, that they might put him to death. And the soldiers, taking him, led him forth to the top of a mountain over against the city. And when he had prayed a long time, they pierced him with their spears, and, falling down, he yielded up the ghost. And his disciples, which stood by, wept for him with many tears, and, taking up his body, they wound it in precious spices, and laid it in a tomb. But the church grew and waxed mightily, and Siforus the priest, and Zuganes the deacon, whom Thomas had ordained as he went forth to die on the mountain, taught in his stead.

Such is the legend of St. Thomas, as recited in the name of Abdias of Babylon, "bishop and disciple," [Footnote 149] in his "ten books upon the conflicts of the apostles." Whatever we may think of the individual events therein detailed, the great outline of the story has much intrinsic probability, and is of no slight interest to the student of Christian history. Especially is this so in the present age, when the vast and mystic East opens her gates once more to the knock of the evangelist, and when the whole Christian world is agitated with a missionary zeal which must be comparatively fruitless, unless guided by a knowledge of the people whom it approaches, and of the religious traditions with which it must combat or agree. It is our intention in this article to suggest some of the chief facts in the ecclesiastical annals of these unknown lands, and to trace, so far as we may be able, the dogmatic genealogy of those religious notions with which the Gospel has been, and will be, there forced to contend.

[Footnote 149: Abdias of Babylon, to whom is ascribed the work mentioned in the text, is accounted among the ecclesiastical writers of the first age. He was a Jew by birth, and one of the seventy disciples of our Lord. He went with SS. Simon and Jude into Persia, and by them was made bishop of Babylon. The work which bears his name was first printed in the year 1532. Its alleged authorship, on account of its citations, and for some other reasons, has generally been denied by the learned. On this point the present writer ventures no opinion, although convinced that the tradition, as contained in The Legend of St. Thomas, is substantially true, and has existed in the same general outline from the earliest periods of Christian history.]

In the legend which we have repeated, and the discussion of which will occupy the present article, the scene of the labors of St. Thomas is laid in India. The tradition that he preached in Parthia and other countries of the east, and that he perished by martyrdom, is nearly as old as Christianity itself. All of the early writers are agreed that his apostolic province lay north and east of Palestine, and that the Persians, Bactrians, Scythians, and other kindred nations were entrusted to his spiritual care. But in regard to the particular regions over which he travelled, and the extent of his missionary efforts, as embraced in modern geographical divisions, there appears to be no small discrepancy between them. Thus, while certain ancient authors ascribe to him the evangelization of the entire East, Socrates and Theodoret expressly state that the Gospel was not preached in India till the fourth century, when Frumentius carried thither the knowledge of the true faith, and established a mission, of which he himself became the bishop; while some extend his wanderings to the Ganges, or even to the Celestial empire itself, others limit him within the eastern boundary of Persia, and place his death and burial-place near the city of Edessa, less than two hundred miles north-east from Antioch.

Much of this apparent disagreement, however, is explained away by the acknowledged ambiguity of the phrases under which these different countries were anciently described. "India" and "Ethiopia" seem to have been terms as loosely applied in that age as "the East," in Europe, and "the West," in America, are today; and it is not at all unlikely that, as has been the case with the latter phrase in this country, the application of the former was gradually changed as their nearer frontiers became better known, and were localized under distinct and peculiar names. The India of Socrates and Theodoret may or may not embrace the districts included in the India of Gaudentius and Sophronius; and each, in his historic statement, may be entirely accurate in fact, though contradictory to the others in his language.

Moreover, in those early ages kingdoms were less known than nations. The ancients spoke of "Persians," "Romans," "Jews," "Egyptians," rather than of the countries in which they were supposed to dwell; while in our day, on the contrary, the explorations of geography have rendered the regions far more definite than the nations which inhabit them. For this reason, what would be comparatively a safe guide to any given locality in modern usage, would be far less reliable in writings of a thousand years ago. Thus we may well dismiss whatever doubts this seeming disagreement at first sight throws around the post-scriptural account of this apostle, or at least hold it in abeyance, to be obliterated if subsequent investigations should disclose sufficient evidence of the toils and triumphs of St. Thomas in the vast empires of oriental Asia.

It is in this generic sense of the terms that "India" and "the Indies" are employed by the author of this legend, and under the singular as well as under the plural name are included many kingdoms through which the apostle travelled, from that in which he preached the Gospel at the nuptials of a king to that in which he found the mountain of his martyrdom. Each of these seems to have had its own court and king, and to have been so far independent of the others that the same religion which was maintained and promulgated by the state in one, was persecuted and condemned by the rulers of the other. It is not, therefore, to these names that we can look with any confidence of finding such vestiges of the apostle's footsteps as shall afford us a definite clue to the countries or the nations which enjoyed the fruits of his laborious love.

Such, however, is not the case with the name of King Gondaphorus to whom particularly, according to the legend, the mission of St. Thomas was directed. Until within a few years, the age, the residence, even the existence of this personage has been matter of serious controversy. The opinion most commonly received among the learned was, that "Gondaphorus" was a corruption of "Gun dishavor" or "Gondisapor," a city built by Artaxerxes, and deriving its name from Sapor or Schavor, the son and successor of its founder. [Footnote 150] As the city could have acquired this title only in the fourth century, this, among other reasons, has generally led historians to deny the substantial authenticity of the legend itself, and to regard it as the fabrication of some later age.

[Footnote 150: Gundisapor was the episcopal and metropolitan city of the province of Sarac, situated on the Tigris, six leagues from Susa. It is said to have been built by Hormisdas, the contemporary of the Emperor Constantine, and to have been called by the name of Sapor, his son, by whom it was afterward immensely enriched and beautified with the treasures which he ravished from the Roman empire.]

Recent investigations among Indian antiquities have thrown new light upon this subject, and, in this particular, at least, seem to have cleared the legend from all suspicions of fraud. Among the many coins and medals lately discovered in the East are those of the Indo-Scythian kings who ruled in the valley of the Indus about the beginning of our present era. One of these kings bore the name of "Gondaphorus," and pieces of his coinage are now said to be preserved in different collections of Paris and the East. [Footnote 151] This striking corroboration, in the nineteenth century, of a tradition which, in one shape or another, has been current in the Christian world for eighteen hundred years, can hardly fail to satisfy the most critical examiner that the legend ascribed to Abdias is, in its grand outline, entitled to a far higher degree of credit than it has been accustomed lately to receive.

[Footnote 151: Vide Le Christianisme en Chine, etc., par M, Huc. Paris, 1857, p. 28, etc.]

The course of the apostle and his companion toward the east, so far as this tradition and its modern limitations have defined it, may thus be traced. Leaving Jerusalem, they journeyed by the usual route to the Red Sea, and thence along the coasts of Arabia Petraea and Arabia Felix to Aden, then, as now, a city of much commercial importance, on account of its excellent harbor and commanding situation. Here they remained for a considerable period of time, the apostle preaching the Gospel and laying foundations on which other men might build. Embarking thence, they sailed around the southern borders of the Arabian peninsula, and, crossing the Gulf of Oman, landed at one of the then flourishing cities near the mouths of the Indus. After some delay, of which St. Thomas made good use in the service of the Gospel, they pushed north-easterly into the interior to the immediate province of King Gondaphorus, where, after the labors of two years, the apostle brought the monarch and his family under obedience to the yoke of Christ. His special work thus accomplished, St. Thomas travelled into many other kingdoms on the same divine errand, and terminated his devoted and fruitful life by holy martyrdom. Thus far, the legend; and that it agrees with and is in fact the interpreter of all other traditions of St. Thomas, as well as of those various monuments which, until recently, have been unknown as teachers of Christian history, will shortly be made manifest.

The holy apostle, having once established Christianity in those parts of India which lie nearest to Jerusalem, would naturally extend his journey into more distant regions, rather than retrace his steps, and occupy, as his field of labor, a territory to which the Gospel would, without his intervention, probably be soon proclaimed. For, having in himself powers plenipotentiary for the organization and perpetuation of the church, wherever he might plant it, and being assured, as a Christian and disciple, that the zeal and perseverance of his fellow-workers might safely be entrusted with the conversion of the nations adjacent to the centres of Christian doctrine, it was simply manlike, simply apostolic, for him to set his face steadfastly toward those who, but for him, might not in many generations obtain the light of faith. If, therefore, the footsteps which we have already traced be genuine, we may with reason look for traces of the same unwearied feet in other and still more unknown lands.

And herein also, the traditions of the early ages will not disappoint us. Still reckoning by nations, rather than by kingdoms, the ancient writers tell us that St. Thomas preached the Gospel to the Parthians, Medes, Persians, Hyrcanians, Bactrians, Germanians, Seres, Indians, and Scythians. Thus in a fragment of St. Dorotheus, (A.D. 254,) "The apostle Thomas, having announced the Gospel to the Parthians, Medes, Persians, Germanians, Bactrians, and Mages, suffered martyrdom at Calamila, a city of India." Theodoret, speaking of the universality of the preaching of the apostles, says, "They have caused, not only the Romans, and those who inhabit the Roman empire, but the Scythians, … the Indians, … the Persians, the Seres, and the Hyrcanians to receive from them the law of the Crucified." Origen, and from him Eusebius, relates that St. Thomas received Parthia as his allotted sphere; and Sophronius mentions that he planted the faith among the Medes, Persians, Carmanians, (Germanians,) Hyrcanians, Bactrians, and other nations of the extreme east. Both the latter and St. Gaudentius declare that he suffered at Calamina in India.

The same traditions are faithfully preserved among the Christians of India. In the breviary of the Church of Malabar, it is stated that St. Thomas converted the Indians, Chinese, and Ethiopians, and that these different nations, together with the Persians, offer their adorations to God in commemoration of this devoted apostle, from whom their forefathers received the truth of Christ. The presumption of fact, which arises out of such a mass of testimony as these and other witnesses which might be quoted offer us, existing for so many ages and in countries so widely separated from each other, is surely sufficient to justify a careful study of the localities to which these different nations belonged, as indicative of the later and more extended missionary labors of St. Thomas.

According to the best authorities on the subjects of ancient geography and ethnology, all the various territories which were inhabited by the nations whose conversion has been attributed to St. Thomas lie east of the Euphrates, and, with the single exception of the Scythians, below the fortieth parallel of latitude. The Medes occupied the districts between the Caspian and Persian seas. The Hyrcanians lay on the south-east of the Caspian, the Parthians and the Bactrians lying east of them; and all three being included in the present Turkistan. The Persians held the northeastern borders of the Persian Gulf, next to the kingdom of the Medes; the Germanians, or Carmanians, lying next on the south-east, in part of what is now known as Beloochistan, and the lower corner of modern Persia. The "Seres" was a name given to the Chinese in the earliest historic ages, and embraced the vast and cultivated people who dwell beyond the Emodi, or Himalaya, mountains, and east of the sources of the Indus. The Indians and Scythians—the former occupying from the Indian Ocean and the latter from the Arctic zone—met together between the Bactrians and the Seres, and formed the Indo-Scythian races of the ante-Christian age. Calamila, or Calamina, the city near which the apostle finally rested from his labors, is on the eastern coast of Hindostan, a short distance from Madras, and has been known, at different periods, by the names of Meliapour, Beit-Thoma, and St. Thomas.

The connection of these ancient nations and countries with, and their successive propinquity to, each other enables us to form a tolerably correct idea of the course of the apostle's missionary work, from the baptism of Gondaphorus to the close of his own career. For although our guide is simply the intrinsic probability which grows out of the nature of the workman and the work God had appointed him to do, yet, to whoever takes the map of the various regions which we have described as the scenes of the apostolic life and death, it will appear that one of two courses must have been adopted. The first starts from the valley of the Indus, and, leading westward, reaches in turn the Germanians, Persians, and Medes; then, turning toward the north and flexing eastward by the southern border of the Caspian Sea, it penetrates the land of the Hyrcanians, Parthians, Bactrians, Indo-Scythians, and Seres; where, again met by the upper Indus, it bends southward, and, striking through the heart of Hindostan, ends in the lower portion of the peninsula at or near Madras. {518} The second, beginning at the same point, follows up the Indus in a path directly opposite to the former, until the place of departure is again reached and the final journey through modern India begins. It is scarcely possible to say which of these two routes is most probably correct. Future researches may throw light upon the extent of the region over which King Gondaphorus reigned, upon the relation of the dialects of these bordering nations to each other, and thus afford a clue to the more exact path of the apostle. But in either case, the districts over which he travelled, and the races into contact with whom he carried the Gospel, are distinguished with a high degree of certainty, and the triumphs of the cross under his leadership may thus be clearly understood.

Indeed, the work of scarce any apostle of the twelve can now be better followed than that of Thomas. The chief indefiniteness attaches to his mission to the Seres; for here little is extant to show, with any great conclusiveness, whether his labors terminated with the borders of Indo-Scythia, or penetrated to the Yellow Sea. Some monuments of antiquity have, it is true, been found, which point strongly to the spreading of the Gospel over a large part of China by primitive if not by apostolic missionaries; but nothing has as yet been discovered which would justify the conclusion that St. Thomas actually attempted the evangelization of that immense and thickly-populated empire. If such had been the case, it is hardly possible that India should have received him back again, and given him the distant Calamina for his martyrdom.

The area of territory over which the apostle Thomas must thus have journeyed embraces over three million two hundred and fifty thousand square miles, and the people to whom he opened the doors of heaven, through the Gospel, numbered more than two hundred millions of souls. The linear distance of his own personal travels probably exceeded ten thousand miles, and this, for the most part, necessarily on foot. The consideration of these facts, and of the results which followed from the apostle's labors, will give us some idea of the work which our Divine Lord committed to his immediate disciples, and of the untiring zeal and superhuman endurance with which they were endowed. It has become far easier for us to say, "The Lord hath shortened his hand," than to go and do likewise.

Yet it is still true that Thomas was an apostle; that it was the will of the Master that all nations should at once almost receive some knowledge of his Gospel; that the miraculous gift of tongues swept out of the way one of the greatest obstacles to missionary labor; and that St. Thomas had received the gifts of faith and charity to such a degree as enabled him to co-operate, to the utmost, with the graces of his work. And it is also true that, had not he and the others of the twelve been such as they were and accomplished what they did, the promises of Christ would have been unfulfilled, and the church have suffered from their failure to its latest day. But in that they were apostles, in that they did their work, the seed of the Gospel can scarcely fall, to-day, on soil which has not been already watered by the blood of martyrs, or among people in whom it has not, long ago, sprung up and brought forth fruit abundantly.

There were, however, in the case of St. Thomas, other and natural reasons why his work should have been so vast and his success so extraordinary. The facility of intercourse between the east and the west was far greater in his day than in our own. The successive conquests of Alexander had led him beyond the present western boundary of China. The Roman empire, at the beginning of our era, reached beyond the Euphrates, and the intimate connection of part with part, and the ease of intercourse between the imperial city and the farthest military outpost, can scarcely be exaggerated. [Footnote 152] Up to the seventh century, this unity continued to a great degree unbroken, and will account not only for the presence of the minister of Gondaphorus in Jerusalem and for the results which followed it, but for the diffusion and preservation of the traditions which have handed down those events to us.

Nor was this unity altogether that of conquest. Beyond the empire of Augustus lay the realms of Porus, of whom history relates that he held six hundred kings beneath his sway. Between these emperors there seem to have been two formal attempts at an intimate political alliance. Twenty-four years before the birth of Christ, an embassy from Porus followed Augustus into Spain, upon this errand, and another some years afterward met with him at Samos. In the reigns of Claudius, Trajan, Antoninus Pius, and succeeding emperors, the same royal courtesies were interchanged, and it was not until the Mussulman power, sweeping like a sea of fire between the east and the west, became an impassable barrier to either, that these relations had an end.

Nearly the same may be said of commercial unity. The trade in silk, from which substance the Seres, or Chinese, derived their name, was carried on between the Romans and that distant nation on no inconsiderable scale. Numerous caravans perpetually journeyed to and fro through the wilds of Parthia and along the southern border of the Caspian Sea; while the Erythrean, Red and Mediterranean waters glittered with sails from almost every land. The whole inhabited world (if we except this continent, the date of whose first settlement no one can tell) was thus providentially brought close together, and a higher degree of unity and association established between its different nations than had existed since the dispersion at Babel, or than has now existed for over twelve hundred years.

How vast an advantage to apostolic labor this unity must have been can easily be seen. While it removed almost entirely the difficulties of travel, it assured for the traveller both safety and good-will upon the way. While it conciliated in advance the people among whom they labored, it gave weight and human authority to the Gospel, when actually preached. And, when the church had been established and little colonies of Christians marked the track of the apostles, it enabled them to maintain a constant intercourse with their spiritual children by messengers or by epistles, and to keep watch and ward over the millions entrusted to their care.

Those prophetic traditions of a coming Saviour, which pervaded the east, as well as the south and west, also effected much toward the rapid spread and wide espousal of Christian truth. The origin of these traditions is shrouded in the mystery of an unchronicled antiquity. They may be attributed to the promise in paradise, to the transfusion of Mosaic teachings, or to direct revelation by means of pagan oracles. But that they existed, in a clear and well-defined prophetic form, is established beyond question; while that they were in the first instance of divine disclosure, it becomes no Christian to deny. {520} The learned and contemplative minds of Asia especially delighted in this state of expectation. Sons of a soil whereon the feet of God had trodden in primeval days, the very atmosphere around them still throbbed with the echoes of that voice which walked in Eden in the cool of the day. The mountains that overlooked them had aforetime walled in the garden of the Lord from a dark and half-developed world. The deserts of their meditations lay like a pall above the relics of those generations to whom the deluge brought the judgment wrath of God. Children of Sem, the eldest son of Noah, it had been theirs to see, even more clearly than God's chosen Israel, the coming of the Incarnate to the world, as it was also theirs to win from heaven the first tidings of his birth through the glowing orient star.

Among the many forms which this tradition assumed, there is one so beautiful and so theologically accurate, that we cannot omit to cite it here. While the swan of Mantua, on the banks of father Tiber, chanted the glories of the golden age, a Hindoo poet, on the borders of the Ganges, thus painted to the wondering eyes of Indian kings the grand event in which the disorders and miseries of that present age should have an end:

"Then shall a Brahmin be born in the city of Sambhala. This shall be Vishnu Jesu. To him shall the divine scriptures and all sciences unfold themselves, without the use of so much time in their investigation as is necessary to pronounce a single word. Hence shall be given to him the name of Sarva Buddha, as to one who fully knoweth all things. Then shall Vishnu Jesu, dwelling with his people, perform that work which he alone can do. He shall purge the world from sin; he shall set up the kingdom of truth and justice; he shall offer the sacrifice; … and bind anew the universe to God. … But when the time of his old age draws nigh, he shall retire into the desert to do penance; and this is the order which Vishnu Sarva shall establish among men. He shall fix virtue and truth in the midst of the Brahmins, and confine the four castles within the boundaries of their laws. Then shall return the primeval age. Then sacrifice shall be so common that the very wilderness shall be no more a solitude. Then shall the Brahmins, confirmed in goodness, occupy themselves only in the ceremonies of religion; they shall cause penance, and all other graces which follow in the path of truth, to flourish, and shall spread everywhere the knowledge of the holy scriptures. Then shall the seasons succeed each other in unbroken order; the rains, in their appointed time, shall water the earth; the harvest, in its turn, shall yield abundance; the milk shall flow at the wish of those who seek it; and the whole world, being inebriated with prosperity and peace, as it was in the beginning, all nations shall enjoy ineffable delights." [Footnote 153]

The well-known policy of St. Paul, who, preaching on Mars' hill to the Athenians, seized the inscription on their altar, "To the unknown God," as the text of his most memorable sermon, is a divine endorsement of the important part which God intended that these far-reaching revelations should play in the conversion of the world. St. Thomas, in the east, had but to repeat the announcement, Him whom ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you. He, for whom you have waited—he, Vishnu Jesu, has already come; his wisdom and his counsels I reveal to you.

And among the clear-thoughted and pure-hearted sages of the east, among the Magi of Persia, the Brahmins of India, and the philosophers of China, among such as those who at the mere bidding of a voiceless star followed it to the world's end—to the cave of Bethlehem—these declarations of the apostle must have been the signal of salvation. In them there were no prejudices to wipe away, no new and strange ideas to be espoused. The Gospel was not to them, as to the Jews, the subversion of anticipated glory. It was the realization of expectation, the golden day which had so long shot gleams of light into the darkness of their iron age. And so it was that, while Judea could give to Christianity but simple fishermen, or at most a ruler of the synagogue, India and the orient thought not too highly of her kings and sages to yield them up to Vishnu Jesu, and offered on his altars the wealth of all her realms.

In the year 1521, certain excavations taking place under the ruins of a large and ancient church at Meliapour, there were found, in a sepulchre, at a great depth beneath the surface of the earth, the bones of a human skeleton, in a state of remarkable whiteness and preservation. With them were also found the head of a lance, still fastened in the wood, the fragments of an iron-shod club, and a vase of clay filled with earth. Some years later, near the same spot, an attempt was made by the Portuguese to build a chapel; and in digging for the foundations, the workmen came upon a monumental stone on which was sculptured a cross, some two feet long by eighteen inches wide, rudely ornamented and surrounded by an inscription in characters which, to the discoverers, were totally unknown. The authorities of Meliapour, being desirous to ascertain the meaning of the letters engraved around this cross, made diligent search among the native scholars for an interpreter, and finally obtained one in the person of a Brahmin of a neighboring city. His translation was as follows:

"Thirty years after the law of the Christians appeared to the world, on the 25th of the month of December, the apostle St. Thomas died at Meliapour, whither he had brought the knowledge of God, the change of the law, and the overthrow of devils. God was born of the Virgin Mary, was obedient to her during thirty years, and was the eternal God. God unfolded his law to twelve apostles, and of these, one came to Meliapour, and there founded a church. The kings of Malabar, of Coromandel, of Pandi, and of other different nations, submitted to the guidance of this holy Thomas, with willing hearts, as to a devout and saintly man." [Footnote 154]

The same inscription was afterward laid before other oriental scholars, each of whom, without conference or collusion with the rest, offered the same rendering of this forgotten tongue.

Thus, again do the discoveries of later ages verify the traditions of early Christian history. That SS. Dorotheus, Sophronius, and Gaudentius possessed reliable evidence for their statement that St. Thomas died at Calamina, we can no longer doubt. That the original framer of "The Legend of St. Thomas" recited events which, in his day, were well known, and could be easily substantiated, is almost beyond dispute. The wondrous tales of heroism, built out of the deeds of martyrs and apostles and evangelists are not all foolish dreams. The "Legends of the Saints" are not, as the wiseacres of the day would lead us to believe, altogether idle words. {522} Men, who could traverse sea and land, without companions, without aid, converting nations, building churches, founding hierarchies, setting their faces ever farther on, looking for no human sympathy, having no mother-country, toiling for ever toward the martyr's crown, were not the men to fabricate childish stories, full of false visions and falser miracles. Nor were those who stood day by day on the brink of doom; who, in the morning, woke perhaps to meet the lions, perhaps the stake, but certainly the burden of the cross of Christ; who lay down at night without hope of day, the men to listen to wild tales of falsehood from some cunning tongue. Traditions of those early days were all too often written in blood. They come to us sealed with the lives of saints. They have stood the test of ages of investigation. They remain, to-day, monuments, engraved in many languages, and on many lands, asserting the achievements of our fathers, while modern science adds to ancient story the corroboration of her undeniable deductions, and vindicates the traditions of Christian antiquity both from the sneers and the indifference of self-exalted men.

It is almost needless to remark, as the conclusion of this sketch, that modern missionaries, who would rival the success of St. Thomas, can fairly expect it from no less exertion, no less singleness of heart. Those who from this or other countries sally forth, with missionary societies behind them to supply their needs, burdened with the double cares of family and church, with boards of directors at home, as well as consciences within, to satisfy, with a support to some extent conditioned on their apparent success, can scarcely be expected to compete with him who, bidding farewell to home and friends, goes out alone, wifeless and childless, looking to God for everything, and seeking nothing but an endless crown. The history of missions proves, by indisputable statistics, which of these two methods is effective, which has borne with it the divine prestige of success, and which remains, in spite of persecutions and oppressions, vigorous and undismayed after the conflicts of eighteen hundred years. If it were a simple question of policy, between the Catholic Church and her opponents, the event would indicate her wisdom. If it were one of precedent, she has the whole apostolic college, and the missionaries of fifteen centuries upon her side. But if the touchstone of the Master be still reliable, and we may know his workmen by their fruits, then does this history of the great missionary church bear witness, that not only her vocation but her operations are divine, and may assure her children, that, though heaven and earth should fail, no jot or tittle of her power or triumph can ever pass away. The throne of Peter may be smitten by the thunderbolt of war; the hoary head of his successor may be bowed with grief; the triple crown may once more be trampled under the feet of men; the faithful may again be overwhelmed with fear; but, in the far wilderness, beyond the glittering deserts, across the frozen and the burning seas, her sons are gathering strange nations to her bosom, over whom, in her coming days of victory and peace, she may renew her joy.

For the same Lord who bade her go into the whole world and teach all his commandments gave, in the same breath, its people to her baptism; and he who promised her the nations for her inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for her possession, was the same God who said to St. Peter, "Super hanc petram aedificabo ecclesiam meam, et porta inferi non prevalebunt."

Beethoven, His Boyhood.

One October afternoon, in 1784, a boat was coming down the Rhine close to that point where the city of Bonn sits on its left shore. The company on board consisted of old and young persons of both sexes, returning from an excursion of pleasure.

The company landed full of gayety and mirth, the young people walking on before, while their seniors followed. They adjourned to a public garden, close on the river side, to finish the day of social enjoyment by partaking of a collation. Old and young were seated ere long around the stone table set under the large trees. The crimson faded in the west, the moon poured her soft light glimmering through the leafy canopy above them, and was reflected in full beauty in the waters of the Rhine.

"Your boys are merry fellows," said a benevolent-looking old gentleman, addressing Herr van Beethoven, a tenor singer in the electoral chapel, pointing at the same time to his two sons, lads of ten and fourteen years of age. "But tell me, Beethoven, why did you not bring Louis with you?"

"Because," answered the person he addressed, "Louis is a stubborn, dogged, stupid boy, whose troublesome behavior would only spoil our mirth."

"Ah!" returned the old gentleman, "you are always finding fault with the poor lad, and perhaps impose too hard tasks upon him. I am only surprised that he has not, ere this, broken loose from your sharp control."

"My dear Simrock," replied Beethoven, laughing, "I have a remedy at hand for his humors—my good Spanish cane, which, you see, is of the toughest. Louis is well acquainted with its excellent properties, and stands in wholesome awe thereof. And trust me, neighbor, I know best what is for the boy's good. Carl and Johann are a comfort to me; they always obey me with alacrity and affection. Louis, on the other hand, has been bearish from his infancy. As to his studies, music is the only thing he will learn—I mean with good will; or, if he consents to apply himself to anything else, I must first knock it into him that it has something to do with music. Then he will go to work; but it is his humor not to do it otherwise. If I give him a commission to execute for me, the most arrant clodpoll could not be more stupid about it."

Here the conversation was interrupted, and the subject was not resumed. The hours flew lightly by. It struck nine, and the festive company separated to return to their homes.

Carl and Johann were in high glee as they went home. They sprang up the steps before their father, and pulled the door-bell. The door was opened, and a boy about twelve years old stood in the entry with a lamp in his hand. He was short and stout for his age, but a sickly paleness, more strongly marked by the contrast of his thick black hair, was observable on his face. His small, gray eyes were quick and restless in their movement, very piercing when he fixed them on any object, but softened by the shade of his long, dark lashes. His mouth was delicately formed, and the compression of the lips betrayed both pride and sorrow. It was Louis Beethoven.

His mother greeted him affectionately. His father said, while the boy busied himself fastening the door, "Well, Louis, I hope you have finished your task."

"Very good; to-morrow I will look and see if you have earned your breakfast." So saying, the elder Beethoven went into his chamber. His wife followed him, after bidding her sons good night, Louis more tenderly than any of them. Carl and Johann withdrew with their brother to their common sleeping apartment, entertaining him with a description of their day of festivity. "Now, Louis," said little Johann, as they finished their account, "if you had not been such a dunce, our father would have taken you along; but he says he thinks that you will be little better than a dunce all the days of your life, and self-willed and stubborn besides."

"Yes, you are always a sleepy-head!" cried they both, laughing; but in a few moments after getting into bed both were asleep and snoring heartily.

Louis took the lamp from the table, left the apartment softly, and went up-stairs to an attic chamber, where he was wont to retire when he wished to be out of the way of his teasing brothers. He had fitted up the little room for himself as well as his means permitted. A table with three legs, a leathern chair, the bottom partly out, and an old piano which he had rescued from the possession of the rats and mice, made up the furniture, and here, in company with his beloved violin, he was accustomed to pass his happiest hours.

The boy felt, young as he was, that he was not understood by one of his family, not even excepting his mother. She loved him tenderly, and always took his part when his father found fault with him; but she never knew what was passing in his mind, because he never uttered it. But his genius was not long to be unappreciated.

The next morning a messenger came from the elector to Beethoven's house, bringing an order for him to repair immediately to the palace, and fetch with him his son Louis. The father was surprised; not more so than the boy, whose heart beat with undefined apprehension as they entered the princely mansion. A servant was in waiting, and conducted them, without delay or further announcement, to the presence of the elector, who was attended by two gentlemen.

The elector received old Beethoven with great kindness, and said, "We have heard much, recently, of the extraordinary musical talent of your son Louis. Have you brought him along with you?"

Beethoven replied in the affirmative, stepped back to the door, and bade the boy come in.

"Come nearer, my little lad," cried the elector graciously; "do not be shy. This gentleman here is our new court organist, Herr Neefe; the other is the famous composer, Herr Yunker, from Cologne. We promised them both they should hear you play something."

The prince bade the boy take his seat and begin, while he sat down in a large easy-chair. Louis went to the piano, and, without examining the pile of notes that lay awaiting his selection, played a short piece, then a light and graceful melody, which he executed with such ease and spirit, nay, in so admirable a manner, that his distinguished auditors could not forbear expressing their surprise, and even his father was struck. When he left off playing, the elector arose, came up to him, laid his hand on his head, and said encouragingly, "Well done, my boy! we are pleased with you. Now, Master Yunker," turning to the gentleman on his right hand, "what say you?"

"Your highness," answered the composer, "I will venture to say the lad has had considerable practice with that last air to execute it so well."

Louis burst into a laugh at this remark. The others looked surprised and grave. His father darted an angry glance at him, and the boy, conscious that he had done something wrong, became instantly silent.

The boy colored and looked down as he replied, "Because Herr Yunker thinks I have learned the air by heart, when it occurred to me but just now while I was playing."

"Then," returned the composer, "if you really improvised that piece, you ought to go through at sight a motive I will give you presently."

Yunker wrote on a paper a difficult motive, and handed it to the boy. Louis read it over carefully, and immediately began to play it according to the rules of counterpoint. The composer listened attentively, his astonishment increasing at every turn in the music; and when at last it was finished, in a manner so spirited as to surpass his expectations, his eyes sparkled, and he looked on the lad with keen interest, as the possessor of a genius rarely to be found.

"If he goes on in this way," said he in a low tone to the elector, "I can assure your highness that a very great contrapuntist may be made out of him."

Neefe observed with a smile, "I agree with the master; but it seems to me the boy's style inclines rather too much to the gloomy and melancholy."

"It is well," replied his highness, smiling; "be it your care that it does not become too much so. Herr van Beethoven," he continued, addressing the father, "we take an interest in your son, and it is our pleasure that he complete the studies commenced under your tuition, under that of Herr Neefe. He may come and live with him after to-day. You are willing, Louis, to come and live with this gentleman?"

The boy's eyes were fixed on the ground; he raised them and glanced first at Neefe and then at his father. The offer was a tempting one; he would fare better and have more liberty in his new abode. But there was his father! whom he had always loved; who, in spite of his severity, had doubtless loved him, and who now stood looking upon him earnestly and sadly. He hesitated no longer, but, seizing Beethoven's hand and pressing it to his heart, he cried, "No, no! I can not leave my father."

"You are a good and dutiful lad," said his highness. "Well, I will not ask you to leave your father, who must be very fond of you. You shall live with him, and come and take your lessons of Herr Neefe; that is our will. Adieu! Herr van Beethoven."

From this time Louis lived a new life. His father treated him no longer with harshness, and even reproved his brothers when they tried to tease him. Carl and Johann grew shy of him, however, when they saw what a favorite he had become. {526} Louis found himself no longer restrained, but came and went as he pleased; he took frequent excursions into the country, which he enjoyed with more than youthful pleasure, when the lessons were over. His worthy master was astonished at the rapid progress of his pupil in his beloved art.

"But, Louis," said he one day, "if you would become a great musician, you must not neglect everything besides music. You must acquire foreign languages, particularly Latin, Italian, and French. Would you leave your name to posterity as a true artist, make your own all that bears relation to your art."

Louis promised, and kept his word. In the midst of his playing he would leave off, however much it cost him, when the hour struck for his lessons in the languages. So closely he applied himself, that in a year's time he was tolerably well acquainted not only with Latin, French, and Italian, but also with the English. His father marvelled at his progress not a little; for years he had labored in vain, with starvation and blows, to make the boy learn the first principles of those languages. He had never, indeed, taken the trouble to explain to him their use in the acquisition of the science of music.

In 1785, appeared Louis' first sonatas. They displayed uncommon talent and gave promise that the youthful artist would, in future, accomplish something great, though scarcely yet could be found in them a trace of that gigantic genius whose death forty years afterward filled all Europe with sorrow.

"We were both mistaken in the lad," Simrock would say to old Beethoven. "He abounds in wit and odd fancies, but I do not altogether like his mixing up in his music all sorts of strange conceits; the best way, to my notion, is a plain one. Let him follow the great Mozart, step by step; after all, he is the only one, and there is none to come up to him—none!" And Louis' father, who also idolized Mozart, always agreed with his neighbor in his judgment, and echoed, "None!"

It was a lovely summer afternoon about 1787; numerous boats with parties of pleasure on board were passing up and down the Rhine; numerous companies of old and young were assembled under the trees in the public gardens, or along the banks of the river, enjoying the scene and each other's conversation, or partaking of the rural banquet.

At some distance from the city, a wood bordered the river; this wood was threaded by a small and sparkling stream, that flung itself over a ledge of rocks, and tumbled into the most romantic and quiet dell imaginable, for it was too narrow to be called a valley. The trees overhung it so closely that at noonday this sweet nook was dark as twilight, and the profound silence was only broken by the monotonous murmur of the stream.

Close by the stream half sat, half reclined, a youth just emerging from childhood. In fact, he could hardly be called more than a boy; for his frame showed but little development of strength, and his regular features, combined with an excessive paleness, the result of confinement, gave the impression that he was even of tender years. His eyes would alone have given him the credit of uncommon beauty; they were large, dark, and so bright that it seemed the effect of disease, especially in a face that rarely or never smiled.

A most unusual thing was a holiday for the melancholy lad. His whole soul was given up to one passion—the love of music. Oh! how precious to him were the moments of solitude. He had loved, for this, even his poor garret room, meanly furnished, but rich in the possession of one or two musical instruments, whither he would retire at night, when released from irksome labor, and spend hours of delight stolen from slumber. But to be alone with nature, in her grand woods, under the blue sky, with no human voice to mar the infinite harmony—how did his heart pant for this communion! His breast seemed to expand and fill with the grandeur, the beauty, of all around him. The light breeze rustling in the leaves came to his ear laden with a thousand melodies; the very grass and flowers under his feet had a language for him. His spirits, long depressed and saddened, sprang into new life, and rejoiced with unutterable joy.

The hours wore on, a dusky shadow fell over foliage and stream, and the solitary lad rose to leave his chosen retreat. As he ascended the narrow winding path, he was startled by hearing his own name; and presently a man, apparently middle-aged and dressed plainly, stood just in front of him. "Come back, Louis," said the stranger, "it is not so dark as it seems here; you have time enough this hour to return to the city." The stranger's voice had a thrilling though melancholy sweetness; and Louis suffered him to take his hand and lead him back. They seated themselves in the shade beside the water.

"You might have done better," returned the lad, reddening at the thought of having been subjected to espionage.

"Peace, boy," said his companion; "I love you, and have done all for your good."

"Yet I know you well. Does that surprise you? I know your thoughts also. You love music better than aught else in the world; but you despair of excellence because you cannot follow the rules prescribed."

"Your masters also despair of you. The court-organist accuses you of conceit and obstinacy; your father reproaches you; and all your acquaintance pronounce you a boy of tolerable abilities, spoiled by an ill disposition."

"The gloom of your condition increases your distaste to all studies not directly connected with music, for you feel the need of her consolations. Your compositions, wild, melancholy as they are, embody your own feelings, and are understood by none of the connoisseurs."

"No matter who I am. I come to give you a little advice, my boy. I compassionate, yet I revere you. I revere your heaven-imparted genius. I commiserate the woes those very gifts must bring upon you through life."

The boy lifted his eyes again; those of the speaker seemed so bright, yet withal so melancholy, that he was possessed of a strange fear. "I see you," continued the unknown solemnly, "exalted above homage, but lonely and unblessed in your elevation. Yet the lot of such is fixed; and it is better, perhaps, that one should consume in the sacred fire than that the many should lack illumination."

"That is not strange, since you do not understand yourself," said the stranger. "As for me, I pay homage to a future sovereign!" and he suddenly snatched up the boy's hand and kissed it. Louis was convinced of his insanity.

"A sovereign in art," continued the unknown. "The sceptre that Haydn and Mozart have held shall pass without interregnum to your hands. When you are acknowledged in all Germany for the worthy successor of these great masters—when all Europe wonders at the name of Beethoven—remember me.

"But you have much ground to pass over," resumed the stranger, "ere you reach that glorious summit. Reject not the aid of science, of literature; there are studies now disagreeable that still may prove serious helps to you in the cultivation of music. Contemn not any learning: for art is a coy damsel, and would have her votaries all accomplished! Above all—trust yourself. Whatever may happen, give no place to despondency. They blame you for your disregard of rules; make for yourself higher and vaster rules. You will not be appreciated here; but there are other places in the world; in Vienna—"

"You shall go there, and remain," said the stranger; "and there too you shall see me, or hear from me. Adieu, now—auf Wiedersehen." ("To meet again.")

And before the boy could recover from his astonishment the stranger was gone. It was nearly dark, and he could see nothing of him as he walked through the wood. He could not, however, spend much time in search; for he dreaded the reproaches of his father for having stayed out so late. All the way home he was trying to remember where he had seen the unknown, whose features, though he could not say to whom they belonged, were not unfamiliar to him. It occurred to him at last, that while playing before the elector one day a countenance similar in benevolent expression had looked upon him from the circle surrounding the sovereign. But known or unknown, the "auf Wiedersehen" of his late companion rang in his ears, while the friendly counsel sank deep in his heart.

Traversing rapidly the streets of Bonn, young Beethoven was soon at his own door. An unusual bustle within attracted his attention. To his eager questions the servants replied that their master was dying. Shocked to hear of his danger, Louis flew to his apartment. His brothers were there, also his mother, weeping; and the physician supported his father, who seemed in great pain.

Louis clasped his father's cold hand, and pressed it to his lips, but could not speak for tears.

"God's blessing be upon you, my son!" said his parent. "Promise me that throughout life you will never forsake your brothers. I know they have not loved you as they ought; that is partly my fault; promise me, that whatever may happen you will continue to regard and cherish them."

"I will—I will, dear father!" cried Louis, sobbing. Beethoven pressed his hand in token of satisfaction. The same night he expired. The grief of Louis was unbounded.

It was a bitter thing thus to lose a parent just as the ties of nature were strengthened by mutual appreciation and confidence; but it was necessary that he should rouse himself to minister support and comfort to his suffering mother.

Lecky On Morals.

[Footnote 155: History of European Morals, from Augustus to Charlemagne. By William Edward Hartpoole Lecky, M.A. London: Longmans, Green & Co. 1869. 2 vols. 8vo.]

Mr. Lecky divides his work into five chapters. The first chapter is preliminary, and discusses "the nature and foundations of morals," its obligation and motives; the second treats of the morals of the pagan empire; the third gives the author's view of the causes of the conversion of Rome and the triumph of Christianity in the empire; the fourth the progress and deterioration of European morals from Constantine to Charlemagne; and the fifth the changes effected from time to time in the position of women. The author does not confine himself strictly within the period named, but, in order to make his account intelligible, gives us the history of what preceded and what has followed it; so that his book gives one, from his point of view, the philosophy and the entire history of European morals from the earliest times down to the present.

The subject of this work is one of great importance in the general history of the race, and of deep interest to all who are not incapable of serious and sustained thought. Mr. Lecky is a man of some ability, of considerable first or second hand learning, and has evidently devoted both time and study to his subject. His style is clear, animated, vigorous, and dignified; but his work lacks condensation and true perspective. He dwells too long on points comparatively unimportant, and repeats the same things over and over again, and brings proofs after proofs to establish what is mere commonplace to the scholar, till he becomes not a little tedious. He seems to write under the impression that the public he is addressing knows nothing of his subject, and is slow of understanding. He evidently supposes that he is writing something very important, and quite new to the whole reading world. Yet we have found nothing new in his work, either in substance or in presentation, nothing—not even an error or a sophism—that had not been said, and as well said, a hundred times before him; we cannot discover a single new fact, or a single new view of a fact, that can throw any additional light on European morals in any period of European history. Yet we may say Mr. Lecky, though not an original or a profound thinker, is above the average of English Protestant writers, and compiles with passable taste, skill, and judgment.

We know little of the author, except as the author of the book before us, and of a previous work, on Rationalism in Europe, and we have no vehement desire to know anything more of him. He belongs, with some shades of difference, to a class represented, in England, by Buckle, J. Stuart Mill, Frank Newman, and James Martineau; and of which the Westminster Review is the organ; in France, by M. Vacherot, Jules Simon, and Ernest Renan; and, in this country, by Professor Draper, of this city, and a host of inferior writers. They are not Christians, and yet would not like to be called anti-Christians; they are judges, not advocates, and, seated on the high judicial bench, they pronounce, as they flatter themselves, an impartial and final judgment on all moral, religious, and philosophical codes, and assign to each its part of good, and its part of evil. {530} They aim to hold an even balance between the church and the sects, between Christian morals and pagan morals, and between the several pagan religions and the Christian religion, all of which they look upon as dead and gone, except with the ignorant, the stupid, and the superstitious. Of this class Mr. Lecky is a distinguished member, though less brilliant as a writer than Renan, and less pleasing as well as less scientific than our own Draper.

The writers of this class do not profess to break with Christian civilization, or to reject religion or morals, but strive to assert a morality without God, and a Christianity without Christ. They deny in words neither God nor Christ, but they find no use for either. They deny neither the possibility nor the fact of the supernatural, but find no need of it and no place for it. They concede providence, but resolve it into a fixed natural law, and are what we would call naturalists, if naturalism had not received so many diverse meanings. In their own estimation, they are not philosophers, moralists, or divines, but really gods, who know, of themselves, good and evil, right and wrong, truth and error, and whose prerogative it is to judge all men and ages, all moralities, philosophies, and religions, by the infallible standard which each one of them is, or has in himself. They are the fulfilment of the promise of Satan to our mother Eve, "Ye shall be as gods."

Mr. Lecky, in his preliminary chapter, on the nature and foundation of morals, refutes even ably and conclusively the utilitarian school of morals, and defends what he calls the "intuitive" school. He contends that it is impossible to found morals on the conception of the useful, or on fears of punishment and hopes of reward; and argues well, after Henry More, Cudworth, Clark, and Butler, that all morality involves the idea of obligation, and is based on the intuition of right or duty; or, in other words, on the principle of human nature called conscience. But this, after all, is no solution of the problem raised. There is, certainly, a great difference between doing a thing because it is useful, and doing it because it is right; but there is a still greater difference between the intuitive perception of right and the obligation to do it. The perception or intuition of an act as obligatory, or as duty, but is not that which makes it duty or obligatory. The obligation is objective, the perception is subjective. The perception or intuition apprehends the obligation, but is not it, and does not impose it. The intuitive moralists are better than the utilitarians, in the respect that they assert a right and a wrong independent of the fact that it is useful, or injurious, to the actor. But they are equally far from asserting the real foundation of morals; because, though they assert intuition or immediate perception of duty, they do not assert or set forth the ground of duty or obligation. Duty is debt, is an obligation; but whence the debt? whence the obligation? We do not ask why the duty obliges, for the assertion of an act as duty is its assertion as obligatory; but why does the right oblige? or, in other words, why am I bound to do right? or any one thing rather than another?

Mr. Lecky labors hard to find the ground of the obligation in some principle or law of human nature, which he calls conscience. But conscience is the recognition of the obligation, and the mind's own judgment of what is or is not obligatory; it is not the obligation nor its creator. {531} This mistake proceeds from his attempt to found morals on human nature as supreme law-giver, and is common to all moralists who seek to erect a system of morals independent of theology. Dr. Ward, in his work on Nature and Grace, commits the same mistake in his effort to find a solid foundation in nature of duty, without rising to the Creator. All these moralists really hold, as true, the falsehood told by Satan to our first parents, "Ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil;" that is, in order to know good or evil ye shall not need to look beyond your own nature, nor to recognize yourselves as subject to, or dependent on, any authority above or distinct from it. It is the one fundamental error that meets us in all Gentile philosophy, and all modern philosophy and science, speculative, ethical, or political, that holds itself independent of God. The schoolmen understood by morals, when the term means duty, or anything more than manners and customs, what is called Moral Theology, or the practical application of speculative and dogmatic theology to the offices of life, individual, domestic, and social or political. Natural morality meant that portion of man's whole duty which is prescribed by the natural law and promulgated by reason, as distinguished from revelation. They based all morals on the great principle of theology, and therefore they called theology the queen of the sciences. We have made no advance on them.

In morals, three things—first, the obligation; second, the regula or rule; third, the end—are essential, and must be carefully distinguished. Why am I bound to do one thing rather than another? that is, why am I bound at all? What am I bound to do, or to avoid? For what end? These three questions are fundamental and exhaustive. The intuitionists hold that all morals involve the idea or conception of duty; but they omit to present the reason or ground of duty or obligation, and therefore erect their moral fabric without any foundation, and make it a mere castle in the air. They confound conscience with obligation, and the rule or law with the reason or motive for observing it. Suppose we find in human nature the rule or law; we cannot find in it either the obligation or the motive, for the simple reason that human nature is not independent, is not sufficient for itself, does not belong to itself, and has in itself neither its origin nor its end, neither its first nor its final cause. The rule—regula—is the law, and the law prescribes what is to be done and what is to be avoided; but it does not create the obligation nor furnish the motive of obedience. Mr. Lecky himself maintains that it does not, and is very severe upon those who make an arbitrary law the ground of moral distinctions, or the reason of duty. The law does not make the right or the wrong. The act is not right because commanded, nor wrong because prohibited; but it is commanded because it is right, and prohibited because it is wrong. Whence then the obligation? or, what is it that transforms the right into duty? This is the question that the independent or non-theological moralists, no matter of what school, do not and cannot answer.

There is no answer, unless we give up the godship of man, give Satan the lie, and understand that man is a dependent existence; for an independent being cannot be bound or placed under the obligation of duty, either by his own act or by the act of another. If man is dependent, he is created, and, if created, he belongs to his Creator; for the maker has a sovereign right to that which he makes. {532} It is his act, and nothing is or can be more one's own, than one's own act. Man, then, does not own himself; he owes himself, all he is, and all he has, to his Creator. As it has pleased his Creator to make him a free moral agent, capable of acting from choice, and with reference to a moral end, he is bound to give himself, by his own free will, to God to whom he belongs; for his free will, his free choice, belongs to God, is his due; and the principle of justice requires us to give to every one his due, or what is his own.

Here, then, in man's relation to God as his creator, is the ground of his duty or obligation. It grows out of the divine creative act. Deny the being of God, deny the creative act, deny man is the creature of God, and you deny all obligation, all duty, and therefore, according to Mr. Lecky's own doctrine, all morals.

The irrational cannot morally bind the rational. All men are equal, and no man, no body of men has, or can have, a natural right to bind or govern another. Only the Creator obliges, as the owner of the creature; and if I owe myself, all I am and all I have, to God, I owe nothing to another in his own right, and only God has any right over me, or to me. Here is at once the basis of obligation and of liberty, and the condemnation of all tyranny and despotism. From this, it clearly follows that every system of morals that rests on nature, the state, or any thing created, as its foundation, is not and of itself cannot be obligatory upon any one, and that without God as our creator, and whose we are, there is and can be no moral obligation or duty whatever. Pantheism, which denies the creative act, and atheism, which denies God, both alike deny morals by denying its basis or foundation. Either is fatal to morals, for obligation is only the correlative of the right to command. Having found the ground of obligation, and shown why we are morally bound, the next thing to be considered is the rule by which is determined what we are bound to do, and what we are bound to avoid. Mr. Lecky makes this rule conscience, which, though he labors to prove that it is uniform and infallible in all ages and nations, and all men, he yet concedes varies in its determinations as to what is or is not duty according to the circumstances of the age or nation, the ideal or standard adopted, public opinion, etc. That is, conscience assures us that we ought always to do right, but leaves us to find out, the best way we can, what is or is not right. Conscience, then, cannot be itself the rule; it is a witness within us of our obligation to obey God, and the judgment which we pass on our acts, usually, in practice, on our acts after they are done, is at best only our judgment of what the rule or law is, not the rule or law itself. The rule or regula is not conscience, but the light of conscience, that by which it determines what is or is not duty; it is the law which, according to St. Thomas, is "quaedam est regula et mensura actuum, secundum quam inducitur ad agendum, vel ab agendo retrahitur;" [Footnote 156] or, in the sense we here use the term, the rule, or measure of duty prescribing what is to be done, and what avoided.

It is, as St. Thomas also says, an ordinatio rationis, and as an ordination of reason, it can be only the rule or measure of what is obligatory to be done or to be avoided. It defines and declares what is or is not duty, it does not and cannot make the duty, or create the obligation. The author and his school overlook the fact that reason is perceptive, not legislative. {533} They confound the obligation with the rule that measures and determines it, and assume that it is the reason that creates the duty. They are psychologists, not philosophers, and see nothing behind or above human reason, man's highest and distinguishing faculty. Certainly without reason man could not either perform, or be bound to perform, a single moral act; and yet it is not the reason that binds him; and if he is bound to follow reason, as he undoubtedly is, it is only because reason tells him what is obligatory, and enables him to do it.

Since only God can bind morally, only God can impose the law which measures, defines, or discloses what independent of the law is obligatory. The rule of duty, of right and wrong, is therefore the law of God. The law of God is promulgated in part through natural reason, and in part through supernatural revelation. The former is called the natural law, lex naturalis; the latter, the revealed law, or the supernatural law. But both are integral parts of one and the same law, and each has its reason in one and the same order of things, emanates from one and the same authority, for one and the same ultimate end. There are, no doubt, in the supernatural law, positive injunctions, and prohibitions, which are not contained in the natural law, though not repugnant thereto; but these have their reason and motive in the end, which in all cases determines the law. All human laws, ecclesiastical or civil, derive all their vigor as laws from the law of God, and all the positive injunctions and prohibitions of either are, in their nature, disciplinary, or means to the end, in which is the reason or motive of the law. Hence there is, and can be, nothing arbitrary in duty. Nothing is or can be imposed, under either the natural law or the supernatural law, in either church or state, in religion or morals, that does not immediately or mediately grow out of our relation to God as our creator, and as our last end or final cause. As a Christian I am bound to obey the supreme Pastor of the church, not as a man commanding in his own name, or by his own authority, but as the vicar of Christ, who has commissioned him to teach, discipline, and govern me. As a citizen I am bound to obey all the laws of my country not repugnant to the law or the rights of God, but only because the state has, in secular matters, authority from God to govern. In either case the obedience is due only to God, and he only is obeyed. It is his authority and his alone that binds me, and neither church nor state can bind me beyond or except by reason of its authority derived from him.

The law is the rule, and is prescribed by the end, in which is the reason or motive of duty. The law is not the reason or motive of duty, nor is it the ground of the obligation. It is simply the rule, and tells us what God commands, not whence his right to command, nor wherefore he commands. His right to command rests on the fact that he is the Creator. But why does he command such and such things, or prescribe such and such duties? We do not answer, because such is his will; though that would be true as we understand it. For such answer would be understood by this untheological age, which forgets that the divine will is the will of infinite reason, to imply that duties are arbitrary, rest on mere will, and that there is no reason why God should prescribe one thing as duty rather than another. What the law of God declares to be duty is duty because it is necessary to accomplish the purpose of our existence, or the end for which we are created. Everything that even God can enjoin as duty has its reason or motive in that purpose or end. The end, then, prescribes, or is the reason of, the law.

The end for which God creates us is himself, who is our final cause no less than our first cause. God acts always as infinite reason, and cannot therefore create without creating for some end; and as he is self-sufficing and the adequate object of his own activity, there is and can be no end but himself. All things are not only created by him but for him. This is equally a truth of philosophy and of revelation, and even those theologians who talk of natural beatitude, are obliged to make it consist in the possession of God, at least, as the author of nature. Hence, St. Paul, the greatest philosopher that ever wrote, as well as an inspired apostle, says, Rom. xi. 36, "Of him, and by him, and in him are all things;" or, "in him and for him they subsist," as Archbishop Kenrick explains in a note to the passage. The motive or reason of the law is in the end, or in God as final cause. The motive or reason for keeping or fulfilling the law is, then, that we may gain the end for which we are made, or, union with God as our final cause. This is all clear, plain, and undeniable, and hence we conclude that morals, in the strict sense of the word, cannot be asserted unless we assert God as our creator and as our last end.

Mr. Lecky and his school do not, then, attain to the true philosophy of morals, for they recognize no final cause, either of man or his act; and yet there is no moral act that is not done freely propter finem, for the sake of the end. We do not say that all acts not so done are vicious or sinful, nor do we pretend that no acts are moral that are not done with a distinct and deliberate reference to God as our last end. The man who relieves suffering because he cannot endure the pain of seeing it, performs a good deed, though an act of very imperfect virtue. We act also from habit, and when the habit has been formed by acts done for the sake of the end, or by infused grace, the acts done from the habit of the soul without an explicit reference to the end are moral, virtuous, in the true sense of either term; nor do we exclude those Gentiles who, not having the law, do the things of the law, of whom St. Paul speaks, Rom. ii. 14-16.

Mr. Lecky overlooks the end, and presents no reason or motive for performing our duty, distinguishable from the duty itself. He adopts the philosophy of the Porch, except that he thinks it did not make enough of the emotional side of our nature, that is, was not sufficiently sentimental. The Stoics held that we must do right for the sake of right alone, or because it is right. They rejected all consideration of personal advantage, of general utility, the honor of the gods, future life, heaven or hell, or the happiness of mankind. They admitted the obligation to serve the commonwealth and to do good to all men, but because it was right. The good of the state or of the race was duty, but not the reason or motive of the duty. The professedly disinterested morality on which our author, after them, so earnestly insists, closely analyzed, will be found to be as selfish as that of the Garden, or that of Paley and Bentham. The Epicurean makes pleasure, that is, the gratification of the senses, the motive of virtue; the Stoic makes the motive the gratification of his intellectual nature, or rather his pride, which is as much a man's self as what the apostle calls concupiscence, or the flesh. {535} Intellectual selfishness, in which the Stoics abounded, is even more repugnant to the virtue of the actor than the sensual selfishness of the votary of pleasure. We care not what fine words the Stoic had on his lips, no system of pagan morals was further removed from real disinterested virtue than that of the Porch.

Mr. Lecky denounces the morality of the church as selfish, and says the selfish system triumphed with Bossuet over Fénélon; but happily for us he is not competent to speak of the morals enjoined by the church. He does not understand the question which was at issue, and entirely misapprehends the matter for which Fénélon was censured by the Holy See. The doctrine of Fénélon, as he himself explained and defended it, was never condemned, nor was that of Bossuet, which, on several points, was very unsound, ever approved. Several passages of Fénélon's Maxims of the Saints were censured as favoring quietism, already condemned in the condemnation of Molinos and his adherents—a doctrine which Fénélon never held, and which he sought in his Maxims to avoid without running into the contrary extreme, but, the Holy See judged, unsuccessfully. His thought was orthodox, but the language he used could be understood in a quietistic sense; and it was his language, not his doctrine, that was condemned.

The error favored by Fénélon's language, though against his intention, was that it is possible in this life to rise and remain habitually in such a state of charity, or pure love of God for his own sake, of such perfect union with him, that in it the soul no longer hopes or fears, ceases to make acts of virtue, and becomes indifferent to its own salvation or damnation, whether it gains heaven or loses it. The church did not condemn the love of God for his own sake, nor acts of perfect charity, for so much is possible and required of all Christians. The church requires us to make acts of love, as well as of faith and hope, and the act of love is: "O my God! I love thee above all things, with my whole heart and soul, because thou art infinitely amiable and deserving of all love; I love also my neighbor as myself for the love of thee; I forgive all who have injured me, and ask pardon of all whom I have injured." Here is no taint of selfishness, but an act of pure love. Yet though we can and ought to make distinct acts of perfect charity, it is a grave error to suppose that the soul can in this life sustain herself, habitually, in a state of pure love, that she ever attains to a state on earth in which acts of virtue cease to be necessary, in which she ceases from pure love to be actively virtuous, and becomes indifferent to her own fate, to her own salvation or damnation, to heaven or hell—an error akin to that of the Hopkinsians, that in order to be saved one must be willing to be damned. As long as we live, acts of virtue, of faith, hope, and charity, are necessary; and to be indifferent to heaven or hell, is to be indifferent whether we please God or offend him, whether we are united to him or alienated from him.

It is a great mistake to represent the doctrine the church opposed to quietism or to Fénélon as the selfish theory of morals. To act from simple fear of suffering or simple hope of happiness, or to labor solely to escape the one and secure the other, is, of course, selfish, and is not approved by the church, who brands such fear as servile, and such hope as mercenary, because in neither is the motive drawn from the end, which is God, as our supreme good. {536} What the church bids us fear is alienation from God, and the happiness she bids us seek is happiness in God, because God is the end for which we are made. Thus, to the question, "Why did God make you?" the catechism answers, "That I might know him, love him, and serve him in this world, and be happy with him for ever in the next." With him, not without him. The fear the church approves is the fear of hell, not because it is a place of suffering, and the fear of God she inculcates is not the fear of him because he can send us to hell, but because hell is alienation from God, is offensive to him: and therefore the fear is really fear of offending God, and being separated from him. The hope of happiness she approves is the hope of heaven, not simply because heaven is happiness, but because it is union with God, or the possession of God as our last end, which is our supreme good.

Here neither the fear of hell nor the hope of heaven is selfish; for in each the motive is drawn from the end, from God who is our supreme good. It therefore implies charity or the love of God. And herein is its moral value. It may not be perfectly disinterested, or perfect charity, which is the love of God for his own sake, or because he is the supreme good in himself; but to love him as our supreme good, and to seek our good in him and him only, is still to love him, and to draw from him the motive of our acts. The church enjoins this reference to God in which, while she recognizes faith and hope as virtues in this life, she enjoins charity, without which the actor is nothing.

If Mr. Lecky had known the principle of Catholic morals, and understood the motives to virtue which the church urges, he would never have accused her of approving the selfish theory, which proposes in no sense God, but always and everywhere self, as the end. He will allow us no motive to virtue but the right; that is, in his theory, duty has no reason or motive but itself. No doubt his conception of right includes benevolence, the love of mankind, and steady, persevering efforts to serve our country and the human race; but he can assign no reason or motive why one should do so without falling either into the selfishness or the utilitarianism which he professes to reject. The sentimental theory which he seems to adopt cannot help him, for none of our sentiments are disinterested; all the sentiments pertain to self, and seek always their own gratification. This is as true of those called the higher, nobler sentiments as of the lower and baser, and, in point of fact, sentimentalists, philanthropists, and humanitarians are usually the most selfish, cruel, heartless, and least moral people in society. Men who act from sentimental instead of rational motives are never trustworthy, and are, in general, to be avoided.

Mr. Lecky maintains that right is to be done solely because it is right, without any considerations of its particular or general utility, or regard to consequences. But he shrinks from this, and appeals to utility when hard pressed, and argues that considerations of advantage to society or to mankind, or a peculiar combination of circumstances, may sometimes justify us in deviating from the right—that is, in doing wrong. He contends that it may be our duty to sacrifice the higher principles of our nature to the lower, and appears shocked at Dr. Newman's assertion that "the church holds that it were better for sun and moon to drop from heaven, for the earth to fail, and for all the many millions of its inhabitants to die of starvation in extreme agony, so far as temporal affliction goes, than that one soul, I will not say should be lost, but should commit one venial sin, tell one wilful untruth, though it harmed no one, or steal one poor farthing, without excuse." {537} This is too rigid for Mr. Lecky. He places duty in always acting from the higher principles of our nature; but thinks there may be cases when it is our duty to sacrifice them to the lower! He supposes, then, that there is something more obligatory than right, or that renders right obligatory when obligatory it is.

But this doctrine of doing right for the sake of the right is utterly untenable. Right is not an abstraction, for there are no abstractions in nature, and abstractions are simple nullities. It must be either being or relation. If taken as a relation, it can be no motive, no end, because relation is real only in the related. If being, then it is God, who only is being. Your friends, the Stoics, placed it above the divinity, and taught us in Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius that it binds under one and the same law both God and man. But an abstraction which is formed by the mind operating on the concrete can bind no one, for it is in itself simply nothing. The weaker cannot bind the stronger, the inferior the superior, or that which is not that which is. But there is no being stronger than God or above him; for he is, in every respect, supreme. Nothing can bind him, and right must either be identified with him or held to grow out of the relations of his creatures to himself. In the first case, right is God, or God is right; and the obligation to do right is only the obligation to do what God commands. Right, as being, cannot exist distinct from God, and can bind men only in the sense in which God himself binds them. Their sovereign, in such case, is God, who, by his creative act, is their lord and proprietor. But right and God are not identical, and, consequently, right is not being, but a relation. What binds is not the right or the relation, but he who, by his creative act, founds the relation. Rejecting, then, right as an abstraction, we must understand by the right what under this relation it is the duty of the creature to do. Right and duty are then the same. Ask what is man's duty; the answer is, what is right. Ask what is right, and the answer is, whatever is duty.

But right does not make itself right, nor duty itself duty. Here is the defect of all purely rationalistic morals, and of every system of morals that is not based, we say not on revelation, but on theology, or the creative act of God. Right and duty are identical, we grant; but neither can create its own obligation, or be its own reason or motive. To say of an act, it is duty because it is right, or it is right because it is duty, is to reason, as the logicians say, in a vicious circle, or to answer idem per idem, which is not allowable by any logic we are acquainted with. We must, then, if we assert morals at all, come back to theology, and find the ground of obligation or duty—which is simply the right or authority of God to command us—in our relation to God, as our creator or first cause, and the reason or motive in our relation to him as our last end or final cause.

No doubt the reason why the rationalistic moralists in modern times are reluctant to admit this is, because they very erroneously suppose that it means that the basis of morals is to be found only in supernatural revelation, and is not ascertainable or provable by reason. But this is a mistake, growing out of another mistake; namely, that the creative act is a truth of revelation only, and not a truth of science or philosophy. The creative act is a fact of science, the basis, rather, of all science, as of all life in creatures, and must be recognized and held before revelation can be logically asserted. {538} That God is, and is our creator, our first cause, and our final cause, are truths that do not depend on revelation to be known; and the theological basis of morals which we assert, in opposition to the rationalistic moralists, is within the province of reason or philosophy. But the rationalists, in seeking to escape revelation, lose God, and are forced to assert a morality that is independent of him, and does not suppose or need him in order to be obligatory. They are obliged, therefore, to seek a basis of morals in nature, which in its own right has no legislative authority; for nature is the creature of God, and is nothing without him.

The intuition of right, obligation, duty, which, according to our author, is the fundamental principle of morals, is only, he himself maintains, the immediate apprehension of a principle or law of human nature, or of our higher nature, from which we are to act, instead of acting from our lower nature; but our higher nature is still nature, and no more legislative than our lower nature. Nature being always equal to nature, nothing is more certain than that nature cannot bind nature or place it under obligation.

Besides, when the author places the obligation in nature, whether the higher or the lower, he confounds moral law with physical law, and mistakes law in the sense in which it proceeds from God as first cause for law in the sense in which it proceeds from God as final cause. The physical laws, the natural laws of the physiologists, are in nature, constitutive of it, indistinguishable from it, and are what God creates: the moral law is independent of nature, over it, and declares the end for which nature exists, and from which, if moral nature, it must act. It is supernatural in the sense that God is supernatural, and natural only in the sense that it is promulgated through natural reason independently of supernatural revelation. Natural reason asserts the moral law, but asserts it as a law for nature, not a law in nature. By confounding it with physical laws, and placing it in nature as the law of natural activity, the author denies all moral distinction between it and the law by which the liver secretes bile, or the blood circulates. He holds, therefore, with Waldo Emerson that gravitation and purity of heart are identical, and, with our old transcendentalist friends, that the rule of duty is expressed in the maxims, Obey thyself; Act out thyself; Follow thy instincts. No doubt they meant, as our author means, the higher instincts, the nobler self, the higher nature. But the law recognized and asserted is no more the moral law than is the physical law by which the rain falls, the winds blow, the sun shines, the flowers bloom, or the earth revolves on its axis. Physical laws there are, no doubt, in human nature; but the theologians tell us that an act done from them is not an actus humanus, but an actus hominis, which has no moral character, and, whatever its tendency, is neither virtuous nor vicious.

Mr. Lecky, as nearly all modern philosophers, denies God as final cause, if not as first cause. The moral law has its reason and motive in him as our final cause, and this is the difference between it and physical law. The pagan Greeks denied both first cause and final cause, for they knew nothing of creation; but being a finely organized race and living in a country of great natural beauty, they confounded the moral with the beautiful, as some moderns confound art with religion. The author so far agrees with them, at least, as to place duty in the beauty and nobility of the act, or in acts proceeding from the beauty and nobility of our nature—what he calls our higher nature. {539} We do not quarrel with Plato when he defines beauty to be the splendor of the divinity, and therefore that all good, noble, and virtuous acts are beautiful, and that whoever performs them has a beautiful soul. But there is a wide difference between the beautiful and the moral, though the Greeks expressed both by the same term; and art, whose mission it is to realize the beautiful, has of itself no moral character; it lends itself as readily to vice as to virtue, and the most artistic ages are very far from being the most moral or religious ages. The mistake is in overlooking the fact that every virtuous or moral act must be done propter finem, and that the law, the reason, the motive of duty depends on the end for which man was made and exists.

But the author and his school have not learned that all things proceed from God by way of creation, and return to him without absorption in him as their last end. Morals are all in the order of this return, and are therefore teleological. Not knowing this, and rejecting this movement of return, they are forced to seek the basis of morals in man's nature in the order of its procession from God, where it is not. The intuition they assert would be something, indeed, if it were the intuition of a principle or law not included in man's nature, but on which his nature depends, and to which it is bound, by the right of God founded in his creative act, to subordinate its acts. But by the intuition of right, which they assert, they do not mean anything really objective and independent of our nature, which the mind really apprehends. On their system they can mean by it only a mental conception, that is, an abstraction. We indeed find men who, as theologians, understand and defend the true and real basis of morals, but who, as philosophers, seeking to defend what they call natural morality, only reproduce substantially the errors of the Gentiles. This is no less true of the intuitive school, than of the selfish, the sentimental, or the utilitarian. Cudworth founds his moral system in the innate idea of right, in which he is followed by Dr. Price; Samuel Clarke gives, as the basis of morals, the idea of the fitness of things; Wollaston finds it in conformity to truth; Butler, in the idea or sense of duty; Jouffroy, in the idea of order; Fourier, in passional harmony—only another name for Jouffroy's order. But these all, since they exclude all intuition of the end or final cause, build on a mental conception, or a psychological abstraction, taken as real. The right, the fitness, the duty, the order they assert are only abstractions, and they see it not.

It is the hardest thing in the world to convince philosophers that the real is real, and the unreal is unreal, and therefore nothing. Abstractions are firmed by the mind, and are nothing out of the concrete from which they are generalized. A system of philosophy, speculative or moral, built on abstractions or abstract conceptions of the true, the right, the just, or duty, has no real foundation, and no more solidity than "the baseless fabric of a vision." Yet we cannot make the philosophers see it, and every day we hear people, whose language they have corrupted, talk of "abstract principles," "abstract right," "abstract justice," "abstract duty," "abstract philosophy," "abstract science;" all of which are "airy nothings," to which not even the poet can give "a local habitation and a name." The philosophers who authorize such expressions are very severe on sensists and utilitarians; yet they really hold that all non-sensible principles and causes, and all ideas not derived from the senses, are abstractions, and that the sciences which treat of them are abstract sciences. {540} Know they not that this is precisely what the sensists themselves do? If the whole non-sensible order is an abstraction, only the sensible is real, or exists a parte rei, and there is no intelligible reality distinct from the sensible world. All heathen philosophy ends in one and the same error, which can be corrected only by understanding that the non-sensible is not an abstraction, but real being, that is God, or the real relation between God and his acts or creatures. But to do this requires our philosophers to cast out from their minds the old leaven of heathenism which they have retained, to recognize the creative act of God, and to find in theology the basis of both science and morals.

Mr. Lecky proves himself, in the work before us, as in his previous work, an unmitigated rationalist, and rationalism is only heathenism revived. He himself proves it. He then can be expected to write the history of European morals only from a heathen point of view, and his judgments of both heathen and Christian morals will be, in spite of himself, only those of a respectable pagan philosopher and in the latter period of pagan empire, and attached to the moral philosophy of the Porch. He is rather tolerant than otherwise of Christianity, in some respects even approves it, lauds it for some doctrines and influences which it pleases him to ascribe to it, and to which it has no claim; but judges it from a stand-point far above that of the fathers, and from a purely pagan point of view, as we may take occasion hereafter to show, principally from his account of the conversion of Rome, and the triumph of the Christian religion in the Roman empire.

But we have taken up so much space in discussing the nature and foundation of morals, to which the author devotes his preliminary chapter, that we have no room for any further discussion at present. What we have said, however, will suffice, we think, to prove that rationalism is as faulty in morals as in religion, to vindicate the church from the charge of teaching a selfish morality, and to prove that the only solid basis of morals is in theology.

Faith.

      Faith is no weakly flower,
  By sudden blight, or heat, or stormy shower
      To perish in an hour.

      But rich in hidden worth,
  A plant of grace, though striking root in earth,
      It boasts a hardy birth:

      Still from its native skies
  Draws energy which common shocks defies,
      And lives where nature dies!


   Oratory, Birmington.          E. Caswall.

Religion Emblemed In Flowers.

  "Wondrous truths, and manifold as wondrous,
     God hath written in the stars above;
   But not less in the bright flowerets under us
     Stands the revelation of his love.
   And with childlike, credulous affection
     We behold their tender buds expand—
   Emblems of our own great resurrection,
     Emblems of the bright and better land."

Of all the poetic and suggestive traditions that linger with us from the early ages—those ages when art revived through religion, and symbolized the truths of eternity by the creation and application of such esthetics which, under the dominion of heathendom, had been perverted to purely sensual enjoyment—of all these traditions, then, we find few more beautiful in their various types, more elevating in their idealization, or which form a stronger connecting link between the soul's aspirations and our material enjoyment, than those frailest children of the beautiful that belong to the floral kingdom. Coeval with the creation, the solace, companions, and delight of our first parents, they shared the punishment, likewise, of man's transgression, in the flood; but when the waters subsided, they were the chosen symbols to announce to Noah the cessation of omnipotent vengeance, and the first to greet the weary wanderers, as their feet again touched the earth; raising their lowly heads from around the tree-roots, and through the rocky fissures, as emblems of the life immortal that springs from decay.

Among those which seem to be the chosen ones, as most expressive of religious sentiment, both in the Old and New Testament as well as in early legendary lore, are the rose, the lily, the olive, and the palm.

To each of these has been given a significance, from the earliest times, that has made them cherished with our households and associated with our faith. Although the rose was perverted by the heathen into a type of sensual love and luxury, yet, through the marvellous beauty and variety of its creation, it was reclaimed by the Christian poets, to be the attendant of the pure and holy, wherever an ornament was needed to paint a moral victory, or glorify decay.

That this flower was largely cultivated by the Jews, and used in their religious festivals as an ornament, is made clear by the frequent use we find of it, as a simile in the Bible. Solomon, in his song, compares the church to the "rose of Sharon and lily of the valley." Again, in the book of Wisdom, we see their appreciation in the admonition, "Let us crown ourselves with rosebuds ere they be withered." Also, in Ecclesiasticus, occurs this metaphor, "I was exalted like a palm-tree in Engaddi, and as a rose-plant in Jericho." Again, "Hearken to me, ye holy children, and bud forth as roses growing by the brook."

It was a belief among the Jews, according to Zoroaster, says Howitt, "that every flower is appropriated to a particular angel, and that the hundred-leaf rose is consecrated to an archangel of the highest order." The same author relates, that the Persian fire-worshippers believe that Abraham was thrown into a furnace by Nimrod, and the flames forthwith turned into a bed of roses.

In contradistinction to this in sentiment is the belief of the Turk, who holds that this lovely flower springs from the perspiration of Mohammed, and, in accordance with this creed, they never tread upon it or suffer one to lie upon the ground.

I think it was Solon who held the theory that the rose and the woman were created at the same time, and in consequence thereof, there sprang up a contest among the gods, as to which should be awarded the palm of superior beauty. Certainly there may yet be traced a close resemblance between these native queens, not only in the matter of beauty, but also in the variety and fragility for which the rose, above all others, is distinguished. Everywhere has God planted this exquisite work of his hand. In the bleak polar regions, where the days of sunshine are so short, and so few, there is seen among the first breathings of the summer zephyrs the "Rosa rapa," its slender stem covered with pale double flowers, lifting its head to greet those ice-bound prisoners as they issue from the stifling air of their winter huts. Degraded as are that people in their tastes, the magic of these silent messengers from God is so forcible, that they greet them with a poet's joy, and deck their heads and rough sealskin clothing with their tender blossoms. Even to the broken-hearted Siberian exile, there come a few short days in his life when these frail comforters rise from the frozen earth to greet him, like messengers from his lost home and friends. … It is not to be wondered, then, with all the associations of Eden ever clinging about these eloquent voices, that the early Christians transferred their ornamental and suggestive beauties from the saturnalian rites of heathendom to the honor of God and his saints. Hence it is, that, in so many of the beautiful legends that have come down to us, we find these frail memorials so often associated as types of some noble deed accomplished, or the given reward of some heavy human sacrifice. To those who look upon these legends as myths, or simply religious fairy tales, we can only say, with Mrs. Jameson, that we most sincerely pity all such sceptics from our heart; for, where they outstrip the bounds of even miraculous probability, there may yet be found in their pages both entertainment and instruction. And after all, why should not religion have her fairyland, as well as material life? Why should not the soul enjoy the privilege of an occasional transport into a world of poetical visions, as well as the imagination, which finds in the fairy-dreams of childhood only a dim vista of annual blooms, upon which the breath of heaven can never blow? Weary with the turmoil of life, with the noise and whirl of the shifting scenes that open continuously upon a vista of pain, and sorrow, and unrealized hopes, such legends recall to the soul auroral gleams of childhood's purity, and transport her into fields that are redolent with the flowers of that eternal land where earthly woes can never come. In this Dodona grove, the soul hallows the heart; the impossible becomes the real; and as all the aspirations for the higher life possess it, the skies seem to open, we catch a flutter of the angels' robes, the perfume of the flowers of paradise, and a glimmer even of the golden gates shoots radiantly across the uplifted, tear-dimmed eye; and we feel, for these few moments at least, that God and heaven are very nigh, ay! even in our heart of hearts. {543} What matters it, then, if it be not all truth, since it serves the purpose, and for the time being decks the soul in regal splendor, and makes the unattainable and dim worth the longest toil and hardest battle that the short span of human life can compass? In those early ages, when the heathen idols were tottering on their thrones, and the voice of Pan had died out in a mighty wail at the sound of a feeble infant's cry—in those dawning Christian days there was felt the need of mental food of a nourishing and elevating kind for the masses. Heretofore, they had been kept occupied by public games, periodical saturnalian revels, gladiatorial combats, and other heathen abominations, in order to allow the philosopher to pursue his subtle theories in quiet, and the wheels of government to run smoothly on. As years and numbers, however, increased the Christian fold, and the first fervor began to abate under the influence of human passions and the need of life's varieties, it became evident that some food was necessary to meet the hunger of the craving mind. The time and thoughts of the philosophers and theologians were too deeply engrossed with the abstruse problems of the day—the esoteric and exoteric—to give other time beyond that of the soul's immediate requirements to the ignorant. Hence it was, that, as human blood was poured out like water, in libations to the true God, when beauty and innocence, rank and lowliness, wealth and poverty, found a common centre wherein to pray and suffer—hence it was, that the religious, poetic heart of the people idealized and beatified these deeds of heroic sanctity; and the church, while striving to repress extravagance, yet welcomed and fostered a taste which she saw, in her mighty wisdom, would be productive of elevating thought and emulative example. "And it is a mistake," says Mrs. Jameson, "to suppose that these legends had their sole origin in the brains of dreaming monks. The wildest of them had some basis of truth to rest on, and the forms which they gradually assumed were but the necessary results of the age which produced them. They became the intense expression of that inner life which revolted against the desolation and emptiness of the outward existence; of those crushed and outraged sympathies which cried aloud for rest, and refuge, and solace, and could nowhere find them." Mrs. Jameson disclaims any idea of treating these legends save in their poetic and artistic aspect. But as religion is the root from whence all have their source, so it is insensibly transmuted throughout the whole work. And how could she do otherwise, Protestant though she was? For the great trunk, the massive column, around which all these delicate fibres of poesy cling, is religion. Without such support, they would fall, and be trailed in the dust, and long, long ere this, their ephemeral life would have been crushed out, as were the oracular voices of the marble gods.

This literature, then, "became one in which peace was represented as better than war, and sufferance more dignified than resistance; which exhibited poverty and toil as honorable, and charity as the first of virtues; which held up to imitation and emulation self-sacrifice in the cause of good, and contempt of death for conscience' sake—a literature in which the tenderness, the chastity, the heroism of woman, played a conspicuous part; which distinctly protested against slavery, against violence, against impurity in word and deed; which refreshed the fevered and darkened spirit with images of moral beauty and truth, revealed bright glimpses of a better land, where the wicked cease from troubling, and brought down the angels of God with shining wings, and bearing crowns of glory, to do battle with the demons of darkness, to catch the fleeting soul of the triumphant martyr, and carry it at once into a paradise of eternal blessedness and peace." [Footnote 157]

Under the influence, then, of these new inspirations, art likewise revived, and the brush and the chisel lent the aid of their immortal touch to give force and perpetuity to these creations; and birds, and flowers, and the elements were introduced as types or allegories of the subjects thus interpreted. Each one possessed a significance and symbolism that united the soul to the eternal source of these gifts, and kept alive in the common heart those principles which the people could admire if not emulate. The rapidity with which artists multiplied at this period belongs to the marvelous. God needed artisans for his work, and truly the old masters seemed, judging from their deeds and spirit, to have risen, like Adam, from the clay moulding of the almighty hand. Possessed by a sense of the lofty nature of their calling, they not only strove for perfection in detail, but also for a religious spirit, which should so inspire the work as to move every heart to piety, and embody for instruction the full force of the solemn truths therein portrayed. They emerged from the impure influences of the old religion and literature, like the chrysalis, into the golden-hued glory that shone in the lives of the ancient patriarchs and prophets; in the auroral beams that hung like sea-foam over the angels as they walked or talked as God's messengers on earth, until, bathed in a glory borrowed from the very smile of the Creator, they saw the divine Son descend like the morning star, and dwell upon earth among men.

In all their work a confession of faith lay embodied; and feeling themselves called to this vocation, hearing the voice and seeing in the enthusiasm of their fervor the burning bush, they purified themselves by prayer, and fasting, and long meditation upon the subject that was to grow into life under the glowing tints of the brush or the magic stroke of the chisel. This mystical spirit so elevated and ennobled the soul-work of those grand old masters that faults in mechanical execution and anachronisms in details are, even to this day, overlooked, for the sake of that con amore zeal which pervades the vital treatment of their subjects. Fra Angelico, a Dominican monk, devoted his art life exclusively to the religious mysticism of his subjects. "Whenever he painted Christ upon the cross," says Jarves, "the tears would roll down his cheeks as if he were an actual eyewitness of his Saviour's agony. There is a celestial glow in all his beatified faces that seem to radiate from his own soul." Lippo Dalmasio, an early painter of Bologna, was also noted for his piety in art.

"He never painted the holy Virgin without fasting the previous evening, and receiving absolution and the bread of angels in the morning after; and, finally, never consented to paint for hire, but only as a means of devotion." [Footnote 158]

Add to these, Luini, of Milan; Francia, of Bologna; Gentile and John Bellini, of Venice; Fra Bartolomeo, the Florentine monk, and friend of Savonarola; Perugino, and finally, Raphael—and we have the list of those who led the vanguard in the perpetuity of those heaven-toned idealizations that yet greet the eye with their beauty and animate the heart with emotions of grateful homage.

"Such art has left us, and can never again be revived until artists believe and pray as did those men of old; until they can see and feel as they did at all hours, amid their rejoicings or as they slept, holy personages, saints, and virgins, apostles and evangelists, martyrs, and the symbolized faith for which they died. Virtues, and not graces; angels, and not muses; types of spiritual truths, and not expressions of sensuous beauty or lustful passion—these were their daily intellectual food. Amid all things—in church, shop, or bedroom; on the roadside and by the palace; at every street corner, and over every threshold—were the figures of the Redeemer and his holy mother to direct their thoughts still higher heavenward. Religion, at all events, in its external form, and as believed, was confessed by all men and in all places. Youth were taught to rely on spiritual powers for their earthly support and sole sustenance. Charity, faith, the due subjection of the body to the development of its perfect strength, humanity, the succor of the oppressed, the relief of the unfortunate, devoir, duty to all men—such were the doctrines of chivalry in the middle ages." [Footnote 159]

Apart from the palm and olive, we find no mention in the New Testament of flowers, save that exquisite simile of the lilies, made by our Saviour himself; and there can be found no other instance wherein such an illustration is rendered with more beautiful pathos and force. That he appreciated these frail emblems is not only made apparent in this, but is further proved by his choice of the calm repose and soothing influence of these silent sympathizers on Gethsemane's night of woe. No human companionship, no human eye or voice, could aid him then, in that fearful contest of humanity over divinity, as did nature's voiceless comforters—the flowers that were bent down by the weight of their tears, the great shifting sky above, with the eloquent calm of its silver stars, through which floated clear and luminous the angel comforters. Our Saviour proved in all the suffering episodes of his life that lovely groves, and dim funereal forests speak more forcibly to a heart in pain than do the wilder and grander convulsions of nature.

"It is in quiet and subdued passages of unobtrusive majesty, the deep, the calm, and the perpetual; that which must be sought ere it can be seen, and loved ere it is understood; things which the angels work out for us daily, and yet vary eternally; which are never wanting, and never repeated; which are to be found always, yet each found but once—it is through these that her lesson of devotion is chiefly taught and the blessing of beauty given." [Footnote 160]

Nowhere have these beautiful accessories in life's pilgrimage been more glowingly and successfully used, not only as an abstract religious emblem, but as a divine allegorical poem, than in the representations of the life and attributes of the blessed Virgin. To this type of all that was pure and noble in woman; to the humanity which was a link in the chain of divinity, a partaker of all human woes, and yet the chosen of the Godhead—to her were specially dedicated those early labors in revived art, and of which she was the inspiration. Herein, as elsewhere, we find the historical, mystical, and devotional treated with every conceivable adjunct that can typify a being so elevated and benign. The beauty and variety of the rose, the purity and fragrance of the lily, were devoted to her special honor, wherever her name was venerated and loved. Even before it was safe for the early Christians to make an open profession of faith, they expressed their devotion to the mother conjointly with the Son, in the darkness and solitude of the catacombs. {546} Therein it was, that the first Christian artist dared give life to his heart's belief; and therein it was, that her image with that of her divine Son and the apostles were impressed upon the walls and sarcophagi of that grand subterranean temple.

As the Annunciation was the door through which all future blessings flowed, so it became a most fruitful theme to the faith and imagination of those great religious artists whose work was a labor of love; and we find it treated from the fifth to the sixteenth century by Byzantine, Italian, Spanish, and German art with a variety, beauty, and significance that only an enshrined saint could inspire. In the earliest representations of this subject, the angel appeared holding a sceptre, but this mark of authority gradually gave way to the more symbolic lily. This was introduced universally, either held in the hand of the angel as he salutes her, or seen growing in a pot placed in some part of the room. Others again, represent an enclosed garden, upon which the Blessed Virgin is looking from a window. In all, from the crudest to the most finished, some floral adjunct gives beauty and significance to the subject. The Assumption—that fitting climacteric of a life whence sprung the Eternal Word—was likewise a theme of devotional and sublimated art-worship, which gathered pathos and beauty from the belief that her body was worthy the care of the seraphim and cherubim, who transported it with angelic harmonies into the home of her glorified Son. Here, too, we find, according to the legend, her floral emblems springing up in the tomb from whence her incorruptible body had just been raised.

In an Annibale Carracci, the apostles are seen below, one of whom is lifting, with an astonished air, a handful of roses out of the sepulchre. In another, by Rubens, one of the women exhibits the miraculous flowers held up in the folds of her dress. Dominico di Bartolo, who painted in 1430, (according to Mrs. Jameson,) omits the open tomb, but clothes the holy mother in a white robe embroidered with golden flowers.

From the time of the Nestorian heresy, when the title of Dei genitrix was denied the Blessed Virgin, her votaries became even more zealous to corroborate her right to the title and privileges of mother of the man-God; and under the influence of this test of devotion and faith sprang those multitudinous representations of the woman glorified, as the enthroned Madonna. From thence the descent was natural and gradual to those characteristics which distinguished her life in its daily ministrations to her divine Son; and so touchingly natural, so beautiful in their tenderness, are many of these more human portraitures, that the coldest heart cannot withhold its homage, though it may its devotion. Even Mrs. Jameson, herself a Protestant, says, "We look, and the heart is in heaven; and it is difficult to refrain from an Ora pro nobis." In a large number of these inspirations of faith and love, we meet the various floral emblems that typify her beauty and purity. Some of the earliest representations are found in many of the old Gothic cathedrals, executed in sculpture. She is therein portrayed in a standing position, bearing the child on her left arm, while in the right hand she holds a flower, or sometimes a sceptre. In a holy family in the academy of Venice, by Bonifazio, "The virgin is seated in glory, with her infant on her knee, and encircled by cherubim. On one side an angel approaches with a basket of flowers on his head, and she is in the act of taking these flowers and scattering them on the saints who stand below."

The Arcadian and pastoral life, with which many of the Italian artists environ the mother and child, is certainly both poetical and natural. Mrs. Jameson gives many instances of this treatment; among them, one by Philippino Lippi, which is a beautiful idea. "Here," she says, "the mystical garden is formed of a balustrade, beyond which is seen a hedge, all in blush with roses. The virgin kneels in the midst and adores her infant; an angel scatters rose leaves over him, while the little St. John also kneels, and four angels, in attitudes of devotion, complete the group." "But a more perfect example," continues the same author, "is the Madonna of Francia in the Munich gallery, where the divine infant lies on the flowery turf, and the mother standing before him, and looking down on him, seems on the point of sinking on her knees in a transport of tenderness and devotion. With all the simplicity of the treatment, it is strictly devotional. The mother and her child are placed within the mystical garden enclosed in a treillage of roses, alone with each other, and apart from all earthly associations, all earthly communions."

Those who are familiar with the Raphael series of Madonnas will recall, in this connection, his exquisite pastoral La Jardinière. There is also one similarly entitled by a French artist, though differently treated. The virgin is enthroned on clouds, and holds the infant, whose feet rest on a globe. Both mother and child are crowned with roses; and on each side, as if rising from the clouds, are vases filled with roses and lilies. Titian has also left many beautiful and some exaggerated works of the Arcadian school. There is an old Coptic tradition which is very beautiful, and bears somewhat on this subject of nature's aid in glorifying these two lives. Near the site of the ancient Heliopolis, there still stands a very pretty garden, in which (runs the tradition) the holy family rested in their flight into Egypt. Feeling oppressed with thirst, a spring of fresh water gushed at their feet, and on being pursued into their retreat by robbers, a sycamore-tree opened, and hid them from sight. "The spring still exists," says a recent traveller, "and the tree yet stands, and bears such unmistakable marks of antiquity as to make this tradition and faith of the present generation of Coptics at least plausible." But these floral emblematical tributes are as inexhaustible as are the sentiments of love, homage, and tender pity that fill the heart from the contemplation of the Mater Dei Genitrix down to the appealing anguish of the Dolorosa. "Thus in highest heaven, yet not out of sight of earth; in beatitude past utterance; in blessed fruition of all that faith creates and love desires; amid angel hymns and starry glories," we will leave enthroned the "blessed amongst women," and turn to other legends, wherein the saints who followed her stand crowned with flowers celestial, awaiting a share of our praise and veneration.

In Thuringia, one of the provinces of Germany, the traveller is attracted by a species of rose that is universally cultivated by the poorest peasant, as well as the richest land-owner. When the question as to its origin is asked, the answer invariably is, "Oh! that is the rose of the dear St. Elizabeth, our former queen; and was grown from one of the sprigs given to her by the angels." {548} One might as well try to turn the faith of these simple people from their belief in the sanctity of her life as from the truth of the miraculous roses. According to Montalembert and others, thus runs the substance of the legend. Elizabeth loved the poor, and was specially devoted to relieving their necessities, frequently carrying with her own hands goods of various kinds, to distribute among them. At one season, there was a great scarcity of crops throughout the land, and caution and economy in the use of the royal stores had been advised even in the palace. Elizabeth could not bear to know of unrelieved suffering among her people; so, by close economy in her own wants, she managed to furnish food for many others. On one occasion, a very pressing case of necessity reached her; and not wishing to encourage her servants in disobedience to the general command, she started alone on her errand of mercy, with some lighter articles of food concealed in the folds of her dress. Just as she reached the back steps of the chateau, however, she met her husband, with several gentlemen, returning from the chase. Astonished to see his wife alone, and thus burdened, he asked her to show him what she was carrying; but as she held her dress in terror to her breast, he gently disengaged her hands, and behold! "It was filled with white and red roses, the most beautiful he ever saw."

Wandering in thought over these scenes wherein the air is redolent with their fragrance, the form of the young and lovely Dorothea, with the radiant boy-angel at her side, rises in diaphonous light before the vision. We see her as she stands confronting her heathen judge Fabricius, who longs to possess her charms; and to his command, "Thou must serve our gods or die." she mildly answers, "Be it so; the sooner shall I stand in the presence of Him I most desire to behold." Then the governor asked her, "Whom meanest thou?" She replied, "I mean the Son of God, Christ, mine espoused. His dwelling is in paradise; by his side are joys eternal, and in his garden grow celestial fruits, and roses that never fade." And resisting all temptations, all entreaties, she went forth to torture and to death. "And as she went," (continues the legend,) "a young man, a lawyer of the city, named Theophilus, who had been present when she was first brought before the governor, called to her mockingly, 'Ha! fair maiden, goest thou to join thy bridegroom? Send me, I pray thee, of the fruits and flowers of that same garden of which thou hast spoken. I would fain taste of them!' And Dorothea, looking on him, inclined her head with a gentle smile, and said, 'Thy request, O Theophilus! is granted.' Where at he laughed aloud with his companions; but she went on cheerfully to death. When she came to the place of execution, she knelt down and prayed; and suddenly at her side stood a bright and beautiful boy, with hair bright as sunbeams. In his hands, he held a basket containing three apples and three fresh-gathered fragrant roses. She said to-him, 'Carry these to Theophilus; say that Dorothea hath sent them, and that I go before him to the garden whence they came, and await him there.' With those words, she bent her neck, and received the stroke of death. Meantime, the angel went to seek Theophilus, and found him still laughing in merry mood over the idea of the promised gift. The angel placed before him the basket of celestial fruit and flowers, saying, 'Dorothea sends thee these,' and vanished." {549} Amazement filled the mind of Theophilus, and the taste of the fruit and fragrance of the roses pervaded his soul with a new life, the scales of darkness fell, and he proclaimed himself a servant of the same Lord that had won the heart of the gentle maiden. Carlo Dolci, Rubens, and Van Eyck have given the most poetical illustrations of this subject. Many other artists have also treated it, but more coldly.

With the name of St. Cecilia arise visions of angels poised in mid-air, enthralled by seraphic music, which, through the power of its voluminous sweetness, has pierced even the gates of heaven. But the flowers of paradise, as well as its celestial harmonies, are also associated with the name of this beautiful virgin—flowers that were sent to her bridal-chamber, as a reward for her angelic purity and the eloquence which had moved her young heathen husband to respect her vow of chastity. Returning from the instructions of St. Urban, to whom she had sent him, he heard the most enchanting music, and on reaching his wife's chamber he "beheld an angel, who was standing near her, and who held in his hands two crowns of roses gathered in paradise, immortal in their freshness and perfume, but invisible to the eyes of unbelievers. With these he encircled the brows of Cecilia and Valerian; and he said to Valerian, "Because thou hast followed the chaste counsel of thy wife, and hast believed her words, ask what thou wilt, it shall be granted thee."

I stood, early one morning late in the month of June, looking sadly upon the dead, white, upturned face of one who had seemed to walk, while on earth, more with angels than with men. A mystery of sadness had enveloped her life, but, like the cloud in the wilderness, it proved a power that drew her in the footprints of the "Man of sorrows." As I meditated upon the calm etherealized beauty that now absorbed the old earthly pain, and wondered what this secret of a heart-life could have been, her mother entered with tear-dimmed eyes, and placed upon her brow of auburn hair, through which glinted here and there a streak of gray—"dawn of another life that broke o'er her earthly horizon"—in her hands, and over the white fleecy robes, crowns and sprays of mingled crimson and white roses, all glistening with the morning dew.

"Red roses for the dead!" I exclaimed in surprise. "White alone can surely typify such a life and death as hers."

"So you think, my friend, because you with others saw only the outward calm that marked her way. But I—I who loved her so, knew and saw the thorn-crown that pressed her brow, and the hard stones and barbs that strewed every step of her way through life—I place them then here, because she loved them, and because they express, in conjunction with their sister's whiteness, the sorrow and purity of the angelic life now closed to pain and open only to joy.

  "Well done of God, to halve the lot,
     And give her all the sweetness;
   To us, the empty room and cot;
     To her, the heaven's completeness.
   For her to gladden in God's view;
     For us to hope and bear on.
   Grow, Lily, in thy garden new
     Beside the rose of Sharon."

I turned away sadly, marvelling upon the mystery of this life now closed so happily, and involuntarily arose to my mind the exquisite legend of the sultan's daughter.

             I.

  "Early in the morning,
   The sultan's daughter
   Walked in her father's garden,
   Gathering the bright flowers,
   All full of dew.
   And as she gathered them,
   She wondered more and more
   Who was the master of the flowers,
   And made them grow
   Out of the cold, dark earth.
   In my heart,' she said,
       'I love him; and for him
   Would leave my father's palace
   To labor in his garden.'

             II.

  "And at midnight
   As she lay upon her bed,
   She heard a voice
   Call to her from the garden,
   And, looking forth from her window,
   She saw a beautiful youth
   Standing among the flowers;
   And she went down to him,
   And opened the door for him;
   And he said to her,'O maiden!
   Thou hast thought of me with love,
   And for thy sake
   Out of my father's kingdom
   Have I come hither.
       I am the master of the flowers;
   My garden is in paradise,
   And if thou wilt go with me,
   Thy bridal garland
   Shall be of bright red flowers.'
   And then he took from his finger
   A golden ring,
   And asked the sultan's daughter
   If she would be his bride.
   And when she answered him with love,
   His wounds began to bleed,
   And she said to him,
   'O Love! how red thy heart is,
   And thy hands are full of roses.'
   'For thy sake,' answered he,
   'For thy sake is my heart so red,
   For thee I bring these roses.
   I gathered them at the cross
   Whereon I died for thee!
   Come, for my father calls,
   Thou art my celestial bride!'
   And the sultan's daughter
   Followed him to his father's garden." [Footnote 161]

Throughout all the early church legends, we find whatever is pure and beautiful in sentiment and exalted in art carefully cherished, and constantly presented to the contemplation of the votary in some glowing form that could act as a counterpoise to the corrupting influence of heathen passions and pursuits.

When the holy mother stood on Calvary, her heart steeped in agony unutterable, not the least cause of her anguish was to see the waste of those precious drops of blood as they bedewed the hard insensible ground. But behold! as she gazes, and her tears fall, delicate bell-shaped crimson blossoms spring up, and absorb the human dew; and thus, through these frail beautifiers of suffering and consolers of grief, the heart of the mother was comforted, and the soul is drawn to look upward, away from the agonizing ignominy of the cross to the beatified glory to which he is translated at the price of so much woe.

Thus also, in the horrid details of the early martyrdoms, we constantly meet these compensating, suggestive metaphors of the glory won. The painful agony of the downward crucifixion of St. Peter, the waste of blood from that congested head, springs into a fountain of clear gurgling water, from which flows healing for all suffering flesh that seek its miraculous aid. As St. Grata bears the decapitated head of her friend St. Alexander to the tomb, lo! flowers spring up as the blood falls, and are gathered by the mourners to deck his grave.

Among the little band that followed Mother Seton more than fifty years ago, in her divine mission of self-abnegation and Christian love, was a delicate young woman whose life had been spent in ease, amid the devoted love and admiration of a large family circle. Dreamy and poetical by nature, her talent, then rare among American women, was revered and looked up to by seven young brothers as something marvellous; and no implement more fatiguing than the pen or needle was ever allowed to weary her dainty fingers. One day as she sat amid her flowers and books, conning a new inspiration, suddenly the open door of heaven seemed to stand before her, and she felt a voice saying, "He who would come after me must take up his cross and follow me." {551} And believing that her heavenly spouse had called, she closed her books, and turned her face steadfastly away from her weeping friends, and went cheerfully forth to privation and labor. Faithful to her new vows, religion yet did not forbid the exercise of the talent God had given her; only now her themes had become more exalted, and the love and perennial sublimity of heaven took the place of the perishable and annual blooms of time. The privations and labors spent in the service of suffering humanity soon reduced her delicate frame to patient helplessness; but the beauty and love of God in his works and ways triumphed over all her bodily infirmities, and her strength was never too frail to raise a sursum corda in his praise. Whitsuntide of 1813 rose in the light of a glorious May morning, and the sufferer lay panting for breath, after a night of exhausting hemorrhage, and she knew that the angel, with palm in hand, stood by her side ready to conduct her to God. In blissful hope of the fruition that now dawned upon all those past sacrifices, labors, and sufferings, she fell, to the music of those unseen, undulating wings, into a sweet sleep. Mother Seton, who had left the sufferer's bed for a breath of the fresh morning air, just then returned from the garden, bearing in her hand the first rose of the season, knowing how refreshing and suggestive such a gift would be to the weary sufferer. Rejoiced to find her in repose, she gently laid the flower upon her bosom, above the white, folded hands, and quietly left the room. The fitful fever sleep was soon ended, and as Mary opened her eyes, first the fragrance, then the beauty of this heavenly symbol, caught her eye. Wasted and dying though the earthly tenement was, the soul, the poet's soul, yet glowed with vital power; and raising from a little table at her side a pencil and paper, she thereon breathed her last pean of poetic utterance in these lines:

  "The morning was beautiful, mild, and serene,
     All nature had waked from repose;
   Maternal affection came silently in,
     And placed on my bosom a rose.

  "Poor nature was weak, and had almost prevailed,
     The weary eyelids were closed;
   But the soul rose in triumph, and joyfully hailed
     The sweet queen of flowers—the rose.

  "Whitsuntide was the time, the season of love:
     Methought the blest spirit had chose
   To leave for awhile the mild form of a dove,
     And come in the blush of a rose.

  "Come, Heavenly Spirit, descend on each breast,
     And there let thy blessing repose,
   As thou once didst on Mary, thy temple of rest;
     For Mary's our mystical rose.

  "Oh! may every rose that blooms forth evermore,
     Enkindle the spirit of those
   Who see it, or wear it, to bless and adore
     The hand that created the rose."

When Mother Seton returned, she found the lines with the rose still lying on her bosom; and looking into the sweet upturned face, she saw the signet of death stamped upon the luminous eyes, and knew by her short, heavy breathing that ere long she would be singing her songs in the rose-gardens of paradise.

Suggestive of peace and lowliness as are these creations, yet even they have been perverted by the passions of man into insignia of blood and shame. The thirty years' war of the houses of York and Lancaster make the white and red rose ever associated with the sorrows and humiliations, the heroic endurance, and true womanly nobility of Margaret of Anjou. We see her as she stands under her rose-banner, on the heights of Tewksbury, with dauntless courage in her heart, and a mother's wild prayer upon her lips; standing there, amid the wild havoc, unflinchingly, until the wailing, weird blast of the trumpeters tells her that her beautiful white rose is broken at the stem, and its leaves scattered, trampled, and bathed in the life-blood of her only son.

Tracing, then, these exquisite adumbrations throughout the spiritual aspect of life, is it strange that we have learned to look upon these frail children of the beautiful as one of the connecting links with heaven? Of such every heart has its conservatory; every home its storehouse of withered, scentless mementoes, that recall, when the gates of the sanctuary are unbarred, memories deep and voiceless, and faces whose beauty has paled, like them, in dust. Here is the remnant of a cross of white immortelles. It was taken from the breast of a loved one who died far away in a foreign land, among strangers. It was sent with the last spoken words to comfort and uplift the heart of the mourners; and as we lift it from the sacred casket, the echo of those words seems to take form in the rustle of its blighted leaves, and the old, subdued sorrow breaks out afresh before the multitudinous memories and images evoked by a withered flower.

Here lie together a sprig of orange blossom and a white rosebud, double memorial of a happy bridal and an early grave. Ere the perfume of the orange blossom had faded from her brow, the white rose lay on her pulseless heart. Ere the echo of the wedding march had died on the air, it was merged into a requiem dirge of woe.

Ah this spray of brown leaves! what memories lie folded in its veins! A picture of a lone, far away grave rises, and by its side kneel a wife and daughter, come from a great distance to pay some tribute to a beloved one's last resting-spot in a land of strangers. Desolate looked the bare, uncultivated mound; but at the head some tender stranger's hand had placed a plain wooden cross to mark the spot for the absent ones, and planted a wild rose which twined its arms over and around the cross in graceful beauty, as if to offer a poor substitute for the visits of loving friends. How warmly the prayers of the widow went forth for that unknown one who had thus filled the place and thoughtfulness of the absent!

A prisoner walks rapidly up and down the parapet of the Capitol prison in Washington, the wild throbbings of his heart keeping time to the tramp, tramp of his restless feet, which long for space, for liberty, and the sound of the brother voices that send their wild echo from the other side of the Potomac. Suddenly the laughter of a child's voice sounds above him, and, as he in surprise raises his eyes, lo! a cherub head looks from a window down upon him, and the little hands drop at his feet a half-blown rose.

"War's wild alarum call" suddenly dies out, and the soldier's dream of glory gives place to the man's warm love. The wide blue sea no longer rolls between him and home, and over and above the din of battle floats the voice of mother and sister in loving prayer for the absent one, who, impelled by a noble people's cry for aid, hastened to the rescue, and found instead of the élan of battle the cold, dark walls of a prison home. Lo! the power and pathos of a little child and a fragile flower within the walls of a dungeon.

A father kneels in grief unutterable by the soulless body of a little daughter. In the agony of his rebellious grief, he prays to God to send him one ray of comfort, one gleam of light, to see and know that the transition is at least well for her. As he raises his head, his eyes fall upon the family Bible, and with the prayer still in his heart he opens its leaves, and his finger, as if guided by an angel, falls upon these lines, "And he took the damsel by her hand, and said unto her, I say unto thee, arise." {553} With the sacred verse, there came shining down into his heart a clear, sweet perception of the fact that at that very moment our Lord Jesus Christ, who alone is the resurrection and the life, was raising up out of her cold and lifeless form that beautiful, spiritual body in which little Lucy will exist as an angel for ever. He plucked some white and green leaves from the flowers which lay in the dead child's hands, and placed them on that verse of the sacred volume.

"Years have passed away, and they are there still, pale and withered, sacred little mementoes of the consolation which came like a voice from heaven in his hour of need. When he is haunted by sorrowful memories, and falls into states of desolation and despair, he opens that holy book, and kisses those faded leaves, and his spirit is sometimes elevated into that mount which the three disciples ascended with their Lord, and there, by the permission of the same Redeemer who makes every child an image of himself, he sees the body of his little daughter transfigured in glory!" [Footnote 162]

In a white alabaster box, yellowed by the mould of years, are lying, side by side, a crisp, golden curl, a sprig of lily of the valley, and a tuberose. Through the mist of tears that fill the eye rise the angelic features of a little girl, the first-born of her mother. The joyous laughter, the music of the little feet, the endless activity of the waxen fingers, ere they closed lifelessly over those tender lily sprays, all take form and life in presence of these mute memorials. Other children God sent to console the mother for the loss of this little one, and long, long years have ripened them into men and women, and sent them forth to fill the various missions of life that separate them from mother and home. But to the long and early lost, the maternal heart now yearningly turns, as still, above all others, the child of her love. No stronger earthly ties stand between them even now; the mother holds her place supreme here, and feels that for her, above all others on earth, those little hands are folded in prayer, and that sweet-toned voice raised in songs of supplication.

  "Yet still, in all the singing,
     Thinks haply of her song,
   Which in that life's first springing
     Sang to her all night long."

Comforted by such memories, she kisses the mute and withered mementoes, and, as she folds them again reverently, lovingly away in their casket, she prays that

  "When her dying couch about
     The natural mists shall gather,
   Some smiling angel close shall stand
     In old Correggio's fashion,
   And bear a lily in his hand
     For death's annunciation."

Catholicity And Pantheism.

Number Seven.

The Finite.—Continued.

God is infinite intelligence. An agent who acts by understanding must always act for a reason, which is as the lever of the intelligence. This reason is called the end of the action. Therefore, the external act, being the act of an infinite intelligence, must have an end, an object, a reason. So far everything is evident; but a very difficult question here arises: What can the end of the exterior action be? In the first place, it cannot be an end necessarily to be attained; for the necessity of the end would imply also the necessity of the means, and the external act in that supposition would become necessary. But suppose the end not necessary. God, in that case, would be free to accept it; and in that supposition he would either act without a reason, or have another reason or object for accepting an end not necessary to be attained; which second reason would, in its turn, be either necessary or not necessary. If the former, the same inconvenience would exist which we have pointed out before; if the latter, it would require a third reason to account for the second; and so on ad infinitum. The answer to this difficulty consists in the following doctrine. The reason by which an agent acts may be twofold: one, efficient or determining; the other, qualifying the action without determining it. Ontologically speaking, every intelligent agent must act for a reason, but not always be determined to act by the reason. This is eminently true when the agent or efficient cause is the first and universal agent. In this case there would be a contradiction, if the first and universal agent were to act by a reason determining him to the act. For then the predicate would destroy the subject; that is, if the first and universal agent were to act by a determining reason, he would no longer be first, but second agent; no longer universal, but particular. Because in that case the final cause would move him, and thus he would neither be the first nor the cause of everything. This theory resolves the question of the end of the external act. There exists neither an intrinsic reason on the part of the agent to determine him to act outside himself, nor an exterior reason on the part of the term to impel him to act, as we have already demonstrated. Consequently, there can be no determining reason for the external act, and the act must determine itself. The efficient or determining reason of the external act is the choice of the act which is absolute master of itself; it lies in its liberty: and here applies with strict truth that saying, "Stat pro ratione voluntas." And necessarily so, since the first agent either determines himself without any efficient reason, or he is determined by the reason; and in that case he is no longer first, but second. But then God acts outside himself without any reason? Without any efficient and determining reason, independent of his own act, it is granted; without a sufficient reason to make the act rational, it is denied. {555} If there be a reason which qualifies the act, it is sufficient and rational. Now, for instance, to create finite substances is to create substantial good; hence the act of creating them must be good, and therefore rational. And since every finite being, or its perfection, is good, inasmuch as it resembles the infinite goodness and perfection of God, it follows that, as St. Thomas says, the goodness of God is the end of the external act. Divina bonitas est finis omnium rerum.

The determination of the end of the exterior act, which is the goodness of God, as we have explained it, gives rise to another question, which has occupied the highest intellects among philosophers and theologians, and of which we must speak, to pave our way to lay down the whole plan of the exterior action of God, as proclaimed by the Catholic Church.

Finite beings are capable of indefinite perfection. An assemblage of finite beings would form a cosmos, or universe; and as they are capable of indefinite perfections, we may suppose an indefinite number of these, one more perfect than the other, all arrayed in beautiful order in the intelligence of the Creator, in which the intelligibility of all possible things resides. The question arises here, suppose God has determined to act outside himself, which of the whole series of the ideal worlds residing in his intelligence shall he choose? Can he choose any of them? Is he bound to choose the best?

The reader will remark that this question is different from that of the end of creation. The one establishes that God cannot be forced by any reason to act outside himself, else he would not be the first and universal cause. The other question that is proposed now, supposes that God has determined freely and independently of any reason to act outside himself, and asks whether God can choose any of the possible ideal worlds residing in his intellect, or is he forced to choose the best in the series?

Some philosophers, among whom are Leibnitz and Malebranche, contend that God is absolutely free to create or not to create; but once he has determined to create, he is bound to choose the best possible cosmos in the series. We shall let them expound their system in their own words.

"God," says Leibnitz, "is the supreme reason of things, because those which are limited, like everything which comes under our vision and experience, are contingent and have nothing in them which may render their existence necessary; it being manifest that time, space, and matter, united and uniform in themselves, and indifferent to everything, may receive every other movement and figure and be in another order. We must, therefore, seek for a reason for the existence of the world, which is the whole assemblage of contingent beings, and seek it in that substance which carries within itself the reason of its own existence, and which is consequently necessary and eternal.

"It is necessary also that this cause should be intelligent, because the world which exists now, being contingent, and an infinity of other worlds being equally possible, and equally claiming existence, so to speak, it is necessary that the cause of this world should have looked into all such possible worlds to determine upon one. {556} This look or relation of an existing substance to simple possibilities can only be the intelligence which possesses their ideas; and to determine upon one, can only be the act of a will which chooses. The power of such substance renders its will efficacious. Power has relation to being; intelligence, to truth; the will, to good. This cause, moreover, must be infinite in every possible manner, and absolutely perfect in power, in wisdom, in goodness; because it reaches all possibility. And as all this goes together, we can only admit one such substance. Its intelligence is the source of metaphysical essences; its will, the origin of existences. Behold, in a few words, the proof of one God with all his perfections, and of the origin of things by him!

"Now, this supreme wisdom, allied to a goodness no less infinite, could not fail to choose the best. For as a lesser evil is a kind of good, so a lesser good is a kind of evil; and there would be something to correct in the action of God, if there were a means to do better. And as in mathematics when there is neither a maximum nor a minimum—in fact, no difference at all—all is done equally, or, when this is impossible, nothing is done, [Footnote 163] so we may say the same in respect to perfect wisdom, which is no less regulated than mathematics, that if there had not been a best one among all possible worlds God would not have created any. I call world the whole series and collection of all existing things, that none may say that several worlds might exist in different times and places. For in that case they would be counted together as one world, or, if you prefer, universe. And although one might fill all time and space, it would always be true that they could be filled in an infinity of manners, and that there is an infinity of worlds possible; among which it is necessary that God should have selected the best, because he does nothing without acting according to supreme reason." [Footnote 164]

[Footnote 163: If it is required, for instance, to draw the shortest possible line from the centre to the circumference of a circle, you may draw a line to every point of the circumference, and there is no reason why a line should be drawn to any one point rather than to another. Or, if an object at the centre is attracted equally to every point in the circumference, it cannot move in any direction, but remains at rest.—ED.]

Malebranche, in his ninth metaphysical conversation, after having laid down the principle that the end of creation is the glory of God, concludes that God must choose the best possible cosmos, because thereby he would gain greater glory than if he chose any of the series. "That which God wishes solely, directly, and absolutely in his designs, is to act in the most divine manner possible; it is to impress upon his conduct, as well as upon his work, the character of his attributes; it is to act exactly according to what, and to all he is. God has seen from all eternity all possible works, and all possible ways of producing them; and as he does not act but for his own glory and according to what he is, he has determined to will that work which could be effected and maintained by ways which must honor him more than any other work produced in a different manner."

The principles of this theory are two. One is to admit a necessity on the part of God to choose the best possible world in the series; the other is to suppose from reason that there is a best possible cosmos, as Leibnitz does; in other words, it is to limit the question only to the creative moment, and not to the whole external action of God. Now, we think that both propositions are false. As regards the first, why should God choose the best? For three reasons, according to the German philosopher. {557} The first is as follows: A lesser good is a kind of evil, if it be opposed to a greater good. But if God chose any world of the series in preference to the best, he would prefer a lesser good to a greater; hence, he would prefer a kind of evil to good, and the world chosen would be a kind of evil. The major of the syllogism might be granted, though not perfectly correct, if a lesser good were opposed to a greater which must necessarily be effected, but not otherwise. Suppose, among a number of actions, one more perfect than the other, of which I am not bound to perform any, I choose to perform any of the series, rejecting all others; how would the action which I choose to perform be a kind of evil? If I was bound to perform the best, and preferred one which is less so, in a certain sense we might grant that the one I select is a kind of evil. But when I am not bound to perform any, the one I choose, though not the most perfect, cannot change its nature of good because I might, if I preferred, perform a more perfect one. The argument, therefore, of Leibnitz, supposes what is to be proved, that God was bound to effect the best possible cosmos; for only in that case it might be said that he preferred a certain kind of evil to good. His second reason is not more solid than the first: If God did not choose the best, we might find something to correct in his action, because there would be a means to do better. We might find something to correct in the action of God, if, in the world he chose in preference to the best, there was something wanting in the attributes and properties required by its nature. But if the world that God chooses is endowed with all its essential attributes and proper elements, certainly there would be nothing at all to correct in it. When that great Italian artist drew a fly upon the picture of his master, so true to nature that the master on coming home went right up to the canvas to chase it away, if any one holding the opinion of Leibnitz had told him, "There is something to correct in your fly, because you could have painted a madonna or a saint," the painter would certainly have been astonished, and his answer would have been, "I might do a greater and better work; but you cannot discover any defect in my fly, because you cannot deny that, though a fly, it is a masterpiece of art." The same reason holds good with regard to the subject in question. God might certainly do better; but if he prefers not to create the best possible cosmos, and selects any of the series, if the one selected is endowed with all the elements its nature requires, it is perfect in its own order; and no one could discover any flaw or defect in it, but every one would be obliged to call it a masterpiece. The last reason of Leibnitz has much less foundation, and savors very strongly of pantheism: If there had not been a best possible world in the series of all the possible ones, God would not have created any. This means neither more nor less than that the world, or the aggregate of all contingent beings, unless it had a kind of absolute perfection, would be impossible. It is tantamount to denying the very possibility of creation. Because a best possible world cannot be had; for the nature of all contingent beings is like number, which progresses indefinitely, without ever reaching to a number beyond which you cannot go. Consequently, the nature of contingent things, though capable of indefinite progress, is altogether incapable, ontologically speaking, of absolute perfection; a perfection which would be required to effect a world truly the best. {558} If, therefore, such ultimate perfection is required in order that God may create, it is evident that creation is impossible, and that optimism runs into pantheism. The argument drawn from the sufficient reason also fails. If God were to choose a cosmos less perfect in preference to one more perfect, he would have no sufficient reason for the preference. This argument fails, first, because a cosmos, the very best and most perfect, cannot be had, as we have hinted just now. Therefore, there is no necessity for any sufficient reason for choice. Suppose a series of worlds, one more perfect than the other, arrayed in the mind of God according to numerical order. If God were to choose the tenth in the series, there would be no sufficient reason for his preferring it to the eleventh; and if he were to select this last, there would be no sufficient reason for his preferring it to the twelfth, and so on indefinitely; and as we cannot reach to a cosmos which would be the last and the highest in perfection, so there never could be a sufficient reason for the preference of any. Consequently; there being no sufficient reason for preferring any cosmos of the series, God is free to choose any.

In the second place, even if there could be a best possible cosmos, the reason alleged by Leibnitz would not, on that account, oblige God to choose it. For a reason may be objectively or subjectively sufficient; that is, its sufficiency may emerge from the object to be created, or from the agent. Now, granting the principle of the German philosopher, God might have a subjective reason to make him act according to the requirements of wisdom, even in preferring any cosmos of the series and rejecting the best. This subjective reason might be to show and to put beyond any possibility of doubt his absolute freedom and independence in the creative act. No optimist can deny that this may have been a sufficient reason for the creative act. Consequently, even granting the possibility of a best possible world, God was not bound to create it.

The reason of Malebranche is not more conclusive than those we have just refuted. God must prefer the best possible cosmos, because this alone would manifest his glory in the best possible manner. The argument would be conclusive if it were proven that God does wish to, or must manifest his glory in the best possible manner. But this the French philosopher does not and cannot prove. Because the best possible manner for God to manifest his infinite excellence is, to cause an infinite effect. Now, this is a contradiction in terms.

The second position of the optimists to which we object is, to assume the possibility of a best possible cosmos, as Leibnitz does, from reason. Now, we contend that reason alone, unaided by revelation, proves decidedly the contrary; it proves that, ontologically speaking, a best possible cosmos cannot exist, and that if there be a way by which to raise the cosmos to a certain ultimate perfection, or perfection beyond which it could not be supposed to go, this is altogether outside and beyond the province of reason alone, and must be determined by revelation. We have already alluded to this in the examination of the third argument of Leibnitz. The best possible cosmos implies a certain ultimate and absolute perfection. Now, ontologically speaking, this is impossible in finite beings. For the question here is between two extremes, the finite and the infinite. Between the two lies the indefinite. {559} The first extreme, or the finite, may be supposed to ascend the ladder of perfection, or quantity of being, indefinitely, without ever reaching the infinite; because its nature is essentially immutable, as every other essence. Hence, suppose it as great in perfection as you can, it will be always finite, and consequently you may always suppose a greater still. Hence, admitting a series of numberless worlds one ontologically more perfect than the other, and you can never arrive at one of which you may say this is the best, because you can always suppose a better still.

St. Thomas with his eagle glance saw, centuries before, the birth of optimism, and refuted it triumphantly, in the following argument, similar to that which we have just given. Asking the question, whether the divine intellect is limited to certain determinate effects, he denies it thus: "We have proved," he says, "the infinity of the divine essence. Now, however you may multiply the number of finite beings, they can never approximate the infinite, the latter surpassing any number of finite beings, even if it be supposed infinite. On the other hand, it is clear that, besides God, no being is infinite, because every being comes under some category of genus or species. Therefore, no matter of what quality the divine effects are supposed to be, or what quantity of perfections they may contain, it is in the nature of the divine essence infinitely to excel them, and hence the possibility of an indefinite number of them. Consequently, the divine intellect cannot be limited to this or that effect."

This argument might be abridged thus: The nature of the infinite and of the finite being immutable, the infinite must always surpass, infinitely, the finite. Hence there can be no definite term assigned to the perfection of the finite, and consequently there cannot be a cosmos ultimate and absolute in perfection. Our reason, therefore, does not support the optimists in supposing a most perfect cosmos; on the contrary, it shows that, as to essence and nature, there cannot be a cosmos the perfection of which can be supposed to be ultimate, and in a certain manner absolute; in other words, limiting the question to the creative moment which effects ontological perfection only, a best possible cosmos cannot be had. Moreover, if there be a way by which to raise the cosmos to a certain ultimate and absolute perfection, reason can tell us also that it must be altogether supernatural, and to it superintelligible. In other words, this way must be a moment or moments of the action of God, distinct from the creative moment, and causing effects above and beyond the nature and essential attributes of every possible cosmos, ontologically considered.

For if this way of raising the cosmos to an ultimate perfection were the same moment of the action of God which creates essences and proper attributes, it could not correspond to the effect desired—that of raising the cosmos to a certain absolute perfection. Because, when we speak of a creative moment effecting essences and attributes, we consider the cosmos ontologically; and ontologically the cosmos cannot have an absolute and ultimate perfection. The creative moment creates substances and essential attributes; hence if the moment of raising the cosmos to an ultimate perfection were identified with the creative moment, it would always effect substances and essential attributes—that is, a cosmos indefinitely progressive—and could not give us a cosmos absolute in perfection. Therefore the moment or moments of the action of God raising the cosmos to a certain absolute perfection must be distinct from the creative moment, and must produce effects above and beyond every possible cosmos, ontologically considered.

Now, that which implies a moment of the action of God, distinct from the creative moment and causing effects above and beyond every possible cosmos, is called supernatural, because beyond and above nature or essence. Therefore, the way of raising the cosmos to a certain absolute perfection must be supernatural in its cause and in its effects.

If supernatural in its cause and in its effects, it is evident that this way is superintelligible to reason. Because reason, being an effect of the creative moment, cannot understand that which is above and beyond it in its cause and in its effects.

Hence, reason cannot determine whether there is such a way, or what this way is; and must necessarily leave these two questions to be determined by revelation.

Another problem, closely connected with the one which we have just discussed, presents itself here. It is as follows: In the supposition that God could find a way by which to raise the cosmos to a certain ultimate perfection, it is asked whether the divine goodness, which is the end of the exterior action of God, contains in itself a principle of fitness and agreeableness to incline it to effect this best possible cosmos. This question, as the reader is aware, is altogether different from optimism. This opinion contends that God must create the best possible cosmos. The question we propose now asks whether divine goodness, which is the end of the external action of God, may be inclined to effect it in force of reason of fitness and agreeableness between divine goodness and the best possible production of it, a reason of fitness which implies no manner of obligation or necessity whatever.

We answer it affirmatively; it having the support of all Catholic tradition, and the proof of it is to be found in the very force of the terms—God is infinite goodness; in acting outside himself, he effects finite goodness. Now, finite goodness and infinite goodness are agreeable to each other; therefore, if there be a way of raising finite goodness to a certain absolute goodness, it will be most agreeable to infinite goodness. [Footnote 165]

Before we enter upon the explanation of the whole plan of the exterior works of God, it is necessary to notice another point altogether within the reach and province of reason; this is, to assign some general laws which must govern the exterior action of God.

Reason, as we have seen, cannot of itself tell whether there may be a way of exalting the cosmos to a certain ultimate perfection, and thus rendering it the best possible cosmos; again, reason cannot tell whether God has or has not chosen to effect it. But, admitting the supposition that there is such a way, and that God has preferred it, reason can assign some laws, which it conceives must necessarily govern his exterior action, if he chooses to effect the best possible cosmos. Nor is this going beyond the sphere or province of reason, or infringing upon the rights of revelation. Because, although the premises are superintelligible, and to be declared by revelation, yet the premises once given, reason may lawfully and safely deduce some consequences, evidently flowing from those premises. In this case, the premises would be superintelligible; the consequences springing from them altogether intelligible.

Reason, therefore, affirms that if God chooses to make the best possible cosmos, the effectuation of such cosmos must be governed by the laws of variety, of unity, of hierarchy, of continuity, of communion, of secondary agency. The first imports that, if God intends to effect the best possible manifestations of himself, to which the best possible cosmos would correspond, he must effect a variety of moments, a variety of species, of individuals under each species, except when the nature and the object of the moment admits no variety or multiplicity. St. Thomas proves the necessity of such a law by the following argument: "Every agent," he says, "intends to stamp his own likeness on the effect he produces, as far as the nature of the effect will permit, and the more perfect the agent, the stronger is the likeness he impresses upon his effect."

God is a most perfect agent; it was fitting therefore that he should impress his own likeness on his exterior works as perfectly as their nature would allow. Now, a perfect likeness of God cannot be expressed by one moment or species of effects; because it is a principle of ontology that, when the effect is necessarily inferior in nature to the cause, as in the present case of the cosmos with regard to God, the perfections, which in the cause are united and, as it were, gathered together into one intense perfection, cannot be expressed in one effect, but ask for a variety and multiplicity of effects. The truth of this principle may be seen in the following example. What is the reason that we must frequently make use of a variety of words to express one idea? The reason lies in the objective and ontological difference of the nature of the two terms. The idea is simple, spiritual, intelligible; words are a material sound. The one in its nature is far superior to the other; the idea is possessed of more being, more perfection than words. Hence the one cannot be expressed and rendered by the other, except through a variety and multiplicity of terms. Consequently this example illustrates the principle that, when an effect is inferior in nature to its cause, whatever perfections are found in the cause, as united and simplified in one perfection, cannot be rendered or expressed except by a multiplicity and variety of effects. What we have said of language may be affirmed of every fine art, as painting, sculpture, music, etc. The type which creates them is always one and simple; it cannot be expressed except in a variety and multiplicity of forms.

The best manifestations, therefore, of God's transcendental excellence cannot be rendered and mirrored except through a variety of moments, of species, and of individuals.

The law of variety asks for the law of hierarchy. For variety cannot exist except by supposing a greater or less amount of perfection in the terms composing the series, one being varying from the other by possessing a greater amount of ontological perfections. Now, by admitting a greater or less amount of being, we admit a superiority on the part of that which is endowed with more ontological perfection, and an inferiority on the part of that which is endowed with less; and each being composing the cosmos, keeping its own place according to the general order, and in relation to other beings, it follows that this superiority on the part of one, and inferiority on the part of the other, founded on the intrinsic worth of their respective essences, establishes and explains the law of hierarchy.

The third law is that of unity, which implies that the variety of the different moments composing the cosmos must be brought together so as to form a perfect whole. For, first, if the variety of moments, of species and individuals, is requisite in order to express the intensity of the ontological perfection and excellence of the type of the universe, which is the infinite grandeur of God, unity, also, is required, in order to express the simplicity and entirety of the type. In the second place, what would be the cosmos without unity but a numberless and confused assemblage of beings? Hence, whatever may be the variety of the moments and species of the cosmos, they must necessarily be brought together as parts and components of one harmonic whole. The nature of this unity will be gathered from the explanation of the other laws. And first, it begins to be sketched out by the law of continuity. This implies that there should be a certain proportion between each moment of the cosmos, between one species and another, and between the degrees and gradations within the species, all as far as the nature of the terms will permit. Hence, the law embraces two parts:

1st. The necessity of the greatest number of moments and of species, as much as possible alike to each other, without ever being confounded.

2d. The greatest possible number of gradations within the same species, in proportion as individuals partake more or less fully of the species.

To give an instance: the first part of this law explains why substantial creation is composed of, 1st, atoms which do not give any signs of sensitive life; 2d, of brute animals; 3d, of intelligent animals; 4th, of pure spirits. The second part of this law explains why each of the four species just mentioned is developed in gradations almost infinite—minerals composed and recomposed in all possible ways, manifesting forms, properties, and acts altogether different, and some so constantly as to defy any change from the force of nature so far known to man; hence, in force of that immutable type, they are taken by naturalists as so many scientific species, and the fifty-nine or sixty elements which chemistry so far enumerates; animals also, extending so gradually that the ladder of fixed marks, taken by natural philosophers as so many species, begins where the signs of life are almost insensible and dubious, and ends with man; nor is there wanting, as far as it may be known, any of the intermediate steps.

The pure spirits, as we know from revelation, are divided into choirs and legions innumerable, whose successive gradations in quality and number, to us unknown but certain, are unfathomable; and it is most probable that the ladder of pure spirits is higher, beyond measure, than that which we observe in the sensible universe, and that one spirit is far more superior and distant from another spirit than one star from another.

The necessity of this law springs from that of unity. For, if the type of the cosmos be one, each moment and species representing, as it were, a side of that type, there must be as much affinity and proportion between each moment and each species as to pave the way for the law of unity to represent and mirror the entirety and oneness of the type. We say as much affinity as it is possible to produce, because between each moment and each species there is necessarily a chasm which no continuity or affinity can fill up. For instance, between pure animality and pure intelligence there is necessarily a chasm. Man, placed between the two, draws them together as much as possible; yet the necessary distance marking the two distinct natures cannot by any proportion be eliminated, else the natures would be confounded and destroyed.

But variety, brought together by the law of continuity, cannot sufficiently exhibit unity. Hence the necessity of a fourth law, that of communion.

This law implies, 1st, that the terms of the cosmos should be so united together as to act one upon the other, and serve each other for sustenance and development; 2d, that, founded on the law of hierarchy, inferior beings should be so united to superior ones as to be, in a certain sense, transformed into them, the distinctive marks of their respective natures being kept inviolate.

This law, in both its aspects, we see actuated in the visible universe. Thus man has need of food, which is administered to him by brutes and the vegetable kingdom; he has need of air, to breathe; of light, to see; of his kind, to multiply and to form society. All other animals have need of beings different from themselves to maintain their own existence; and of their like, to multiply their species. The vegetable kingdom needs minerals, earth, water, and the different saps by which it lives. If vegetables did not expel oxygen and absorb carbonic acid, air would become unfit for the respiration of animals; and these sending back, by respiration, carbonic acid, supply that substance of which plants stand in need. Everything, moreover, in the world serves for the development and perfection of man, both as to his body and as to his intellectual, moral, and social life. Every inferior creature is transformed into man. The same animal and vegetable kingdom which, transformed into his blood, sustains his life, helps him for the development of his ideas and his will. The reason of this law, which may be called the law of life, is, that the unity of the cosmos should not be only apparent and fictitious, but real. Now, a real union is impossible if the terms united exercise no real action upon each other, and do not serve for the maintenance and development of each other.

Finally, the law of communion calls for the law of secondary agency; that is, the effects resulting from the moments of the exterior action of God should be real agents. For no real union and communion could exist among the terms of the external action unless they really acted one upon another; any other union or communion being simply fictitious and imaginary. Hence Malebranche, in his system of occasional causes, where he deprives finite beings of real agency, has not only undermined the liberty of man, but destroyed the real communion among creatures, and marred the beauty and harmony of the cosmos. To represent the cosmos as a numberless series of beings united together by no other tie than juxtaposition, and by no means really acting upon each other, is to break its connection, its real and living unity; is to do away with the whole beauty and harmony of that hymn and canticle which God has composed to his own honor and glory.

We come now to the last question: What is the whole plan of the exterior action of God? We have seen that if there be a way by which to effect a cosmos endowed with a certain absolute perfection, that it would be most agreeable to infinite goodness, the end of the exterior action of God. We have seen, moreover, that whether there be such a way, and what this way is, must be determined by revelation. The Catholic Church, therefore, the living embodiment of revelation, must answer these two problems.

It answers both affirmatively. The most perfect cosmos is possible. God has effected it, because most agreeable to his infinite goodness.

  God's exterior action divided into:
    The hypostatic moment;
    The beatific, or palingenesiacal moment;
    The sublimative moment;
    The creative moment.

The Theanthropos, or Jesus Christ, God and man, centre of the whole plan;
Beatific cosmos;
Sublimative cosmos;
Substantial cosmos.
Individual terms of each cosmos:
1. Beatified angels and men;
2. Regenerated men on the earth;
3. Angels, or pure spirits;
Men, or incarnate spirits;
Sensitive beings;
Organic beings;
Inorganic beings.

As each moment of the action of God, as the creative, implies two subordinate moments, preservation and concurrence, it follows that each moment of the action of God implies its immanence and concurrence, though in the Theanthropos it takes place according to special laws. Hence,

Hypostatic immanence and concurrence;
Beatific immanence and concurrence;
Creative immanence and concurrence.

To A Favorite Madonna.

  Lady Mary, throne of grace,
    Imaged with thy Child before me!
  Softly beams the perfect face,
    Fragrant breathes its pureness o'er me.

  I but gaze, and all my soul
    Thrills as with a taste of heaven.
  Passion owns the sweet control;
    Peace assures of sin forgiven.

  Oh! then, what thy loveliness
    Where it shines divinely real,
  If its strength has such excess
    Feebly shadowed in ideal!

  From thy arms thy Royal Son
    Waits to fill us past our needing:
  Hears for all, denied to none,
    Thy resistless whisper pleading.

  Dream, say they, for poet's eye?
    Thou a dream! Then truth is seeming.
  Only let me live and die
    Safely lost in such a dreaming!

                           B. D. H.

Translated From The French.

To Those Who Tell Us What Time It Is.

Before introducing our subject, my dear reader, let me give a moment to a little person whose caprices equal those of any woman living.

Brilliant as the most fashionable beauty, she never goes without her diamonds and rubies in their golden setting, and of which she is equally proud.

Her little babbling is heard continually; and while she boasts her independent movements, like any prisoner or slave she always wears her chain.

I call her a little person, because she accompanies me everywhere; though sometimes she stops while I walk, and goes again when I am inclined to stop.

This delicate, fantastical organization, so difficult to discipline, and as subject to the influences of cold and heat as any nervous lady or chilly invalid, is Mademoiselle—my watch.

You have nearly all, my dear readers, a watch of silver or gold in your vest-pocket, and you can have them of wood or mother-of-pearl, with one great advantage: they cannot be pawned.

Ladies wear watches whose cases shine with their diamonds like the decorations of a great officer of the Legion of Honor. And they can have them inserted in bracelets, in bon-bon boxes, and in buckles for sashes and belts.

But I must tell you, the first accurate instruments, after the sun-dial and hour-glass of the ancients, were huge clocks; and these clocks, so immense, led artists insensibly to construct smaller ones for apartments, in form of pendulums, and which were in the beginning very imperfect.

Then others still more skilful conceived the idea of portable clocks, to which they gave the name of montres, (watches, in English,) from montrer, to show.

But at first these ornaments were very awkward, and of inconvenient size for the pocket to which they were destined.

Finally, however, they were lessened to such a point that they graced the heads of canes, the handles of fans, and even the setting of rings, and were about the size of a five-cent silver piece.

It is to Hook, a physician and English philosopher, born in 1635, died in 1702, that we owe the invention of pocket watches.

In 1577, the first watches were brought from Germany to England. They had been made at Nuremberg for the first time in the year 1500, and were called the eggs of Nuremberg, on account of their oval form.

At last a man appeared who, not content to enchain time, endeavored to force matter to represent with greater accuracy the flight of years. This was Julien le Roy, the most skilful practical philosopher that France ever had. Always on the qui vive for everything useful and curious, as soon as he heard of the watches of the celebrated Graham, he imported the first one seen in Paris, and not until he had proved it would he relinquish it to M. Maupertuis. Graham, in turn, procured all he could from Julien le Roy. {566} One day my Lord Hamilton was showing one of these wonderful repeaters to several persons. "I wish I were younger," said Graham, "to be able to make one after this model."

This illustrious Maupertuis, who accompanied the king of Prussia to the battle-field, was made prisoner at Molwitz and conducted to Vienna. The grand-duke of Tuscany—since emperor—wished to see a man with so great a reputation.

He treated him with respect, and asked him if he had not regretted much of the baggage stolen from him by the hussars. Maupertuis, after being urged a long time, confessed he would gladly have saved an old watch of Graham's, which he used for his astronomical observations.

The grand-duke, who owned one by the same maker, but enriched with diamonds, said to the French mathematician, "Ah! the hussars have wished to play you a trick; they have brought me back your watch. Here it is; I restore it to you."

To-day, as formerly, the handling of watches is an art. It is much more difficult to measure time than wine or cider. Therefore, among the members of the Bureau of Longitudes, by the side of the senator Leverrier, the marshal of France, (M. Vaillant,) the Admiral Matthieu, is placed the simple clock-maker, M. Bregnet.

And for these artists who give us the means of knowing the hour it is, there is a publication as serious as the Journal of Debates, called the Chronometrical Review. It certainly should be regularly sent to its subscribers. If the carrier is late, it cannot be for want of knowing if he has to-day's or yesterday's paper; and the subscribers are never exposed to chercher midi à quatorze heures.

M. Claudius Saurrier, the chief editor of this Chronometrical Review, has also a clock-maker's annual almanac for 1869. This appears very abstruse at the first glance; but if we examine the little volume with the same nicety as a watchmaker his mainspring—that is to say, with a powerful magnifying glass—we will find some things to greatly interest us. For example, a sketch of different attainable speed:

	Miles per hour.
The soldier in ordinary step makes	2¾
The soldier in a charge	4
The soldier in gymnastic exercise	7
The horse walking	3
The horse on the trot	7
The horse on the gallop	14
The horse on the race-course	30
The locomotive at ordinary speed	30
The locomotive going rapidly	60
The current of the Seine	3
Steamboats	4 to 14

A railroad train making thirty miles the hour would consume about three hundred and fifty years in the journey from the earth to the sun. More than a dozen successive generations would have time to appear and disappear during the transit.

But nothing can more surely measure speed than the man who says to his watch, "Thou givest me sixty seconds a minute, and thou canst go no farther."

The little book which has so worthily occupied my attention is not contented with simply describing professional instruments. It plunges into old curiosity shops, and brings out the watch of Marat!

Evidently it does not tell us if this watch was hung in the bathing saloon where the friend of the people was struck by the poignard of Charlotte Corday. But it gives us an exact description of the jewel, or rather of the onion of the celebrated and redoubtable tribune.

It was, indeed, a curious watch that Marat possessed; and, if we cannot imagine the fashion of the epoch, which gave to every one an immense gewgaw, requiring a counter-weight to support it, it will be impossible to explain the oddity of its form.

It was a massive silver pear, opening into two equal parts. In the lower part of the fruit was found the dial; the upper contained engraved designs of foliage. The case of the pear reproduced the same model; the artist evidently had but one idea. Its size was that of an English pear of medium dimensions, and, thanks to its density, this jewel has been able to pass without any deterioration through the most stormy periods of the world.

The almanac for clock-makers also contains its good stories. It relates that a thief introduced himself into a watch-store as a workman seeking employment, but with the design of abstracting the pocket-book of the proprietor. The scene is dialogued as the two parts of a clock containing the chimes of the north, the solemn stillness of the night broken by question and response, until they mingled in a naïve contre-point.

"The hour of thy death!" replied the young man in a thundering voice, presenting at the same time a double-barrelled pistol at his head.

The thief, trembling from head to foot, drew out a package of watches, entangled one in the other.

The young watch-maker, perfectly astonished, went immediately to the mayor. They counted twenty-two watches; and the grateful proprietors handsomely indemnified him for his trouble, while at the same time he found himself, by this one stroke, with twenty-two good jobs and a patronage.

For example, a description of a watch made by the grandfather of the present Bregnet—the perpetual watch, so called because it winds itself through some simple movement inserted by the maker. And I could give, also, good advice to wearers of watches.

The manner and time to wind them, and the management of the little needle that makes them go slower and faster.

Then, again, the injury done watches by trotting horsemen, especially physicians, who thereby lose an accurate guide for the pulse of their patients.

Then I should like to consider how Abraham Bregnet made the sympathetic clock, upon which it is only necessary to place before midday or midnight a pocket repeating-watch, advancing or retarding it a little to allow for the time consumed, and by simple contact it regulates the pendulum.

If M. Claudius Saurrier wants something curious for his almanac of the coming year, he has only to take the chapter on clock-making from The Arts of the Middle Ages, by Paul Lacroix. There he will see the three primitive methods of measuring time, namely, the sun-dial or gnomon that Anximandre imported from Greece; the clepsydra, where the flowing water indicated the flying minutes; and the hour-glass, where the sand took the place of the water.

He will find there a watch of the house of Valois placed in the centre of a Latin cross, and moving with it symbolical figures, Time, Apollo, Diana, etc.; or, again, the Virgin, the apostles and saints.

Time has not always been lost through the instruments that indicate its flight. Ages have changed even palaces; and the Palais Royal, whose cannon gives us still the exact hour of mid-day, once knew no hours for its habitués, and vice and immorality consumed the time that virtue now gives to better purposes. The poet of 1830 said:

  "The palace lives in better days,
     And virtue holds its court supreme;
   The sun that lent to vice its rays
     Now gives to time its potent beam."

But now that I have rendered every tribute to M. Claudius Saurrier that his special science can demand, may I not be equally frank with him?

I don't like to know what time it is; I am seized with profound melancholy when the clock strikes and as the hands of my watch indicate the rapidity with which my life is passing.

If there had never been an hourglass, a clepsydra, a clock, a regulator, a Swiss cuckoo, or a French chronometer, what with the variations of the seasons which are no longer regular—the trees leafing in January, and the house-tops iced in April—we might never be sure of anything, and lead the existence of those who frequented the balls of the tenor Roger. With shutters closed and curtains drawn, the sun excluded for four days, his guests could have doubted whether time had anything to do with their existence.

Then we could so long believe ourselves young! The dreaded question How old are you? could be answered in all sincerity, I do not know.

One word more, however, for our pretty watch. How often has it been the symbol of gallantry.

  "Dear madam, shall I tell you why?
     One goes too fast, and one too slow;
   When near you I would fondly fly,
     I use the first; the other, when I go."

New Publications.

The Catholic Doctrine Of The Atonement.
An Historical Inquiry into its Development in the Church. With an Introduction on the Principle of Theological Development.
By Henry Nutcombe Oxenham, M.A., formerly Scholar of Balliol College, Oxford.
Second Edition. London: Allen & Co. 1869.

This is a very scholarly treatise on an important subject. It is not a dogmatic work, but a work on the history of dogma. The author possesses a remarkable insight into the deep and sublime mysteries of faith, especially that of the Incarnation, and writes like one whose whole mind and soul have become imbued with the spirit of scriptural and patristic theology. His manner is remarkably calm, impartial, and dignified; his method of statement, clear and succinct; and his style is that of an accomplished English and classical scholar, often rising to passages of high poetic fervor and beauty. {569} So far as the exhibition of the true doctrine of the atonement is concerned, beyond the critical statement of different schools of opinion, its chief value consists in the refutation of the Calvinistic doctrine, and its discrimination of the modern prevalent Catholic opinion derived from St. Anselm from the dogma properly so called. The essay on development is one of the ablest portions of the book. Möhler, in his Athanasius, has accused Petavius of overstating or pressing too far, in his controversial zeal, the well-known points of his thesis respecting the doctrine of the anti-Nicene fathers against Bishop Bull. It appears to us that Mr. Oxenham has overstepped the mark in the same way in regard to development in general, or at least has used language liable to misapprehension. We think, also, that the character of his mind, which is not adapted to metaphysical or speculative inquiries, and the influence under which his opinions have been formed, lead him to undervalue scholastic theology. There are here and there, also, indications of a bias toward the opinions of a certain class of French writers of the last century, which appears to us to be out of harmony with the genuine spirit of docility to the teaching of the church, and the pietas fidei with which the author is certainly animated. We will specify one instance of this, where Mr. Oxenham has exposed a most vulnerable spot in his defensive armor. It is on page 11 of the introductory essay, where he is rebutting the famous statement of Chillingworth, that there are "Popes against popes, councils against councils," etc. In reply to this, he says, "On this I have to observe, as to popes against popes, waiving the question of fact, their judgments, when resting on their own authority alone, if maintained by some theologians to be infallible, are as strenuously denied to be so by others. It is a purely open question. Councils are held by no one to be infallible except in matters of doctrine, and there is no case of doctrinal contradiction between councils universally received in the church as ecumenical." The author, in this specimen of most faulty logic, by waiving the question of fact respecting the dogmatic judgments of the popes, concedes everything which Chillingworth asserted on that point, and leaves him master of the field. He confines himself to one point of defence, that there are no dogmatic decisions of ecumenical councils which are contradictory to each other. But suppose there are dogmatic decisions of popes to which obedience is required as a term of communion and under pain of excommunication, which are contrary to dogmatic decisions of councils, what then? Suppose one pope requires submission to a dogmatic decision as a term of communion, and his successor requires the same to an opposite decision, what then? Can Mr. Oxenham say transeat? If Mr. Ffoulkes should write a letter to Mr. Oxenham containing an argument based on an affirmation that those suppositions are facts, against the actual position of the holy see and the Catholic episcopate, as against Constantinople and Canterbury, could Mr. Oxenham answer it conclusively without defending that point which he so easily gives up? That the question of the infallibility of the pope is not entirely closed is, of course, true; but it is not so wide open as an ordinary reader would infer it to be from the author's very inconsiderate and unsatisfactory way of stating the matter; nor has it ever been so wide open at any time since St. Peter received from our Lord the charge to confirm his brethren in the faith. Bossuet would never have exposed his flank in the unguarded manner that our author has done. The indefectibility of the Roman see in doctrine, and the duty of obedience to its dogmatic judgments, were always maintained by that great theologian, and by all orthodox Gallicans. The doctrine of what may be called passive infallibility is logically contained in this doctrine of Bossuet and in that doctrine of Catholic faith, that the pope is always the supreme head of the church. By passive infallibility, we mean a security against the separation of the pope and the Roman Church in doctrine from the universal church, either by apostasy from dogmas already defined, or by the enforcement of any new and false dogmas. {570} The active power of the pope, as the teacher and defender of the faith which he perpetually proclaims to the world, and protects by denouncing and condemning heresy, which no Catholic questions, is necessarily secured by this indefectibility or passive infallibility from being perverted to the service of heresy or immorality. The only question that can be discussed between Catholics regarding this matter relates to the conditions and extent of the active infallibility of the pope. The gift of infallibility must necessarily preserve the dogmatic unity of the pope and the Catholic episcopate, and must therefore influence both. They are both factors in the sum of infallibility. What is precisely the force of each as distinct from the other is not yet fully and clearly defined as a canon of faith, and we are willing to await the result of the approaching council which will, probably, at least consider the question of the propriety of making such a canon, before applying any theological formula as a criterion of the orthodoxy of writers, or written statements. Nevertheless, we have a right to expect that every writer should so guard his language and statements that they be not open to a misconception that furnishes a convenient door for the enemy to enter in by.

Perhaps Mr. Oxenham will not essentially dissent from the view we have expressed; and we have the best reason to expect that whatever there may be that is defective or inconsequent in his theological system will be filled up and harmonized by the result of riper thought and study. His work, as a whole, is one of the best and most valuable of those which have been produced by the sound scholars and devoted sons of the church who have been won to the ancient faith of England within the classic halls of Oxford. Every clergyman or scholar addicted to theological studies will find it well worthy of a place in his library, and of a careful perusal.

Alice Murray; a Tale.
By Mary I. Hoffmnan, authoress of Agnes Hilton.
1 vol. 12mo. Pp. 490.
New York: P. O'Shea. 1869.

We like this story for its perfect picture of American country life. We get but one glimpse, and that a very imperfect one, of the city. We have plenty of books, good, bad, and indifferent, describing city life, its manners and customs, its frivolities and follies, and even its vices. It was, therefore, with a feeling of relief, that we read this volume; for, even if one can but seldom visit the country, still one likes to read about its green fields, rippling brooks, gushing springs and dark, cool woods, the lowing kine, and bleating sheep, and in this book we get a goodly dose. Miss Hoffman seems to be a practical farmer, and is as much at home with the butter-ladle as with the pen, and has a thorough disgust, as all good farmers must have, for what city folk often cultivate as flowers—the "pesky white daisy."

The first chapters of the story are a little dull, and the place in which its scene is laid is not definitely stated; but further on, we learn that it is in Western New York. There is nothing extraordinary or intricate in the plot of of the story. Every scene and incident may have occurred just as it is related. It is the old story of innocence and virtue being outgeneralled for a while by craftiness and vice. And while we have such timid girls as Alice Murray, such acts of wrong are possible. It is very well to follow the gospel precept, and when struck upon one cheek to turn the other; but the gospel nowhere requires us to give in addition our own hand with which to smite our cheek.

Alice Murray was the niece of Mr. Elbray's first wife. Her parents died while she was quite young, and Mr. Elbray brought her up as his daughter, as he had no children of his own. He was rich, a self-made man, and a worldly-minded Catholic, paid little attention to the duties or requirements of his religion, but made money his God. {571} He became acquainted with a strong-minded, designing widow, who manages to make him marry her, and from that moment Alice Murray had actually no home. The ambitious wife had her own daughter to provide for, and her whole energies were bent on getting rid of Alice, which she succeeded in accomplishing. From her adopted home Alice went to her uncle Bradley—her mother's sister's husband—who procured her a district school. Even here, though miles away from her, the new Mrs. Elbray, beside intercepting all letters between Alice and her uncle, got up a charge against her of having stolen a gold chain presented to her by her dear departed husband. This was done to prevent Alice returning to her uncle, who was ever regretting her absence. But the crafty woman succeeded; Alice is discarded, and the result is, that Mrs. Elbray's daughter makes a brilliant match, and all the Elbray family move to New York, where old Elbray is ruined by his wife and her daughter's husband, and has to go to the almshouse, where he is discovered by a priest who knew him, and Alice is informed of the poverty of her uncle. She hesitates not a moment, accepts the hand of the lover she had previously refused, because she wished to pay back her uncle all the money he had spent on her, and the new-married couple go straight to New York, rescue the uncle from the almshouse, and take him home with them, where he lives in peace.

The picture of the Bradley family is a beautiful one—just what a good Catholic family should be; in fact, all of Miss Hoffman's family pen-pictures are good. Her great weakness lies in her dialogues; they need more animation and sprightliness; and her very bad characters are better drawn than her very good ones. For instance, in Mrs. Elbray, an ambitious, proud, self-willed and worldly woman, we have decidedly the best depicted character in the book. She labors for a purpose, a bad purpose it is true, and succeeds, although the success was her ruin. Had Alice used for a good purpose one half the energy Mrs. Elbray did for a bad one, a world of suffering would have been saved her, but then Alice Murray would not have been written. We wish the writers of our Catholic stories would allow their good characters to act like living men and women, not mere machines, throwing the responsibility of all their troubles and tribulations upon God, and leaving it all in his hands to see justice done; but teach them to use the means God gave them to help themselves.

We have said that Miss Hoffman's descriptions of American country life and scenery are good. There is one pen-picture on page 170 that will remind many of similar scenes. The story is thoroughly Catholic in tone and sentiment, but is not of the belligerant class. There are no religious discussions indulged in for the sake of displaying one's theological knowledge; but the whole atmosphere of the book—the whole sentiment is Catholic, and the reader feels it, just as one in reading à Kempis would know and feel that the writer was a devout, practical Catholic.

The typographical execution of the book might easily be improved by employing a better proof-reader and the use of better type.

Chips From A German Workshop.
By Max Müller, M. A.
2 vols. crown 8vo, pp. 374, 402.
New York: Charles Scribner & Co.

These two volumes consist of various essays, lectures, etc., which Professor Müller has published from time to time during the intervals of his long years of labor on the Rig-Veda. They are all more or less closely connected with the great work to which he has devoted his life, and are all illustrations of a systematic religious philosophy. The first volume is devoted to essays on "The Science of Religion." The author remarks that in religion "everything new is old, and everything old is new, and there has been no entirely new religion since the beginning of the world." St. Augustine says that "what is now called the Christian religion has existed among the ancients, and was not absent from the beginning of the human race until Christ came in the flesh;" and the design of these essays is to show how the radical ideas of religion revealed by Almighty God at the beginning have undergone various changes, corruptions, and combinations, yet, though frequently distorted, tend again and again to their perfect form. {572} Professor Müller traces these primitive ideas through the ancient religions of India and Persia, and extracts from the forbidding obscurity of Sanscrit literature a wealth of illustration, which, with his charming style and incomparable happiness in selection, he makes attractive to nearly all classes of readers. He studies the matter not as a theologian but as a coldly critical man of science; and his reasoning is, of course, directly in support of the truths of revelation. The second volume contains an essay on Comparative Mythology, and papers on early traditions and customs, all bearing upon the subject of the first, and many of them highly curious. At some future day, if opportunity permits, we hope to recur to these valuable "Chips," and give our readers a few specimens of their excellence.

Pastoral Letter Of The Most Rev. Archbishop and Suffragan Prelates of the Province of Baltimore, at the close of the Tenth Provincial Council. May, 1869.
Baltimore: J. Murphy & Co.

This letter of the fathers of the council of Baltimore is a renewed evidence of the paternal affection and ceaseless vigilance with which the pastors of the church watch over their flock. On many most important points, they have spoken out with a clearness that must be gratifying to every Catholic heart. First among them is Education. We quote a portion:

"Bitter experience convinces us daily more and more that a purely secular education, to the exclusion of a religious training, is not only an imperfect system, but is attended with the most disastrous consequences to the individual and to society. Among Catholics, there cannot be two opinions about this subject. And we are happy to see that this practical truth is beginning to find acceptance also in the minds of reflecting men among our separated brethren.

"The catechetical instructions given once a week in our Sunday-schools, though productive of the most beneficial results, are insufficient to satisfy the religious wants of our children. They should every day breathe a healthy religious atmosphere in those schools, where not only their minds are enlightened, but where the seeds of faith, piety, and sound morality are nourished and invigorated.

"Children have not only heads to be enlightened, but, what is more important, hearts to be formed to virtue."

The most reverend archbishop has been from the first one of the most earnest supporters of the Catholic Publication Society, and, with the prelates of the council, again commends it to the patronage of clergy and laity.

"We desire to renew," say they, "our cordial approbation of the Catholic Publication Society, recently established in New York, and we earnestly hope it may receive from our clergy and laity all the patronage it so well deserves.

"This society is laudably engaged in the publication of such Catholic works as are peculiarly adapted to the wants of our times, and it serves as a powerful auxiliary in the propagation of Catholic truth.

"Short religious tracts are also issued under the auspices of the same society. These tracts are daily growing in popularity and usefulness. In one year, about six hundred thousand of them were printed and distributed. Their brevity recommends their perusal to many who have neither leisure nor disposition to read books treating of the same subject. Their short but convincing arguments always make a favorable impression on sincere minds; while their plain, familiar style renders them attractive to the lowest capacity. The very moderate price at which they are sold places them within the reach of all.

"We trust that our zealous missionary clergy will adopt some effectual and systematic means by which the books, and especially the tracts of this excellent society may be regularly circulated throughout their missions, and distributed among the children attending our schools."

These words are very encouraging and opportune; for one thing is sure, and that is, "The Catholic Publication Society," without this co-operation and sympathy, both on the part of the clergy and the laity, cannot accomplish the great work that is before it in our country.

Then follow some timely words of admonition to Catholics lest they imbibe the loose notions which prevail among many around them in regard to the crime of infanticide.

Next, are condemned round dances, indecent publications, and the obscene theatrical performances which are becoming so abundant.

The remainder of the letter contains words of encouragement to the clergy and laity in the various charitable works in which they are engaged, as the erecting of protectories and orphan asylums, the providing churches and schools for our colored brethren, etc.

Fénélon's Conversations With M. De Ramsai On The Truth Of Religion, With his Letters on the Immortality of the Soul, and the Freedom of the Will.
Translated from the French by A. E. Silliman. 1869.

Fénélon was a genius and a saint. He had, moreover, the faculty of expressing his thoughts in a remarkably clear style, and throwing a peculiar charm about every subject he handled. The conversations with Chevalier Ramsay form a short treatise, proving that there is no medium between deism and Catholicism. It is very admirable, and Mr. Silliman has done a good service in translating it, with the two other short but excellent treatises which are appended. The translator's preface, which is perfectly calm and passionless in its tone, gives a brief but interesting sketch of Fénélon's character, and of some of the events of his life, and relates the circumstance which gave occasion to the conversations with Chevalier Ramsay. As it alludes to the condemnation of the Maxims by the pope, and states that this condemnation was given reluctantly and under threats from the king of France, it may be well to explain this matter in a few words. It is true that the accusation of Fénélon at Rome was made through enmity against his person, and in a manner discreditable to the parties concerned, and very displeasing to the pope. It is not true, however, that the decision was given in accordance with the wishes of the king on account of his entreaties or threats. The pope did not wish to have the matter brought before him, because he preferred to leave the errors of Fénélon's book to be corrected by milder methods than a public condemnation, and desired to spare so great and holy a prelate—who had erred only through a mistaken judgment of the true sense of certain statements of the most approved mystic authors—the mortification of a public censure and a formal retraction. The action of Fénélon's enemies made the matter so public and notorious, and brought his erroneous statements into such a clear light that it was impossible to avoid an examination and judgment without scandal. The judgment was impartial, and was necessarily against Fénélon, whose doctrine was clearly irreconcilable with the teaching of the church. At the same time, a sharp reproof was given to his accusers for the spirit which they had shown in pushing matters to extremes, and the personal respect and esteem of the pope for Fénélon were clearly manifested.

The translator has added a very judicious note to the treatise on the immortality of the soul, justly censuring certain statements of the author on the nature of the connection between soul and body. Like many other writers of that time, Fénélon was too much influenced by the philosophy of Descartes whose ridiculous theory of occasional causes appears in the passages criticised by Mr. Silliman. On this point, the language of the Protestant translator is much more in accordance with the Catholic doctrine that the soul is forma corporis than that of the Catholic archbishop.

We recommend this most beautiful specimen of reasoning and persuasive eloquence most heartily to all readers, especially to those who fancy they can find a halting-place somewhere between the rejection of all positive revelation and the acceptance, pure and simple, of Catholicity. {574} The translation is well done, and the mechanical execution of the book, which is a medium between a volume and a pamphlet, is elegant. If the translator finds sufficient encouragement in the reception which it meets with to induce him to continue, we recommend to him the translation of Fénélon's admirable treatise on the existence and attributes of God, as a work which we should welcome as a timely and valuable addition to our English religious literature.

La Natura E La Grazia, (Nature And Grace.)
Discourses on Modern Naturalism delivered in Rome during the Lent of 1865.
By Father Charles M. Curci, S.J.
2 vols. Rome, Turin, and Venice.

We are greatly indebted to the courtesy of F. Curci in sending us a copy of this admirable collection of discourses. With the greatest modesty, the distinguished author apologizes in his preface for the defects of his work. To his readers, however, his name will be a sufficient guarantee of its excellence and ability; nor will a careful examination give them any reason to change their opinion. These are no ordinary Lent sermons upon the commonplace themes of exhortation which preachers are wont to handle during this holy season. They are profound, eloquent, and classically written discourses upon all the great Catholic doctrines and practices which are disputed or denied by modern infidels and rationalists; a specimen of that high, intellectual, philosophical, and, at the same time, thoroughly spiritual preaching which is so necessary in our day for the educated classes. If it were possible, it would be highly desirable and beneficial to have these volumes translated into English. If we are not able, at present, to have this done, it is only because of the very great cost of translating and publishing in this country a work of such a high class, the circulation of which would be necessarily limited to the clergy and a small portion of the most highly educated among the laity.

Italy, Florence, And Venice.
From the French of H. Taine.
By J. Durand.
8vo, pp. 385. New York: Leypoldt & Holt.

This is a companion volume to M. Taine's book on Rome and Naples, which appeared in an English dress about a year ago. The author visited Italy in 1864, (though the date, by a strange oversight, is not mentioned in the volume now before us,) and his observations upon the political situation of the country and such social peculiarities as arose from political causes, have now lost much of their value. These observations are fortunately few, nor were they ever very profound. M. Taine is not a student of public affairs, nor a keen observer of popular characteristics. Of Italian life and manners, he learned no more than the mere guide-book tourist can see in hotels, galleries, and public conveyances, and what he saw he tells no better than many have told the same things before him, and not so well as at least one or two American travellers whom we could mention. It is as a critic of art that he demands our attention, and in this particular he far surpasses nine tenths of all the writers on such topics with whom English readers are familiar. The eloquence and rapidity of his style, the refinement of his esthetic sense, and the keenness of his philosophy, invest his pages with an interest and a brilliancy which must charm every body. Yet there is something lacking in his appreciation of paintings, there is a coldness even in the midst of his enthusiasm, which leave the mind unsatisfied. The fact is, he writes like a man of the world, to whom the inner religious sentiment of art is only half revealed. He judges of paintings only with the head; but there are certain works—above all, for instance, those of Fra Angelico—which must be judged by the heart.

Love; Or Self Sacrifice:
a Story by Lady Herbert.
Published by D. & J. Sadlier & Co.
Price, 75 cts.

The life of Gwladys, the heroine of Lady Herbert's story, is made up of three important events; two marriages and the death of her lovely boy; and it required all of Lady Herbert's experience as a writer to fill a volume covering the space of eighteen years, with the joys and sorrows of her monotonous life. {575} The book abounds in exquisite descriptive scenes and truthful narratives of the fatigues and incidents of travel; but there is a striking resemblance between many of the leading characters, and the episodes, in general, are unnatural.

These faults can only be accounted for on the supposition that the overstrained mind of the heroine did not preserve a perfect picture of each individual; their virtues and faults appearing to Gwladys in proportion to the amount of kindness they heaped upon her. Thus Lady Herbert was unable to paint them as they were in reality and contented herself by coloring them to suit the ideas of her much-loved friend. The external appearance of the book we cannot praise. The proofs must have been read by the "printer's devil," with malice prepense, for a more slovenly printed book it has never been our misfortune, as a reviewer, to have been compelled to read.

Die Alte Und Neue Welt.
Vols. I. II. III.
New York and Cincinnati: Benziger Bros.

We are indebted to the publishers for the three volumes, beautifully bound, of this excellent German illustrated magazine. We have already noticed the admirable character both of the reading matter and of the illustrations of this periodical, which is an instructive and at the same time highly entertaining family magazine, decidedly the best of its class we have ever met with in any language. For those who can read the German language, these volumes form as pleasant a companion as one could desire of a rainy afternoon, or in any leisure hour when one is desirous of some pleasant and innocent mental relaxation. It is also profitable as well as pleasant, chiefly on account of the charming pictures it presents of Catholic life in ancient and modern Germany. To all who read German, we cordially recommend the purchase of these volumes, both for the sake of the reading matter, and also of the excellent illustrations. As for our German fellow-Catholics, they ought to be proud of possessing in their own rich and grand mother-tongue a magazine which does them so much honor, and ought to give it their universal support. For the clergy, for parish libraries, for the family, and for young people who have a taste for reading, it is invaluable. We fear that the children of our German fellow-citizens are too much disposed to forget the glorious fatherland of their parents, which is in them a great folly, to be checked and discouraged in every way. It is not necessary, in order to become good Americans, to disown and forget the country and the literature of one's ancestors. If it is worth while for those whose mother-tongue is English to spend years in acquiring a knowledge of the language and literature of Germany, it is surely a great piece of folly for those whose early education has given them the means of attaining this knowledge without any trouble to throw it away as of no value.

We think that the American part of the magazine, that is, all that represents the life of the German population in the United States, might be much better sustained than it is. We cannot blame the editors for this defect, which is no doubt entirely due to a lack of contributors living in this country; but it appears to us that a more extensive and zealous co-operation of the clergy here with the European editors would, without difficulty, supply it, and make the Alte und Neue Welt really, as its name imports, a magazine of the new as well as of the old world. We wish the enterprising firm of the Messrs. Benziger abundant success in their laudable and skilful efforts to promote the cause of Catholic literature in the German language.

This story has appeared in The Tablet, and has nothing remarkable in it to praise or blame, if we except the numerous typographical errors, which are the more noticeable on account of the dulness of the narrative, and the low order of the curious dialogues.

Little Women; Or, Meg, Jo, Beth, And Amy.
By Louisa M. Alcott.
Illustrated by May Alcott.
Boston: Roberts Brothers. 1869.

This is a charming story, full of life, full of fun, full of human nature, and therefore full of interest. The little women play at being pilgrims when they are children, and resolve to be true pilgrims as they grow older. Life to them was earnest; it had its duties, and they did not overlook them or despise them. Directed by the wise teachings and beautiful example of a good mother, they became in the end true and noble women. Make their acquaintance; for Amy will be found delightful, Beth very lovely, Meg beautiful, and Jo splendid; that there is a real Jo somewhere we have not the slightest doubt.

Mental Photographs.
An Album for Confessions of Tastes, Habits, and Convictions.
Edited by Robert Saxton.
New York: Leypoldt & Holt.

We have here an ingenious invention for the amusement of the social circle, and one which is capable of affording a good deal of merriment and interest, provided smart and sensible people take part in it. The album contains places for photographs, and by the side of each a series of forty questions, such as "What is your favorite book? color? name? occupation?" etc., to which answers are to be written by the original of the picture. In this way, the editor says, as complete a portrait as possible is obtained both of the inner and outer man. Most of the questions are pertinent and suggestive.

The Phenomena And Laws Of Heat.
By Achille Cuzin, Professor of Physics in the Lyceum of Versailles.
Translated and edited by Elihu Rich.
1 vol. 12mo. Illustrated. Pp. 265.
New York: Charles Scribner & Co. 1869.

This volume belongs to the Library of Wonders, and its aim is to present in a summary the principal phenomena of heat, as viewed from the standpoint afforded by recent discoveries in physics. The illustrations are excellent, and give the reader a complete elucidation of the text.

The Fisher-Maiden. A Norwegian Tale.
By Björnstjerne Björnson.
From the Author's German Edition,
by M. E. Niles.
New York: Leypold & Holt. 1869.

"An artist, not a photographer, Björnson draws souls more than faces." "In these times of blatant novelists, it is no ordinary treat to get a story which affects one almost as finely as a poem."

The Catholic Publication Society will soon publish The History of the Catholic Church on the Island of New York. By the Rt. Rev. J. R. Bayley, D.D., Bishop of Newark. This work will contain many important documents relating to the history of the church in this city, not heretofore published.

Waterloo; a Sequel to the Conscript of 1813.
Translated from the French of Erckmann-Chatrian.
Illustrated. 1 vol. 12mo, pp. 368.

Speeches on the Legislative Independence of Ireland. With introductory notes by Thomas Francis Meagher, and a memorial oration, by Richard O'Gorman. 1 vol. 12mo, pp.317.

The Catholic World.

Vol. IX., No. 53.—August, 1869.

"Our Established Church."

[Footnote 166: Putnam's Monthly Magazine. Our Established Church. New York. G. P. Putnam & Son. July, 1869.]

The title, Our Established Church, given by Putnam to a bitterly anti-Catholic article in its number for last July, is too malicious for pleasantry and too untrue for wit. The writer knows perfectly well that we have in this State of New York no established church, and that, of all the so-called churches, the Catholic Church is the furthest removed from being the state church. In no city, town, or county of the State are Catholics the majority of the population; and even in this city, where their proportion to the whole population is the largest, they probably constitute not much, if any, over one third of the whole. Public opinion throughout the State, though less hostile than it was a few years ago, is still bitterly anti-Catholic. In this city, the numbers and influence of naturalized, as distinguished from natural born citizens, is, no doubt, very great; but these naturalized citizens are by no means all Catholics, and a large number of those who may have been baptized Catholics are wholly uninfluenced by their Catholicity in their public, and, we fear, to a great extent, even in their private life. It is simply ridiculous, even by way of irony, to speak of our church as the established church, or as exerting a controlling influence in the State or city.

Moreover, no church can be the established church, here or elsewhere, unless it concedes the supremacy of the state, and consents to be its slave. This the Catholic Church can never do. The relations of church and state in Catholic countries have for many centuries been regulated by concordats; but in this country, since the adoption of the Federal constitution, the civil authority has recognized its own incompetency in spirituals, and, as before it, the equal rights of all religions not contra bonos mores, as also its obligation to protect the adherents of each in the free and full enjoyment of their entire religious liberty. The state guarantees, thus, all the freedom and protection the church has ever secured elsewhere by concordats. She much prefers freedom to slavery, and her full liberty, though shared with hostile sects, to the gilded bondage of a state church. She neither is the established church, nor can she consent to become so; for a state church means a church governed by the laity, and subordinated to secular interests, as we see in the case of the Anglican establishment. {578} Her steady refusal to become a state establishment is the key to those fearful struggles in the middle ages between the church and the empire; and the secret of the success of the Protestant Reformation is to be found in its ready submission to the secular prince, or its practical assertion of the supremacy of the civil power and the subordination of the spiritual.

There is always great difficulty in discussing such questions as the writer in Putnam raises with our Protestant fellow-citizens; for we and they start from opposite principles and aim at different ends. We, as Catholics, assert the entire freedom and independence of the spiritual order; but they, consciously or unconsciously, assume that the state is supreme, and that the spiritual should be under the surveillance and control of the secular. We understand by religious liberty the freedom and independence of the church as an organic body; they understand by it the freedom of the laity from all authority claimed and exercised by the pope and clergy as ministers of God or stewards of his kingdom on earth. If each Protestant sect claims, in its own case, exemption from secular control, every one insists that the Catholic Church shall be subject to Caesar, and all unite to deprive her of her spiritual freedom and independence. Hence, they and we view things from opposite poles. They regard them from the point of view of the Gentiles, with whom religion was a civil function, and the state supreme alike in spirituals and temporals; we, from the point of view of the Gospel, or the New Law, which asserts the divine sovereignty, and requires us to obey God rather than men. They would secularize the church and education, abolish the priesthood, explain away the sacraments, and reduce the worship of God to the exercise of preaching, praying, and singing, which can be performed by laymen, or even women, as well as by consecrated priests. What they call their religion is a perpetual protest against what we call religion, or the Christian religion as we understand, hold, and practise it. It is especially a protest against the priesthood, priestly functions and authority.

Hence the difficulty of a mutual understanding between them and us. What they want is not what we want. We are willing to let them have their own way for themselves, but they are not willing that we should have our own way for ourselves; and they try all manner of means in their power to force us to follow their way and to fashion ourselves after their model. They do not concede that we have, and are not willing that we should have, equal rights with themselves in the state. If the state treats us as citizens standing on a footing of equality with them, they are indignant, and allege that it treats us as a privileged class, and to their great wrong. If it does not subordinate us to them, they pretend that it makes ours the established church, and places them in the attitude of dissenters from the state religion. They are not satisfied with equality; they can see no equality where they are not the masters. They cannot endure that Mordecai should be allowed to sit in the king's gate. This is the real sense of Putnam's article, and the meaning of the clamor of the sectarian and a large portion of the secular press, against the State and city of New York, for their alleged liberality to the church.

The complaint in Putnam is, that the State and city of New York have granted aid to certain Catholic charitable institutions, such as hospitals, orphan asylums, reformatories or protectorates for Catholic boys, etc., out of all proportion to its grants of aid to similar Protestant institutions. Also, that the Legislature has authorized the city to appropriate a certain percentage of the fees received for liquor licenses to the support of private schools for the poor, some portion, even the larger portion, of which, it is assumed, will go to the support of Catholic parochial schools, and therefore, it is pretended, to the support of sectarian schools; for in the Protestant mind whatever is Catholic is sectarian. But is it true that the State or the city does proportionably less for non-Catholic charitable or educational institutions—not a few of which are well known to be formed for the very purpose of picking up, we might say kidnapping, Catholic poor children, and bringing them up in some form of Protestantism or infidelity—than it does for Catholic charitable institutions? Most certainly not. It does far less for Catholic than for non-Catholic institutions; and yet, because it does a little for institutions, though for the benefit of the whole community, under the control and management of Catholics, the State and city are calumniated, and we are insulted by its being pretended that our church is made the state church.

In this matter of State grants or city donations, the Protestant mind proceeds upon a sad fallacy. The divisions of Protestants among themselves count for nothing in a question between them and Catholics. Protestants overlook this fact, and while they call all grants and donations to Catholic institutions sectarian, they call none sectarian of all that made to Protestant institutions which are not under the control and management of some particular denomination of Protestants, as the Episcopalian, the Presbyterian, the Baptist, or the Methodist; but this is a grave error, and cannot fail to mislead the public. All grants and donations made to institutions, charitable or educational, not under the control and management of Catholics are made to non-Catholics; and, with the exception of those made to the Hebrews, to Protestant institutions. There are but two religions to be counted, Catholic and Protestant. The true rule is to count on one side whatever is given to institutions under Catholic control and management, and on the other side all that is given for similar purposes to all the institutions, whether public or private, not under Catholic control and management. The question, then, comes up, Have the State and city given proportionately greater amounts to Catholic charitable and other institutions than to Protestant institutions? If not, we have no more than our share, and the Protestant clamor is unjust and indefensible.

Of the policy of granting subsidies by State or city, to eleemosynary institutions, whether Catholic or Protestant we say nothing; for being, even now, at most not more than one fifth of the whole population of the State, we are in no sense answerable, as Catholics, for any policy the State may see proper to adopt. But, if it adopts the policy of granting subsidies, we demand for our institutions our proportion of the subsidies granted. Have we received more than our proportion? Nay, have we received anything like our proportion? We find from the official report made to the State Convention, that the total of grants made by the State to charitable and other institutions—including the New York Institution of the Deaf and Dumb, the New York Institution for the Blind, the Society for the Reformation of Juvenile Delinquents of New York, State Agricultural College, State Normal School, the Western House of Refuge for Juvenile Delinquents, State Lunatic Asylum, the Asylum for Idiots, the Willard Asylum for the Insane, academies, orphan asylums, etc., hospitals, etc., colleges, universities, etc., and miscellaneous—-have amounted, for twenty-one years, ending with 1867, to $6,920,881.91. {580} Of this large amount, Catholics should have received for their institutions certainly not less than one million of dollars. Yet, all that we have been able to find that they have received out of this large sum is a little less than $276,000; that is, not over one fourth of what they were entitled to; yet Putnam's Magazine has the effrontery to pretend that our church is favored at the expense of Protestantism.

So much for the State subsidies. In passing to the city, we find its donations to charitable institutions, from 1847 to 1867 inclusive, amount to $1,837,593.27; of which, Catholic institutions, including $45,000 for parochial schools, have received, as nearly as we can ascertain from the returns, a little over three hundred thousand dollars. All the rest has gone to non-Catholic, and a large part to bitterly anti-Catholic associations and institutions. Of the aggregate grants and donations of the State and city of $8,754,759.18, Catholic institutions, as far as we have been able to discover from the official tables before us, received, prior to 1868, less than $600,000, not, by any means, a fourth of our proportion. Yet we are treated as the established church!

But we have not yet stated the whole case. We do not know how many millions are appropriated annually for the support of public schools throughout the State; but in this city the tax levy, this year, for the public schools, is, we are told, $3,000,000 or over. Catholics pay their proportion of this amount, and they are a third of the population of the city. The sum appropriated to the aid of private schools, we are told, is estimated at $200,000; and if every cent of it is applied in aid of our schools, as it will not be, it is far less than the tax we pay for schools which we cannot use. The public schools are anti-Catholic in their tendency, and none the less sectarian because established and managed by the public authority of the State. The State is practically Protestant, and all its institutions are managed almost exclusively by Protestants. St. John's College, Fordham, or St. Francis Xavier's, in this city, is not more exclusively Catholic than Columbia or Union is exclusively Protestant. These latter are open to Catholics, but not more than the former are to Protestants. We count in the grants and donations to Protestant institutions the whole amount raised by public tax, together with that appropriated from the school fund of the State for the support of the public schools. Thus we claim that Catholic charities and schools do not receive, in grants and donations, a tithe of what is honestly or justly their share—whether estimated according to their numbers or according to the amount of public taxes, for sectarian charitable and educational purposes levied on them by the State and its municipalities. How false and absurd, then, to pretend that this State specially favors our religion, and treats us as a privileged class! The writer in Putnam is obliged to draw largely on his sectarian imagination for facts to render his statements at all plausible. His pretended facts are in most cases no facts at all. We wish his estimate of the value of the real estate owned by the church were true; but he exaggerates hugely the amount, and then says it is held, for the most part, in fee-simple, by one or another of five ecclesiastics, which shows how ill-informed he is. {581} We subjoin the brief but spirited contradiction, by the bishop of Rochester, of several of his misstatements.

"In your paper, of June 16, appears an article with the caption, Our Established Church.' The article is based on one with the same title in Putnam's Magazine for July. I do not wish to review the article in Putnam, but claim the privilege of correcting some of its misstatements.

"I am one of the 'five ecclesiastics' in the State of New York holding property worth millions. Yet, strange to say, there is not to my knowledge one foot of land in the wide world in my name. All the church societies in the diocese of Rochester not organized as corporate bodies under the laws of the State of New York, previous to my appointment as Bishop of Rochester, have organized or are completing their organization under those laws. So soon as these societies comply with the law of the State, Bishop Loughlin, of Brooklyn, will transfer to them, by quit-claim deeds, whatever property of theirs he inherited from the late Bishop Timon. Had I had ever so little desire to hold property in my name, I might have held in fee-simple the lots on which I am building the bishop's house; but I have placed the title in the name of 'St. Patrick's Church Society.'

"The other 'ecclesiastics' in the State of New York, who have not already transferred the property which they held in fee-simple, are engaged in making such transfer of the 'fifty millions' said to be held by them.

"The chief trouble, it seems to me, is in the fact that the Catholic Church is allowed to hold property in any shape or form. But the Catholic Church does hold property, and she will continue to hold it to the end of the chapter, and 'What do you propose to do about it?'

"'The (Catholic) Nursery and Hospital on Fifty-first street and Lexington avenue,' is a Protestant institution.

"The new St. Patrick's Cathedral stands on ground purchased by Catholics about sixty years ago, and ever since in their possession. This fact spoils Parton's compliment to the Archbishop Hughes's foresight, and a nice bit of irony in Putnam's Magazine.

"The Catholics in New York City, in 1817, opened an orphan asylum, which they maintained, without assistance from the city or State, until some time after the year 1840, when they received on a perpetual lease the block of ground between Fourth and Fifth avenues and Fifty-first and Fifty-second streets, at that time of very little value. On these lots they have erected two vast and magnificent buildings, in which they support over a thousand children, at an annual cost to them, and not to the city or State, of from $70,000 to $90,000.

"I make these corrections to show that the writer of the article in Putnam is far astray in his facts. There are many other objectionable statements in the article, but a magazine contribution without a little spice in it would be tame and unreadable. Thus, the allusion to the church trouble in Auburn, and the pretty play on the name of the church, would lose their point if the history of that affair were properly understood.

"Catholics do not claim to have rights above any one else, but they know they have equal rights with others. They have no notion of their church ever becoming the 'Established Church,' and they are just as certain that no other church shall ever assume to be the 'Established Church' in the United States.

This is conclusive as far as it goes. We do not know the money value of our churches, the sites and buildings of our schools, colleges, orphan asylums, hospitals, religious houses, and academies; but it is possible that in the five dioceses into which the State is ecclesiastically divided it may be half as much as the value of the real estate owned by Trinity Church in this city; but be it more or be it less, the property of the church has been bought and paid for, so far as paid for at all, with very slight exceptions, by the voluntary offerings of the faithful, and none of it has been obtained by the despoiling of Protestant owners. Very little of it is due to public grants, and the few lots leased us by the city at a nominal rent for a term of years, though of great value now, were of little value when leased. {582} Nor have these lots in any case been leased for sites of churches, but in all cases for purposes in which the city itself is no less deeply interested than the Catholics themselves. The grants to the reformatory for Catholic boys, though apparently large, are measures of economy on the part of the city; for we can manage reformatories and take care of our juvenile delinquents far more economically than the city or Protestant institutions can. The industrial school of the Sisters of Charity is a public benefit, and the city and the State would save money were all their hospitals and asylums placed under the charge of these good sisters, or of the kindred congregation of the Sisters of Mercy. Our hospitals, again, are as open to Protestants as to Catholics. It is never a Catholic practice to inquire what is a man's religion before rendering him assistance. Whoever needs our help, whatever his religion, is our neighbor.

The city has made donations, as far as we are aware, only to such Catholic institutions as are established for really public objects, and which in their operations save the city from what would otherwise be either a public nuisance or a public charge. Take the case of Catholic orphan asylums. The orphans they receive and provide for would otherwise be a charge on the city treasury. Take the institute of the Sisters of the Good Shepherd. It has for its object a noble charity, that of rescuing and reforming fallen women. These victims of vice and propagators of corruption, received and cared for by the Sisters of the Good Shepherd, and generally restored to health, virtue, and usefulness, would, if not taken up by them, fall into the hands of the correctional police, and the city would have the expense of arresting, punishing, and providing for them in the house of correction, the penitentiary, or its hospitals. Catholic charity not only accomplishes a good object, confers a public benefit, but saves a heavy expense to the Commissioners of Public Charities and Correction. It is only such Catholic institutions as tend directly to promote a public good, and to lighten the public expense, that the city aids with its grants and donations. It aids in the same way, and to a far greater extent, similar Protestant institutions, such as the House of the Friendless, the House of Mercy, the Society for the Protection of Juvenile Delinquents, the Christian's Aid Society, the Magdalen Society, the Nursery and Children's Hospital, etc., for the most part, institutions founded with an anti-Catholic intent.

The Magazine asserts, the "State paid out, in 1866, for benefactions under religious control, $129,025.49, … of which the trifling sum of $124,174.14 went to the religious purposes" of the Catholic Church. We have not been able to find a particle of proof of this, and the mode of reckoning adopted by Putnam is so false, and its general inaccuracy is so great, that, in the absence of specific proof, we must presume it to be untrue, and made only for a sensational effect. The writer in Putnam seems to count as Catholic such institutions and associations as the Ladies' Mission Society, The New York Magdalen Benevolent Society, Ladies' Union Aid Society, Nursery and Children's Hospital, Ladies' Home Missionary Society, Five Points Gospel Union Mission, Five Points House of Industry, Young Men's Christian Association, and we know not how many more, all Protestant, and not a few of them designed, under pretext of charity, and by really rendering some physical relief to the poor and destitute, to detach the Catholic needy, and especially Catholic children, from the church, and yet all of them are beneficiaries of the State or city. {583} No institution supported, even for proselyting purposes, by a union of two or more evangelical sects, is reckoned by Putnam as Protestant or sectarian. We hold them to be thoroughly Protestant, and rabidly sectarian.

The sensational writer in Putnam complains of the city for leasing to Catholics valuable real estate, at a nominal rent, for a long term of years. Only one such lease, that for the House of Industry for the Sisters of Charity, has been made in this city since 1847. The site of St. Patrick's Cathedral, which he pretends is leased by the city, at a rent of one dollar a year, has been owned by Catholics for over sixty years, and was bought and paid for by them with their own money, as the venerable Bishop of Rochester asserts. The only other instance named, that of the Nursery and Children's Hospital, Fifty-first street and Lexington avenue, is a Protestant, not a Catholic institution. The writer should not take grants and donations made to Protestants as grants and donations made to Catholics. Between Catholics and Protestants there is a difference!

The writer's statement of the huge endowments the church will have, at the rate the city and State are endowing her, in 1918, we must leave to the consideration of the future Putnams. Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof. We will only say that the church has had, thus far, in this country, no endowment, and has no source of revenue but the unfailing charity of the faithful. The magnificent revenues of our churches, colleges, hospitals, asylums, etc., so dazzling to the writer in Putnam, are all in his eye. We have not a single endowed church, convent, college, school, hospital, or asylum in the Union! We do great things with small means, and what to Protestants would seem to be no means at all, because He who is great is with us, and because we rely on charity, and charity never faileth.

We have sufficiently disposed of the property question, and vindicated the State and city from the charge of undue favoritism to our church. No charge can be more untrue or more unjust. A few words on the common school question, and we dismiss the article in Putnam, which has already detained us too long.

The writer in Putnam attempts to be so ironical and so witty, and so readily sacrifices sobriety and truth to point, that he must excuse us from following him step by step in his account of our relation to the common schools. We know well the common school system of this and other States. We—we speak personally—received our early education in the public schools, were for five years a common school teacher, and for fifteen years had charge of the schools in the place of our residence, as school committee-man. We have not one word to say against them as schools for the children of those who are willing to secularize education. We make no war on the system for non-Catholics. If they wish the system for themselves, we offer them no opposition. Indeed, for those who hold the supremacy of the secular order, and believe that every department of life should be secularized, no better system can be devised. We oppose it not when intended for them, but only when intended for us and we are taxed to support it. We hold the spiritual order superior to the secular, and wish our children to be educated accordingly.

We hold that education, or the instruction and training of children and youth, is a function of the church, a function which she cannot discharge except in schools exclusively under her management and control. This education and training can be successfully given only in the Catholic family and the Catholic school. In this country, for reasons we need not stop to enumerate, the Catholic school is especially necessary. We do not, by any means, oppose what is called secular learning, and in no country where they have not been prevented by a hostile or anti-Catholic government, have Catholics failed to take the lead in all branches of secular learning and science. All the great literary masterpieces of the world, since the downfall of Pagan Rome, are the productions either of Catholics or of men who have received a Catholic training. Few as we are, and great as are the disadvantages under which we labor in this country, Catholics even here compare more than favorably, at this moment, in secular learning and science, with non-Catholics. The religious training they receive from the church, the great catholic principles which she teaches them in the catechism and in all her services, tend to quicken and purify the mind, and to fit it to excel even in secular science and learning. The Catholic has the truth to start from, and why should he not surpass all others? No! we do not oppose, we favor secular learning and science; but we oppose separating secular training from religious training, and can never consent to the secularization of education. Here is where we and the present race of Protestants differ. It is because the common schools secularize, and are intended by their chief supporters to secularize, education and to make all life secular, that we oppose them, and refuse to send our children to them where we can possibly avoid it. Even if religious education is given elsewhere, in the family or in the Sunday-school, the evil is only partially neutralized. The separation of the secular from the religious tends to create a fearful dualism in both individual and social life, to place the spiritual and the secular in the relation of antagonism, each to the other, which renders impracticable that concord between the two orders so necessary to the harmonious development of the individual life and the promotion of the well-being and progress of society. We insist, therefore, on having our children and youth trained in schools under charge of the church, that in them the spiritual and the secular may be harmonized as necessary parts of one dialectic whole.

Such are our views and wishes, and such our conscientious conviction of duty. Whether we are right or wrong, is no question for the state or civil authority to settle. The state has no competency in the matter. It is bound to respect and protect every citizen in the free and full enjoyment of the freedom of his conscience. We stand before the state on a footing of perfect equality with non-Catholics, and have the same right to have our Catholic conscience respected and protected, that they have to have their non-Catholic and secularized conscience respected and protected. We do not ask the state to impose our conscience on them, or to compel them to adopt and follow our views of education; but we deny its right to impose theirs on us, or even to carry out their views of education in any degree at our expense. The Catholic conscience binds the state itself so far, but only so far, as Catholics are concerned. Non-Catholics are the great majority of the population, at least five to our one, throughout the State, and they have the power, if they choose to exercise it, to control the State and to deny us our equal rights; but that does not alter the fact that we have equal rights, and that the State is bound to respect and cause them to be respected. {585} The State no doubt is equally bound to respect and protect the equal rights of non-Catholics, but no more than it is bound to respect and protect ours.

On this question of education, we and non-Catholics no doubt stand at opposite poles. We cannot accept their views, and they will not accept ours. Between them and us there is no common ground on which we and they can meet and act in concert. They feel it as keenly as we do. Now as the State owes equally respect and protection to both parties, and has no right to attempt to force either to conform to the views of the other, its only just and honest course is to abandon the policy of trying to bring both together in a system of common schools. Catholic and non-Catholic education cannot be carried on in common. In purely secular matters, Catholics and Protestants can act in common, as one people, one community; but in any question that involves the spiritual relations and duties of men, we and they are two communities, and cannot act in concert; and as both are equal before the State, it can compel neither to give way to the other. This may or may not be a disadvantage; but it is a fact, and must by all parties be accepted as such.

The solution of the problem would present no difficulty, were the non-Catholics as willing to recognize our rights as we are to recognize theirs. They support secular schools, and wish to compel us to send our children to them, because they hope thus to secularize the minds of our children—enlighten them, they say; darken them, we say—and detach them from the church, or, at least, so emasculate their Catholicity that it will differ only in name from Protestantism. They regard common schools, in which secular learning is diverted from religious instruction and training, as a most cunningly devised engine for the destruction of the church; and therefore they insist on it with all the energy of their souls, and the strength of their hatred of Catholicity. It gives them the forming of the character of the children of Catholics, and thus in an indirect way makes the State an accomplice in their proselyting schemes. Here arises all the difficulty in the case. But, whether they are right or wrong in their calculations, the State has no more right to aid them against us, than it has to aid us against them. If it will, as it is bound to do, respect and protect the rights of conscience, or real religious liberty, the only solid basis of civil liberty, it must do as the continental governments of Europe do, and divide the public schools into two classes; the one for Catholics, and the other for non-Catholics; that is, adopt the system of denominational schools, or, rather, as we would say, Catholic schools—under the management and control of the church—for Catholics, and secular schools—under its own management and control,—for the rest of the community. Let the system stand as it is for non-Catholics, by whatever name they may be called, and let the State appropriate to Catholics, for the support of schools approved by their church, their proportion of the school fund, and of the money raised by public tax for the support of public schools, simply reserving to itself the right, through the courts, to see that the sums received are honestly applied to the purposes for which they are appropriated. {586} The State may, if it insists, fix the minimum of secular instruction to be given, and withhold all or a portion of the public moneys from all Catholic schools that do not come up to it.

This, if the State, for public reasons, insists on universal education, is the best way of solving the difficulty, without violence to the equal rights of either Catholics or non-Catholics. The State would thus respect all consciences, and at the same time secure the education of all the children of the land, which is, no doubt, a public desideratum. Another way would be, to exempt Catholics from the tax levied for the support of the public schools, and give to the schools they maintain their proportion of the school fund held in trust by the State, and leave Catholics to establish and manage schools for their own children in their own way, under the supervision and control of the church. Either way of solving the difficulty would answer our purpose, and we venture to say that one or the other method of dealing with the public school question will ere long have to be adopted, whatever the opposition excited.

The American sense of justice already begins to revolt at the manifest wrong of taxing us to support schools from which our conscience will not permit us to derive any benefit. At present, we pay our quota to the support of the public schools, which we cannot with a good conscience use, and are obliged to support our own schools in addition. This is grossly unjust, and in direct violation of the equal rights guaranteed us by the constitution, and the religious liberty which is the loud boast of the country. The subsidies granted to some of our parochial schools in this city are an attempt, and an honorable attempt, to mitigate the injustice which is done us by the common school system. But the sums appropriated, as considerable as they may seem, are far below the sums collected from us, for the support of the public schools. The principle on which the common school system is founded is, that the wealth of the State should educate the children of the State. One third, at least, of the children of this city, are the children of Catholic parents, and belong to the Catholic Church. The sum appropriated for the public schools in this city, the present year, is, if we are correctly informed, something over three millions of dollars, and Catholics are entitled to one third of it, or to one million of dollars. They do not receive for their schools even a third of one million—even according to the most exaggerated statements of Putnam's Magazine and the sectarian press—and nothing like the amount of the public school tax which they are compelled to pay; yet it is pretended that ours is the established church, and that Catholics are specially favored by the State and city! We ask no favors, but we demand justice, and that our equal rights with non-Catholic citizens be respected, and protected.

There are other points, in Putnam, that we should like to notice—points which are intended, and not unfitted, to tell on the minds of ignorant anti-Catholic bigots and fanatics; but our space, as well as our patience, is exhausted. The writer is worthy of no confidence in any of his statements. He proves effectually that it is untrue that figures cannot lie; for under his manipulation they not only lie, but lie hugely. Even the anti-Catholic Nation has rebuked him for his levity, and he has even disgusted all fair-minded and moderate Protestants. He has quite overshot his mark. But be that as it may, we have confidence in the justice and right sense of the great body of our countrymen and fellow-citizens, and we do not believe, however much they dislike the church, that they will persevere in a course manifestly unjust to Catholics, and repugnant to the first principles of American liberty, after becoming once aware of its bad character.

As to the subsidies granted by the Legislature to Catholic charitable and educational institutions, they have been far less than are due—as the Hon. John E. Devlin justly remarked in the Convention, not ten per cent of the amount granted. And it has been no crime on our part to accept what has been offered us; for we have received and accepted them only for purposes of public utility and common humanity. Nor are we responsible for the action of the State Legislature; for it is composed chiefly of non-Catholics, and by a large majority elected by non-Catholics. Catholics are by no means the majority of electors in the State. We institute no inquiry into the motives that have influenced the members of the Legislature; we never assign bad or sinister motives, when good and proper motives are at hand. We presume the motive has been a sense of justice toward a large and growing class of the community, whose rights have for a long time been trampled on or disregarded. To condemn them, is not at all creditable to the rabid Protestant press, and, in our judgment, is very bad policy. However it may be with the Protestant leaders, the majority of the American people are sincerely and earnestly attached to the American doctrine of equal rights, and will no more consent to its manifest violation in the case of Catholics than of non-Catholics.

Mark IV.

           As if the storm meant Him;
           Or'cause Heaven's face is dim,
               His needs a cloud.
           Was ever froward wind
           That could be so unkind,
               Or wave so proud?
  The wind had need be angry, and the water black,
  That to the mighty Neptune's self dare threaten wrack.

           There is no storm but this
           Of your own cowardice
               That braves you out:
           You are the storm that mocks
           Yourselves; you are the rocks
               Of your own doubt.
  Besides this fear of danger there's no danger here,
  And he that here fears danger does deserve his fear.

Daybreak.

Chapter XII.

So As By Fire.

When spring came again, the letters from Mr. Granger were less frequent, and as weather and work grew warmer, the family had to content themselves with a few lines at irregular and sometimes long intervals.

They were not to be anxious, he wrote, even if they should not hear from him for several weeks. As the newspapers and the speech-makers had it, we were making history every day, and he must write his little paragraph with the rest. It took both hands to wield the pen, and he must have a care to make no blots. Which was a roundabout way of saying that his military duties required all his time. They must remember that "no news is good news," and try to possess their souls in patience.

  "Shoulder his crutch,
   and tell how fields were won,"

or lost; but till then a hasty scrawl must suffice. He thought of them whenever he lay down to rest; and sometimes, when he was in the midst of the hurry and noise of battle, he would catch a flitting vision of the peaceful fireside where friends sat and thought of him. That home was to him like the headland beacon to the mariner far away on the rough horizon, and threw its point of tender light on every dark event that surged about him.

From Mr. Southard they had heard less frequently, and less at length. His monthly letters to his congregation were usually accompanied by a few lines addressed to Mr. or Mrs. Lewis, telling them in rather formal fashion where he was, and as little as possible of what he was doing. At present, the regiment of which he was chaplain still had their quarters at New Orleans.

"I am afraid he thinks that we don't care much to hear from him," Margaret said, the three ladies sitting together, and talking the matter over. "Suppose we all write just as freely as we do to Mr. Granger? We can tell him all the little household events, and how his chair and his place at the table are still called his, and kept for him. I think he would be pleased, don't you, Aura?"

"I do. It isn't a wonder that he writes formally to us when he gets such ceremonious answers."

"To complain of cold replies to cold letters is like the wolf accusing the lamb of muddying the brook," retorted Mrs. Lewis. "I shall waste none of my sweetness on the desert air, and you will be a pair of simpletons if you do. We might expend ourselves in those gushing epistles to him, and after a month or two we should probably get about three lines apiece in return, each line cooler than the last, and not an intimation that he wasn't bored."

"But I think he would be pleased," repeated Margaret doubtfully, beginning to waver.

"What right or reason have you to think so when he never says that he is?" Mrs. Lewis persisted. "For my part, I think that friendship is worthy of acknowledgment from king or kaiser—that is, if he wants it; and if Mr. Southard isn't an iceberg, then he is a very selfish and arrogant man, that's all. {589} You may do as you like. But I shall never again try to get a sunbeam out of that cucumber. I have spoken."

The entrance of Mr. Lewis put an end to their discussion. He came in with a very cross face.

"Here I've got to start for Baltimore, with the thermometer at eighty degrees, and the Confederates swarming up the Shenandoah by tens of thousands, and ready to pounce on anybody south of New York!' Why have I got to go?' Why, my agent is on the point of absconding with the rents, and the insurance policies on my houses are out, and I can't renew them in Boston or New York for love or money; and if things are not seen to there, we shall be beggars. You needn't laugh, madam! It's no joke. I've just seen a man straight from Baltimore, and he says that rascal is all but ready to start on a European tour with my money in his pocket. I shall get a sunstroke, or have an apoplexy; I know I shall."

"A cabbage-leaf in your hat might prevent the sunstroke," his wife said serenely. "As to the apoplexy, I am not so safe about that, if you keep on at this rate. When do you start?"

"To-night; and now it is two o'clock. The rails may be ripped up at any hour. You see now, Mrs. Lewis, the disadvantage of living in one town and having your property in another. You would come to Boston. Nothing else would suit you. And the consequence is, that I've got to go posting down to Baltimore in July, to collect my rents."

"'The woman whom thou gavest me'—that's the way, from Adam down. Who would think, girls, that this is the very first intimation I ever had that Mr. Lewis would rather live in Baltimore than Boston! But, bless me! I must see to his valise, and have an early dinner. As for the raid panic, I will risk you. I don't believe there's much the matter."

Margaret had been looking steadily at Mr. Lewis ever since he began speaking. She said not a word while the others exclaimed and questioned, and finally went out to prepare for his journey; but some sharp work was going on in her mind, an electric crystallization of vague and floating impressions, impulses, and thoughts into resolve.

It had been weeks since they heard from Mr. Granger. She had not been very much troubled about it—had, indeed, wondered that she felt so little anxiety; but her quietude was by no means indifference or security. She could not have defined her own feelings. For the last week she had not uttered his name, had shrunk with an unaccountable reluctance from doing so, and, worse yet, had found it impossible to pray for him.

Her other prayers she said as usual; but when she would have prayed for his safe return, the words died upon her lips. She was neither excited nor distressed; she was, perhaps, more calm than usual. Her hands were folded, her face upraised, she had placed herself in the presence of God; but if a hand had been laid upon her lips she could not have been more mute. A physical weakness seemed to deprive her of the power of speech. This was not once, but again, and yet again.

Margaret had the most absolute faith in the power of prayer. She believed that we may sometimes obtain what we had better not have, God giving for his word's sake to those who will not be denied, but chastening the petitioner for his lack of submission by means of the very gift he grants {590} She had said to herself, "If a sword were raised to strike one I love, it could not fall while I prayed. He has promised, and I believe."

But now, if the sword hung there indeed, she could utter no word to stay its falling. She felt herself forbidden, bound by a restraint she could not throw off. "Well, Margaret," Mr. Lewis said at length, "what are you thinking of? You look as if your brain were a galvanic battery in full operation, sending messages in every direction at once. The sparks have been coming out of your eyes for the last five minutes."

The crystallizing process was over, and her resolution lay there in her mind as bright and hard as though it were the work of years.

"I'm going to Washington," she said. "I have been thinking of it this week. I will go with you tonight, if you please."

Of course there were wonderments, and questions, and objections. According to all the canons of propriety, it was highly improper for a lady to go South under the existing state of things, unless there were bitter need. It was warm, and it was hard travelling night and day, as he would have to do. He would like to have her company, of course, but he didn't see—

"No matter about your seeing," interrupted Miss Hamilton, rising. "If you won't have me with you, I'll go alone. Please don't say any more. Cannot you understand, Mr. Lewis, that there are times when trivial objections and opposition may be very irritating? We will not discuss canons of propriety just now. I have something of more consequence to attend to."

"Well, don't be cross," he said good-naturedly. "I won't say another word. If you can stand the journey, I shall be glad to have you go. But you will have to be quicker in getting your traps ready than my wife and Aurelia ever are."

"I can be ready in fifteen minutes to go anywhere," was the reply. "Now I will go tell Mrs. Lewis."

Mrs. Lewis saw at a glance that opposition was useless. Moreover, she was one of those persons who can allow for exceptional cases, and distinguish between rashness and inspiration.

"I know it seems odd," Margaret said to her; "but I must go. I feel impelled. I would go if I had to walk. You will be good, and take my part, won't you? Don't tell anybody where I have gone—nobody has any right to know—and take care of my little Dora. I'm going up to the State House now, but will be back by the time dinner is ready."

"I wouldn't venture to stop her if I could," Mrs. Lewis said. "Margaret is not given to flying off on tangents, and this start may mean something. She has perception at every pore of her."

"You will have to wait your turn, ma'am," answered a very authoritative individual. "The gov'ner's tremendously busy—overwhelmed with work—hasn't had time to get his dinner yet. Just sit down and wait, and I will let him know as soon as there is a chance. If you tell me your business, I might mention it to him."

He pointed to a door. "But you can't go in now. I'll tell him presently, if you give me your name."

With the most sublime disregard for formalities, Miss Hamilton walked straight toward the door indicated.

"But I tell you you can't go in there," said the messenger angrily, attempting to stop her.

For answer, she opened the door, and walked into the room where the governor sat at a table, with a secretary at each side of him. He looked up with a frown on seeing a visitor enter unannounced, but rose immediately as he recognized her.

"That's right. I'm glad you did not wait," he said. Then as she glanced at his companions, added, "Come in here," and led her through a small ante-room where two young ladies sat waiting, and into the vacant council-chamber.

I will detain you but a minute," she said hastily. "I am going to start for Washington to-night, and I want to visit the hospitals there. Will you give me a letter to some one who will get me permission? I am not sure that I shall find an acquaintance in the city at this season, except the family to whose house I shall go, and they are people of no influence. Besides, I do not wish to have any delay!"

"Certainly; with pleasure! I will give you letters that will take you through everything without a question. But what in the world are you going there now for? It is hardly safe. My autograph will stand a pretty good chance of falling into the hands of Mosby."

"I am uneasy about Mr. Granger," she replied directly. "We haven't heard from him for weeks, and I must know if there is anything the matter. He has been a good friend to me. He saved my life once, and I owe him everything. We are only friends, you know; but that word means something with me. Do you think there is any impropriety in my going? Mr. Lewis goes with me as far as Baltimore."

"Not the least impropriety in life," was the prompt reply. "I won't say a word against your going. I always think that when any person, man or woman, gets that raised look that I see in your face, slow coaches had better roll off the track. Come, now, and I'll write your letters."

"You are worth a million times your weight in gold!" Margaret exclaimed. "You are one of the few persons who don't carry a wet blanket about in readiness to extinguish people. I cannot tell how I thank you!"

"Rather an extravagant valuation, considering the present percentage, and my pounds avoirdupois. As for wet blankets, I never did much believe in 'em."

While the governor wrote, Margaret stood at his elbow and watched the extraordinary characters that grew to life beneath his pen.

"They will know the signature," he replied, making a dab over a letter, to indicate that an i was somewhere in the vicinity. "You can use them as cartes—well—noires, I suppose, on the strength of which you are to ask anything you please. Choate and I"—here a polysyllable was dashed across the whole sheet—"had a vocation for lettering tea-boxes, you know. There! now you had better use either of these first, if it is just as convenient, and keep Mr. Lincoln's till the last. But aren't you afraid of being stopped on the way? Everything is in a heap down there."

"Don't mention to any one about my going, will you?" she whispered, as they went to the door.

An hour later she saw the city slowly disappearing as the cars rolled out over the new lands.

Mr. Lewis settled himself comfortably in his seat. "And now for Maryland, my Maryland!"

"By George!" he exclaimed presently, putting his hand into his pocket, "here is a letter from Mr. Southard. It will serve to amuse us; but I am sorry that the others hadn't seen it."

He opened the letter, and they read it together. Mr. Southard had been ill, he wrote, and was yet only able to dawdle about the wards of the hospital and gossip with the patients. He had been offered private quarters, but had preferred a hospital. It chanced that the Sisters of Charity had charge of the one to which he was sent, and they had given him the best of care.

How will that read to his congregation, I wonder?" Margaret said. "I fancy they won't half like it."

"Perhaps not. But I call that a good letter. It is the best we have had; not a word of religion, from first to last."

"But it breathes the very spirit of charity," was the quick reply. "How gently he mentions every one! Not a hard word even for the enemy!"

"I dare say; and that is the kind of religion I like. When I hear a man continually calling on God to witness everything he says and does, I always think that he stands terribly in need of a backer."

They reached New York the next morning, and learned there that the panic was increasing rather than diminishing. The track was yet open, but no one went South who had not pressing business.

"Wait, sir?" said Mr. Lewis bluffly. "By no means! Don't trouble yourself. She isn't one of the squealing sort."

Margaret's heavy eyes brightened. "That is what I want. You cannot go too fast for me."

On they went again with steadily increasing speed, reaching Philadelphia ahead of time. There fresh news of disaster awaited them. On then to Baltimore, where they found the citizens arming, and every one full of excitement.

"I must and will go through!" Margaret said passionately, seeing Mr. Lewis about to expostulate.

They stopped only long enough to be assured that communication with Washington was still open, then started on the last stage of their journey, keeping a sharp lookout, since it was not impossible that at almost any moment they might be saluted by a volley of musketry, or thrown headlong over an unseen hiatus in the rail.

"Seems to me we are getting over the ground at a tearing pace," remarked one of the passengers in a lazy drawl. "For my part, I don't know but I'd as lief stand my chance of a minie-ball as run the risk of being knocked into railroad-pi. A slug is a neat thing; but these smash-ups are likely to injure a fellow's personal appearance."

"There they are!" exclaimed an other, who had been watching through a glass ever since they left Baltimore. "I should guess that there's only a score of cavalry; but they may have more behind. Do you see? Just over the hill. It's a pretty even thing which of us reaches the crossing first. Not above a mile ahead, is it?"

He of the drawl, a cavalry captain, turned to Margaret. "Do you object to fire-arms, ma'am?" he asked, in much the same tone of voice he would have used in asking if she objected to cigar-smoke.

He pulled a beautiful silver-mounted revolver out of his pocket, and carefully examined the barrels.

"This has been like a father to me," he said with great tenderness. "It's all the family I have. The barrels I call my six little sisters. Each one has a name. They've got pretty sharp tongues, but I like the sound of 'em; and they always speak to the point. Jennie is my favorite—see! her name is engraven, with the date—ever since she helped me out of a hobble at Ball's Bluff. I was playing cat and mouse with a fellow there, he with his rifle aimed, waiting to get a shot at something besides my boot or the end of my beard, and I hanging on the off-side of my horse, clinging to saddle and mane. I was brought up on horseback, and have spent a good part of my time scouring over the Southwest, Missouri, Texas, and thereabouts; but of course I couldn't hang there for ever. Well, just as I was thinking that I should have to drop, or straighten up and take my slug like a man, I managed to spare a finger and thumb, and got Paterfamilias here out of my belt. Where can one better be than in the bosom of his family? says I. I didn't hurt the fellow much; I didn't mean to. When two men have been dodging and watching that way for some time, they get to have quite an affection for each other. I spoilt his aim, though; and I fancy that he will never be a very good writer any more."

A new spirit was beginning to stir in her veins. The speed of the cars was of itself exciting—those long strides at the full stretch of the iron racer, when the wheels, instead of measuring the track with a steady roll, rise up and drop again with a sharp click, as regular as verse; not that cantering line of Virgil's, "Quadrupedante" and the rest, but a hard, iambic gallop. Besides this, the sense of danger and power combined was intoxicating. For, after all, danger is intolerable only when we have nothing to oppose to it.

There had been trees and rocks, but they were changed to a buzz, the road became a dizziness, and the whole landscape swam. There was something near the track that looked about as much like horsemen as the shadow of the same would look in broken, swift-running water; a few shots were heard, there was a little rattle of shivered glass; then all the men broke into a shout.

"Did you hear Jennie smile?" asked the captain, as he put Paterfamilias carefully into his belt again.

Margaret laughed with delight, and gave her handkerchief a little flutter out the window. "I can guess how chain-lightning feels," she said; "only it can't go on minutes and minutes."

After their little adventure, our travellers rode triumphantly into Washington, and Miss Hamilton found her friends glad to receive her the more so that she came as a boarder, and their house was nearly empty.

The Blacks had, in their younger days, been humble followers of Doctor Hamilton; and though their acquaintance with Margaret was slight, as they felt a kind of duty toward all the connection, they were proud to receive her.

"I am anxious about friends whom I have not heard from for some time," she explained; "and I have come here to look round a little."

"Who do you know in the army?" Mrs. Black inquired, not too delicately, considering the reserve with which her visitor had spoken.

Miss Hamilton was not learned in the slippery art of evasion. She simply ignored the question.

"I am exhausted," she said. "Of course I did not sleep any last night; and the ride has been fatiguing. I have but one desire, and that is to rest. Can you show me to my room at once? I feel as though I should drop asleep as soon as my head touches the pillow. When I do sleep, please don't wake me."

When she lay down to rest the afternoon sun was gilding the trees in the square opposite, flaring on the long white-washed walls of the hospital in their midst, and brightening momentarily the pale faces pressed close to the window-bars of the jail beyond. When she woke from the deep and dreamless sleep that seemed to have almost drawn the breath from her lips, it was night. Some one had set a star of gas burning in her room, and left a plate of cake and a glass of wine on the stand at her bedside.

Margaret raised herself like one who has been nearly drowned and still catches for breath, gathered her benumbed faculties and recollected where she was. All was quiet within the house; and without there was stillness of another sort, a silence that was living and aware, a sense as of thousands waking and watching. Now and then there came from the hospital across the street some voice of a sleepless sufferer, the long, low moan of almost exhausted endurance, the broken cry of delirium, or the hoarse gasp of pneumonia.

After a while these sounds became deadened, and finally lost in another that rose gradually, deepening like the roll of the sea heard at night.

Margaret went to her window and leaned out. The sultry air was heavily-laden with fragrance from the flower-gardens around, and in the sky the large stars trembled like over-full drops of a golden shower descending through the ambient purple dusk.

That sea-roll grew nearer as she listened, and became the measured tramp of men. Soon they appeared out of the darkness at the left, marching steadily line after line, and company after company, to disappear into darkness at the right. They moved like shadows, save for that multitudinous muffled tread, and save that, at certain points, a street-light would flash along a line of rifle-barrels, or catch in a flitting sparkle on a spur or shoulder-strap. Then, like a dream, they were gone; darkness and distance had swallowed them up from sight and hearing; and again there was that strange, live stillness, broken only by the complaining voices of the sick.

As Margaret looked, the dim light in one of the hospital-wards flared up suddenly and showed three men standing by a bed near one of the windows. They lifted the rigid form that lay there, and placed it on a stretcher; two of the men bore it out, and the light was lowered again, After a little while the men appeared outside bearing that white and silent length between them, through the dew and the starlight, and were lost from sight behind the trees. When they returned, they walked side by side; and what they had carried out they brought not back again.

The watcher's heart sent out a cry: "O Father in heaven! see how thy creatures suffer."

In the excitement of the last part of her journey, and the exhaustion following it, she had almost forgotten her object in coming; but this sight brought it all back. She remembered, too, that she had been dropping into the old way of taking all the burden on her own shoulders; and even in crying out for pain, she recollected the way of comfort. How sweet the restfulness of that recollection! As though a child, wandering from home, lost, weary, and terrified, should all at once see the hearth-light shining before him, and hear the dear familiar voices calling his name. She thought over the lessons learned during that blessed retreat, that Mecca toward which henceforth her thoughts would journey whenever her soul grew faint by the way. The half-forgotten trust came back. Who but He who had set the tangles of this great labyrinth could lead the way out of it? Who but He whose hand had strung the chords of every human heart could ease their straining, and bring back harmony to discord? Where but with Him, the centre of all being, could we look for those who are lost to us on earth?

When, long after sunrise, Mrs. Black entered her visitor's chamber, she found Margaret kneeling by the window, fast asleep, with her head resting on the sill.

There was plenty of news and excitement that morning. All communication with the North was cut off, the President and his family had come rushing in at midnight from their country-seat, and there was fighting going on only a few miles out of town. It was altogether probable that the Confederates would be in the city before night.

Mrs. Black told all this with such an air of satisfaction in the midst of her terror that Margaret made some allowance for embellishment in the story. Evidently the good woman enjoyed a panic, and was willing to be frightened to the very verge of endurance for the sake of having it to tell of afterward. She went about in a sort of delighted agony, gathering up her spoons and forks, and giving little shrieks at the least unusual sound.

"If they should bombard the city, my dear," she said, "we can go down cellar. I have an excellent cellar. It is almost certain that they will come. We must be in a strait when the treasury-clerks come out. And such a sight! They passed here just before I went up to call you, all in their shirt-sleeves, and looking no more like soldiers, dear, than I do this minute. Half of them carried their rifles over the wrong shoulder, and seemed scared to death lest they should go off. And no wonder; for the way the barrels slanted was enough to make you smile, even if there were a bomb-shell whizzing past your nose. {596} The muzzles looked all ways for Sunday, so to speak. There were little boys with them, too. I don't see where their pas and mas were, if they've got any. It's a sin and shame. Do eat some more breakfast, pray! You may as well have a full stomach; for if we should be obliged to hide in the cellar, we might not dare come up to get a mouthful for twenty-four hours. I do hope it won't be a long siege. If they've got to come in, let'em come. I'm sure they would be too much of gentlemen to molest a houseful of defenceless females. As for poor Mr. Black, he doesn't count. Though he is my husband, I have seen braver men, not to speak of women. I had to threaten him, this morning, within an inch of his life, to prevent him from running a Confederate flag out of the window. He keeps one in his trunk, in case it should be needed. He declared he heard firing in the avenue. Bless me! What is that?"

"The destructive minxes! But where are you going, dear? Over to the hospital? Oh! they don't admit visitors on Sunday. Even on week-days you can't get in till after the surgeons have gone their rounds, and that is never before ten o'clock. It is military rule, you know; as regular as clock-work. It won't come ten till sixty minutes after nine o'clock, not if you perish. The first time I went in there, the soldier on guard came near running me through with his bayonet, just because I didn't walk in a certain particular road. I tried to reason with him; but you might as well reason with stocks and stones. There was the man in the middle of the road, and there was the point of his bayonet within an inch of my stomacher; and the upshot of the matter was, that I had to turn about and walk in a straight road instead of a curved one, for no earthly reason that I could see. You really cannot get in to-day. Wait till to-morrow, and I will go over with you."

"Mrs. Black," she said, "did you ever hear of the man who said that whenever he saw 'Positively no admittance' posted up anywhere, he always went in there directly?"

"Well," the lady sighed, "I can't say but you may get in. You are your grandfather's granddaughter, and he never said fail. Only, be sure you look your best. You remember the song your mother used to sing about the chief who offered a boatman a silver pound to row him and his bride across the stormy ferry; and the Highland laddie said he would, not for the 'siller bright,' but for the 'winsome lady.' Many's the time I cried to hear your poor mother sing that, and how they all perished in the storm, and the father they were running away from stood on the shore lamenting. Your grandfather would wipe his eyes on the sly, and wait till she had finished every word of it; and then he would speak up and say that she had better be singing the praises of God. May be the officers over there will be like the Highland boatman, and do for you what they would n't do for an ugly old woman like me."

Margaret closed her ears to that piercing sentence, "the song your mother used to sing "—O silent lips!—and going out, crossed over to the hospital.

As she turned into a curved road that approached the door, a soldier pacing there presented his bayonet, probably the same one that had threatened Mrs. Black's plaited linen stomacher.

The smaller the warrior, the greater the martinet. Doubtless this young man regarded his present adversary with far more fierceness than he would have shown toward a six-foot Texan grey coat, with a belt bristling with armor, and two eyes like two blades.

"I haven't any," she said pitifully, and looked with appealing eyes at an officer just inside the door.

Mrs. Black had not overrated the power of the winsome lady. The surgeon in charge, for this was he, merely glanced over the letters to learn the bearer's name and State. He had already found her face, voice, and gloves such as should, in his opinion, be admitted anywhere and at all times.

"Please come in," he said courteously. "It is almost inspection time now, and I must be on duty. But if you will wait in my office a little while, I shall be happy to escort you through the wards."

He drew himself up stiffly, in high dudgeon at the little value she set on his escort. "Certainly! You can do just as you please."

She thanked him again, and went up the hall, utterly unconscious that she had been greatly honored.

The hall was very long, so long that the door at the furthest end looked as though only a child could go through without stooping, and the wards were built out to right and left. She visited every one, walking up and down the rows of beds, her eager glance flashing from face to face. There was no face there that she had ever seen before. With a faint voice she asked for the names of those who had lately died. The names were as strange as the faces. Finally she sat down in one of the wards to rest.

The inside of the hospital was altogether less gloomy than the outside had appeared. They were in a bustle of preparation for inspection, putting clean white covers on the beds and the stands, regulating the medicine-table and the book-shelves, squaring everything, looking out that the convalescents were in trim, belt-buckles polished, shoes bright, hair smooth, jackets buttoned up to the chin.

The ward looked fresh and cheerful. The white walls were festooned with evergreen, green curtains shaded the windows, and the floor was as white as a daily scouring could make it. Nearly half of the patients were dressed, and eagerly talking over the news; and even the sickest there looked on with interest, and brightened occasionally.

"Fly round here!" cried the ward-master, a fair-faced, laughing young German. "They've gone into the next ward. Hustle those clothes out of sight somewhere. Tumble 'em out the window! Kohl, if you groan while the surgeons are here, I'll give you nothing but quinine for a week. Can't somebody see to that crazy fellow up there! He's pulling the wreath down off the wall. Pitch into him! Tell him that he shan't have a bit of ice to-day if he doesn't lie still. And there's that other light-head eating the pills all up. I'll be hanged if he hasn't swallowed twenty-five copper and opium pills! {598} Well, sir, you're dished. Long Tom, mind yourself, and keep your feet in bed."

"I can't!" whispered Tom, who seemed to be a mere boy, though his length was something preposterous. "The bed is too short."

"Well, crumple up some way," said the ward-master, laughing. "I'll have you up next week, fever or no fever. If you lie there much longer, you'll grow through the other side of the ward."

"It isn't my fault," Tom said pitifully to Miss Hamilton, who sat near him. "When I went to bed here, five weeks ago, I wasn't any taller than the ward-master; and now I believe I'm seven feet long. I believe it was that everlasting quinine!" And poor Tom burst into tears.

Instantly all was silence. Each convalescent stood at the foot of his bed, and the nurses were drawn up inside the door. The little procession of surgeons appeared, marched up one side of the ward and down the other, and out the door; and the inspection was over.

As they passed by her, one of them, in drawing his handkerchief from his pocket, drew with it a card, which, unseen by him, dropped at Margaret's feet. She took it up, and saw the photograph of the gentleman who had dropped it, dressed in the uniform of a Confederate colonel.

An orderly came to the door. "Every man who is able to carry a rifle get ready to go down to Camp Distribution," he said. "Don't let any of 'em shirk, Linn. Send some of those fellows down to the office to be examined. Every man is wanted."

As Margaret went out, she saw Surgeon A—— hasten from one of the wards, and look along the floor of the hall, as if in search of something. His face was very pale, she saw, and he looked up sharply at her as she approached him.

His face reddened violently as he took it. "Has any one seen it besides you, madam?" he asked.

"Will you give me an opportunity to explain?" he asked eagerly. "If you would permit me to call on you, or accompany you out now—"

"By no means," she replied coldly. "I do not wish to hear any explanation. I am here on business of my own, and shall not, probably, take any further notice of what I have seen. But if on second thought I should consider myself obliged to mention it, you can make your explanation to Mr. Lincoln."

She left him at that, and went home to hear Mrs. Black's compliments on her success.

There were no more visits that day; but the next morning a close carriage was sent to the door, and Margaret began her rounds.

In the afternoon she found herself going out Fourteenth street toward Columbia Hospital. There was a shower, and as the horses plodded along through the pouring floods of southern rain, she leaned her face upon her hand and wondered sadly what was to come of this search of hers, and if that strange, irresistible impulse on which she had been shot, like Camilla on her spear, over every obstacle to her coming, had been, after all, but a vain whim.

Looking up presently, she found that they were in the midst of what seemed to her an army, soldiers crowding close to the carriage, and stretching forward and backward as far as she could see. It was the Sixth corps, one of them told her, going out to meet Early and Breckinridge.

They were marching in a mob, without order, plodding wearily through the rain that just served to wash from them the stains of their last battle. Their faces were browned and sober, their clothes faded and stained; many, foot-sore with long marches, carried their shoes in their hands. They were little enough like the gay troops she had seen march away from home.

When they came to the college hospital, it was found impossible to reach the side-walk through that crowd, and Margaret ordered the driver to wait till they should pass. As she leaned back in her carriage and watched the living stream flow slowly over the hill, a gentleman came out of the hospital, and, standing on the sidewalk opposite her, seemed to be looking for some one among them. Presently his face brightened with a recognizing smile, and he waved his handkerchief to one who was riding near. As the horseman drew up between her and the sidewalk, Margaret's heart seemed to leap into her mouth. He was wrapped in a cloak, and a wide-brimmed hat, still dripping from the spent shower, shaded his face; but she knew him at the first glance.

A shout from the convalescents collected outside the tent wards drowned her glad cry, and the next instant she would not for the world have repeated it. By a sudden revulsion of feeling, the face that had flushed with delight now burned with unutterable shame and humiliation.

For the first time she looked on what she had done as the world might look upon it—as Mr. Granger himself might look upon it. Friends or foes, he was a gentleman, and she a lady, and not a baby. She, wandering from place to place, unbidden, in search of him, weeping, praying, making a fool of herself, she thought bitterly, and he sitting his horse there gallantly, safe and merry, within reach of her hand, showing his white teeth in a laugh, stroking down his beard with that gesture she knew so well, taking off his hat to shake the raindrops from it, and loop up the aigrette at the side!

She had time to remember with a pang of envy the quiet, guarded women who sit at home, and take no step without first thinking what the world will say of it.

"If he should think of me at all," she said to herself, "he would fancy me at home, trailing my dress over his carpets, making little strokes with a paint-brush, having a care lest I ink my fingers, or teaching Dora to spell propriety—as I ought to be! as I ought to be! I need a keeper!"

But still, with her veil drawn close, she looked at him steadily; for, after all, he was going into battle, and he was her friend. As she looked, he glanced up at one of the hospital windows, and immediately his glance became an earnest gaze. He ceased speaking, and his face showed surprise and perplexity.

"Strange!" he muttered, half to himself. "It is only a resemblance, of course, but I fancied I saw there a face I know, looking out at me. It is gone now."

Whatever it was, the sight appeared to sober as well as perplex him. He took leave of his friend, and, drawing back to join his regiment, brought his horse round rather roughly against Miss Hamilton's carriage.

"I beg your pardon, madam!" he said at once, taking off his hat to the veiled lady he saw there.

He must have thought her scarcely courteous; for she merely nodded, and immediately turned her face away.

He rode slowly on, looking back once more to the hospital window, and in a few minutes was out of sight.

She went in and seated herself in the hall. "I want to rest," she said to a soldier who stood there. "I don't feel quite well."

A slight, elderly lady in a black dress, and with her bonnet a little awry, came down the stairs, and stood looking about as though she expected some one.

"Can you tell me where Miss Blank is to be found?" she asked of the soldier to whom Margaret had spoken. "She has been out in the tent wards, and there she comes," he said, nodding toward a young woman who came in at the door furthest from them, and, with a face expressive of apprehension, approached the waiting lady.

"Yes," was the reply. "You will be ready to return home to-morrow, or as soon as communication is reestablished. I will send your transportation papers to-night. You need not go into the wards again."

The young woman stared in speechless distress and astonishment, her eyes filling with tears.

"Yes," he replied. "She makes short work of it. That is one of the best nurses, and the best dresser in the hospital."

"Miss Dix has probably heard something about her. She's a good young woman, but the old lady is mighty particular."

"I am going to stay in Washington a few days," she said, "and I would like to be useful while I am here. Can I do anything for you?"

"Who are you?" asked the lady. Margaret presented her credentials, and Miss Dix glanced them over, then looked sharply at their owner.

In two minutes the carriage was dismissed, and Margaret was seated in the ambulance, and on her way down to the city again.

"You will be very careful who you speak to," the lady began; "you will dress in the plainest possible manner, wear no ornaments, and, of course, high necks and long sleeves. Your hair—are those waves natural?"

"Yes'm!" said Margaret humbly, and was about to add that perhaps she could straighten them out, but checked herself.

"Well, dress your hair very snugly, wear clean collars, and don't let your clothes drag. It looks untidy. Is that dress quite plain?"

Margaret threw back the thin mantle she wore, and showed a gray dress of nunlike plainness.

Here they turned into the square, and got out at the door of the hospital Margaret had visited the day before. She was introduced to the officer of the day, received an astonished bow from the surgeon-in-charge in passing, caught a glimpse of Doctor A——, and was escorted to her ward.

"I'm proper glad," said Tom, with an ecstatic grin. "I liked the looks of you when I saw you yesterday."

Common sense goes a great way in nursing; and when there is added a sympathetic heart, steady nerves, a soft voice, and a gentle hand, your nurse is about perfect, though she may not have gone through a regular course of training.

Ward six considered itself highly favored in having Miss Hamilton's ministrations, even for a few days. The nauseous doses she offered were swallowed without a murmur, fevered eyes followed her light, swift step, and men took pride in showing how well they could bear pain when such appreciative eyes were looking on.

Mrs. Black, rushing over to expostulate and entreat, became a convert. It was certainly very romantic, she said; and since her young friend was not treated like a common nurse, but had everything her own way, it was not so bad. And without, perhaps, having ever heard the name of Rochefoucauld, the good lady added, "Anything may happen in Washington now."

Moreover, Miss Hamilton would sleep and take her meals at Mrs. Black's, which was another palliating circumstance.

Mr. Lewis, with a fund of gibes ready, came also to see the new nurse. But the sight of her silenced him.

Bending over a dying man to catch the last whisper of a message to those he would never see again; speaking a word of encouragement to one who lay with his teeth clenched and with drops of agony standing on his forehead; mediating in the chronic quarrel between regulars and volunteers; hushing the ward, that the saving sleep of an almost exhausted patient might not be broken—in each of these she seemed in her true place. As he looked on, he began to realize how impertinent are conventionalities when life and death are in the balance.

"I don't blame you, Margaret," he said seriously, "though I am glad that you don't think of staying any longer than I do. I will give you till Friday afternoon. If we start then, we can reach home by Sunday morning. The track is open, and I am just off for Baltimore. Good-by."

She accompanied him to the door. "If you should see Mr. Granger, or write to him," she said, with some confusion, "don't mention why I came here. I am ashamed of it."

"Oh! you needn't feel so," he replied soothingly. "We have had a nice little adventure to pay us for the journey; and you were breaking your heart with inaction and anxiety."

"Women should break their hearts at home!" she said proudly, her cheeks glowing scarlet.

That was Wednesday. Thursday morning, as she rose from a five o'clock breakfast to go over to the hospital, a carriage stopped at the door, and, looking out, she saw Mr. Lewis coming up the walk.

O God! The blow had fallen! No need even to look into his white and smileless face to know that.

Morning, was it? Morning! She could hardly see to reach the carriage, and the earth seemed to be heaving under her feet.

As they drove through that strange, feverish world that the sunny summer day had all at once turned into, she heard a long, heavy breath that was almost a groan. "O dear!" said Mr. Lewis.

She reached out her hand to him, as one reaches out in the dark for support. "Tell me!"

"It is a wound in the head," he said; "and any wound there is bad. I got the dispatch at Baltimore last night, and came right back. They forwarded it from Boston. Why did not you tell me that you saw him Monday?"

"Then you didn't know him?" Mr. Lewis said. "I thought it strange you shouldn't mention it. Louis says that when they were going out past Columbia College, he glanced up at one of the windows, and saw you leaning out and looking at him. You were very sober, and made no motion to speak; and after a moment your face seemed to fade away. It made such an impression on him that he asked to be carried there and to that room, though it isn't an officers' hospital. He was almost superstitious about it, till I told him that you were really here."

It was true then. The intensity of her gaze, and the concentration of her thoughts upon him at that moment had by some mystery of nature which we cannot explain, though guesses have been many, impressed her image on his mind, and thrown the reflection of it through his eyes, so that where his glance chanced to fall at that instant, there she had seemed to be.

"You must try to control yourself, Margie," Mr. Lewis went on, his own lip trembling. "There is danger of delirium. He is afraid of it, and watches every word he says. He can't talk much. I'll give you a chance to say all you want to; and whenever I'm needed, you can call me. I will wait just outside the door. Give your bonnet and shawl to the lady. There, this is his room, and that is yours, just across the entry."

The pleasant chamber was clean, cool, and full of a soft flicker of light and shade from trees and vines outside. On a narrow, white bed opposite the windows lay Mr. Granger. Could it be that he was ill? His eyes were bright, and his face flushed as if with health. The only sign of hurt was a little square of wet cloth that lay on the top of his head. But in health, in anything short of deadly peril, he would have smiled on seeing her after so long a time, and when she stood in such need of reassuring. His only welcome was an outstretched hand, and a fixed, earnest gaze.

She seated herself by the bedside. "I have come to help take care of you, Mr. Granger." Then smiling, faintly, "You don't look very sick."

Perhaps he saw in her face some sharp springing of hope; for he closed his eyes, and added almost in a whisper, "It isn't as wide as a barn-door, nor as deep as a well; but it will do."

Presently the surgeon came in, and she gave place to him. But as he removed the cloth from his patient's head, she bent involuntarily, with the fascination of terror, and looked, and at the sight, dropped back into her chair again. She had looked upon nature in her inmost mysterious workshop, to which only death can open the door. It was almost like having committed a sacrilege.

Mr. Lewis wet a handkerchief with cologne, and put it into her hand. The others had not noticed her agitation.

When the surgeon left the room, he beckoned Margaret out with him. "All that you can do is, to keep his head cool," he said. "Don't let him get excited, or talk much without resting. He has kept wonderfully calm so far; but it is by pure force of will. I never saw more resolution."

There was nothing to do, then, but to sit and wait; to make him feel that he was surrounded by loving care, and to let no sign of grief disturb his quiet.

She returned to the room, and Mr. Lewis, after bending to hold the sick man's hand one moment in a silent clasp, went out and left them together.

After a little while, when she had resumed her seat by him, Mr. Granger spoke, always in that suppressed voice that told what a strain there was on every nerve. "I should have asked you to marry me, Margaret, if I had gone back safe," he said, looking at her with a wistful, troubled gaze, as if he wished to say more, but could not trust himself.

"No matter about that now," she replied gently. "You have been a good friend to me, and that is all I ever wanted."

"We could be married here, if you are willing," he went on. "Mr. Lewis will see to everything."

Margaret lightly smoothed his feverish hands. "No," she said, "I do not wish it. I didn't come for that. We are friends; no more. Let me wet the cloth on your head now. It is nearly dry."

He closed his eyes, and made no answer. If he guessed confusedly that his proposal, and what it implied, so made, was little less than an insult, it was out of his power to help it then. And if for a breath Margaret felt that all her obligations to him were cancelled, and that she could not even call him friend again, it was but for a breath. His case was too pitiful for anger. She could forgive him anything now.

"I shall always stay with Dora, if you wish it," she said softly. "Do not have any fears for her. I will be faithful. Trust me. I could gladly do it for her sake, for I never loved any other child so much. But still more, I will take care of her for yours."

"I arranged everything before I came away," he said, looking up again. And his eyes, she saw, were swimming in tears. "I looked out for both of you. Your home was to be always with her, and Mr. Lewis to be guardian for both."

Margaret could not trust herself to thank him for this proof of his care for her.

"Yes; but I don't feel like seeing him again. He does me no good, and his voice confuses me. You are all the minister I need"—smiling faintly—"and yours is the only voice I can bear."

Mr. Granger had never been baptized; and, though nominally what is called an orthodox Congregationalist, he held their doctrines but loosely. He had that abstract religious feeling which is the heritage of all noble natures, the outlines of Christianity even before Christianity is adopted, as Madame Swetchine says; but his experience of pietists had not been such as to tempt him to join their number. If a man lived a moral life, were kind, just, and pure, it was about all that could be required of him, he thought. Such a life he had lived; and now, though he approached death solemnly, it was with no perceptible tremor, and no painful sense of contrition.

She watched him as he lay there, smitten down in the midst of his life and of health. He was quiet, now, except that his hands never ceased moving, tearing slowly in strips the delicate handkerchief he found within his reach, pulling shreds from the palm-leaf fan that lay on the bed, or picking at the blanket. It was the only sign of agitation he showed. His face was deeply flushed, his breathing heavy, and his teeth seemed to be set.

Once he raised himself, and looked through the open window at the treetops, and the city spires and domes. Margaret wondered if they looked strange to him, and what thoughts he had; but she never knew.

After waiting as long as she dared, she spoke to him. "Can I talk to you a little, Mr. Granger, without disturbing you?" she asked.

She began, and without any useless words, explained to him the fundamental doctrines of the church, original sin, the redemption, the necessity and effects of baptism. What she said was clear, simple, and condensed. A hundred times during the last two years she had studied it over for just such need as this.

"You know of course," she concluded, "that I say this because I want you to be baptized. Are you willing?"

"I would like to do anything that would satisfy you," he said presently. "But you would not wish me to be a hypocrite? You cannot think that baptism would benefit me, if I received it only because you wanted me to. I don't think that I have led a bad life. I have not knowingly wronged any one. I am sorry for those sins which, through human frailty, I have committed. But if I were to live my life over again, I doubt if I should do any better. No, child, I think it would be a mockery for me to be baptized now."

She changed the cloth on his head, laid the ice close to his burning temples, and fanned him in silence a few minutes.

Then she began again, repeating gently the command of our Saviour regarding baptism, and his charge to the church to baptize and teach.

"It is impossible to force conviction," he said. "I cannot profess to believe what I do not."

The words came with difficulty, and his brows contracted as if some sudden pain shot through them.

"I am not careless of the future, dear," he said after a while. "I know that it is awful, and uncertain; but it is also inevitable! It is too late now for me to change. But I wish that you would pray for me. Let me hear you. Pray your own way. I am not afraid of your saints."

Margaret knelt beside the bed, and repeated the Our Father. He listened reverently, and echoed the Amen. She repeated the Acts, and there was no response this time; the Creed, and still there was no answer. She could not rise. In faltering tones she said the Memorare, with the request, "Obtain for this friend of mine the gift of faith, that though lost to me he may not be lost to himself."

Still he was silent. All the pent emotion of her soul was surging up, and showing the joints in her mail of calmness. He was going out into what was to him the great unknown, and she, with full knowledge of the way, could not make him see it. One last, vain effort of self-control, then she burst forth with a prayer half drowned in tears.

"O merciful Christ! I cannot live upon the earth unless I know that he is in heaven. Thou hast said, Knock, and it shall be opened unto you. With my heart and my voice I knock at the door. Open to me for thy word's sake! Thou hast said that whatever we ask in thy name, we shall receive. I ask for faith, for heaven, for my friend who is dying. Give them for thy word's sake! Thou hast said that whoever does good to the least of thy children has done it unto thee. Remember what this man has done for me. I was miserable, and he comforted me. I was at the point of death, and he saved me. I was hungry, and he fed me. I was a stranger, and he took me in. Oh! look with pity on me, who in all my life have had only one year of happiness, but many full of sorrow; see how my heart is breaking, and hear me for thy word's sake! for thy word's sake!"

As her voice failed, a hand touched her head, and she heard Mr. Granger's voice.

"I cannot make you distrust the truth of God," he said. "I do not believe; but also, I do not know. I am willing to do all that he requires. Perhaps he does require this. Such faith as yours must mean something. Do as you will."

"O Mr. Granger! God bless you! I am happy. Doesn't he keep his promises? I will never distrust him again."

His grave looks did not dampen her joy. Of course it was not necessary that he should have much feeling. The good intention was enough. She wet his face with ice-water, laid ice to his head, put the fan in his hand, in her childish, joyful way, shutting his fingers about it one by one, then went out to send Mr. Lewis for a priest.

He stared at her. "Why, you look as if he were going to get well," he said almost indignantly.

"So he is, Mr. Lewis," she answered. "He is going to have the only real getting well. I shall never have to be anxious about him any more. He will be out of harm's way."

She went back to the sick-room then, quiet again. "Forgive me if my gladness jarred on you," she said. "I forgot everything but that you were now all safe. You will go straight to heaven, you know. And of course, since it is to be now, then now is the best time."

He said nothing, but watched her with steady eyes, wherever she moved. What thoughts were thronging behind those eyes, she could never know. Nothing was said till Mr. Lewis came back with the priest.

It was sunset when he came, and the father staid till late in the evening. Then he went, promising to say mass the next morning for his new penitent, and to come early to see him.

Mr. Granger was evidently suffering very much, and Margaret would not talk to him. Only once, when he opened his eyes, she said,

When the priest came up in the morning, they had some difficulty in rousing Mr. Granger; and when at length he comprehended their wishes, he looked from one to the other with an expression of incredulity.

The priest sat beside him, and as gently as possible prepared him for the sacrament.

"What! it is really and indeed the body and blood of Jesus Christ that is offered me as a viaticum?" he asked, now thoroughly roused.

The patient raised himself upright. "After I have spent all my life in forgetfulness of him, when I turn to him only on my death-bed, will he come to me now, and give me all himself?"

"Yes," the priest answered. "He forgives generously, as only God can. He does not wait, he comes to you. 'Behold! I stand at the door, and knock.'"

Left alone with him once more, Margaret knelt, praying continually, but softly too, so as not to disturb one sacred thought in that soul for the first time united to its Saviour. When a half-hour had passed, she touched his folded hands. He had always before opened his eyes at her faintest touch; but now he did not.

"He has lost consciousness," the surgeon said, when she called him. "He will never speak again."

Mr. Lewis took her by the hand. "Try to bear it, Maggie," he said. "Think what comfort you have."

"But he never said good-by to me! I wanted to say something to him. I had so much to tell him; but I thought of him first!"

Ah! well. When we go down to the valley of the shadow of death with our loved ones, and find the iron door that admits them shut in our faces, then indeed we know, if never before, how precious is faith. And those who can see the pearly gates beyond the iron one should take shame to themselves if they refuse to be comforted.

Beethoven.

His Youth.

At eighteen, Louis Beethoven became conscious of new perceptions, and new capacities for joy. A young kinswoman of his mother, a beautiful, sprightly girl, whose parents lived in Cologne, came on a visit to Bonn. The voice and smile of Adelaide called his genius into full life, and he felt he had power to do as he had never done. But Adelaide could not understand him, nor appreciate his melodies, which were now of a bolder and higher, yet a tenderer cast. He never declared his love in language; but his brother Carl discovered it, and one evening, Louis overheard him and Adelaide talking of his boyish passion, and laughing at him. The girl said she "was half inclined to draw him out, it was such a capital joke!"

Pale and trembling, while he leaned against the window-seat concealed by the folds of a curtain, Louis listened to this colloquy. As his brother and cousin left the room, he rushed past them to his own apartment, locked himself in, and did not come forth that night. Afterward he took pains to shun the company of the heartless fair one; and was always out alone in his walks, or in his room, where he worked every night till quite exhausted. The first emotions of chagrin and mortification soon passed away; but he did not recover his vivacity. His warmest feelings had been cruelly outraged; the spring of love was never again to bloom for him; and it seemed, too, that the fair blossoms of genius also were nipped in the bud. The critics of the time, fettered as they were to the established form, were shocked at his departure from their rules. Even Mozart, whose fame stood so high, whose name was pronounced with such enthusiastic admiration, what struggles had he not been forced into with these who would not approve of his so-called innovations! The youth of nineteen had struck out a bolder path! What marvel, then, that, instead of encouragement, nothing but censures awaited him? His master, Neefe, who was accustomed to boast of him as his pride and joy, now said, coldly and bitterly, his pupil had not fulfilled his cherished expectations—nay, was so taken up with his newfangled conceits, that he feared he was for ever lost to real art.

"Is it so indeed?" asked Louis of himself in his moments of misgivings and dejection. "Is all a delusion? Have I lived till now in a false dream?"

Young Beethoven sat in his chamber, leaning his head on his hand, looking gloomily out of the vine-shaded window. There was a knock at the door; but wrapped in deep despondency, he heard it not, nor answered with a "come in."

The door was opened softly a little ways, and in the crevice appeared a long and very red nose, and a pair of small, twinkling eyes, overshadowed by coal-black bushy eyebrows. Gradually became visible the whole withered, sallow, comical, yet good-humored face of Master Peter Pirad.

Peter Pirad was a famous kettle drummer, and was much ridiculed on account of his partiality for that instrument, though he also excelled on many others. He always insisted that the kettle-drum was the most melodious, grand, and expressive instrument, and he would play upon it alone in the orchestra. But he was one of the best-hearted persons in the world. It was quite impossible to look upon his tall, gaunt, clumsy figure—-which, year in and year out, appeared in the well-worn yellow woolen coat, buckskin-colored breeches, and dark worsted stockings, with his peculiar fashioned felt cap—without a strong inclination to laugh; yet, ludicrous as was his outward man, none remained long unconvinced that, spite of his exterior, spite of his numerous eccentricities, Peter Pirad was one of the most amiable of men.

From his childhood, Louis had been attached to Pirad; in later years, they had been much together. Pirad, who had been absent several months from Bonn, and had just returned, was surprised beyond measure to find his favorite so changed. He entered the room, and walking up quietly, touched the youth on the shoulder, saying, in a tone as gentle as he could assume, "Why, Louis! what the mischief has got into your head, that you would not hear me?" Louis started, turned round, and, recognizing his old friend, reached him his hand.

"You see," continued Pirad, "you see I have returned safely and happily from my visit to Vienna. Ah! Louis! Louis! that's a city for you. As for taste in art, you would go mad with the Viennese! As for artists, there are Albrechtsberger, and Haydn, Mozart, and Salieri—my dear fellow, you must go to Vienna." With that Pirad threw up his arms, as if beating the kettle-drum, (he always did so when excited,) and made such comical faces, that his young companion, spite of his sorrow, could not help bursting out laughing.

"Saker!" cried Pirad, "that is clever; I like to see that you can laugh yet, it is a good sign; and now, Louis, pluck up like a man, and tell me what all this means. Why do I find you in such a bad humor, as if you had a hole in your skin, or the drums were broken—out with it? My brave boy, what is the matter with you?"

"Ah!" replied Beethoven, "much more than I can say; I have lost all hope, all trust in myself. I will tell you all my troubles, for, indeed, I cannot keep them to myself any longer!" So the melancholy youth told all to his attentive auditor; his unhappy passion for his cousin; his master's dissatisfaction with him, and his own sad misgivings.

When he had ended, Pirad remained silent awhile, his forefinger laid on his long nose, in an attitude of thoughtfulness. At length, raising his head, he gave his advice as follows: "This is a sad story, Louis; but it convinces me of the truth of what I used to say; your late excellent father—I say it with all respect to his memory—and your other friends, never knew what was really in you. As for your disappointment in love, that is always a business that brings much trouble and little profit. Women are capricious creatures at best, and no man who has a respect for himself will be a slave to their humors. I was a little touched that way myself, when I was something more than your age; but the kettle-drum soon put such nonsense out of my head. {609} My advice is, that you stick to your music, and let her go. For what concerns the court-organist, Neefe, I am more vexed; his absurdity is what I did not precisely expect. I will say nothing of Herr Yunker; he forgets music in his zeal for counterpoint; as if he should say he could not see the wood for the tall trees, or the city for the houses! Have I not heard him assert, ay! with my own living ears, slanderously assert, that the kettle-drum was a superfluous instrument? Only think, Louis, the kettle-drum a superfluous instrument! Donner and—! Did not the great Haydn—bless him for it!—undertake a noble symphony expressly with reference to the kettle-drum? What could you do with 'Dies irae, dies illa,' without the kettle-drum? I played it at Vienna in Don Giovanni, the chapel-master Mozart himself directing. In the spirit scene, Louis, where the statue has ended his first speech, and Don Giovanni in consternation speaks to his attendants, while the anxious heart of the appalled sinner is throbbing, the kettle-drum thundering away—" Here Pirad began to sing with tragical gesticulation. "Yes, Louis, I beat the kettle-drum with a witness, while an icy thrill crept through my bones; and for all that the kettle-drum is a useless instrument! What blockheads there are in this world! To return to your master—I wonder at his stupidity, and yet I have no cause to wonder. Now, my creed is, that art is a noble inheritance left us by our ancestors, which it is our duty to enlarge and increase by all honest and honorable means. My dear boy, I hold you for an honest heir, who would not waste your substance; who has not only power, but will to perform his duty. So take courage, be not cast down by trifles; and take my advice and go to Vienna. There you will find your masters: Mozart, Haydn, Albrechtsberger, and others not so well known. One year, nay, a few months in Vienna, will do more for you than ten years vegetating in this good city. You can soon learn, there, what you are capable of; only mind what Mozart says, when you are playing in his hearing."

The young man started up, his eyes sparkling, his cheeks glowing with new enthusiasm, and embraced Pirad warmly. "You are right, my good friend!" he cried. "I will go to Vienna; and shame on any one who despises your counsel! Yes, I will go to Vienna."

When he told his mother of his resolution, she looked grave, and wept when all was ready for his departure. But Pirad, with a sympathizing distortion of countenance, said to her, "Be not disturbed, my good Madame van Beethoven! Louis shall come back to you much livelier than he is now; and, madame, you may comfort yourself with the hope that your son will become a great artist!"

Young Beethoven visited Vienna for the first time in the spring of the year 1792. He experienced strange emotions as he entered that great city; perhaps a dim presentiment of what he was in future years to accomplish and to suffer. He was not so fortunate this time as to find Haydn there; the artist had set out for London a few days before. He was disappointed, but the more anxious to make the acquaintance of Mozart. Albrechtsberger, Haydn's intimate friend, undertook to introduce him to Mozart.

They went several times to Mozart's house before they found him at home. At last, on a rainy day, they were fortunate. They heard him from the street, playing; our young hero's heart beat wildly as they went up the steps, for he looked on that dwelling as the temple of art. When they were in the hall, they saw, through a side-door that stood open, Mozart, sitting playing the piano; close by him sat a short, fat man, with a shining red face; and at the window, Madame Mozart, holding her youngest son, Wolfgang, on her lap, while the eldest was sitting on the floor at her feet.

The composer greeted Albrechtsberger cordially, and looked inquiringly on his young companion. "Herr van Beethoven from Bonn," said Albrechtsberger, presenting his friend; "an excellent composer, and skilful musician, who is desirous of making your acquaintance."

"You are heartily welcome, both of you, and I shall expect you to remain and dine with me to-day," said Mozart; and taking Louis by the hand, he led him to the window where his wife sat. "This is my Constance," he continued, "and these are my boys; this little fellow is but three months old"—and throwing his arm around Constance's neck, he stooped and kissed the smiling infant.

Louis looked with surprise on the great artist. He had fancied him quite different in his exterior; a tall man, of powerful frame, like Handel. He saw a slight, low figure, wrapped in a furred coat, notwithstanding the warmth of the season; his pale face showed the evidences of long-continued ill-health; his large, bright, speaking eyes alone reminded one of the genius that had created Idomeneus and Don Giovanni.

"So you, too, are a composer?" asked the fat man, coming up to Beethoven. "Look you, sir, I will tell you what to do; lay yourself out for the opera; the opera is the great thing!"

"Master Emanuel Schickaneder, the famous impressario," said Albrechtsberger, scarcely controlling his disposition to laugh.

"Yes," continued the fat man, assuming an air of importance, "I tell you I know the public, and know how to get the weak side of it; if Mozart would only be led by me, he could do well! I say if you will compose me something—by the way, here is a season ticket; I shall be happy if you will visit my theatre; to-morrow night we shall perform the Magic Flute, it is an admirable piece, some of the music is first-rate, some not so good, and I myself play the Papageno."

"You ought to do something in that line," said Mozart, laughing, "your singing puts one in mind of an unoiled door-hinge."

The impressario took a pinch of snuff, and answered with an important air, "I can tell you, sir, the singing is quite a secondary thing in the opera, for I know the public."

Here several persons, invited guests of the composer, came in; among them Mozart's pupils, Sutzmayr and Holff, with the Abbé Stadler and the excellent tenorist, Peyerl. After an hour or so spent in agreeable conversation, enlivened by an air from Mozart, they went to the dinner-table. Schickaneder here played his part well, doing ample justice to the viands and wine. The dinner was really excellent; and the host, notwithstanding his appearance of feeble health, was in first-rate spirits, abounding in gayety, which soon communicated itself to the rest of the company. After they had dined, and the coffee had been brought in, Mozart took his new acquaintance apart from the others, and asked if he could be of any service to him.

Louis pressed the master's hand, and without hesitation gave his history, and informed him of his plans; concluding by asking his advice.

Mozart listened with a benevolent smile; and when he had ended, said, "Come, you must let me hear you play." With that, he led him to an admirable instrument in another apartment; opened it, and invited him to select a piece of music.

The master looked surprised; but without reply wrote some lines on a leaf of paper, and handed it to the young man. Beethoven looked over it; it was a difficult chromatic fugue theme, the intricacy of which demanded much skill and experience. But without being discouraged, he collected all his powers, and began to execute it.

Mozart did not conceal the sur prise and pleasure he felt when Louis first began to play. The youth perceived the impression he had made, and was stimulated to more spirited efforts.

As he proceeded, the master's pale cheek flushed, his eyes sparkled; and stepping on tiptoe to the open door, he whispered to his guests, "Listen, I beg of you! You shall have some thing worth hearing."

That moment rewarded all the pains, and banished all the apprehensions of the young aspirant after excellence. Louis went through his trial-piece with admirable spirit, sprang up, and went to Mozart; seizing both his hands and pressing them to his throbbing heart, he murmured, "I also am an artist!"

"You are indeed!" cried Mozart, "and no common one! And what may be wanting, you will not fail to find, and make your own. The grand thing, the living spirit, you bore within you from the beginning, as all do who possess it. Come back soon to Vienna, my young friend—very soon! Father Haydn, Albrechtsberger, friend Stadler, and I will receive you with open arms; and if you need advice or assistance, we will give it you to the best of our ability."

The other guests crowded round Beethoven, and hailed him as a worthy pupil of art! Even the silly impressario looked at him with vastly increased respect, and said, "I can tell you, I know the public-well, we will talk more of the matter this evening over a glass of wine."

"I also am an artist!" repeated Louis to himself, when he returned late to his lodgings.

Much improved in spirits, and reinspired with confidence in himself, he returned to Bonn, and ere long put in practice his scheme of paying Vienna a second visit.

This he accomplished at the elector's expense, being sent by him to complete his studies under the direction of Haydn. That great man failed to perceive how fine a genius had been intrusted to him. Nature had endowed them with opposite qualities; the inspiration of Haydn was under the dominion of order and method; that of Beethoven sported with them both, and set both at defiance.

When Haydn was questioned of the merits of his pupil, he would answer with a shrug of his shoulders—"He executes extremely well." If his early productions were cited as giving evidence of talent and fire, he would reply, "He touches the instrument admirably." To Mozart belonged the praise of having recognized at once, and proclaimed to his friends, the wonderful powers of the young composer.

Sauntering.

NO. 11.

Among the churches of Paris which I visited in my saunterings, whose very stones seemed to have a tongue and cry aloud, was the interesting one of St. Germain des Près.

Here were buried Mabillon and Descartes, and also King Casimir of Poland, who laid aside his crown for a cowl in 1668, and died abbot of the monastery in 1672. He is represented kneeling on his tomb offering his crown to heaven. Two of the Douglases are likewise buried here, with their carved effigies lying on their tombs clad in armor. One was the seventeenth earl, who died in 1611. He had been bred a Protestant, but, going to France in the time of Henry III., was converted to the faith of his fathers, those old knights of the Bleeding Heart, by the discourses at the Sorbonne. He returned to Scotland after his conversion, but was persecuted there on account of his religion, and had the choice of prison or banishment. So he chose to be exiled, and went back to France, where he ended his days in practices of piety. He used to attend the canonical hours at the abbey of St. Germain des Près, and even rose for the midnight office. It was no unusual thing in the middle ages for the laity to assist at the night offices, and the church encouraged the practice. There was a confraternity in Paris, in the thirteenth century, composed of devout persons who used to attend the midnight service. This was not confined to men, but even ladies did the same. Many people used to pass whole nights in prayer in the churches, as, for example, King Louis IX. and Sir Thomas More.

There is in this church a statue of the Blessed Virgin, under a Gothic canopy all of stone, at the west end of the edifice, and looking up the right aisle. It pleased me so much that I never passed the church afterward without turning aside for a moment to say my Ave before it. Tapers were always burning before it, and there was always some one in prayer, who, like me, would doubtless forget for a few moments the cares and vanities of life at the feet of the Mother of Sorrows. This statue was at St. Denis before the revolution, having been given to that church by Queen Jeanne D'Evereux.

King Childebert's tomb formerly occupied a conspicuous place in this church, but it is now at St. Denis, where he is represented holding a church in his hands, and with shoes which have very sharp and abrupt points at the ends, like an acuminate leaf. He was the original founder of this church and the abbey once adjoining. It was called the Golden Church, because the walls outside were covered with plates of brass, gilt, and inside with pictures on a gold ground. It took its name from St. Germain, Bishop of Paris, who was buried here, and was the spiritual adviser of Childebert. St. Germaine l'Auxerrois was named from the sainted bishop of Auxerre of that name, renowned for his instrumentality in checking Pelagianism in England. He visited that country twice for that purpose. And at the head of the Britons he was the instrument of the great Alleluia victory in 430.

Whatever other people discover, I found a great deal of piety in Paris. The numerous churches and chapels are frequented at an early hour for the first masses; and all through the day is a succession of worshippers. I particularly loved the morning mass in the Lady Chapel at St. Sulpice, at which a crowd of the common people used to assist and sing charming cantiques in honor of the Madonna or the Blessed Sacrament. And at Notre Dame des Victoires, one of the most popular churches in the city, and renowned throughout the world for its arch-confraternity to which so many of us belong, there is no end to the stream of people. The wonderful answers to prayer and the many miracles wrought there draw needy and heavily-laden hearts, not only from all parts of the kingdom, but of the world. The altar of Notre Dame des Victoires looks precisely as it is represented in pictures. The front and sides are of crystal, through which are seen the relics of St. Aurelia, from the Roman catacombs. Seven large hanging lamps burn before it, and an innumerable quantity of tapers. On the walls are ex voto and many marble tablets with inscriptions of gratitude to Mary; such as: "J'ai invoqué Marie, et elle m'a exaucé." "Reconnaissance à Marie," etc. It is extremely interesting and curious to examine all these, and they wonderfully kindle our faith and fervor.

Among them is one of particular interest—-a silver heart set in a tablet of marble fastened to one of the pillars of the grand nave. On it are the arms of Poland and a votive inscription. This heart contains a portion of the soil of Poland impregnated with the blood of her martyred people—hung here before her whom they style their queen, as a perpetual cry to Mary from the bleeding heart of crushed and Catholic Poland. This was placed here on the two hundredth anniversary of the consecration of that country to the Blessed Virgin Mary, by King John Casimir, on the first of April, 1656. On the same day, 1856, all the Polish exiles in Paris assembled at Notre Dame des Victoires, to renew their vows to Mary and make their offering, which was received and blessed by M. l'Abbé Desgenettes, the venerable curé, and founder of the renowned arch-confraternity of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. A lamp burns perpetually before this touching memorial, emblem of the faith, hope, and charity of the donors.

"Give back, O Lord! to our Poland her ancient splendor. Look down on our fields, soaked with blood! When shall peace and happiness blossom among us? God of wrath, cease to punish us. At thy altar we raise our prayer; deign to restore us, O Lord! our free country."

This prayer is a Parce nobis which will be echoed by every one who sympathizes with the down-trodden and oppressed.

Coming out of the church of Notre Dame des Victoires I heard the words, "Quelques sous, pour l'amour de la Sainte Vierge," and looking around I saw an old man holding out his hat in the most deferential of attitudes—one of the few beggars I met in the city. I could not resist an appeal made in the holy name of Mary, and on the threshold of one of her favorite sanctuaries. I thought of M. Olier, the revered founder of the Sulpicians, who made a vow never to refuse anything asked in the name of the Blessed Virgin—a resolution that would not often be put to the test in the United States, but one which in Catholic countries is less easy to be kept, where the name of Mary is so often on the lips. {614} M. Olier never left his residence without encountering a crowd of cunning beggars crying for alms in the name of the Sainte Vierge, and, when he had nothing more, he would give them his handkerchief or anything else he had in his pocket.

Some do not approve of indiscriminate charity; but if God were to bestow his bounties only on the deserving, where should we all be? Freely ye have received; freely give.

The Sainte Chapelle has peculiar attractions. It was built in the middle of the thirteenth century for the reception of the precious relics connected with the Passion of our Lord, given by Baldwin II., Emperor of Constantinople, to Louis IX., in 1238. There is a nave with four windows on each side, and a semi-circular choir with seven windows, all filled with beautiful old stained glass, representing the principal events of the life of St. Louis and of the first two crusades.

Among the relics enshrined here was the holy crown of thorns. The king sent two Dominican friars, James and Andrew, to Constantinople for it. When it approached Paris, St. Louis, Queen Blanche his mother, with a great many of the court, went out beyond Sens to meet it. Entering Paris, the king and his brother Robert, clad in woollen and with feet bare, bore the shrine on their shoulders to the church. The bishops and clergy followed with bare feet. The streets through which they passed were sumptuously adorned. In 1793, the holy crown was transferred to the Hotel des Monnaies, where it was taken from its reliquary and given with other relics to the commission of arts under the care of Secretary Oudry, from whom the Abbé Barthélemi obtained it in 1794. He was one of the conservateurs of the antique medals in the Bibliothèque Nationale, where the sacred relic remained till 1804, when the Cardinal de Belloy, Archbishop of Paris, reclaimed the relics from the ministre des cultes. Every proper means was taken to identify them, which being satisfactorily done, the holy crown was transported with great pomp to Notre Dame, August 10, 1806.

A portion of the holy cross, once in the Sainte Chapelle, was saved in 1793 by M. Jean Bonvoisin, a member of the commission des arts and a painter. He gave it to his mother, who preserved it with veneration during the revolution and restored it to the chapter of Paris, in 1804, after M. Bonvoisin and his mother had sworn to the truth of these facts in order to authenticate the relic. It was then allowed to be exposed in the reliquary of crystal in which we see it.

There were at Paris other portions of the holy and true cross on which our Saviour was crucified. One was the Vraie Croix d'Anseau, so called because it was sent in 1109 to the archbishop and chapter of Paris by Anselle or Anseau, grand-chantre of the church of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem, who had obtained it from the superior of the Georgian nuns in that city, the widow of David, king of Georgia. In 1793, M. Guyot de St. Hélène obtained permission to keep the cross of Anseau. He divided it with Abbé Duflost, guardian of the four crosses made of the part he kept, of which three only have been restored to Notre Dame. M. Guyot took the precaution to have them authenticated, and they were restored to the veneration of the faithful in 1803.

Another portion of the true cross was called the Palatine cross, because it belonged to Anna Gonzaga of Cleves, a Palatine princess, who left it by her will to the Abbey of St. Germain des Près, attesting that she had seen it in the flames without being burnt. This relic was enclosed in a cross of precious stones, double, like the cross of Jerusalem. This cross had belonged to Manuel Comnenus, Emperor of Constantinople, who presented it to a prince of Poland. It is eight inches high, without measuring the foot of vermeil of about the same height, ornamented with precious stones. It has two cross-pieces, like the crosses of Jerusalem, which are filled with the wood of the true cross. It is bordered with diamonds and amethysts. The Palatine princess received it from John Casimir, King of Poland, who took it with him when he retired to France. It was preserved by a curé in 1793, and restored, in 1828, to Notre Dame.

There are two portions of the holy nails at Notre Dame de Paris—one formerly at the abbey of St. Denis, and the other at St. Germain des Près. The first was brought by Charles the Bald from Aix-la-Chapelle, it having been given Charlemagne by the Patriarch of Jerusalem.

In 1793, M. Le Lièvre, a member of the Institute, begged permission to take it from the commission des arts to examine and analyze it as a specimen of mineralogy. He thus saved it from profanation, and restored it to the Archbishop of Paris in 1824.

The second portion was given to St. Germain des Près by the Princess Palatine, who had received it from John Casimir of Poland.

There are many curious old legends respecting the wood of the cross. Sir John Mandeville says it was made of the same tree Eve plucked the apple from. When Adam was sick, he told Seth to go to the angel that guarded paradise, to send him some oil of mercy to anoint his limbs with. Seth went, but the angel would not admit him, or give him the oil of mercy. He gave him, however, three leaves from the fatal tree, to be put under Adam's tongue as soon as he was dead. From these sprang the tree of which the cross was made.

One of the first portions of the holy cross received in France was sent by the Emperor Justin to St. Radegonde. It was adorned with gold and precious stones. When it arrived with other relics, and a copy of the four Gospels richly ornamented, the archbishop of Tours and a great procession of people went out with lights, incense, and sound of holy chant to bear them into the city of Poitiers, where they were placed in the monastery of the Holy Cross founded by St. Radegonde. The great Fortunatus composed in honor of the occasion the Vexilla Regis, now a part of the divine office. I quote two verses of a fine translation of this well-known hymn:

  "O tree of beauty, tree of light!
   O tree with royal purple dight!
   Elect on whose triumphal breast
   Those holy limbs should find their rest!

  "On whose dear arms, so widely flung,
   The weight of this world's ransom hung,
   The price of human kind to pay,
   And spoil the spoiler of his prey!"

One pleasant morning I took the cars to visit St. Denis, the old burial-place of the kings of France. As Michelet says, "This church of tombs is not a sad and pagan necropolis, but glorious and triumphant; brilliant with faith and hope; vast and without shade, like the soul of the saint who built it; light and airy, as if not to weigh on the dead or hinder their spring upward to the starry spheres."

Mabillon was at one time the visitor's guide to the tombs of St. Denis. I do not know whether I should prefer his learned details and sage reflections over the ashes of the illustrious dead, or be left as I was to wander alone with my own thoughts through the church of the crypts. What a great chapter of history may be read in this sepulchre of kings! What a commentary on the text, "Dieu seul est grand," is that stained page of the revolution, when the bones of the mighty dead were torn from their magnificent tombs and cast into a trench! It was then earth to earth and ashes to ashes, like the meanest of us. What a long stride may be made here from King Dagobert's tomb at the entrance, all sculptured with legendary lore, to the clere-story window, all emblazoned with Napoleon's glory; from the recumbent Du Guesclin to the tomb of Turenne, and from the chair of St. Eloi to the stall of Napoleon III.! A fit place to moralize, among these statues of kneeling kings and queens, with their hands folded as if they had gone to sleep in prayer.

  "For heaven's sake, let us sit upon the ground,
   And tell sad stories of the death of kings."

I sought out the tomb of one of my favorite knights of the middle ages—that of Bertrand du Guesclin, who, by his devotion to his country and his prowess, merited a place here among kings and to have his ashes mingled with theirs in 1793. There are four of these knights of the olden time in this chapel, all in stone, lying in armor on their tombs. I sat down at the feet of Du Guesclin to read my monographie before going around the church.

My visit was in the octave of the festival of St. Denis and his companions, and their relics were exposed on an altar covered with crimson velvet. Huge wax tapers burned around them, and the chancel was hung around with old tapestry after the designs of Raphael—

  "Whose glittering tissues bore emblazoned
   Holy memorials, acts of zeal and love
   Recorded eminent."

This church is a monument of the genius and piety of Suger, one of the most noble and venerable figures in French history, the Abbot of St. Denis, and a statesman. He has been styled "the true founder of the Capetian dynasty." He was one of those eminent men so often found in the church of the middle ages who were raised from obscurity to positions of authority. In his humility, when regent of France, he often alluded to his lowly origin, and once in the following words: "Recalling in what manner the strong hand of God has raised me from the dunghill and made me to sit among the princes of the church and of the kingdom."

The princes of France used to be educated in the abbey of St. Denis, and it was here Louis VI. formed a lasting friendship for Suger, which led him afterward to make him his prime minister.

The monk Suger was on his way home from Italy in 1122 when he heard of his election as abbot of St. Denis. He burst into tears through grief for the death of good old abbot Adam, who had cared for him in his youth. That very morning he had risen to say matins before leaving the hostelry where he lodged, and, finishing the office before it was light, he threw himself again on his couch to await the day. Falling into a doze, he dreamed he was in a skiff on the wide raging sea, at the mercy of the waves, and he prayed God to spare and to conduct him into port. He felt, on awakening, as if threatened with some great danger, but, as he afterward said, he trusted the goodness of God would deliver him from it. {617} After travelling a few leagues, he met the deputation from St. Denis announcing his election as abbot.

When Louis le Jeune, with a great number of nobles, decided to go to the Holy Land, it was resolved to choose a regent to govern the kingdom during his absence. The Holy Spirit was invoked to guide the decisions of the nobles and bishops. St. Bernard delivered a discourse on the qualities a regent should possess. The Count de Nevers and Abbot Suger were chosen. The former declined the office, wishing to enter the Carthusian order. Suger accepted this office with extreme reluctance, and only at the command of the pope. He showed himself an able statesman. St. Bernard reproached him for the state in which he lived while at court, but he proved his heart was not in such a life by resuming all his austerities when he returned to his monastery.

He rebuilt the abbey church of St. Denis in a little more than three years. He assembled the most skilful workmen and sculptors from all parts. But he himself was the chief architect. The very people around wished to have a share in the work, believing it would draw down on them the blessing of Heaven. They brought him marble from Pontoise, and wood from the forest of Chevreuse, sixty leagues distant. But he himself selected the trees to be cut down. Bishops, nobles, and the king assisted in laying the foundations, each one laying a stone while the monks chanted, "Fundamenta ejus in montibus sanctis." While they were singing in the course of the service, "Lapides pretiosi omnes muri tui," the king took a ring of great value from his finger and threw it on the foundations, and all the nobles followed his example.

When the church was consecrated, the king and a host of church dignitaries were present. Thibaud, Archbishop of Canterbury, consecrated the high altar, and twenty other altars were consecrated by as many different bishops.

Suger had a little cell built near the church for his own use. It was fifteen feet long and ten wide. When he built for God his ideas were full of grandeur, but for himself nothing was too lowly. This little cell beside the magnificent church was a continual act of humility before the majesty of the Most High. "Whatever is dear and most precious should be made subservient to the administration of the thrice holy Eucharist," said he. We read how Peter the Venerable, Abbot of Cluny, came to visit St. Denis. After admiring the grandeur of the church, they came to the cell. "Behold a man who condemns us all!" exclaimed Peter with a sigh. The cell had neither tapestry nor curtains. He slept on straw, and his table was set with strictest regard to monastic severity. He never rode in a carriage, but always on horseback, even in old age.

When Abbot Suger felt his end approaching, he went, supported by two monks, into the chapter room where the whole community was assembled, and addressed them in the most solemn and impressive manner on the judgments of God. Then he knelt before them all, and with tears besought their pardon for all the faults of his administration during thirty years. The monks only answered with their tears. He laid down his crosier, declaring himself unworthy the office of abbot, and begged them to elect his successor, that he might have the happiness of dying a simple monk. There is a touching letter from St. Bernard written at this time, which commences thus:

"Friar Bernard to his very dear and intimate friend Suger, by the grace of God abbot of St. Denis, wishing him the glory that springs from a good conscience, and the grace which is a gift of God. Fear not, O man of God! to put off the earthly man —that man of sin which torments, oppresses, persecutes you—the weight of which sinks you down to earth and drags you almost to the abyss! What have you in part with this mortal frame—you who are about to be clothed with glorious immortality?"

Toward Christmas Suger grew so weak that he rejoiced at the prospect of his deliverance, but fearing his death would interrupt the festivities of that holy time, he prayed God to prolong his life till they were over. His prayer was heard. He died on the twelfth of January, having been abbot of St. Denis twenty-nine years and ten months, from 1122 to 1152. His tomb bore the simple inscription:

The charter for the foundation of the abbey of St. Denis was given by Clovis. It was written on papyrus, and among others the signature of St. Eloi was attached to it. Pepin and Charlemagne were great benefactors of the abbey. Pepin was buried before the grand portal of the old church with his face down, wishing by his prostrate position to atone for the excesses of his father Charles Martel. Charlemagne with filial reverence built a porch to the church, as a covering over his father's tomb, and that he might not lie without the church. In rebuilding it, Suger had the porch removed and the body transferred into the interior.

The treasury of the abbey was once exceedingly rich. The old kings of France left their crowns to it, and on grand festivals they were suspended before the high altar. Here were the cross and sceptre of Charlemagne, and the crown and ring of the holy Louis IX. Philip Augustus gave the abbey in his will all his jewels and crosses of gold, desiring twenty monks to say masses for his soul. The chess-board and chess-men of Charlemagne were kept here for ages. Joubert, the Coleridge of France, says:

"The pomps and magnificence with which the church is reproached are in truth the result and proof of her incomparable excellence. Whence came, let me ask, this power of hers and these excessive riches, except from the enchantment into which she threw all the world? Ravished with her beauty, millions of men from age to age kept loading her with gifts, bequests, and cessions. She had the talent of making herself loved and the talent of making men happy. It is that which wrought prodigies for her, it is thence she drew her power."

Sixty great wax candles used to burn around the high altar of St. Denis on great festivals. Dagobert left one hundred livres a year to obtain oil for lights, and Pepin allowed six carts to bring it all the way from Marseilles without toll.

In the middle ages there were fairs near the abbey which lasted for a month. Merchants came from Italy, Spain, and all parts of Europe, and, to encourage them to be mindful of their souls as well as of their purses, indulgences were granted to all who visited the church.

These are a few notes of my saunterings. Each one of these holy places, as well as every church in those old lands, has its history which is interesting, and its legends that are poetical and full of meaning. They would fill volumes. Travelling is like eating; what gives pleasure to one only aggravates the bile of another. Some only find tyranny in the authority of the church, a love of pomp and display in her splendor, and superstition in her piety. Thoreau says, "Where an angel treads, it will be paradise all the way; but where Satan travels, it will be burning marl and cinders."

Spiritualism and Materialism.

Professor Huxley, as we saw in a late number of this magazine, in the article on The Physical Basis of Life, while rejecting spiritualism, gives his opinion that materialism is a philosophical error, on the ground of our ignorance of what matter is, or is not. There is some truth in the assertion of our ignorance of the essence or real nature of matter or material existence, though the professor had no logical right to assert it, after having adopted a materialistic terminology, and done his best to prove the material origin of life, thought, feeling, and the various mental phenomena. Yet we are far from regarding what is called materialism as the fundamental error of this age, nor do we believe that there is any necessary or irrepressible antagonism between spirit and matter, either intellectual or moral. In our belief, a profound philosophy, though it does not identify spirit and matter, shows their dialectic harmony, as revelation asserts it in asserting the resurrection of the flesh, and the indissoluble reunion of body and soul in the future life.

The fundamental error of this age is the denial of creation, and, theologically expressed, is, with the vulgar, atheism, and with the cultivated and refined, pantheism. Atheism is the denial of unity, and pantheism the denial of plurality or diversity, and both alike deny creation, and seek to explain the universe by the principle of self-generation or self-development. What is really denied is God THE CREATOR.

There are, no doubt, moral causes that have led in part to this denial, but with them we have at present nothing to do. The assertion of moral causes is more effective in preventing men from abandoning the truth and falling into error than in recovering and leading back to the truth those who have lost it, or know not where to find it. We lose our labor when we begin our efforts, as philosophers, to convert those who are in error by assuring them that they have erred only through moral perversity or hatred of the true and the good, the just and the holy, especially in an age when conscience is fast asleep. We aim at convincing, not at convicting, and therefore take up only the intellectual causes which lead to the denial of creation. Among these causes, we shall, no doubt, find materialism and a pseudo-spiritualism both playing their part; but the real causes, we apprehend, are in the fact that the philosophic tradition, which has come down to us from gentilism, has never been fully harmonized with the Christian tradition, which has come down to us through the church.

Gentilism had lost sight of God the Creator, and confounded creation with generation, emanation, or formation. Why the gentiles were led into this error would be an interesting chapter in the history of the wanderings of the human mind; but we have no space at present for the inquiry. It is enough, for our present purpose, to establish the fact that the gentiles did fall into it. The conception of creation is found in none of the heathen mythologies, learned or unlearned, of which we have any knowledge; and that they do not recognize a creative God, may be inferred from the fact that in them all, so far as known, was worshipped, under obscure symbols, the generative forces or functions of nature. {620} In no gentile philosophy, not even in Plato or Aristotle, do you find any conception of God the Creator. Père Gratry, indeed, thinks he finds the fact of creation recognized by Plato, especially in the Timaeus; but though we have read time and again that most important of Plato's dialogues, we have never found the fact of creation in it; all we can find in it bearing on this point is what Plato, as we understand him, uniformly teaches, the identity of the idea with the essence or causa essentialis of the thing. As, for instance, the idea of a man is the real, essential man himself; and is simply the idea in the divine mind, impressed on a preexisting matter, as the seal upon wax. God creates neither the idea nor the matter. The idea is himself; the matter is eternal. Aristotle does not essentially differ from Plato on this point. The individual existence, according to him, is composed of matter and form; the form alone is substantial, and matter is simply its passive recipient. The substantial forms are supplied, but not created by the divine intelligence. In no form of heathenism that existed before the Christian era have we found any conception of creation. The conception or tradition of creation was retained only by the patriarchs and the synagogue, and has been restored to the converted gentiles by the Christian church alone.

St. Augustine, and after him the great medieval doctors—especially the greatest of them all, the Angel of the schools—labored assiduously, and up to a certain point successfully, to amend the least debased gentile philosophy so as to make it harmonize with Christian theology and tradition. They took from gentile philosophy the elements it had retained from the ancient wisdom, supplied their defects with elements taken from the Christian tradition, and formed a really Christian philosophy, which still subsists in union with theology.

This work of harmonizing faith and philosophy, or, perhaps, more correctly, of constructing a philosophy in harmony with faith and theology, was nearly, if not quite completed by the great western scholastics or medieval doctors; but, unhappily, the East, separated from the centre of unity, or holding to it only loosely and by fits and starts, did not share in the great intellectual movement of the West. It made little or no progress in harmonizing gentile philosophy and Christian theology. It retained and studied the gentile philosophers, especially of the Platonic and Neoplatonic schools; and when the Greek scholars, after the taking of Constantinople by the Turks, in 1453, sought refuge in the West, they brought with them, not only their schism, but their unmitigated gentile philosophy, corrupted the western schools, and unsettled to a fearful extent the confidence of scholars in the scholastic philosophy. We owe the false systems of spiritualism and materialism, of atheism and pantheism, to what is called the Revival of Letters in the fifteenth century, or the Greek invasion of western Christendom.

The scholastics, especially St. Thomas, had transformed the peripatetic philosophy into a Christian philosophy; but the other Greek schools had remained pagan; and it was precisely these other schools, especially the Platonic, and Neoplatonic, or Alexandrian eclecticism, that now revived in their unchristianized form, and were opposed to the Aristotelian philosophy as modified by the schoolmen. {621} Some of the early fathers were more inclined to Plato than to Aristotle, but none of these, not Clemens Alexandrinus, Origen, or even St. Augustine, had harmonized throughout Plato's philosophy with Christianity, and we should greatly wrong St. Augustine, at least, if we called him a systematic Platonist.

With the study of Plato was revived in western Europe a false and exaggerated spiritualism, and a philosophy which denied creation as a truth of philosophy, and admitted it only as a doctrine of revelation. The authority of the scholastic philosophy was weakened, a decided tendency in pantheistic direction to thought was given, and the way was prepared for Giordano Bruno, as well as for the Protestant apostasy. We say apostasy, because Luther's movement was really an apostasy, as its historical developments have amply proved. With Plato was revived the Academy with its scepticism, Sextus Empiricus, and after him Epicurus; and before the close of the sixteenth century, Europe was overrun with false mystics, sceptics, pantheists, and atheists, who abounded all through the seventeenth century, in spite of a very decided reaction in favor of faith and the church. What is worthy of special note is, that in all this period of two centuries and a half it was no uncommon thing to find men who, as philosophers, denied the immortality of the soul, which as believers they asserted; or combining a childlike faith with nearly universal scepticism, as we see in Montaigne.

Gradually, however, men began to see that, while they acknowledged a discrepancy between what they held as philosophy and the Christian faith, they could not retain both; that they must give up the one or the other. England, in the latter half of the seventeenth century, swarmed with free thinkers who denied all divine revelation; and France, in the eighteenth century, rejected the church, rejected the Bible, suppressed Christian worship, rebuilt the Pantheon, and voted death to be an eternal sleep. But the eighteenth century was born of the seventeenth, as the seventeenth was born of the sixteenth, as the sixteenth was born of the revival of Greek letters and philosophy, thoroughly impregnated with paganism, supposed by unthinking men to be the most glorious event in modern history, saving, always, Luther's Reformation.

In the seventeenth century, Descartes undertook to reform and reconstruct philosophy after a new method. He undertook to erect philosophy into a complete science in the rational order, independent of revelation. If he recognized the creative act of God, or God as creator, it was as a theologian, not as a philosopher; for certainly he does not start with the creative act as a first principle, nor does he, nor can he, arrive at it by his method. God as creator cannot be deduced from cogito, ergo sum; for, without presupposing God as my creator, I cannot assert that I exist. Gentilism had so far revived that it was able to take possession of philosophy the moment it was detached from Christian theology and declared an independent science; and as that has no conception of creation, the tradition preserved by Jews and Christians was at once relegated from philosophy to theologian, from science to faith. Hence we fail to find creation recognized as a philosophical truth in the system of his disciple Malebranche, a profounder philosopher than Descartes himself. The prince of modern sophists, Spinoza, adopting as his starting point the definition of substance given by Descartes, demonstrates but too easily that there can be only one substance, and that there can be no creation, or that nothing does or can exist except the one substance and its attributes, modes, or affections. Calling the one substance God, he arrived at once at pantheism, now so prevalent.

That Descartes felt a difficulty in asserting creation in its proper sense, may be inferred from the fact that he always calls the soul la pensée, thought; never, if we recollect aright, a substance that thinks, which was itself a large stride toward pantheism, for pantheism consists precisely in denying all substantive existences except the one only substance, which is God. Spinoza developed his principles with a logic vastly superior to his own, and brought out errors which he probably did not foresee. Indeed, we do not pretend that Descartes intended to favor or had any suspicion that he was favoring pantheism; but he most certainly did not recognize any principle that would enable his disciples to oppose it, and in former days, before we knew the church, we ourselves found, or thought we found, pantheism flowing logically from his premises, and we escaped it only by rejecting the Cartesian philosophy.

Descartes revived in modern philosophy that antagonism between spirit and matter which was unknown to the scholastic philosophy, and which renders the mutual commerce of soul and body inexplicable. The scholastic doctors had recognized, indeed, matter and form; but with them matter was simply possibility, existing only in potentia ad formam, and was never supposed to be the basis or substratum of any existence whatever. The real existence was in the form, the forma or the idea. They distinguished, certainly, between corporeal and incorporeal existences; but not, as the moderns do, between spiritual and material existences, and the question between spiritualism and materialism, as we have it to-day, did not and could not come up with them. The distinction with them was between sensibles and intelligibles, the only distinction that philosophy by her own light knows. Spirit was a term very nearly restricted to God, and spiritual meant partaking of spirit, living according to the spirit; that is, living a godly life begotten by the Holy Spirit, as in the inspired writings of St. Paul.

Even the ancients did not distinguish, in the modern sense, between spirit and matter. Their gods were corporeal, but ordinarily impassible. The spirit was not a distinct existence, but was the universal principle of life, thought, and action, and the spirit of man was an emanation from the universal spirit, which at death flowed back and was reabsorbed in the ocean from which it emanated. Their ghosts were not disembodied spirits, as ours are, were not departed spirits, but the umbra or shade—a thin, aerial apparition, bearing the exact resemblance of the body, and had formed during life, if I may so speak, its inner lining, or the immediate envelope of the spirit. It is the body that after death still invests the soul, according to Swedenborg, who denies the resurrection of the flesh. According to ancient Greek and Roman gentilism it was not spirit, nor body, but something between the two. It hovered over and around the dead body, and it was to allay it, and enable it to rest in peace that the funeral rites or obsequies of the dead were performed, and judged to be so indispensable. The Marquis de Mirville, in his work on The Fluidity of Spirits, seems to think the umbra was not a pure imagination, and is inclined to assert it, and to make it the basis of the explanation of many of the so-called spirit-phenomena. {623} He supposes it is capable of transporting the soul, or of being transported by the soul, out of the body, and to a great distance from it, and that the body itself will bear the marks of the wounds that may be given it. In this way he also explains the prodigies of bilocation.

But however this may be, the ghost of heathen superstition is never the spirit returned to earth, nor is it the spirit that is doomed to Tartarus, or that is received into the Elysian Fields, the heathen paradise. Hades, which includes both Tartarus and Elysium, is a land of shadows, inhabited by shades that are neither spirit nor body; for the heathen knew nothing, and believed nothing, of the resurrection of the flesh, and the reunion of soul and body in a future life. The spirit at death returns to its fountain, and the body, dissolved, loses itself in the several elements from which it was taken, and only the shade or shadow of the living man survives. Even in Elysium, the ghosts that sport on the flowery banks of the river, repose in the green bowers, or pursue in the fields the mimic games and pastimes that they loved, are pale, thin, and shadowy. The whole is a mimic scene, if we may trust either Homer or Virgil, and is far less real and less attractive than the happy hunting grounds of the red men of our continent, to which the good, that is, the brave Indian is transported when he dies. The only distinction we find, with the heathen, between spirit and matter, is, the distinction between the divine substance, or intelligence, and an eternally existing matter, as the stuff of which bodies or corporeal existences, the only existences recognized, are formed or generated.

But Descartes distinguished them so broadly that he seemed to make them each independent of the other. Why, then, was either necessary to the life and activity of the other? And we see in Descartes no use that the soul is or can be to the body, or the body to the soul. Hence, philosophy, starting from Descartes, branched out in two opposite directions, the one toward the denial of matter, and the other toward the denial of spirit; or, as more commonly expressed, into idealism and materialism, but as it would be more proper to say, into intellectism and sensism. The spiritualism of Descartes, so far as it had been known in the history of philosophy, was only the Neoplatonic mysticism, which substitutes the direct and immediate vision, so to speak, of the intelligible, for its apprehension through sensible symbols and the exercise of the reasoning faculty. From this it was an easy step to the denial of an external and material world, as was proved by Berkeley, who held the external world to consist simply of pictures painted on the retina of the eye by the creative act of God; and before him by Collier, who maintained that only mind exists. It was an equally short and easy step to take the other direction, assert the sufficiency of the corporeal or material, and deny the existence of spirit or the incorporeal, since the senses take cognizance of the corporeal and the corporeal only. Either step was favored by the ancient philosophy revived and set up against the scholastic philosophy. It was hardly possible to follow out the exaggerated and exclusive spiritualism of the one class without running into mystic pantheism, or the independence of the corporeal or material, without falling into material pantheism or atheism. These two errors, or rather these two phases of one and the same error, are the fundamental or mother error of this age—perhaps, in principle, of all ages—and is receiving an able refutation by one of our collaborateurs in the essay on Catholicity and Pantheism now in the course of publication in this magazine.

It is no part of our purpose now to refute this error; we have traced it from gentilism, shown that it is essentially pagan, and owes its prevalence in the modern world to the revival of Greek letters and philosophy in the fifteenth century, the discredit into which the study of Plato and the Neoplatonists threw the scholastic philosophy, and especially to the divorce of philosophy from theology, declared by Descartes in the seventeenth century. Yet we do not accept either exclusive materialism or exclusive spiritualism, and the question itself hardly has place in our philosophy, as it hardly had place in that of St. Thomas. It became a question only when philosophy was detached from theology, of which it forms the rational as distinguishable but not separable from the revealed element, and reduced to a mere Wissenchaftslehre, or rather a simple methodology. True philosophy joined with theology is the response to the question, What is, or exists? What are the principles and causes of things? What are our relations to those principles and causes? What is the law under which we are placed? and what are the means and conditions within our reach, natural or gracious, of fulfilling our destiny, or of attaining to our supreme good? Not a response to the question, for the most part an idle question, How do we know, or how do we know that we know?

Many of the most difficult problems for philosophers, and which we confess our inability to solve, may be eluded by a flank movement, to use a military phrase. Such is the question of the origin of ideas, of certitude, and the passage from the subjective to the objective, and this very question of spiritualism and materialism. All these are problems which no philosopher yet has solved from the point of view of exclusive psychology, or of exclusive ontology, or of any philosophy that leaves them to be asked. But we are much mistaken if they do not cease to be problems at all, when one starts with the principles of things, or if they do not solve themselves. We do not find them, in the modern sense, raised by Plato or Aristotle, nor by St. Augustine or St. Thomas. When we have the right stand-point, if Mr. Richard Grant White will allow us the term, and see things from the point of view of the real order, these problems do not present themselves, and are wholly superseded. Professor Huxley is right enough when he tells us that we know the nature and essence neither of spirit nor of matter. I know from revelation that there is a spirit in man, and that the inspiration of the Almighty giveth him understanding, but I know neither by revelation nor by reason what spirit is. God is a spirit; but if man is a spirit, it must be in a very different sense from that in which God is a spirit. Although the human spirit may have a certain likeness to the Divine spirit, it yet cannot be divine, for it is created; and they who call it divine, a spark of divinity, or a particle of God, either do not mean, or do not know what they literally assert. They only repeat the old gentile doctrine of the substantial identity of the spirit with divinity, from whom it emanates, and to whom it returns, to be reabsorbed in him—a pantheistic conception. All we can say of spiritual existences is, that they are incorporeal intelligences; and all we can say of man is, that he has both a corporeal and an incorporeal nature; and perhaps without revelation we should be able to say not even so much.

We know, again, just as little of matter. What is matter? Who can answer? Nay, what is body? Who can tell? Body, we are told, is composed of material elements. Be it so. What are those elements? Into what is matter resolvable in the last analysis? Into indestructible and indissoluble atoms, says Epicurus; into entelecheia, or self-acting forces, says Aristotle; into extension, says Descartes; into monads, each acting from its centre, and representing the entire universe from its own point of view, says Leibnitz; into centres of attraction and gravitation, says Father Boscovich; into pictures painted on the retina of the eye by the Creator, says Berkeley, the Protestant bishop of Cloyne, and so on. We may ask and ask, but can get no final answer.

Take, instead of matter, an organic body; who can tell us what it is? It is extended, occupies space, say the Cartesians. But is this certain? Leibnitz disputes it, and it is not easy to attach any precise meaning to the assertion "it occupies space," if we have any just notion of space and time, the pons asinorum of psychologists. What is called actual or real space is the relation of co-existence of creatures; and is simply nothing abstracted from the related. It would be a great convenience if philosophers would learn that nothing is nothing, and that only God can create something from nothing. Space being nothing but relation, to say of a thing that it occupies space, is only saying that it exists, and exists in a certain relation to other objects. This relation may be either sensible or intelligible; it is sensible, or what is called sensible space, when the objects related are sensible. Extension is neither the essence nor a property of matter, but the sensible relation of an object either to some other objects or to our sensible perception. It is, as Leibnitz very well shows, only the relation of continuity. Whirl a wheel with great force and rapidity, and you will be unable to distinguish its several spokes, and it will seem to be all of one continuous and solid piece. Intelligible space as distinguished from sensible space is the logical relation of things, or, as more commonly called, the relation of cause and effect. When we conform our notions of space to the real order, and understand that the sensible simply copies, imitates, or symbolizes the intelligible, we shall see that we have no authority for saying extension is even a property of body or of matter.

That extension is simply the sensible relation of body, not its essence, nor even a property of matter, is evident from what physiologists tell us of organic or living bodies. There can be no reasonable doubt that the body I now have is the same identical body with which I was born, and yet it contains, probably, not a single molecule or particle of sensible matter it originally had. As I am an old man, all the particles or molecules of my body have probably been changed some ten or twenty times over; yet my body remains unchanged. It is evident, then, since the molecular changes do not affect its identity, that those particles or molecules of matter which my body assimilates from the food I take to repair the waste that is constantly going on, or to supply the loss of those particles or molecules constantly exuded or thrown off, do not compose, make up, or constitute the real body. This fact is commended to the consideration of those learned men, like the late Professor George Bush, who deny the resurrection of the body, on the ground that these molecular changes which have been going on during life render it a physical impossibility. This fact also may have some bearing on the Catholic mystery of Transubstantiation. {626} St. Augustine distinguishes between the visible body and the intelligible body—the body that is seen and the body that is understood—and tells us that it is the intelligible, or, as he sometimes says, the spiritual, not the visible or sensible, body of our Lord that is present in the Blessed Eucharist. In fact, there is no change in the sensible body of the bread and the wine, in Transubstantiation. The sensible body remains the same after consecration that it was before. The change is in the essence or substance, or the intelligible body, and hence the appropriateness of the term transubstantiation to express the change which takes place at the words of consecration. Only the intelligible body, that is, what is non-sensible in the elements bread and wine, is transubstantiated, and yet their real body is changed, and the real body of our Lord takes its place. The nonsensible or invisible body, the intelligible body, is then, in either case, assumed by the sacred mystery to be the real body; and hence, supposing us right in our assumption that our body remains always the same in spite of the molecular changes—which was evidently the doctrine of St. Augustine—there is nothing in science or the profoundest philosophy to show that either transubstantiation or the resurrection of the flesh is impossible, or that God may not effect either consistently with his own immutable nature, if he sees proper to do it. Nothing aids the philosopher so much as the study of the great doctrines and mysteries of Christianity, as held and taught by the church.

The distinction between seeing and intellectually apprehending, and therefore between the visible body and the intelligible body, asserted and always carefully observed by St. Augustine when treating of the Blessed Eucharist, belongs to a profounder philosophy than is now generally cultivated. Our prevailing philosophy, especially outside of the church, recognizes no such distinction. It is true, we are told, that the senses perceive only the sensible properties or qualities of things; that they never perceive the essence or substance; but then the essence or substance is supposed to be a mere abstraction with no intelligible properties or qualities, or a mere substratum of sensible properties and qualities. The sensible exhausts it, and beyond what the senses proclaim the substance has no quality or property, and is and can be the subject of no predicate. This is a great mistake. The sensible properties and qualities are real, that is, are not false or illusory; but they are real only in the sensible order, or the mimesis, as Gioberti, after Plato and some of the Greek fathers, calls it in his posthumous works. The intelligible substance is the thing itself, and has its own intelligible properties and qualities, which the sensible only copies, imitates, or mimics. All through nature there runs, above the sensible, the intelligible, in which is the highest created reality, with its own attributes and qualities, which must be known before we can claim to know anything as it really is or exists. We do not know this in the case of body or matter; we do not and cannot know what either really is, and can really know of either only its sensible properties.

We know that if matter exists at all, it must have an essence or substance; but what the substance really is human science has not learned and cannot learn. We really know, then, of matter in itself no more than we do of spirit, except that matter has its sensible copy, which spirit has not. {627} Matter, as to its substance, is supersensible, and as to the essence or nature of its substance is superintelligible, as is spirit; and we only know that it has a substance; and of substance itself, we can only say, if it exists, it is a vis activa, as opposed to nuda potentia, which is a mere possibility, and no existence at all. Such being the case, we agree with Professor Huxley, that neither spiritualism nor materialism is, in his sense, admissible, and that each is a philosophical error, or, at least, an unprovable hypothesis.

But here our agreement ends and our divergence begins. The Holy See has required the traditionalists to maintain that the existence of God, the immateriality of the soul, and the liberty of man can be proved with certainty by reason. We have always found the definitions of the church our best guide in the study of philosophy, and that we can never run athwart her teaching without finding ourselves at odds with reason and truth. We are always sure that when our theology is unsound our philosophy will be bad. There is a distinction already noted between spirit and matter, which is decisive of the whole question, as far as it is a question at all. Matter has, and spirit has not, sensible properties or qualities. These sensible properties or qualities do not constitute the essence or substance of matter, which we have seen is not sensible, but they distinguish it from spirit, which is non-sensible. This difference, in regard to sensible qualities and properties, proves that there must be a difference of substance, that the material substance and the immaterial substance are not, and cannot be one and the same substance, although we know not what is the essence or nature of either.

We take matter here in the sense of that which has properties or qualities perceptible by the senses, and spirit or spiritual substance as an existence that has no such properties or qualities. The Holy See says the immateriality, not spirituality, of the soul, is to be proved by reason. The spirituality of the soul, except in the sense of immateriality, cannot be proved or known by philosophy, but is simply a doctrine of divine revelation, and is known only by that analogical knowledge called faith. All that we can prove or assert by natural reason, is, that the soul is immaterial, or not material in the sense that matter has for its sign the mimesis, or sensible properties or qualities. We repeat, the sensible is not the material substance, but is its natural sign. So that, where the sign is wanting, we know the substance is not present and active. On the other hand, where there is a force undeniably present and operating without the sign, we know at once that it is an immaterial force or substance.

That the soul is not material, therefore is an immaterial substance, we know; because it has none of the sensible signs or properties of matter. We cannot see, hear, touch, smell, nor taste it. The very facts materialists allege to prove it material, prove conclusively, that, if anything, it is immaterial. The soul has none of the attributes or qualities that are included, and has others which evidently are not included, in the definition of matter. Matter, as to its substance, is a vis activa, for whatever exists at all is an active force; but it is not a force or substance that thinks, feels, wills, or reasons. It has no sensibility, no mind, no intelligence, no heart, no soul. But animals have sensibility and intelligence; have they immaterial souls? Why not? We have no serious difficulty in admitting that animals have souls, only not rational and immortal souls. {628} Soul, in them, is not spirit, but it may be immaterial. Indeed, we can go further, and concede an immaterial soul, not only to animals but to plants, though, of course, not an intelligent or even a sensitive soul; for if plants, or at least some plants, are contractile and slightly mimic sensibility in animals, nothing proves that they are sensitive. We have no proof that any living organism, vegetable, animal, or human, is or can be a purely material product. Professor Huxley has completely failed, as we have shown, in his effort to sustain his theory of a physical or material basis of life, and physiologists profess to have demonstrated by their experiments and discoveries that no organism can originate in inorganic matter, or in any possible mechanical, chemical, or electrical arrangement of material atoms, and is and can be produced, unless by direct and immediate creation of God, only by generation from a preexisting male and female organism. This is true alike of plants, animals, and man. Nothing hinders you, then, from calling, if you so wish, the universal basis of life anima or soul, and asserting, the psychical basis, in opposition to Professor Huxley's physical basis, of life; only you must take care and not assert that plants and animals have human souls, or that soul in them is the same that it is in man.

There are grave thinkers who are not satisfied with the doctrine that ascribes the apparent and even striking marks of mind in animals to instinct, a term which serves to cover our ignorance, but tells us nothing; still less are they satisfied with the Cartesian doctrine that the animal is simply a piece of mechanism moved or moving only by mechanical springs and wheels like a clock or watch. Theologians are reluctant chiefly, we suppose, to admit that animals have souls, because they are accustomed to regard all souls, as to their substance, the same, and because it has seemed to them that the admission would bring animals too near to men, and not preserve the essential difference between the animal nature and the human. But we see no difficulty in admitting as many different sorts or orders of souls as there are different orders, genera, and species of living organisms. God is spirit, and the angels are spirits; are the angels therefore identical in substance with God? The human soul is spiritual; is there no difference in substance between human souls and angels? We know that men sometimes speak of a departed wife, child, or friend as being now an angel in heaven; but they are not to be understand literally, any more than the young man in love with a charming young lady who does not absolutely refuse his addresses, when he calls her—a sinful mortal, not unlikely—an angel. In the resurrection men are like the angels of God, in the respect that they neither marry nor are given in marriage; but the spirits of the just made perfect, that stand before the throne, are not angels; they are still human in their nature. If, then, we may admit spirits of different nature and substance, why not souls, and, therefore, vegetable souls, animal souls, and human souls, agreeing only in the fact that they are immaterial, or not material substances or forces?

It perhaps may be thought that to admit different orders of souls to correspond to the different orders, genera, and species of organisms, would imply that the human soul is generated with the body; contrary to the general doctrine of theologians, that the soul is created immediately ad hoc. {629} The Holy See censured Professor Frohshamer's doctrine on the subject; but the point condemned was, as we understand it, that the professor claimed creative power for man. But it is not necessary to suppose, even if plants and animals have souls, that the human soul is generated with the body, in any sense inconsistent with faith. The church has defined that "anima est forma corporis," that is, as we understand it, the soul is the vital or informing principle, the life of the body, without which the body is dead matter. The organism generated is a living not a dead organism, and therefore if the soul is directly and immediately created ad hoc, the creative act must be consentaneous with the act of generation, a fact which demands a serious modification of the medical jurisprudence now taught in our medical schools. Some have asserted for man alone a vegetable soul, an animal soul, and a spiritual soul, but this is inadmissible; man has simply a human soul, though capable of yielding to the grovelling demands of the flesh as well as to the higher promptings of the spirit.

But we have suffered ourselves to be drawn nearer to the borders of the land of impenetrable mysteries than we intended, and we retrace our steps as hastily as possible. Our readers will understand that what we have said of the souls of plants and animals is said only as a possible concession, but not set forth as a doctrine we do or design to maintain; for it lies too near the province of revelation to be settled by philosophy. All we mean is that we see on the part of reason no serious objection to it. Perhaps it may be thought that we lose, by the concession, the argument for the immortality of the soul drawn from its simplicity; but, even if so, we are not deprived of other, and to our mind, much stronger arguments. But it may be said all our talk about souls is wide of the mark, for we have not yet proved that man is or has a soul distinguishable from the body, and which does or can survive its dissolution, and that our argument only proves that, if a man has a soul, it is immaterial. The materialist denies that there is any soul in man distinct from the body, and maintains that the mental phenomena, which we ascribe to an immaterial soul, are the effects of material organization. But that is for him to prove, not for us to disprove. Organization can give to matter no new properties or qualities, as aggregation can give only the sum of the individuals aggregated. Matter we have taken all along, as all the world takes it, as a substance that has properties and qualities perceptible by the senses, and it has no meaning except so far as so perceptible. Any active force that has no mimesis or sensible qualities, properties, or attributes, is an immaterial, not a material substance. That man is or has an active force that feels, thinks, reasons, wills, we know as well as we know anything; indeed, better than we know anything else. These acts or operations are not operations of a material substance. We know that they are not, from the fact that they are not sensible properties or qualities, and therefore there must be in man an active force or substance that is not material, but immaterial. Material substance is, we grant, a vis activa; but if it has properties or qualities, it has no faculties. It acts, but it acts only ad finem, or to an end, never propter finem, or for an end foreseen and deliberately willed or chosen. But the force that man has or is, has faculties, not simply properties or qualities, and can and does act deliberately, with foresight and choice, for an end. Hence, it is not and cannot be a substance included in the definition of matter.

That this immaterial soul, now united to body and active only in union with matter, survives the dissolution of the body and is immortal, is another question, and is not proved, in our judgment, by proving its immateriality. There is an important text in Ecclesiastes, 3:21, which would seem to have some bearing on the assumption that the immortality of the soul is really a truth of philosophy as well as of revelation.

  "Who knoweth if the spirit of the children of Adam ascend
  upward, and if the spirit of the beasts descend downward?"

The doubt is not as to the immortality of the soul, but as to the ability of reason without revelation to demonstrate it. Certainly, reason can demonstrate its possibility, and that nothing warrants its denial. The doctrine, in some form, has always been believed by the human race, whether savage or civilized, barbarous or refined, and has been denied only by exceptional individuals in exceptional epochs. This proves either that it is a dictate of universal reason, or a doctrine of a revelation made to man in the beginning, before the dispersion of the human race commenced. In either case the reason for believing the doctrine would be sufficient; but we are disposed to take the latter alternative, and to hold that the belief in the immortality of the soul, or of an existence after death, originated in revelation made to our first parents, and has been perpetuated and diffused by tradition, pure and integral with the patriarchs, the synagogue, and the church; but mutilated, corrupted, and travestied with the cultivated as well as with the uncultivated heathen. With the heathen Satan played his pranks with the tradition, as he is doing with it with the spiritists in our own times.

But if the belief originated in revelation and is a doctrine of faith rather than of science, yet is it not repugnant to science, and reason has much to urge in its support. The immateriality of the soul implies its unity and simplicity, and therefore it can not undergo dissolution, which is the death of the body. Its dissolution is impossible, because it is a monad, having attributes and qualities, but not made up by the combination of parts. It is the form of the body, that is, it vivifies the organic or central cell, and gives to the organism its life, instead of drawing its own life from it. Science, then, has nothing from which to infer that it ceases to exist when the body dies. The death of the body does not necessarily imply its destruction. True, we have here only negative proofs, but negative proofs are all that is needed, in the case of a doctrine of tradition, to satisfy the most exacting reason. The soul may be extinguished with the body, but we cannot say that it is without proof. Left to our unassisted reason, we could not say that the soul of the animal expires with its body. Indeed, the Indian does not believe it, and therefore buries with the hunter his favorite dog, to accompany him in the happy hunting grounds.

The real matter to be proved is not that the soul can or does survive the body, but that it dies with the body. We have seen that it is distinguishable from the body, does not draw its life from the body, but imparts life to it; how then conclude that it dies with it? We have not a particle of proof, and not a single fact from which we can logically infer that it does so die. What right then has any one to say that it does? The laboring oar is in the hands of those who assert that the soul dies with the body, and it is for them to prove what they assert, not for us to disprove it. {631} The real affirmative in the case is not made by those who assert the immortality of the soul, but by those who assert its mortality. The very term immortal is negative, and simply denies mortality. Life is always presumptive of the continuance of life, and the continuance of the life of the soul must be presumed in the absence of all proofs of its death.

We have seen that the immateriality, unity, and simplicity of the soul prove that it does not necessarily die with the body, but that it may survive it. The fact that God has written his promise of a future life in the very nature and destiny of the soul, is for us a sufficient proof that the soul does not die with the body. That God is, and is the first and final cause of all existences, is a truth of science as well as of revelation. He has created all things by himself, and for himself. He then must be their last end, and therefore their supreme good, according to their several natures. He has created man with a nature that nothing short of the possession of himself as his supreme good can satisfy. In so creating man, he promises him in his nature the realization of this good, that is, the possession of himself as final cause, unless forfeited and rendered impossible by man's own fault. To return to God as his supreme good without being absorbed in him, is man's destiny promised in his very constitution. But this destiny is not realized nor realizable in this life, and therefore there must be another life to fulfil what he promises, for no promise of God, however made, can fail. This argument we regard as conclusive.

The resurrection of the flesh, the reunion of the soul and body, future happiness as a reward of virtue, and the misery of those who through their own fault fail of their destiny, as a punishment for sin, etc., are matters of revelation or theology as distinguished from philosophy, and do not require to be treated here, any further than to say, if reason has little to say for them, it has nothing to say against them. They belong to the mysteries of faith which, though never contrary to reason, are above it, in an order transcending its domain.

We have thus far treated spiritualism and materialism from the point of view of philosophy, not from that of psychology, or of our faculties. The two doctrines, as they prevail to-day, are simply psychological doctrines. The partisans of the one say that the soul has no faculty of knowing any but material objects, and therefore assert materialism; the partisans of the other say that the soul has a faculty by which she apprehends immediately immaterial or spiritual objects or truths, and hence they assert what goes by the name of spiritualism, which may or may not deny the existence of matter. Descartes and Cousin assert the cognition of both spirit and matter, but as independent each of the other; Collier and Berkeley deny that we have any cognition of matter, and therefore deny its existence, save in the mind. The truth, we hold, lies with neither. The soul has no direct intuition of the immaterial or intelligible. We use intuition here in the ordinary sense, as an act of the soul—knowing by looking on, or immediately beholding; that is, in the sense of intelligible as distinguished from sensible perceptions—intellection, as some say, as distinguished from sensation. This empirical intuition, as we call it, is very distinct from that intuition a priori by which the ideal formula is affirmed, for that is the act of the divine Being himself, creating the mind, and becoming himself the light thereof. {632} But that constitutes the mind, and is its object, not its act. No doubt, the intellectual principles of all reality and of all science are affirmed in that intuition a priori, and hence these principles are ever present to the soul as the basis of all intelligible as well as of all sensible experience. Yet they are asserted by the mind's own act only as sensibly represented, according to the peripatetic maxim, "Nihil est in intellectu, quod non prius fuerit in sensu." The mind has three faculties, sensibility, intellect, and will, but it is itself one, a single vis or force, and never acts with one faculty alone, whether it feels, thinks, or wills; and, united as it is in this life with the body, it never acts as body alone or as spirit alone. There are then no intellections without sensation, nor sensations without intellection; purely noetic truth, therefore, can never be grasped save through a sensible medium.

We have already explained this with regard to material objects, in which the substance, though supersensible, has its sensible sign, through which the mind reaches it. But immaterial or ideal objects are, as we have seen, precisely those which have no sensible sign of their own—properties or qualities perceptible by the senses. For this order of truth the only sensible representation is language, which is the sensible sign or symbol of immaterial or ideal truth. We arrive at this order of reality or truth only through the medium of language which embodies it; that is to say, only through the medium of tradition, or of a teacher. So far we accord with the traditionalists. We do not believe that, if God had left men in the beginning without any instruction or language in which the ideas are embodied, they would ever have been able to assert the existence of God, the immateriality of the soul, and the liberty or free will of man—the three great ideal truths which the Holy See requires us to maintain can be proved with certainty by reason; and we do not hold that, like the revealed mysteries, they are suprarational truth, and to be taken only on the authority of a supernatural revelation. If God had not infused the knowledge of them into the first of the race along with language, which he also infused into Adam, we should never by our reason and instincts alone have found them out, or distinctly apprehended them; but being taught them, or finding them expressed in language, we are able to verify or prove them with certainty by our natural reason, in which respect we accord with those whom the traditionalists call rationalists.

We have studiously avoided, as far as possible, the metaphysics of the subject we have been considering, and perhaps have, in consequence, kept too near its surface; but we think we have established our main point, that neither spiritualism nor materialism, taken exclusively, is philosophically defensible. We are able to distinguish between spirit and matter, but we can deny the existence or the activity, according to its own nature, of neither. We know matter by its sensible properties or qualities, We know spirit only as sensibly represented by language. Let language be corrupted, and our knowledge of ideal or non-sensible truth, or philosophy, will also be corrupted, mutilated, or perverted. This will be still more the case with the superintelligible truth supernaturally revealed, which is apprehensible only through the medium of language. Hence, St. Paul is careful to admonish St. Timothy to hold fast "the form of sound words," and hence, too, the necessity, if God makes us a revelation of spiritual things, that he should provide an infallible living teacher to preserve the infallibility of the language in which it is made. {633} We may see here, too, the reason why the infallible church is hardly less necessary to the philosopher than to the theologian. Where faith and theology are preserved in their purity and integrity, philosophy will not be able to stray far from the truth, and where philosophy is sound, the sciences will not long be unsound. The aberrations of philosophy are due almost solely to the neglect of philosophers to study it in its relation with the dogmatic teaching of the church.

Some of our dear and revered friends in France and elsewhere are seeking, as the cure for the materialism which is now so prevalent, to revive the spiritualism of the seventeenth century. But the materialism they combat is only the reaction of the mind against that exaggerated spiritualism which they would revive. Where there are two real forces, each equally evident and equally indestructible, you can only alternate between them, till you find the term of their synthesis, and are able to reconcile and harmonize them. The spiritualism defended by Cousin in France has resulted only in the recrudescence of materialism. The trouble now is, that matter and spirit are presented in our modern systems as antagonistic and naturally irreconcilable forces. The duty of philosophers is not to labor to pit one against the other, or to give the one the victory over the other; but to save both, and to find out the middle term which unites them. We know there must be somewhere that middle term; for both extremes are creations of God, who makes all things by number, weight, and measure, and creates always after the logic of his own essential nature. All his works, then, must be logical and dialectically harmonious.

Whether we have indicated this middle term or not, we have clearly shown, we think, that it is a mistake to suppose the two terms are not in reality mutually irreconcilable. Nothing proves that, as creatures of God, each in its own order and place is not as sacred and necessary as the other. We do not know the nature or essence of either, nor can we say in what, as to this nature and essence, the precise difference between them consists; but we know that in our present life both are united, and that neither acts without the other. All true philosophy must then present them not as opposing, but as harmonious and concurring forces.

We do not for ourselves ever apply the term spiritualism to a purely intellectual philosophy. We do not regard the words spirit and soul as precisely synonymous. St. Paul, Heb. iv. 12, says, "The word of God is living and effectual, … reaching unto the division of the soul and the spirit," or, as the Protestant version has it, "quick and powerful, … piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit." There is evidently, then, however closely related they may be, a distinction between the soul and the spirit. Hence there may be soul that is not spirit, which was generally held by the ancients. The Greeks had their [Greek text]

, and the Latins their anima and spiritus. The term spirit, when applied to man, seems to us to designate the moral powers rather than the intellectual, and the moral powers or faculties are those which specially distinguish man from animals. St. Paul applies the term spiritual uniformly in a moral sense, and usually, if not always, to men born again of the Holy Ghost, or the regenerated, and to the influences and gifts of the Holy Spirit; that is, to designate the supernatural character, gifts, graces, and virtues of those who have been translated into the kingdom of God and are fellow-citizens of the commonwealth of Christ, or the Christian republic. {634} Hence, we shrink from calling any intellectual philosophy spiritualism. If it touches philosophy, as it undoubtedly does—since grace supposes nature, and a man must be born into the natural order before he can be born again into the supernatural order, or regenerated by the Spirit—it rises into the region of supernatural sanctity, into which no man by his natural powers can enter; for it is a sanctity that places one on the plane of a supernatural destiny.

But even taken in this higher sense, there is no antagonism between spirit and matter. There is certainly a struggle, a warfare that remains through life; but the struggle is not between the soul and the body; it is, as is said, between the higher and inferior powers of the soul, between the spirit and concupiscence, between the law of the mind, which bids us labor for spiritual good which will last for ever, and the law in the members, which looks only to the good of the body, in its earthly relations. The saints, who chastise, mortify, macerate the body by their fastings, vigils, and scourgings, do not do it on the principle that the body is evil, or that matter is the source of evil. There is a total difference in principle between Christian asceticism and that of the Platonists, who hold that evil originates in the intractableness of matter, that holds the soul imprisoned as in a dungeon, and from which it sighs and struggles for deliverance. The Christian knows that our Lord himself assumed flesh and retains for ever his glorified body. He believes in the resurrection of the body and its future everlasting reunion with the soul. Christ, dying in a material body, has redeemed both matter and spirit. Hence we venerate the relics of our Lord and his saints, and believe matter may be hallowed. In our Lord all opposites are reconciled, and universal peace is established.

Translated From The German Of Conrad Von Bolanden.

Angela.

An express train was just on the eve of leaving the railway station in Munich. Two fashionably dressed gentlemen stood at the open door of a railway carriage, in conversation with a third, who sat within. These two young men bore on their features the marks of youthful dissipation, indicating that they had not been sparing of pleasures. The one in the carriage had a handsome, florid countenance, two clear, expressive eyes, and thick locks of hair, which he now and then stroked back from his fine forehead. He scarcely observed the conversation of the two friends, who spoke of balls, dogs, horses, theatres, and ballet-girls.

In the same carriage sat another traveller, evidently the father of the young man. He was reading the newspaper—that is, the report of the money market—while his fleshy left hand dallied with the heavy gold rings of his watch-chain. He had paid no attention to the conversation till an observation of his son brought him to serious reflection.

"By the by," said one of the young men quickly, "I was nearly forgetting to tell you the news, Richard! Do you know that Baron Linden is engaged?"

"To Bertha von Harburg. I received a card this morning, and immediately wrote a famous letter of congratulation."

"I commiserate the genial baron," said he. "What could he be thinking of, to rush headlong into this misfortune?"

The father looked in surprise at his son; the hand holding the paper sank on his knee.

"Permit me, gentlemen," said the conductor; the doors were closed, the friends nodded good-by, and the train moved off.

"Your observation about Linden's marriage astonishes me, Richard. But perhaps you were only jesting."

"By no means," said Richard. "Never more earnest in my life. I expressed my conviction, and my conviction is the result of careful observation and mature reflection."

"Observation—reflection—-fudge!" said the father impatiently, as he folded the paper and shoved it into his pocket. "How can a young man of twenty-two talk of experience and observation! Enthusiastic nonsense! Marriage is a necessity of human life. And you will yet submit to this necessity."

"True, if marriage be a necessity, then I suppose I must bow to the yoke of destiny. But, father, this necessity does not exist. There are intelligent men enough who do not bind themselves to woman's caprices."

"Oh! certainly, there are some strange screech-owls in the worlds—some enthusiasts. But certainly you do not wish to be one of them. You, who have such great expectations. You, the only son of a wealthy house. You, who have a yearly income of thousands to spend."

"Free and single—and enjoyed! Zounds! you almost tempt me to think ill of you. Happily, I know you well. I know your strict morality, your solidity, your moderate pretensions. All these amiable qualities please me. But this view of marriage I did not expect; you must put away this sickly notion."

The young man made no answer, but leaned back in his seat with a disdainful smile.

Herr Frank gazed thoughtfully through the window. He reflected on the determined character of his son, whose disposition, even when a child, shut him out from the world, and who led an interior, meditative life. Strict regularity and exact employment of time were natural to him. At school, he held the first place in all branches. His ambition and effort was to excel all others in knowledge. His singular questions, which indicated a keen observation and capacity, had often excited the surprise of his father. And while the companions of the youth hailed with delight the time which released them from the benches of the school and from their studies, Richard cheerfully bound himself to his accustomed task, to appease his longing for knowledge. Approaching manhood had not changed him in this regard. {636} He was punctual to the hours of business, and labored with zeal and interest, to the great joy of his father. He recreated himself with music and painting, or by a walk in the open country, for whose beauties he had a keen appreciation. The few shades of his character were, a proud haughtiness, an unyielding perseverance in his determinations, and a strength of conviction difficult to overcome. But perhaps these shades were, after all, great qualities, which were to brighten up and polish his maturity. This obstinacy the father was now considering, and, in reference to his singular view of marriage, it filled him with great anxiety.

"But, Richard," began Herr Frank again, "how did you come to this singular conclusion?"

"By observation and reflection—and also by experience, although you deny my years this right."

"I have observed woman as she is, and found that such a creature would only make me miserable. What occupies their minds? Fineries, pleasures, and trifles. The pivot of their existence turns on dress, ornaments, balls, and the like. We live in an age of crinoline, and you know how I abominate that dress; I admit my aversion is abnormal, perhaps exaggerated, but I cannot overcome it. When I see a woman going through the streets with swelling hoops, the most whimsical fancies come into my mind. It reminds me of an inflated balloon, whose clumsy swell disfigures the most beautiful form. It reminds me of a drunken gawk, who swaggers along and carries the foolish gewgaw for a show. The costume is indeed expressive. It reveals the interior disposition. Crinoline is to me the type of the woman of our day—an empty, vain, inflated something. And this type repels me."

"Then you believe our women to be vain, pleasure-seeking, and destitute of true womanhood, because they wear crinoline?"

"No, the reverse. An overweening propensity to show and frivolity characterizes our women, and therefore they wear crinoline in spite of the protestations of the men."

"Bah! Nonsense; you lay too much stress on fashion. I know many women myself who complain of this fashion."

"And afterward follow it. This precisely confirms my opinion. Women have no longer sufficient moral force to disregard a disagreeable restraint. Their vanity is still stronger than their inclinations to a natural enjoyment of life."

"Do you want a wife who would be sparing and saving; who, by her frugality, would increase your wealth; who, by her social seclusion, would not molest your cash-box?"

"No; I want no wife," answered the young man somewhat pettishly. "And I am not alone in this. The young men are beginning to awaken. A sound, natural feeling revolts against the vitiated taste of the women. Alliances are forming everywhere. The last paper announced that, at Marseilles, six thousand young men have, with joined hands, vowed never to marry until the women renounce their ruinous costumes and costly idleness, and return to a plain style of dress and frugal habits. I object to this propensity to ease and pleasure—this desire of our women for finery and the gratification of vanity. Not because this inclination is expensive, but because it is objectionable. Every creature has an object. But, if we consider the women of our day, we might well ask, for what are they here?"

"For what are women here, foolish man?" interrupted Herr Frank. "Are they to go about without any costume, like Eve before the fall? Are they to know the trials of life, and not its joys? Are they to exist like the women of the sultan, shut up in a harem? For what are they here? I will tell you. They are here to make life cheerful. Does not Schiller say,

  "'Honor to woman! she scatters rife
    Heavenly roses,'mid earthly life;
      Love she weaves in gladdening bands;
    Chastity's veil her charm attires;
    Beautiful thoughts' eternal fires,
      Watchful, she feeds with holy hands.'"

"Poetical fancy!" said he. "My unhappy friend Emil Schlagbein often declaimed and sang with passion that same poem of Schiller's. Love had even made a poet of him. He wrote verses to his Ida. And now, scarcely three years married, he is the most miserable man in the world—miserable through his wife. Ida has still the same finely carved head as formerly; but that head, to the grief of Emil, is full of stubbornness—full of whimsical nonsense. Her eyes have still the same deep blue; but the charming expression has changed, and the blue not unfrequently indicates a storm. How often has Emil poured out his sorrows to me! How often complained of the coldness of his wife! A ball missed—missed from necessity—makes her stupid and sulky for days. In vain he seeks a cheerful look. When he returns home worried by the cares of business, he finds no consolation in Ida's sympathy, but is vexed by her stubbornness and offended by her coldness. Emil sprang headlong into misery. I will beware of such a step."

"I tell you, Richard," said he emphatically. "Your time will come yet. You will follow the universal law, and this law will give the lie to your one-sided view—to your contempt of woman."

"That impulse, father, can be overcome, and habit becomes a second nature. Besides—"

"I would say that the time of which you speak is, in my case, happily passed," answered Richard, still gazing through the window. "For me the time of sentimental delusion has been short and decisive," he concluded with a bitter smile.

The young man leaned back in his seat and looked at the opposite side while he spoke.

"Last summer I visited Baden-Baden. On old Mount Eberstein, which is so picturesquely enthroned above the village, I fell in with a party. Among the number was a young lady of rare beauty and great modesty. An acquaintance gave me an opportunity of being introduced to her. We sat in pleasant conversation under the black oaks until the approaching twilight compelled us to return to the town. Isabella—such was the name of the beauty—had made a deep impression on me. So deep that even the detested crinoline that encircled her person in large hoops found favor in my sight. Her manner was in no wise coquettish. She spoke with deliberation and spirit. Her countenance had always the same expression. Only when the young people, into whose heads the fiery wine had risen, gave expression to sharp words, did Isabella look up, and a displeased expression, as of injured delicacy, passed over her countenance. {638} My presence seemed agreeable to her. My conversation may have pleased her. As we descended the mountain, we came to a difficult pass. I offered her my arm, which she took in the same unchanging, quiet manner which made her so charming in my sight. I soon discovered my affection for the stranger, and wondered how it could arise so suddenly and become so impetuous. I was ashamed at abandoning so quickly my opinion of women. But this feeling was not strong enough to stifle the incipient passion. My mind lay captive in the fetters of infatuation."

He paused for a moment. The proud young man seemed to reproach himself for his conduct, which he considered wanting in manly independence and clear penetration.

"On the following day," he continued, "there was to be a horse-race in the neighborhood. Before we parted, it was arranged that we would be present at it. I returned to my room in the hotel, and dreamed waking dreams of Isabella. My friend had told me that she was the daughter of a wealthy merchant, and that she had accompanied her invalid mother here. This mark of love and filial affection was not calculated to cool my ardor. Isabella appeared more beautiful and more charming still. We went to the race. I had the unspeakable happiness of being in the same car and sitting opposite her. After a short journey—to me, at least, it seemed short—we arrived at the grounds where the race was to take place. We ascended the platform. I sat at Isabella's side. She did not for a moment lose her quiet equanimity. The race began. I saw little of it, for Isabella was constantly before my eyes, look where I would. Suddenly a noise—a loud cry—roused me from my dream. Not twenty paces from where we sat, a horse had fallen. The rider was under him. The floundering animal had crushed both legs of the unfortunate man. Even now I can see his frightfully distorted features before me. I feared that Isabella's delicate sensibility might be wounded by the horrible sight. And when I looked at her, what did I see? A smiling face! She had lost her quiet, weary manner, and a hard, unfeeling soul lighted up her features!

"'Do you not think this change in the monotony of the race quite magnificent?' said she.

"I made no answer. With an apology, I left the party and returned alone to Baden."

"Very well," said the father, "your Isabella was an unfeeling creature granted. But now for your application of this experience."

"We will let another make the application, father. Listen a moment. In Baden a bottle of Rhine wine, whose spirit is so congenial to sad and melancholy feelings, served to obliterate the desolate remembrance. I sat in the almost deserted dining-room. The guests were at the theatre, on excursions in the neighborhood, or dining about the park. An old man sat opposite me. I remarked that his eyes, when he thought himself unobserved, were turned inquiringly on me. The sudden cooling of my passion had perhaps left some marks upon me. The stranger believed, perhaps, that I was an unlucky and desperate player. A player I had indeed been. I had been about to stake my happiness on a beautiful form. But I had won the game.

"The wine soon cheered me up and I entered into conversation with the stranger. We spoke of various things, and finally of the race. As there was a friendly, confiding expression in the old man's countenance, I related to him the unhappy fall of the rider, and dwelt sharply on the impression the hideous spectacle made on Isabella. I told him that such a degree of callousness and insensibility was new to me, and that this sad experience had shocked me greatly.

"'This comes,' said he, 'from permitting yourself to be deceived by appearances, and because you do not know certain classes of society. If you consider the beautiful Isabella with sensual eyes, you will run great danger of taking appearances for truth—the false for the real. Even the plainest exterior is often only sham. Painted cheeks, colored eyebrows, false hair, false teeth; and even if these forms were not false, but true—if you penetrate these forms, if, under the constraint of graceful repose, we see modesty, purity, and even humility—there is then still greater danger of deception. A wearied, enervated nature, nerves blunted by the enjoyment of all kinds of pleasures, are frequently all that remains of womanly nature.

"'Do you wish to see striking examples of this? Go into the gaming saloons—into those horrible places where fearful and consuming passions seethe; where desperation and suicide lurk. Go into the corrupt, poisonous atmosphere of those gambling hells, and there you will find women every day and every hour. Whence this disgusting sight? The violent excitement of gambling alone can afford sufficient attraction for those who have been sated with all kinds of pleasures. Is a criminal to be executed? I give you my word of honor that women give thousands of francs to obtain the best place, where they can contemplate more conveniently the shocking spectacle and read every expression in the distorted features of the struggling malefactor.

"'Isabella was one of these exhausted, enervated creatures, and hence her pleasure at the sight of the mangled rider.'

"Thus spoke the stranger, and I admitted that he was right. At the same time I tried to penetrate deeper into this want of sensibility. Like a venturesome miner, I descended into the psychological depth. I shuddered at what I there discovered, and at the inferences which Isabella's conduct forced upon my mind. No, father, no," said he impetuously, "I will have no such nuptials—I will never rush into the miseries of matrimony!"

"Thunder and lightning! are you a man?" cried Herr Frank. "Because Emil's wife and Isabella are good-for-nothings, must the whole sex be repudiated? Both cases are exceptions. These exceptions give you no right to judge unfavorably of all women. This prejudice does no honor to your good sense, Richard. It is only eccentricity can judge thus."

The coach moved up the street. The dark mountain-side rose into view, and narrow, deep valleys yawned beneath the travellers. Fresh currents of air rushed down the mountain and Herr Frank inhaled refreshing draughts.

Richard gazed thoughtfully over the magnificent vineyards and luxurient orchards.

The road grew steeper and the wooded summit of the mountain approached. A light which Frank beheld with satisfaction glared out from it. Its rays shot out upon the town that, amid rich vineyards, topped the neighboring hill.

"Our residence is beautifully located," said Herr Frank. "How cheerful it looks up there! It is a home fit for princes."

"You have indeed chosen a magnificent spot, father. Everything unites to make Frankenhöhe a delightful place. The vineyards on the slopes of the hills, the smiling hamlet of Salingen to the right. In the background the stern mountain with its proud ruins on the summit of Salburg, the deep valleys and the dark ravines, all unite in the landscape: to the east that beautiful plain."

"You have forgotten a reason for my happy choice," said he, while a smile played on his features. "I mean the habit of my friend and deliverer, who, for the last eight years, spends the month of May at Frankenhöhe. You know the singular character of the doctor. Nothing in the world can tear him from his books. He has renounced all pleasure and enjoyment, to devote his whole time to his books. When Frankenhöhe entices and captivates the man of science, so strict, so dead to the world, it is, as I think, the highest compliment to our place."

Richard did not question his father's opinion. He knew his unbounded esteem for the learned doctor.

The road grew steeper and steeper. The horses labored slowly along. The pleasant hamlet of Salingen lay a short distance to the left. A single house, separated from the village, and standing near the road in the midst of vineyards, came into view. The features of Herr Frank darkened as he turned his gaze from Frankenhöhe to this house. It was as though some unpleasant recollection was associated with it. Richard looked at the stately mansion, the large out-houses, the walled courts, neat and clean.

"This must be a wealthy proprietor or influential landlord who lives here," said Richard. "I have indeed seen this place in former years, but it did not interest me. How inviting and pleasant it looks. The property must have undergone considerable change at least, I remember nothing that indicated the place to be other than an ordinary farmhouse."

Herr Frank did not hear these observations. He muttered some bitter imprecation. The coach gained the summit, left the road, and passed through vineyards and chestnut groves to the house.

Frankenhöhe was a handsome two-story house whose arrangements corresponded to Frank's taste and means. Near it stood another, occupied by the steward. A short distance from it were stables and out-houses for purposes of agriculture.

Herr Frank went directly to the house, and passed from room to room to see if his instructions had been carried out.

Richard went into the garden and walked on paths covered with yellow sand. He strolled about among flower-beds that loaded the air with agreeable odors. He examined the blooming dwarf fruit-trees and ornamental plants. He observed the neatness and exact order of everything. Lastly, he stood near the vineyard whence he could behold an extensive view. {641} He admired the beautiful, fragrant landscape. He stood thoughtfully reflecting. His conversation made it evident to him that his feelings and will did not agree with his father's wishes. He saw that between his inclinations and his love for his father he must undergo a severe struggle—a struggle that must decide his happiness for life. The strangeness of his opinion of women did not escape him. He tested his experience. He tried to justify his convictions, and yet his father's claims and filial duty prevailed.

The next morning Richard was out with the early larks, and returned after a few hours in a peculiar frame of mind. As he was entering his room, he saw through the open door his father standing in the saloon. Herr Frank was carefully examining the arrangements, as the servants were carrying books into the adjoining room and placing them in a bookcase. Richard, as he passed, greeted his father briefly, contrary to his usual custom. At other times he used to exchange a few words with his father when he bid him good-morning, and he let no occasion pass of giving his opinion on any matter in which he knew his father took an interest.

The young man walked to the open window of his room, and gazed into the distance. He remained motionless for a time. He ran his fingers through his hair, and with a jerk of the head threw the brown locks back from his forehead. He walked restlessly back and forth, and acted like a man who tries in vain to escape from thoughts that force themselves upon him. At length he went to the piano, and beat an impetuous impromptu on the keys.

"Ei, Richard!" cried Herr Frank, whom the wild music had brought to his side. "Why, you rave! How possessed! One would think you had discovered a roaring cataract in the mountains, and wished to imitate its violence."

Richard glanced quickly at his father, and finished with a tender, plaintive melody.

Richard followed his father and examined carelessly the elegant rooms, and spoke a few cold words of commendation.

"And what do you say to this flora?" said Herr Frank pointing to a stepped framework on which bloomed the most beautiful and rare flowers.

"All very beautiful, father. The doctor will be much pleased, as he always is here."

"I wish and hope so. I have had the peacocks and turkeys sent away, because Klingenberg cannot endure their noise. The library here will always be his favorite object, and care has been taken with it. Here are the best books on all subjects, even theology and astronomy."

"Frankenhöhe is indeed cheerful as the heart of youth and quiet as a cloister," said Richard. "Your friend would indeed be ungrateful if this attention did not gratify him."

"I have also provided that excellent wine which he loves and enjoys as a healthful medicine. But, Richard, you know Klingenberg's peculiarities. You must not play as you did just now; you would drive the doctor from the house."

"Make yourself easy about that, father; I will play while he is on the mountain."

Richard took a book from the shelf, and glanced over it. Herr Frank left him, and he immediately replaced the book and returned to his own room. There he wrote in his diary:

"12th of May.—Man is too apt to be led by his inclination. And what is inclination? A feeling caused by external impressions, or superinduced by a disposition of the body. Inclination, therefore, is something inimical to intellectual life. A vine that threatens to overgrow and smother clear conviction. Never act from inclination, if you do not wish to be unfaithful to conviction and guilty of a weakness."

He went into the garden, where he talked to the gardener about trees and flowers.

"Do strangers sometimes come there to stop and enjoy the beautiful neighborhood?"

"Oh! no, sir; there is no suitable hotel there—only plain taverns; and people of quality would not stop at them."

"Only farmers, sir. But—-stay. The rich Siegwart appears to be such, and his children are brought up in that manner."

"Four—two boys and two girls. One son is at college. The other takes care of the estate, and is at home. The oldest daughter has been at the convent for three years. She is now nineteen years old. The second is still a child."

Richard went further into the garden; he looked over at Salingen, and then at the mountains. His eye followed a path that went winding up the mountain like a golden thread and led to the top. Then his eye rested for a time on a particular spot in that yellow path. Richard remained taciturn and reserved the rest of the day. He sat in his room and tried to read, but the subject did not interest him. He often looked dreamily from the book. He finally arose, took his hat and cane, and was soon lost in the mountain. The next morning Richard went to the borders of the forest, and looked frequently over at Salingen as it lay in rural serenity before him. The pleasant hamlet excited his interest. He then turned to the right and pursued the yellow path which he had examined the day before, up the mountain. The birds sang in the bushes, and on the branches of the tallest oak perched the black-bird whose morning hymn echoed far and wide. The sweet notes of the nightingale joined in the general concert, and the shrill piping of the hawk struck in discordantly with the varied and beautiful song. Even unconscious nature displayed her beauties. The dew hung in great drops on the grass-blades and glittered like so many brilliants, and wild flowers loaded the air with sweet perfumes. Richard saw little of these beauties of spring. He ascended still higher. His mind seemed agitated and burdened. He had just turned a bend in the road when he saw a female figure approaching. His cheeks grew darker as his eyes rested on the approaching figure. He gazed in the distance, and a disdainful flush overspread his face. He approached her as he would approach an enemy whose power he had felt, and whom he wished to conciliate.

She was within fifty paces of him. Her blue dress fell in heavy folds about her person. The ribbons of her straw bonnet, that hung on her arm, fluttered in the breeze. In her left hand she held a bunch of flowers. On her right arm hung a silk mantle, which the mild air had rendered unnecessary. {643} Her full, glossy hair was partly in a silk net and partly plaited over the forehead and around the head, as is sometimes seen with children. Her countenance was exquisitely beautiful, and her light eyes now rested full and clear on the stranger who approached her. She looked at him with the easy, natural inquisitiveness of a child, surprised to meet such an elegant gentleman in this place.

Frank looked furtively at her, as though he feared the fascinating power of the vision that so lightly and gracefully passed him. He raised his hat stiffly and formally. This was necessary to meet the requirement of etiquette. Were it not, he would perhaps have passed her by without a salutation. She did not return his greeting with a stiff bow, but with a friendly "good-morning;" and this too in a voice whose sweetness, purity, and melody harmonized with the the beautiful echoes of the morning.

Frank moved on hastily for some distance. He was about to look back, but did not do so; and continued on his way, with contracted brows, till a turn in the road hid her from his view. Here he stopped and wiped the sweat from his forehead, His heart beat quickly, and he was agitated by strong emotions. He stood leaning on his cane and gazing into the shadows of the forest. He then continued thoughtfully, and ascended some hundred feet higher till he gained the top of the mountain. The tall trees ceased; a variegated copsewood crowned the summit, which formed a kind of platform. Human hands had levelled the ground, and on the moss that covered it grew modest little violets. Near the border of the platform stood a stone cross of rough material. Near this cross lay the fragments of another large rock, that might have been shattered by lightning years before. A few steps back of this, on two square blocks of stone, stood a statue of the Virgin and Child, of white stone very carefully wrought, but without much art. The Virgin had a crown of roses on her head. The Child held a little bunch of forget-me-nots in its hand, and as it held them out seemed to say, "Forget me not," Two heavy vases that could not be easily overturned by the wind, standing on the upper block, also contained flowers. All these flowers were quite fresh, as if they had just been placed there.

Richard examined these things, and wondered what they meant in this solitude of the mountain. The fresh flowers and the cleanliness of the statue, on which no dust or moss could be seen, indicated a careful keeper. He thought of the young woman whom he met. He had seen the same kind of flowers in her hand, and doubtless she was the devotee of the place.

Scarcely had his thoughts taken this direction when he turned away and walked to the border of the plot, and gazed at the country before him. He looked down toward Frankenhöhe, whose white chimneys appeared above the chestnut grove. He contemplated the plains with their luxuriant fields reflecting every shade of green—the strips of forests that lay like shadows in the sunny plain—numberless hamlets with church towers whose gilded crosses gleamed in the sun. He gazed in the distance where the mountain ranges vanished in the mist, and long he enjoyed the magnificence of the view. He was aroused from his dreamy contemplation by the sound of footsteps behind him.

An old man with a load of wood on his shoulders came up to the place. Breathing heavily, he threw down the wood and wiped the sweat from his face. He saw the stranger, and respectfully touched his cap as he sat down on the wood.

Frank looked at the patched clothes of the old man, his coarse shoes, his stockingless feet, and meagre body, and felt compassion for him.

"For us poor people the earth bears but thistles and thorns." After a pause, the old man continued, "We have to undergo many tribulations and difficulties, and sometimes we even suffer from hunger. But thus it is in the world. The good God will reward us in the next world for our sufferings in this."

These words sounded strangely to Richard. Raised as he was in the midst of wealth, and without contact with poverty, he had never found occasion to consider the lot of the poor; and now the resignation of the old man, and his hope in the future, seemed strange to him. He was astonished that religion could have such power—so great and strong—to comfort the poor in the miseries of a hopeless, comfortless life.

"It is my sole possession on earth. What would support us poor people, what would keep us from despair, if religion did not?"

The old man looked at the bright thalers in his hand, and the tears trickled down his cheeks.

"That is a weather cross, sir. We have a great deal of bad weather to fear. We have frequent storms here, in summer; they hang over the mountain and rage terribly. Every ravine becomes a torrent that dashes over the fields, hurling rocks and sand from the mountain. Our fields are desolated and destroyed. The people of Salingen placed that cross there against the weather. In spring the whole community come here in procession and pray God to protect them from the storms."

Richard reflected on this phenomenon; the confidence of these simple people in the protection of God, whose omnipotence must intervene between the remorseless elements and their victims, appeared to him as the highest degree of simplicity. But he kept his thoughts to himself, for he respected the religious sentiments of the old man, and would not hurt his feelings.

"Ah! that is a wonderful story, sir," he answered, apparently wishing to evade an explanation.

"Because you are a gentleman of quality, and from the city, and such people do not believe any more in miracles."

This observation of rustic sincerity was not pleasing to Frank. It expressed the opinion that the higher classes ignore faith in the supernatural.

"I will; you were kind to me, and you can ask the story of me. About thirty years ago," began the old man after a pause, "there lived a wealthy farmer at Salingen whose name was Schenck. Schenck was young. He married a rich maiden and thereby increased his property. But Schenck had many great faults. He did not like to work and look after his fields. He let his servants do as they pleased, and his fields were, of course, badly worked and yielded no more than half a crop. Schenck sat always in the tavern, where he drank and played cards and dice. Almost every night he came home drunk. Then he would quarrel with his wife, who reproached him. He abused her, swore wickedly, and knocked everything about the room, and behaved very badly altogether. Schenck sank lower and lower, and became at last a great sot. His property was soon squandered. He sold one piece after another, and when he had no more property to sell, he took it into his head to sell himself to the devil for money. He went one night to a cross-road and called the devil, but the devil would not come; perhaps because Schenck belonged to him already, for the Scripture says, 'A drunkard cannot enter the kingdom of heaven.' At last a suit was brought against him, and the last of his property was sold, and he was driven from his home. This hurt Schenck very much, for he always had a certain kind of pride. He thought of the past times when he was rich and respected, and now he had lost all respect with his neighbors. He thought of his wife and his four children, whom he had made poor and miserable. All this drove him to despair. He determined to put an end to himself. He bought a rope and came up here one morning to hang himself. He tied the rope to an arm of the cross, and had his head in the noose, when all at once he remembered that he had not yet said his three "Hail! Marys." His mother who was dead had accustomed him, when a child, to say every day three "Hail! Marys." Schenck had never neglected this practice for a single day. Then he took his head out of the noose and said, 'Well, as I have said the "Hail! Marys" every day, I will say them also to-day, for the last time.' He knelt down before the cross and prayed. When he was done, he stood up to hang himself. But he had scarcely stood on his feet when he was snatched up by a whirlwind and carried through the air till he was over a vineyard, where he fell without hurting himself. As he stood up, an ugly man stood before him and said, 'This time you have escaped me, but the next time I will get you.' The ugly man had horses' hoofs in place of feet, and wore green clothes. He disappeared before Schenck's eyes. Schenck swears that this ugly man was the devil. He declares also that he has to thank the Mother of God, through whose intercession he escaped the claws of the devil. Schenck had that statue placed there in memory of his wonderful escape—and that is why the Mother of God is there."

"A wonderful story indeed!" said Richard. "Although I do not laugh at it, as you see, yet I must assure you that I do not believe the story."

"I thought so," answered the old man. "But you can ask Schenck himself. He is still living, and is now seventy. Since that day he has changed entirely. He drinks nothing but water. He never enters a tavern, but goes every day to church. From that time to this Schenck has been very industrious, and has saved a nice property."

"That the drunkard reformed is the most remarkable and best part of the story," said Frank. "Drunkards very seldom reform. But," continued he smiling, "the devil acted very stupidly in the affair. He should have known that his appearance would have made a deep impression on the man, and that he would not let himself be caught a second time."

"That is true," said the old man. "But I believe the devil was forced to appear and speak so."

"By Him before whom the devils must believe and tremble. Schenck was to understand that God delivered him on account of his pious custom, and the devil had to tell him that this would not happen a second time."

"Now," said Richard quickly, "I would not hurt your feelings. One may be a good Christian without believing fables. And the flowers near the statue. Has Schenck placed them there too?"

"So she may be called. In Salingen they call her only Angel. And she is indeed as lovely, good, and beautiful as an angel. She has a heart for the poor, and she gives with an open hand and a smiling face that does one good. She is like her father, who gives me as many potatoes as I want, and seed for my little patch of ground."

"I do not know the reason; she has done so for the last two years, since she came home from the convent, and she will do so this year."

"Very rich—you can see from his house. Do you see that fine building there next to the road? That is the residence of Herr Siegwart."

It was the same building that had arrested Richard's attention as he passed it some days before, and the sight of which had excited the ill-humor of his father. Richard returned by a shorter way to Frankenhöhe. He was serious and meditative. Arrived at home, he wrote in his diary:

"May 13th.—Well, I have seen her. She exhibits herself as the 'Angel of Salingen.' She is extremely beautiful. She is full of amiability and purity of character. And to-day she did not wear that detestable crinoline. But she will have other foibles in place of it. She will, in some things at least, yield to the superficial tendencies of her sex. Isabella was an ideal, until she descended from the height where my imagination, deceived by her charms, had placed her. The impression which Angela's appearance produced has rests on the same foundation—deception. A better acquaintance will soon discover this. Curious! I long to become better acquainted!

"Religion is not a disease or hallucination, as many think. It is a power. Religion teaches the poor to bear their hard lot with patience. It comforts and keeps them from despair. It directs their attention to an eternal reward, and this hope compensates them for all the afflictions and miseries of this life. Without religion, human society would fall to pieces."

"Ah Richard!" said Herr Frank good-humoredly. "Half an hour late for dinner, and had to be called! That is strange; I do not remember such a thing to have happened before. You are always as punctual as a repeater."

"No excuse, my son. I am glad the neighborhood diverts you, and that you depart a little from your regularity. Now everything is in good order, as I desired, for my friend and deliverer. I have just received a letter from him. He will be here in two days. I shall be glad to see the good man again. If Frankenhöhe will only please him for a long time!"

"I have no doubt of that," said Richard. "The doctor will be received like a friend, treated like a king, and will live here like Adam and Eve in paradise."

"Everything will go on as formerly. I will be coming and going on account of business. You will, of course, remain uninterruptedly at Frankenhöhe. You are high in the doctor's esteem. You interest him very much. It is true you annoy him sometimes with your unlearned objections and bold assertions. But I have observed that even vexation, when it comes from you, is not disagreeable to him."

"But the poor should not annoy him with their sick," said Richard. "He never denies his services to the poor, as he never grants them to the rich. Indeed, I have sometimes observed that he tears himself from his books with the greatest reluctance, and it is not without an effort that he does it."

"But we cannot change it," said Herr Frank; "we cannot send the poor away without deeply offending Klingenberg. But I esteem him the more for his generosity."

After dinner the father and son went into the garden and talked of various matters; suddenly Richard stopped and pointing over to Salingen, said,

"I passed to-day that neat building that stands near the road. Who lives there?"

His tone surprised Richard. He was not accustomed to hear his father speak thus.

"Not in the strict sense. But he is the ruler of Salingen. He rules in that town as absolutely as princes formerly did in their kingdoms."

"His wealth, in the first place; secondly, his charity; and lastly, his cunning."

"No, indeed! The Siegwart family is excessively ultramontane and clerical. You know I cannot endure these narrow prejudices and this obstinate adherence to any form of religion. Besides, I have a particular reason for disagreement with Siegwart, of which I need not now speak."

"Excessively ultramontane and clerical!" thought Richard, as he went to his room. "Angela is undoubtedly educated in this spirit. Stultifying confessionalism and religious narrow-mindedness have no doubt cast a deep shadow over the 'angel.' Now—patience; the deception will soon banish."

He took up Schlosser's History, and read a long time. But his eyes wandered from the page, and his thoughts soon followed.

The next morning at the same hour Richard went to the weather cross. He took the same road and again he met Angela; she had the same blue dress, the same straw hat on her arm, and flowers in her hand. She beheld him with the same clear eyes, with the same unconstrained manner—only, as he thought, more charming—as on the first day. He greeted her coolly and formally, as before. She thanked him with the same affability. Again the temptation came over him to look back at her; again he overcame it. When he came to the statue, he found fresh flowers in the vases. The child Jesus had fresh forget-me-nots in his hand, and the Mother had a crown of fresh roses on her head. On the upper stone lay a book, bound in blue satin and clasped with a silver clasp. When he took it up, he found beneath it a rosary made of an unknown material, and having a gold cross fastened at the end. He opened the book. The passage that had been last read was marked with a silk ribbon. It was as follows:

"My son, trust not thy present affection; it will be quickly changed into another. As long as thou livest thou art subject to change, even against thy will; so as to be sometimes joyful, at other times sad; now easy, now troubled; at one time devout, at another dry; sometimes fervent, at other times sluggish; one day heavy, another day lighter. But he that is wise and well instructed in spirit stands above all these changes, not minding what he feels in himself, nor on what side the wind of instability blows; but that the whole bent of his soul may advance toward its due and wished-for end; for thus he may continue one and the self-same without being shaken, by directing without ceasing, through all this variety of events, the single eye of his intention toward me. And by how much more pure the eye of the intention is, with so much greater constancy mayest thou pass through these divers storms.

"But in many the eye of pure intention is dark; for men quickly look toward something delightful that comes in their way. And it is rare to find one who is wholly free from all blemish of self-seeking."

Frank remembered having written about the same thoughts in his diary. But here they were conceived in another and deeper sense.

He copied the title in his pocketbook. He then with a smile examined the rosary, for he was not without prejudice against this kind of prayer.

He had no doubt Angela had left these things here, and he thought it would be proper to return them to the owner. He came slowly down the mountain reading the book. It was clear to him that The Following of Christ was a book full of very earnest and profound reflections. And he wondered how so young a woman could take any interest in such serious reading. He was convinced that all the ladies he knew would throw such a book aside with a sneer, because its contents condemned their lives and habits. Angela, then, must be of a different character from all the ladies he knew, and he was very desirous of knowing better this character of Angela.

In a short time he entered the gate and passed through the yard to the stately building where Herr Siegwart dwelt. He glanced hastily at the long out-buildings—the large barns; at the polished cleanliness of the paved court, the perfect order of everything, and finally at the ornamented mansion. {649} Then he looked at the old lindens that stood near the house, whose trunks were protected from injury by iron railings. In the tops of these trees lodged a lively family of sparrows, who were at present in hot contention, for they quarrelled and cried as loud and as long as did formerly the lords in the parliament of Frankfort. The beautiful garden, separated from the yard by a low wall covered with white boards, did not escape him. Frank entered, upon a broad and very clean path; as his feet touched the stone slabs, he heard, through the open door, a low growl, and then a man's voice saying, "Quiet, Hector."

Frank walked through the open door into a large room handsomely furnished, and odoriferous with a multitude of flowers in vases. A man in the prime of life sat on the sofa reading and smoking. He wore a light-brown overcoat, brown trousers, and low, thick boots. He had a fresh, florid complexion, red beard, blue eyes, and an expressive, agreeable countenance. When Frank entered he arose, laid aside the paper and cigar, and approached the visitor.

"I found these things on the mountain near the weather-cross." said Frank, after a more formal than affable bow. "As your daughter met me, I presume they belong to her. I thought it my duty to return them."

"These things certainly belong to my daughter," answered Herr Siegwart. "You are very kind, sir. You have placed us under obligations to you."

Herr Siegwart bowed. Frank noticed a slight embarrassment in his countenance. He remembered the expressions his father had used in reference to the Siegwart family, and it was clear to him that a reciprocal ill feeling existed here. Siegwart soon resumed his friendly manner, and invited him with much formality to the sofa. Richard felt that he must accept the invitation at least for a few moments. Siegwart sat on a chair in front of him, and they talked of various unimportant matters. Frank admired the skill which enabled him to conduct, without interruption, so pleasant a conversation with a stranger.

While they were speaking, some house-swallows flew into the room. They fluttered about without fear, sat on the open door, and joined their cheerful twittering with the conversation of the men. Richard expressed his admiration, and said he had never seen anything like it.

"Our constant guests in summer," answered Siegwart. "They build their nests in the hall, and as they rise earlier than we do, an opening is left for them above the hall door, where they can go in and out undisturbed when the doors are closed. Angela is in their confidence, and on the best of terms with them. When rainy or cold days come during breeding time they suffer from want of food. Angela is then their procurator. I have often admired Angela's friendly intercourse with the swallows, who perch upon her shoulders and hands."

Richard looked indeed at the twittering swallows, but their friend Angela passed before his eyes, so beautiful indeed that he no longer heard what Siegwart was saying.

He arose; Siegwart accompanied him. As they passed through the yard, Frank observed the long row of stalls, and said, "You must have considerable stock?"

"Yes, somewhat. If you would like to see the property, I will show you around with pleasure."

"I regret that I cannot now avail myself of your kindness; I shall do so in a few days," answered Frank.

"Herr Frank," said Siegwart, "may the accident which has given us the pleasure of your agreeable visit, be the occasion of many visits in future. I know that as usual you will spend the month of May at Frankenhöhe. We are neighbors—this title, in my opinion, should indicate a friendly intercourse."

On the way to Frankenhöhe Richard walked very slowly, and gazed into the distance before him. He thought of the swallows that perched on Angela's shoulders and hands. Their sweet notes still echoed in his soul.

The country-like quiet of Siegwart's house and the sweet peace that pervaded it were something new to him. He thought of the simple character of Siegwart, who, as his father said, was "ultramontane and clerical," and whom he had represented to himself as a dark, reserved man. He found nothing in the open, natural manner of the man to correspond with his preconceived opinion of him. Richard concluded that either Herr Siegwart was not an ultramontane, or the characteristics of the ultramontanes, as portrayed in the free-thinking newspapers of the day, were erroneous and false.

Buried in such thoughts, he reached Frankenhöhe. As he passed through the yard, he did not observe the carriage that stood there. But as he passed under the window, he heard a loud voice, and some books were thrown from the window and fell at his feet. He looked down in surprise at the books, whose beautiful binding was covered with sand. He now observed the coach, and smiled.

"Ah! the doctor is here," said he. "He has thrown these unwelcome guests out of the window. Just like him."

He took up the books and read the titles, Vogt's Pictures from Animal Life, Vogt's Physiological Letters, Colbe's Sensualism.

He took the books to his room and began to read them. Herr Frank, with his joyful countenance, soon appeared.

"I suspected as much already," said Richard. "I passed by just as he threw the books out of the window with his usual impetuosity."

"Klingenberg walks only in his own room. I wish to read these books; what enrages him with innocent paper?"

"I scarcely know, myself. He examined the library and was much pleased with some of the works. But suddenly he tore these books from their place and hurled them through the window."

"'I tolerate no bad company among these noble geniuses,' said he, pointing to the learned works.

"'Pardon me, honored friend,' said I, 'if, without my knowledge, some bad books were included. What kind of writings are these, doctor?"

"'Stupid materialistic trash,' said he.' If I had Vogt, Moleschott, Colbe, and Büchner here, I would throw them body and bones out of the window.'

"I was very much surprised at this declaration, so contrary to the doctor's kind disposition.'What kind of people are those you have named?' said I.

"'No people, my dear Frank,' said he.' They are animals, This Vogt and his fellows have excluded themselves from the pale of humanity, inasmuch as they have declared apes, oxen, and asses to be their equals.'"

Richard dressed and went to greet the singular guest. He was sitting before a large folio. He arose at Richard's entrance and paternally reached him both hands.

Doctor Klingenberg was of a compact, strong build. He had unusually long arms, which he swung back and forth in walking. His features were sharp, but indicated a modest character. From beneath his bushy eyebrows there glistened two small eyes that did not give an agreeable expression to his countenance. This unfavorable expression was, however, only the shell of a warm heart.

The doctor was good-natured—hard on himself, but mild in his judgments of others. He had an insatiable desire for knowledge, and it impelled him to severe studies that robbed him of his hair and made him prematurely bald.

"How healthy you look, Richard!" said he, contemplating the young man. "I am glad to see you have not been spoiled by the seething atmosphere of modern city life."

"And would go to the station to bring me. Why this ceremony? I am here, and I will enjoy for a few weeks the pure, bracing mountain air. Our arrangements will be as formerly—not so, my dear friend?"

"If not many, at least one—the weather cross," answered Frank. "A beautiful position. The hill stands out somewhat from the range. The whole plain lies before the ravished eyes. At the same time, there are things connected with that place that are not without their influence on me. They refer to a custom of the ultramontanists that clashes with modern ideas; I will have an opportunity of seeing whether your opinion coincides with mine."

"Very well; since we have already an object for our next walk—and this is according to our old plan—tomorrow after dinner at three o'clock," and saying this he glanced wistfully at the old folio. Frank, smiling, observed the delicate hint and retired.

Antiquities of New York.

It is as true of nations as it is of individuals that they "live more in the past and the future than in the present;" and when either are young and have a very limited past, their thoughts dwell most upon the future. This is one marked difference between the peoples of the old world and us on this continent. Our past is so small in comparison with theirs, that antiquarian societies, so common with them, are quite unknown among us, and it is not often that we throw our thoughts back.

Yet in that respect, as in others, we are daily improving, and we begin, now and then, to find something to think upon in the days of our forefathers.

These thoughts have arisen in our mind from having come across a book recently published by the State of New York: "Laws and Ordinances of New Netherlands, 1638-1674, compiled and translated from the original Dutch records in the office of the Secretary of State. Albany, N.Y. E.B. O'Callaghan." From that book a good deal can be learned of the manners and customs in our goodly city some two hundred years ago, that cannot fail to be interesting.

It was in 1621 that the States General of the United Netherlands incorporated a West India Company, with power to establish colonies in such parts of America as were not already occupied by other nations.

Under this authority, the company established a colony embracing the land from the present State of Maryland to the Connecticut River, and called NEW NETHERLAND.

The Amsterdam Chamber of the company exercised supreme government over this colony until 1664, when it was captured by the English, but recovered by the Dutch in 1673, but was finally ceded to the English.

It was in 1609 that Hendrik Hudson discovered the country, and in 1623 it was that the West India Company sent its first colony of families, who settled at what was then Fort Orange, now Albany, and settled a colony of families at New Amsterdam, now New York.

The colonial government, including legislative and executive powers, was administered by a director-general and council; and it is from the laws which they enacted that we can gather much knowledge of the manners and customs of our Dutch progenitors and from which we now proceed to make some extracts.

On the 7th of June, 1629, the West India Company granted what we would call a charter to all settlers in the new world, but which they called "freedoms and exemptions," to all patroons, masters, or private persons who would plant colonies in New Netherland.

They consisted of thirty-one articles; and among them was that which, if it may not be considered the origin, in this country, of that slavery which it took us some two hundred and fifty years to get rid of, was, by one of the articles, not only tolerated, but was actually established, with a covenant on the part of the home government to supply the settlers with slaves.

"The Company will use their endeavors to supply the colonists with as many Blacks as they conveniently can, on the conditions hereafter to be made, in such manner, however, that they shall not be bound to do it for a longer time than they shall think proper."

On the 19th of November, 1654, the Amsterdam board allowed the importation of negroes direct from Africa, by the ship Witte Paert, and on the 6th of August, 1655, the director-general and council of New Netherland imposed an ad valorem duty of ten per cent on the exportation of any of the slaves brought in by that ship.

The discord between the quiet, stolid Dutchmen of those days, and the restless "Yengees," of whom they had so much dread, soon began to show itself, and every once in a while we find a paper bomb-shell fired off at them, in the shape of a law, and hitting them in a tender spot, by forbidding trade.

Of the Director and Council of New Netherland, prohibiting the purchase of produce raised near Fort Hope.—Passed 3 April, 1642.

"Whereas our territory which we purchased, paid for, and took possession of, provided in the year 1633 with a Blockhouse, Garrison, and Cannon, on the Fresh River of New Netherland, a long time before any Christians were in the said river, hath now, for some years past, been forcibly usurped by some englishmen, and given the name of Hartford, notwithstanding we duly protested against them; who, moreover, treat our people most barbarously, beating them with clubs and mattocks even unto the shedding of blood; cut down our corn, sow the fields by night which our people ploughed by day; haul home by force the hay which was mowed by our people; cast our ploughs into the river, and forcibly impound our horses, cows, and hogs, so that no cruelty, insolence, nor violence remains which is not practised toward us, who yet have treated them with all moderation; Yea, even at great hazard, have redeemed and sent back home their Women, who were carried off by the Indians; And although we are commanded by the States-General, his Highness of Orange, and the Honorable West India Company to maintain our Limits and to assert our Right by every means, which We, also, have the power to do, yet rather have We chose patiently to suffer violence, and to prove by deeds that we are better Christians than they who go about there clothed with such outward show, until in its time the measure shall be entirely full.

"Therefore, our order and command provisionally is, & We do hereby Ordain that our Inhabitants of New Netherland be most expressly forbidden from purchasing, either directly or indirectly, by the third or second shipment, or in any manner whatsoever, any produce which has been raised on our land near Fort Hope on the Fresh River, on pain of arbitrary correction, until their rights are acknowledged, and the sellers of the produce which shall arrive from our Fresh River of New Netherland and from New England shall first declare upon oath where the produce has been grown, whereof a certificate shall be given them, and thereupon every one shall be at liberty to buy and to sell."

Of the Governor-General and Council of New Netherland further prohibiting the entertainment of Strangers, forbidding intercourse or correspondence with the people of New England.—Passed, 12 December, 1673.

"Whereas, it is found by experience that notwithstanding the previously published Ordinance and Edicts, many Strangers, yea enemies of this State, attempt to come within this government without having previously obtained any consent or passport, and have even presumed to show themselves within this city of New Orange; also that many Inhabitants of this Province, losing sight of and forgetting their Oath of Allegiance, presume still daily to correspond, and exchange letters with the Inhabitants of the neighboring colonies of New England and other enemies of this State, whence nothing else can result but great prejudice and loss to this Province, and it is, accordingly, necessary that seasonable provision be made therein.

"Therefore, the Governor-General of New Netherland, by and with the advice of his Council, reviewing the aforesaid Ordinances and Edicts enacted on that subject, have deemed it highly necessary strictly to order and command that all Strangers and others, of what nation or quality soever they may be, who have not as yet bound themselves by Oath and promise of fealty to the present Supreme government of this Province, and have not been received by it as good subjects, do within the space of four and twenty hours from the publication hereof depart from out this province of New Netherland, and further interdicting and forbidding any person, not being actually an inhabitant and subject of this government, from coming within this government without first having obtained due license and passport to that end, on pain and penalty that the contraveners shall not be considered other than open enemies and spies of this State, and consequently be arbitrarily punished as an example to others. And to the end that they may be the more easily discovered and found out, all Inhabitants of this Province are interdicted and forbidden from henceforth harboring or lodging any strangers over night in their houses or dwellings unless they have previously given due communication thereof to their officer or Magistrate before sun-down, under the penalty set forth in the former Edict.

"Furthermore, the Inhabitants of this Province are strictly interdicted and forbidden, from this day forward, from holding any correspondence with the neighboring Colonies of New England, and all others actual enemies of our State, much less afford them any supplies of any description, on pain of forfeiting the goods and double the value thereof, likewise from exchanging any letters, of what nature soever they may be, without having obtained previous special consent thereto. Therefore all messengers, skippers, travellers, together with all others whom these may in any wise concern, are most expressly forbidden to take charge of, much less to deliver, any letters coming from the enemy's places, or going thither, but immediately on their arrival to deliver them into the Secretary's office here in order to be duly examined, on pain of being fined One hundred guilders in Beaver, to be paid by the receiver as well as by the deliverer of each letter which contrary to the tenor hereof shall be exchanged or delivered."

Gold and silver were scarce among them. The modern device of paper money had not then come in vogue, and so they had to use wampum—the Indians' currency or medium of exchange.

This was made from oyster-shells, and was worn by the natives as ornaments, and had no intrinsic value, but only a conventional one. And it seems to have been hard work to keep it up to its standard. Every body could make it that could catch oysters, and its plenty or scarcity causing a fluctuation of prices, gave them a great deal of trouble, especially when their old rock of offence, "the Yankees," began to manufacture it and buy away from them all they had to sell, for what was actually of no value.

So we find every once in a while "Ordinances" passed on the subject, which in their quaint and simple way show the state of things. Between April 18th, 1641, and December 28th, 1662, we find in this book twelve different ordinances on the subject; some of them fixing their value, some punishing frauds, some making them a legal tender, some declaring them merchandise, some providing that they shall be paid out by measure, some exempting them from import duty, and some providing for their depreciation.

The following extracts will afford an idea of their difficulties on the subject.

Of the Director and Council of New Netherland respecting loose Wampum.—Passed, 30 November, 1647.

"Resolved and concluded in Council at Fort Amsterdam, that, until further Order, the loose Wampum shall continue current and in circulation only that, in the mean while, all imperfect, broken, or unpierced beads can be picked out, which are declared Bullion, and shall, meantime, be received at the Company's counting-house as heretofore. Provided that the Company, or any one on its part, shall, in return, be at liberty to trade therewith among the Merchants or otter Inhabitants, or in larger parcels, as may be agreed upon and stipulated by any individual, or on behalf of the Company."

Of the Director and Council of New Netherland further regulating the currency.—Passed 14 September, 1650.

"The Director-General and Council of New Netherland, To all those who hear, see, or read these presents, Greeting. Whereas, on the daily complaints of the inhabitants, we experience that our previous Ordinance and Edict relative to the poor strung Wampum, published under date 30 May, A° 1650, for the accommodation and protection of the people, is not observed and obeyed according to our good intention and meaning; but that, on the contrary, such pay, even for small items, is rejected and refused by Shopkeepers, Brewers, Tapsters, Tradespeople, and Laboring men, to the great confusion and inconvenience of the Inhabitants in general, there being, at present, no other currency whereby the Inhabitants can procure from each other small articles of daily trade; for which wishing to provide as much as possible, for the relief and protection of the Inhabitants, the Director and Council do hereby Ordain and command that, in conformity to our previous Ordinance, the poor strung Wampum shall be current and accepted by every one without distinction and exception for small and daily necessary commodities required for housekeeping, as currency to the amount of Twelve guilders and under only, in poor strung wampum; of twelve to twenty-four guilders half and half, that is to say, half poor strung and half good strung Wampum; of twenty guilders to fifty guilders, one third poor strung and two thirds good strung wampum, and in larger sums according to the conditions agreed upon between Buyer and Seller, under a penalty of six guilders for the first time, to be forfeited on refusal by contraveneor hereof; for the second time nine guilders, and for the third time two pounds Flemish and stoppage of his trade and business, pursuant to our previous Edicts.

"Thus done and enacted in Council by the Director and Council, this 14 September, 1650, in New Amsterdam."

Of the Director-General and Council of New Netherland regulating the currency.—Passed 3 January, 1657.

"Whereas they, to their great regret, are by their own experience daily informed, and by the manifold complaints of Inhabitants and Strangers importuned, respecting the great, excessive and intolerable dearness of all sorts of necessary commodities and household supplies, the prices of which are enhanced from time to time, principally among other causes, in consequence of the high price of Beaver and other Peltries in this country beyond the value, which, by reason of the great abundance of Wampum, is advanced to ten, eleven and twelve guilders for one Beaver; And Wampum being, for want of Silver and Gold coin, as yet the most general and common currency between man and man, Buyer and Seller, domestic articles and daily necessaries are rated according to that price, and become dearer from time to time; the rather, as not only Merchants, but also, consequently, Shopkeepers, Tradesmen, Brewers, Bakers, Tapsters, and Grocers make a difference of 30, 40, to 50 per cent when they sell their wares for Wampum or for Beaver. This tends, then, so far to the serious damage, distress and loss of the common Mechanics, Brewers, Farmers and other good Inhabitants of this Province, that the Superior and inferior magistrates of this Province are blamed, abused and cursed by Strangers and Inhabitants, and the Country in general receives a bad name, while some greedy people do not hesitate to sell the most necessary eatables and drinkables, according to their insatiable avarice; viz., the can of Vinegar at 18 @ 20 stivers; the can of Oil at 4 @ 5 guilders; the can of French wine at 40 @ 45 stivers; the gill of Brandy at 15 stivers, and two quarts of home brewed Beer, far above its price, at 14@15 stivers, &c., which the greater number endeavor to excuse on the ground that they lose a great deal in the counting of the Wampum; that it is partly short and partly long; that they must give 11@12 and more guilders before they can convert the wampum into Beaver."

So that, at last, the home government took it up, and in 1659 they wrote to the council at New Amsterdam, among other things:

"From this particular reduction of the Wampum a second general reduction must necessarily follow, if the depreciation thereof is to be prevented. This arises in consequence of the great importation of Wampum from New-England, which barters therewith and carries out of the country not only the best cargoes sent hence, but also a large quantity of beaver and other peltries, whereby the Company is defrauded of its revenues and the merchants here of good returns, while the Factors and inhabitants there remain with chests full of Wampum, which is a currency utterly valueless except among New Netherland Indians only," etc.

The rate of depreciation may be discovered from the fact that an ordinance passed in April, 1641, fixed it at 4 polished and 5 unpolished for one stiver, while another, passed in December, 1662, fixed it at 24 for one stiver; and that in 1650 it was fixed at 6 white and 3 black for one stiver, and twelve years afterward at 24 white and 12 black for one stiver—making what President Johnson would call a depreciation of 400 per cent in that short time.

The government interfered very much in religious matters, seeming to aim not so much at protection against molestation as to produce conformity of opinion, by making the people view such things as the Director and Council did.

Between April, 1641, and November, 1673, fourteen ordinances were passed concerning Sunday. And between June, 1641, and November, 1673, there were sixteen ordinances as to religion.

11 April, 1641.—"No person shall attempt to tap beer or any other strong drink during divine service, nor use any other measure than that which is in common use at Amsterdam."

"Whereas complaints have been made to us that some of the inhabitants here are in the habit of Tapping Beer during Divine Service, and of making use of small foreign Measures, which tends to the dishonor of religion and the ruin of this state."

13 May, 1647.—"None of the Brewers, Tapsters and Tavern-keepers shall on the rest day of the Lord by us called Sunday, before two of the clock when there is no sermon, or, otherwise, before four o'clock in the afternoon, set before, tap or give any people any Wine, Beer or strong liquors of any kind whatever, and under any pretext, be it what it may," etc.

"Whereas we see and observe by experience, the great disorders in which some of our inhabitants indulge in drinking to excess, quarreling, fighting, and smiting, even on the Lord's day of rest, whereof, God help us! we have seen and heard sorrowful instances on last Sunday," etc.

"The reason and cause why this our good Edict and well meant Ordinance is not obeyed according to the tenor and purport thereof, are that this sort of business and the profit easily accruing therefrom divert and lead many from their original and primitive calling, occupation and business, to resort to Tavern-keeping, so that nearly the just fourth of the city of New Amsterdam consists of Brandyshops, Tobacco or Beer-houses."

"sell nor furnish Beer or Liquor to any person, travellers and boarders alone excepted, on the Sunday, before three o'clock in the afternoon, when Divine Service is finished."

29 April, 1648.—After complaining again of non-observance of former laws, they renew and amplify previous edicts, and declare that,

"having for the stricter observance thereof, with the preadvice of the Minister of the Gospel, deemed it expedient that a sermon shall be preached from the sacred Scriptures, and the usual prayers and thanksgivings offered from this time forward in the afternoon as well as the forenoon," etc., and forbid all tapping, fishing, hunting, and business during divine service.

26 October, 1656.—Repeating their complaints, they enact an ordinance against performing on Sunday any work, such as ploughing, mowing, building, etc., and, as they term it,

"much less any lower or unlawful exercise and amusement. Drunkenness, frequenting Taverns or Tippling-houses, Dancing, Playing ball, Cards, Trick-Track, Tennis, Cricket or Nine-pins, going on pleasure parties in a boat, car or wagon, before, between or during Divine Service," and forbidding the sale of liquor "before, between or during the sermons," etc.

12 June, 1657.—They forbid all persons, "of what nation or rank he may be," to entertain any company on Sunday or during divine service.

18 November, 1661.—They forbid all work on Sunday under "the penalty of £1 Flemish for the first time, double as much for the second time, and four times double as much for the third time." (Silent as to the fourth time.)

And they forbid all entertainments in taverns, and any giving away or selling any liquor.

10 September, 1663.—The director-general and council of New Amsterdam passed an ordinance against which the burgomasters and schepens of New Amsterdam rebelled, and which they refused to enforce, for the reason that it was "too severe and too much in opposition to the Freedoms of Holland."

That law extended the former laws to the whole of Sunday from sunrise to sunset, and in addition prohibited any riding in cars or wagons, any roving in search of nuts or strawberries, and the "too unrestrained and excessive playing, shouting and screaming of children in the streets."

16 June, 1641.—They began by securing to all Englishmen who might settle with them "the free exercise of Religion."

16 November, 1644.—They granted to the town of Hempstead the power of using and exercising "the Reformed Religion with the Ecclesiastical discipline thereunto belonging."

10 October, 1645—They granted to the town of Flushing the "Liberty of Conscience according to the Custom and manner of Holland, without molestation or disturbance from any magistrate or any other Ecclesiastical minister."

Of the Director and Council of New Netherland against Conventicles.—Passed 1 February, 1656.

"Whereas the Director and Council of New Netherland are credibly informed and apprized that here and there within this Province not only are Conventicles and Meetings held, but also that some unqualified persons in such Meetings assume the ministerial office, the expounding and explanation of the Holy word of God, without being called or appointed thereto by ecclesiastical or civil authority, which is in direct contravention and opposition to the general Civil and Ecclesiastical order of our Fatherland; besides that many dangerous Heresies and Schisms are to be apprehended from such manner of meetings. Therefore, the Director General and Council aforesaid hereby absolutely and expressly forbid all such conventicles and meetings, whether public or private, differing from the customary and not only lawful but scripturally founded and ordained meetings of the Reformed Divine service, as this is observed and enforced according to the Synod of Dordrecht," etc.

On 21 September, 1662, they enacted that "beside the Reformed worship and service, no conventicles or meetings shall be kept in the province, whether it be in houses, barnes, ships, barkes, nor in the woods nor fields."

In December, 1656, they enacted an ordinance containing this, among other things:

"Further, whenever, early in the morning or after supper in the evening, prayers shall be said, or God's word read, by any one thereunto commissioned, every person, of what quality soever he may be, shall repair to hear it with becoming reverence.

"No man shall raise or bring forward any question or argument on the subject of religion, on pain of being placed on bread and water three days in the ship's galley. And if any difficulties should arise out of the said disputes, the author thereof shall be arbitrarily punished."

They repeatedly passed ordinances requiring their officers to be of the reformed religion.

Of the Director-General and Council of New Netherland prohibiting the bringing of Quakers and other Strollers into New Netherland.—Passed 17 May, 1663.

"The Director-General and Council of New Netherland, To all those who shall see or hear these Presents read, Greeting, make known.

"Whereas we daily find that many Vagabonds, Quakers and other Fugitives are, without the previous knowledge and consent of the Director General and Council, conveyed, brought and landed in this Government, and sojourn and remain in the respective Villages of this Province without those bringing them giving notice thereof, or such persons addressing themselves to the government and showing whence they come, as they ought to do, or that they have taken the oath of fidelity the same as other Inhabitants; the Director General and Council, therefore, do hereby Order and command all Skippers, Sloop Captains and others, whosoever they may be, not to convey or bring, much less to land, within this government, any such Vagabonds, Quakers and other Fugitives, whether Men or Women, unless they have first addressed themselves to the government, have given information thereof, and asked and obtained consent on pain of the importers forfeiting a fine of twenty pounds Flemish for every person, whether Man or Woman, whom they will have brought in and landed without the consent or previous Knowledge of the Director General and Council, and, in addition, be obliged immediately to depart out of this government with such persons."

17 March, 1664, they ordained that the schoolmasters shall appear in church with their scholars, on Wednesday before divine service, and be examined after service by the minister and elders, "as to what they have committed to memory of the Christian Commandments and Catechism, and what progress they have made."

On 1 October, 1673, 8 November, 1673, and 15 January, 1674, they passed ordinances that the sheriff and magistrates, or the schout and magistrates, each in his quality, take care that the reformed Christian religion be maintained in conformity to the Synod of Dordrecht, (or Synod of Dort,) without suffering or permitting any other sects attempting any thing contrary thereto, or suffering any attempt to be made against it by any other sectaries.

On 12 November, 1661, they passed a law imposing "a land tax at Esopus to defray the expense of building a Minister's House there."

On 13 February, 1657, the court of Breuckelen (Brooklyn) imposed an assessment on that town to pay "the Rev. Minister De J. Theodorus Polhemius fl 300," as a supplement of his promised salary and yearly allowance.

A few more instances of the manner in which our staid and quiet Dutch progenitors managed their affairs will suffice for this paper, already long enough.

The Ferry.—In an ordinance regulating the ferry at the Manhattans, passed 1 July, 1654, it was among other things enacted:

"Item. The Lessee shall be bound to accommodate the passengers on summer days only from 5 O'clock in the morning till 8 O'clock in the evening, provided the windmill [Footnote 167] hath not taken in its sail.

[Footnote 167: The windmill here spoken of stood on the old Battery, and seemed to serve as a barometer or indicator of bad weather to all the people.]

"Item. The Lessee shall receive ordinary Ferriage during the Winter from 7 O'clock in the morning to 5 O'clock in the evening; but he shall not be bound, except he please, to convey any one over in a tempest, or when the windmill hath lowered its sail in consequence of storm or otherwise."

Wages.—In 1653, the director and council of New Netherland passed an ordinance fixing the rate of wages to be paid to carpenters, masons, etc. But the directors at Amsterdam disapproved of it "as impracticable."

Fast Driving.—Here, now, is a law which would illy enough suit our times, and which shows us how queer were the times when such a regulation could exist.

Of the Director and Council of New Netherland regulating the driving of Wagons, Carts, etc., in New Amsterdam.—Passed 27 June, 1652.

"The Director-General and Council of New Netherland, in order to prevent accidents, do hereby Ordain that no Wagons, Carts or Sleighs shall be run, rode or driven at a gallop within this city of New Amsterdam; that the drivers and conductors of all Wagons, Carts and Sleighs within this city shall not sit or stand on them, but now henceforth within this City (the Broad Highway alone excepted) shall walk by the Wagons, Carts or Sleighs, and so take and lead the horses."

Danger from Fires.—They passed quite a number of ordinances on this subject.

In January, 1648, they recite that the people do not keep their chimneys clean, whereby "greater damage is to be expected in future from fire, the rather as the houses here in New Amsterdam are, for the most part, built of wood, and thatched with reed, beside which the chimneys of some of the houses are of wood, which is most dangerous;" and they forbid any more wooden chimneys, but those already built may remain.

They appoint as fire wardens to see that the chimneys are kept clean, "from the Hon. Council, Commissary Adriaen D'Keyser; from the commonalty, Thomas Hall, Marten Crigier and George Wolsey."

On 28 September, 1648, they direct the fire wardens to visit every house, "and see that every one is keeping his chimney properly clean by sweeping."

And finally, on 15 December, 1657, they passed a law which complains, as usual, of the non-observance of former laws, and recites that "divers calamities and accidents have been caused, and are still to be apprehended, from fire; yea, a total ruin of this city, inasmuch as it daily begins to be compactly built," etc.;

And enact that "all thatched roofs and wooden chimneys, Hay ricks and hay stacks within this city shall be broken up, and removed within the time of four consecutive months," "to be promptly put in execution for every house, whether small or large, Hay rick, or hay stack, or wooden chimney, hen houses, or hog pens," etc.;

And then, after reciting that "whereas, in all well ordered Cities and Towns it is customary that Fire Buckets, Ladders, and Hooks be found provided about the corner the streets and in public houses," they authorize the burgomaster, "to send by the first opportunity to Fatherland for one hundred to 150 Leather Fire Buckets," etc.

Marriages.—On 15 January, 1658, after reciting that "the Director General and Council not only are informed, but have even seen and remarked that some persons, after the proclamation and publication for the third time of their bans, or intention of marriage, do not proceed further with the solemnization of their marriage, as they ought, but postpone it from time to time, not only weeks, but some months, which is directly contrary to, and in contravention of, the good order and custom of our Fatherland:"

They enact that marriage must be solemnized within one month after the last publication, or appear in council and show cause:

And that "no man and woman shall be at liberty to keep house as married persons before and until they are lawfully married, on pain of forfeiting one hundred guilders, more or less, as their quality shall be found to warrant, and all such persons may be amerced anew therefor every month by the officer, according to the order and the custom of our Fatherland."

The Charms Of Nativity.

In this day, when a spirit of restlessness seems to have seized upon the various peoples of the world, and operates to produce great movements from one locality to another, or from one country to another, we propose to devote some pages to the discussion of this interesting subject. The world may be said to be grossly material; for surely no land of flowering beauty, however rich in the wealth of nature's charms, can, to a sentimental and spiritual soul, be at all comparable to those heavenly flowers of love which bloom in the vicinage in which we were reared. In leaving a cold and bleak country even, we may go to one where nature has stamped her own warmth, as she is sure to do, on the hearts of her inhabitants; but those scenes to which we were earliest used are, by far, dearer to the sensitive soul, than others which, in distant lands, crop out more gorgeously; and the playmates, the associates of our hearts, our early lives, even though it may be in the very chill and frost of barren rocks and dreary plains, are far dearer to us than the welcome of strangers, let it be as warm and as sunny as genial and glowing hearts can make it. The stranger, with soul, in a strange land, has fully felt the truth of these remarks. These are considerations which should operate powerfully with us to bind us to our homes and our own communities. But the benefits of staying at home, or of enlarging the area of "civilization" and of settlement but slowly, are not confined, by any means, to our feelings. To prevent the loneliness which we naturally feel in a strange country is not the only object to be gained by migrating, when we migrate at all, slowly, and but little at a time, (say a few miles only,) and by making our habitations as permanent as possible. There are, perhaps, weightier considerations, even, which should govern in the matter than the loneliness and the estrangement which we must suffer for years, when we make distant removals.

Home is, in its full meaning, a most heavenly word. It is a word that is allied with every principle of our natures. It is the nursery in which our spirits are trained. It is the seat of our religion and the abode of our loves. There can be to us but one home, that is, in the full sense of the term. {661} And that home is a locality, a place, where, with the kindred ideas, elements, and social and spiritual partnerships of our earlier lives and beings, we can enjoy life pure and perfect as we at first received it. Any local or social estrangements from these pure elements of life, no matter how complete the surrounding appointments of comfort may seem to be which draw us away from them, do not constitute and make up the bulk of what, properly, is to the human spirit to be considered home.

The loss of home, then, by removal to a distance from those earlier scenes, localities, peoples, ideas, and customs of which we are a part, is a far greater loss to us, considered in the aggregate, than is at first apparent by any mere feelings of loneliness or estrangement which we may suffer in a strange community. Because, while these feelings undoubtedly indicate to us the part of our lives with which we have parted in leaving those scenes and associations of which we were a part, they do not always reflect back to us the painful vacuum which is created at home by our absence; and therefore, our feelings are not always an accurate measurement of the full injury done by the detaching of human elements from their proper places, to be thereafter located in strange and distant lands. And it may properly be said that the suffering of these feelings by those who have removed is not the greatest injury done by such removals. For, while feelings represent some of the injury done to us by such removals, they certainly do not represent all of it. The strongest powers of a man, naturally considered, are in the locality or in the society in which he was raised. He may, in distant communities, where social life is just taking root, or where, indeed, it has already taken root, be, to outward appearances, a more prominent person than at home, where he was raised. He may be called into public life oftener, and be made to assume offices of trust which at home he never would have assumed, and, perhaps, never could have assumed. But, after all, he is really not so important a personage in his new locality, and in his new offices, as he would have been at home in his natural offices. This statement may appear, to some minds, paradoxical. But it really is not so, examined by the light and the law of uses and of natural adaptations. We shall not go into any extended discussion, however, of this particular question, but we shall assume, at the outset, that the circle of "civilization" or of settlement, should be but slowly and gradually enlarged. There are a great many strong reasons for this plea of widening and enlarging the circle of "civilization" or of settlement. The same reasons which operate to show that no single individual can be as useful (in the scale of nature) in a community distant and remote from his birthplace, as he could in serving out his natural uses in his birthplace, will operate equally to show that such distant removals are not healthy for whole communities of people. Our border States, some of which are very far out from the centres of settlement, have been peopled by persons leaving the older and denser communities where they were born and raised, and repairing to these new "settlements." The effect of it has been, in many instances, to change the wheel of individual fortune, and to place some in high positions who, in their native communities, would never have reached those positions. But we shall argue that this result has not always been beneficial to the parties so elevated. {662} The natural growth of communities, that is, the growth by enlarging the circle of settlement but slowly and connectedly, is sustained by every healthy law of economy. Even in the gross matter of material wealth, the bulk of the people are better off in an old than in a new community. We venture the assertion that this remark will hold good even as between the outer border States of the West, and the inhabitants of those countries from whose populations these States have, in a large measure, been settled. But it will especially hold true as between the people of those outer border States and the people of a corresponding class of our older States.

But what is the moral exhibit? What do the facts here prove? They prove, incontestably, that the standard of law, of morals, of religion, and of society, in all the vast multitude of its meaning, is, in the "new settlements," incomparably below what it is in the old communities. These are grave proofs, and of importance enough, in our judgment, to settle a national policy against the building up of new communities at great distances from the old ones.

If it were physically possible to detach one half of the territory of an old state, and to send the detached portion, with its entire population, to some distant and remote country, and there locate it, even this huge mass of matter and of peoples would greatly suffer by the shock of the new situation. The earth has its affinities as well as people have theirs, and no considerable portion of the earth (that is, if such a thing were possible at all) could be detached from its proper place, where all of its connections are natural and healthy, and could be transported to another portion of the globe where the materials and the fashions of nature are not exactly of the same kind, without suffering by the change. How much more, then, will human beings, who are more subject to influences, suffer by a corresponding change? The laws of affinity and of sympathy must be preserved in the commonest things even; and if such a change as we have spoken of were possible in any considerable portion of the earth's surface, the peoples carried along with the detached portion would, for a time, have the same laws, the same customs, the same religions—would see the same scenery, and would, to some extent, breathe the same air to which they had all along been accustomed; but, in the course of time, they would find themselves laboring and struggling in full sympathy with the earth so detached for sympathy with the new objects and new external surroundings of the new situation, until a perceptible change would take place in their feelings, and in the very ardor of their religious worships.

We have put the case in this strong form to show what will be done by change. Change in one thing necessarily involves change in another thing. We cannot change our habitations and our abodes, without also changing all in us which is peculiar to locality and the law of locality; and in this alone there is a large volume of life. That society is always the best which holds the closest together, and in which the work of adaptation and assimilation has been carried on the longest between its members. The superior frame of English society, which is the growth of an old community, and the sturdy world of the English people, will demonstrate this. There is a certain morality in locality, too, and the morality developed by a particular locality is always the healthiest for its people. We do not, however, mean to say that the morality of locality is sui generis—that it is something which is peculiar to particular localities independent of the people of those localities. {663} This is an absurdity which we will not utter. But we merely mean to say that the morality of localities, or of the people of particular localities, is influenced, more or less, by the surrounding circumstances of locality. This remark will be strongly verified in the different social habits and moral sentiments of people whose occupation, from natural causes, differs; circumstances, for instance, of different situation, such as make some people nautical and seafaring, while others are agricultural and domestic. It is in this wise that locality may be said to have its morality, and that the peculiar phases of morality developed by the natural and unavoidable circumstances of situation are the best for the people of that locality. This is a proposition which we imagine no one will dispute. But there are very often carried into a particular locality certain phases of morality, or rather the want of it, which have no connection with the locality, and with which the genius of the locality has nothing to do. These are positive conditions of vice and immorality which may be engendered in any community.

Sensibilities are the most delicate and refined things conceivable. They are the result of the most delicate nurture of the feelings, the associations, and the relationships of life. The peculiar modes of association of a people—the peculiar frame and structure of their domestic relationships—has a great deal to do with the type and kind of their sensibilities. In a new country, where everything is rough, the sensibilities cannot be as nice and as refined as in an older community where they are nursed. Sensibilities, then, depend for their flexibility, and for the grain of their qualities, on the fineness—on the niceness—of the social food on which they have been fed. This is constantly being illustrated to us in the treatment of animals, even, which certainly have sensibilities of a certain kind.

Where the finer threads of society, then, are preserved, and where there are close-knit sympathies between the people, without too much of the rough work of a rough country to harden them and to dry up the fountains of the sensibilities, we may always there expect to find the flowers of love blooming in the greatest abundance. New countries, then, are not as favorable to the development of these feelings as older ones are, and the moral havoc in such countries is, usually, very great. But, apart from the rough circumstances of a new country, which have upon the feelings a hardening effect, the mental sensibilities are greatly influenced by scenery, and by the natural effect of air, temperature, etc. These refined elements are just as much a part of the mental food on which we feed as anything else is. All our ideas of comfort, of beauty, and of healthiness do not come from artificial surroundings and from the frame-work of society which we may have constructed. Mental emotions are excited in us by scenery; and that of the particular kind to which we have been used, though in reality it may, to some extent, be barren and bleak, is to us the most charming. The appearance of things in nature is indissolubly associated with our earlier lives, memories, incidents, occurrences, and sentiments; and so we, in the very nature of things, must love this earlier record better than any subsequent one which we may make. It necessarily follows that we love those peculiar features in nature the best which are the closest associated with our earlier experiences of life. {664} The analyzing spirit will detect, at a slight glance, even the minute and particular differences between the outward features of different localities. The eye of the student of nature will at once perceive the smallest shades of difference in the leaves of trees of the same class in different localities. To the sensitive mind the rain, even, of different localities will have a different spirit, and its falling will make a different impression upon the mind. We are a wonderfully constructed battery, and the effect of these manifold things in nature upon the organism cannot be estimated, or correctly judged of, by any but those who, by living in new and strange countries, have had full experience of it. The chemistry of the soul is more marvellous than that of flesh and matter, and the effect of scenery, of air, of the spirit of the air, and of all the vast and grand combinations of matter on the brain, and on the life principles of man, cannot be judged of until, to him, some foreign country has written its strange history on his organism, and he discovers that, though in reality he is the same individual, still he does not see nature through the same eyes through which he was wont to see it, and does not feel its refreshing spirit as he was wont to feel it. These are some of the sad mental impressions made by great changes from one distant locality to another. Could anything be more hurtful or injurious to the human spirit? Could anything be more obliterative of morality, than not to respect and act out, every day of our lives, its sacred lessons in close connection with those old school associations with which we linked life the fondest, and through which we enjoyed it the dearest? The early dawn as it came to us shaded by the hills and the forests common to the localities in which we were born and reared; our parting with the great companion of the day, influenced by the same surroundings; the familiar notes of the night-birds common to our localities; the peculiarities of the very gusts of wind there; the peculiar haze of the atmosphere; the methods in which the very trees droop their branches; these, these are all familiar scenes and things to us all, and are, we may say, the school-house associates of our earlier lives, when our spirits were first learning the great lessons of life—those lessons under which life in us was organized and under which it has spread its richest and its grandest panorama. Change these localities and these scenes, and we feel as though we had parted with dear friends whose association is necessary to our lives, and for years afterward, they form, in our minds, an ever present picture of their appearance. These familiar scenes are the old oaken trees, so to speak, under whose umbrageous bowers we learned our first lessons of virtue and of life; and we cannot give them up, and part from them, without also surrendering some of the sacred lessons which, in their midst and in their hallowed shadow, we learned. But, throughout, the parting with home, and going into new localities, makes a new era in our lives. The village boy, who is the object of charity, and who has no ties to bind him but those of the guardian public, feels it. He even feels, when he parts with the dear scenes of his nativity, almost as though he had taken leave of the very God, whom he had been taught to worship, and that he lay launched out upon a great wide ocean of uncertainties, there to hunt for another God, and other friends. How must it, then, be with those who are a part of the household and the inheritance of human affections? Mother, father, brothers and sisters are gathered for the sad parting. {665} Tears of deep grief fall thick and fast. There is, indeed, occasion for them. The heir of the possession, or the mate of fraternal friendship and love, is about to become a stranger. He is about to seek a home! (ah! sad word, in this connection,) it may be in the midst of olive-groves and of vineyards—away from the home of his inheritance, and the family are summoned to bemoan their loss. Years are to pass between him and them before they meet again, and when they do meet they are to each other strangers. This is indeed a sad picture. Can the growth and the building up of "a new country" compensate for it? I say not. I say that the planting of empire even, in the name and under the titles of the home government, it may be in some grandly tropical country, will not repay for these losses and for these sacrifices. Political grandeur is not the only object to be attained in this world. In fact, it is but an epitome of the grand and the beautiful objects of life. The comforts of home, and its solid connections, are worth more to us than all the offices in the world could be without them. And how few are there who nowadays appreciate and enjoy the comforts of home, even in their own natural communities, who are weighed down with the shackles and the plunder of office? How much more deplorable, then, the fate of the poor office-holder at a distance from his natural home, and those associates of his early life, found nowhere outside of home, which make life agreeable, and give to it its charms and its zest? His fate must indeed be pitiable and deplorable in the extreme. It is only, then, viewed generally, in the interests "of the public," (a most false "public interest,") that we heretofore have been enabled to find so much heroism in the spirit of venture and of distant emigration that the almost entire press of the country have lauded it, and have praised it "as a spirit of public enterprise;" which praise has done much toward exciting in the people of the world that restlessness and feverish spirit of excitement, which has led so many men and families to leave their natural attachments, and to seek location either in foreign and distant countries, or in States, at least, remote from those in which they were reared. These removals have always, when viewed in a moral and social light, been more productive of harm to the parties concerned than of good. Avoid them, in the future, would be our earnest advice to all good people. The best and greatest men of the world have invariably staid at home.

But are not the boundaries of civilization to be extended, may be asked? Most assuredly they are; but only slowly and by degrees, like waves as they spread and enlarge from a centre of disturbed waters. This is, undoubtedly, the true method of enlarging the area of settlement and of "civilization."

The parties immediately concerned are not alone the parties injured by distant removals. They affect, more or less, the world at large. The bad morals, engendered by innumerable people leaving their homes, where the sediments of society have settled to the bottom, and repairing to new and remote localities where there is no strongly constructed web of society, are not confined alone to the localities where the social connections are loose; but they spread like some terrible plague, and seize upon the minds of people of the denser and older communities. {666} A reciprocal interchange in morals is finally established between these remote and unlike communities, until the tone of the one is measurably improved, while that of the other is gradually reduced, and made worse by the interchange than it was before. These are some of the damaging effects of "new settlements," at a distance from the older ones. The law perfected is to be found only in the close and tight connections of society, with all of the social interests well defined, and with social rights so clear that one person will not interfere with those of another. This degree of social security and comfort is the perfection of the law; and no civilized government has any interest in upholding a system of "settlement" and of colonization which impairs the strength of the social structure.

Society has been built under the guardianship of the church, and any system either of "settlement," or of politics, which threatens the integrity of society, is against the interests of government, and equally against the interests of the Christian religion. Government is the secular means which we employ to enforce those wholesome moral inspirations of the church which have constructed society on sure foundations. Anything which attacks this wholesome system is at war with the Christian religion, and, consequently, against the higher civilization of the age. The sacred affinities and congenialities of home should not be disturbed, and society debauched, by a mania amongst the people for separations and removals. "Those whom God hath joined together let no man put asunder," applies also to the firm welding together of those whose lots he has made similar by nature, as it does to that holy matrimonial alliance by which a man takes to himself a consort and a mate, and by which a woman takes to herself a husband. That government is not truly and reliably built on the foundations of the Christian religion which disregards any of these sound maxims of social life, and which makes provision for scattering those members of society who are the most natural to each other, and which holds out to them the very strongest inducements to scatter and to form new associations. Such is certainly not a healthy law of society, and is in direct contravention of the great natural order. We must pay attention, in this as in all other things, to the associations made by nature. It is a monstrosity to suppose that there is not power enough in nature to adapt those to each other who were born together. It is a faith in this sort of power which associates people together in family groups, and which upholds the vast system of paternal and fraternal relations established throughout the world. If it were not for the belief in the perfect natural adaptation to each other of persons born of the same parents, we would not have so strong a system for rearing them together, and for imposing upon those who are responsible for their being so large a duty to keep them together whilst taking care of them. Nature, it is true, would suggest this duty, but society has strengthened it. It is the perfect fitness, naturalness, and adaptation of beings for each other, who were born together, which makes the family system strong, and which imposes upon parents the moral duty of keeping their offspring together while they take care of them; by which means the beautiful and sacred relations of brother and sister are established in something more than in the mere name. But we will not discuss a proposition which is so plain. It is not necessary for us to do it. The main feature which, in this connection, it is the most necessary for us to notice, is the necessity for some system by which violent separations between members of the same community and family may be avoided, and by which society may be strengthened in its foundations. {667} For, if these separations tend, as they most assuredly do, to the weakening of the family ties, it is necessary for us to take some strong measures in order to bind families more closely together; or else, the whole system of society, through these very means of neglect, will ultimately be disorganized, and will go to pieces. Indeed, we are rather verging on such a condition in this country now. We have what we call homes, it is true; but we now have really very little of the true family system. Nearly one half of the time of the younger members of the family—if not more—is not now spent, in the great majority of cases, under the paternal roof; and there is now in American society a perfect mania for being anywhere else except at home, and there may be said to be no family law. This is certainly a most deplorable state of things, and if pushed to further extremes, will ultimately disorganize society altogether. Whenever that may be done, government will then be impossible. So it behooves the public men of this country to look about for some remedy for this most distressing evil. Where can it be found? is the important inquiry of to-day. Our opinion is, that emigration, the restless spirit of movement, which our system of legislation has developed, is the fruitful source of the evil, and consequently, to correct it, we must change our migratory habits and policy. We have organized too many "territories," and have encouraged the building of too many railroads in far distant and remote regions from the centres of settlement, thereby causing our people to emigrate and to move about from one place to another. We have not sufficiently encouraged stability in the people. We have pursued a course of legislation which has made them restless, speculative, and venturesome. In this way we have not developed the real wealth which we might have developed had our people staid at home, and preserved their even, temperate avocations. But the material injury done by this system of removals has not been the principal evil of it by any means. Society has been unhinged by it. The strong attachments of home have been violently rent asunder, and by that means, our people have been compelled to look for their amusements, their enjoyments, and their entertainments, more in public than in private. This has had upon their dispositions, their habits, and their morals a most unbalancing effect, until now very little indeed is held by them to be any longer secured. These are the gigantic evils of the day with which we now have to battle, and the important question of the hour is, How are they to be met?

The question is much more easily asked than answered. A huge evil is upon us, however, and we must devise ways of ridding ourselves of it. Indeed, we do but develop the strength of the human, by devising means for the overthrow—the complete overthrow—of all of our evil conditions. No condition, then, however bad, may be supposed to be too gigantic for our efforts. Let us but keep steadily in view the great and important aims of life, and we certainly can make all else succumb to them. In working out the great problem of life, we must expect often to have to go back, and work it over again. We must often undo much of the work which we may suppose ourselves to have done, and must do it over again, in order to avoid errors and to correct mistakes. {668} It may be a hard task for us to perform; but nevertheless, we must do it. We know that there is a common error that in national affairs God is at the helm, and that we cannot steer wrong; that everything that has been done in the national "destiny" has been rightly done, and that God is certainly with us there in every step that we may take. This is certainly a most fatal error. God is no more with us in our national course than he is in our individual business, and in this we very often find it necessary to retrace our steps, and to correct errors. If we were to accept every individual misfortune, and every individual piece of bad management, as the direct work of God, and should make no effort to correct it, our private fortunes would be in a most deplorable condition. Without, then, being irreverent, we must recognize God in ourselves, in our national as well as in our individual matters, and must understand that good results are invariably the offspring of good motives and of good efforts, and that bad results are invariably the offspring of bad motives and bad efforts. We must understand this, and we must make results the guide and the criterion of divine will and divine favor. If results are good, we must suppose that God favors them; if they are bad, we must suppose that he disapproves them; and, as we honor him, we must set about correcting them. This, in my judgment, is the true criterion by which to judge of the divine will and the divine favor. Under this rule, then, we are at liberty, and we are expected to scrutinize every act of national conduct, and to see whether or not it is full of the seeds of good results; and if we find that it is not, then, at whatever cost to us the thing may have been done, to expunge it, and correct the error. This is sound national wisdom, as it would be sound individual wisdom. We have, then, already, too many railroads extending into far, remote regions of our country, distant from the centres of settlement, inviting our people to leave their homes and their families, and to emigrate in quest of fortune and of new honors. These invitations by our government are like so many snares set by the tempter to tempt us into sin and wickedness. I would say that all of the sacred interests of society would dictate to us the policy of abandoning the building of these roads, and equally to abandon the policy of organizing "new territories," to thereby tempt our people to hunt for new fields of "settlement." Let us make that strong which we already have. Let us refine and civilize as we go, and let us make but slow haste in extending the boundaries of our "settlements." This would seem, to our mind, to be the suggestion of wisdom. We must not conclude, either, that because money has been spent, and labor has been performed, that therefore we may not abandon altogether huge enterprises of "settlement" which have already been begun, and that our people now in remote "settlements" may not, in a great measure, return to their former homes. Such a course, undertaken on a large scale, might be productive of the best results, and perhaps, in the course of time, would be. But we must not anticipate too much. We must reach this proposition by degrees. We must, in a matter so grave as this, be, as in the process of settlement, slow. We must not proceed with it too fast.

The degrees of civilization are remote from each other. Indeed, government would be of but little use if it were not productive of the best results, where it is applied in the best spirit and under the soundest administration. {669} We cannot, from the very nature of the circumstances, expect these results for it in distant and remote regions from the centres of settlement, where the population is sparse, and where, on account of the formidable difficulties of a new country and new fields of labor, there is but little time on the part of the people to devote to social improvements. These are difficulties, certainly, to be considered, in estimating the scale of civilization of a people. We naturally look for a much healthier tone in an old community than we do in a new one. In an old community there is a much larger surface from which to choose an occupation, and the various interests of society are much better connected than they are in the new communities. These are important things to be considered by the adventurer after a home—if so paradoxical a thing is to be allowed as that a home may be found by adventure! In fact, the thing is impossible. Adventure can never make a home. A home is the product of continuing possession, and of careful culture. It is not necessarily a particular house, or a particular piece of land, which has been in the same hands for generations, which makes a home. But it is a continuous abiding of the same family and its members for several generations in the same neighborhood, the same locality, which makes, in the fullest sense, a home. They are then a part—incorporated as such by nature—of the community and of the locality in which they may chance to dwell. It is this, more than the continuous possession of a particular house or a particular piece of ground, which makes home. The woods, the streams, the outer walls of nature to which people have been accustomed, must have been the same, or similar and kindred ones, for at least several generations, in order to make for them a home. Where this has been the case, there nature is fully incorporated in those beings. There is not, then, in their own peculiar locality, a leaf, or a tree, or a flower, or a bird, that is not fully understood, and interiorly possessed by them. Through the manifold processes of nature, they, in this time, have made acquaintance with things in nature, and have become a much stronger part of the creation. Any traveller will tell us that, when he first begins to wander, things in nature at a distance from home appear strange to him, and that he never does become as well acquainted with them as he is with those corresponding things which he has left behind, that have been not only his, but also the familiar associates of his parents before him. This, we will venture to say, will be the testimony of all travellers. There is, in this testimony, a great lesson to be learned by us. It is the lesson that, if we want to be a part—absolutely a part—of creation, so as to have immediately under our control, at all times, a commanding sense and consciousness of our power in nature, and over it, as a part of it, we must stay where our organisms command the elements the best, and where, by long residence, they have become the strong masters of things in nature. This is certainly no new philosophy. If it has not been fully heretofore eliminated as a philosophy, in this form, it certainly has in other forms, just as substantial and far more practical. What are our feelings connected with our return to the earth but a confirmation of this doctrine? Every man who has a soul in him loves his own native soil; and when the solemn hour of dissolution approaches, he feels, as one of the last of his earthly hopes, that he would like to be gathered to the graves of his fathers, in the land of his and of their wanderings. {670} This is an event which is capable of testing the matter, and of proving the attractions which our earliest homes have for our spirits. When all nature is dissolving in us, we naturally look for support to those localities where life was organized in us, and which have fortified us the strongest with those forces on which we must rely the most to ward off dissolution. Thus our minds and our affections are naturally carried back to the land of our birth, in a way to make us love it above all other spots of earth, and in a way to cause us to desire it as our last resting-place. If these last trials do not show to the human spirit—drawing upon all of its resources for support—where its chief strength in nature lies, whether in the new home, or the old one, then perhaps our theory that we lose many of the essential elements of life by migrating, and by going to a great distance from the home of our nativity, may not, indeed, be a sound one. But we must take the case of the normal spirit to prove it. The moods of the spirit that has been debauched and made common; that has lost the love of its sanctuaries by dishonorable and aimless wanderings, are not a fair test of our philosophy. We must take some spirit who has gone into a distant land seeking fortune, with the love of home in his heart, and with the responsibilities of family upon him; and let the trial of dissolution come upon him, even after years of absence, and see if his last thoughts are not directed to the home of his childhood, and if the last appeals which he makes in his mind to nature to save him are not addressed to the genius, the localities, the scenes, the cherished associations, of his earlier home. This must be so. It is unavoidable. The cool stream from which we drank in our boyhood thirst often has power, when vividly called to mind, to abate the rage of some terrible fever; and the maternal hand, as we see it in imagination laid upon us, long years, even, after that hand has been stilled, has power to soothe us. Thus fancy makes medicine from the past, and the chosen spots of the spirit's earlier wanderings are the places to which she goes for her healing arts.

The maternal breast has attractions for us as long as we live. Its sorrows are our sorrows, and it is upon the same principle and by the same laws of correspondence that we love our earlier homes the best, and that they have over our morals a stronger control and a more salutary influence than any other society or community can have. In fact, a removal from our own community and our own home is too often looked upon as a license to do as we please, and is interpreted as a relaxing of the social traces in which we had been bound. It is not worth while, at present, to explore the philosophy of this fact, but it is a fact, and we therefore deal with it accordingly. We know that the white man is the representative of civilization, and that he carries with him a Christian inheritance wherever he goes. We know that in any situation in which he may be placed, he will strive to ally himself with his God. We know that he has fixed the cross of his worship upon many a bleak mountain of this land, and that he has planted the vineyard of peace in the remote regions of the wilderness. We know that he has established government, erected schools, built churches, and planted the seeds of society in far and distant regions from the centres of civilization. We know all this, and yet we know, or believe, that if this same potent mass of human beings, thus scattered and toiling separate and apart from each other, had held together under the strong covenants of a powerful society, and had advanced in a body to occupy and possess the land, holding together at every step, the rainbow of God's favor would have spanned over them in such luminous light that we of this continent would now have been a strong and powerful and united people, in the enjoyment of a civilization and in the possession of a purity of social life neither enjoyed nor possessed by any other people on the earth.

It may be supposed by some that this position assumes too much; but our own opinion is, that it may be brought almost down to a demonstration. Such a social wreck as follows the violent segregation of members of the same family or community, to form in new communities, must be followed by a corresponding civil prostration. But wild and incoherent ideas of government will be entertained, and the strength of the masses in such communities, or in old ones, either, that have been much affected by these separations, may, upon any wild and great excitement, although in reality springing but from trivial causes, be organized to overturn rather than to sustain a government. Without intending in the least to be sectional, or even to verge, in the slightest degree, on the brink of politics, we will venture to say that the history of events in this country within the last few years will sustain this position. Too much liberty—such as is usually enjoyed in new communities free from proper social restraints—confuses the reason. Law, as a centre of action, is the only safeguard of any people; and to be law, it must be firmly planted in constitutions beyond the reach of the passions of the populace. To maintain law as a centre, there must not be too many flying forces connected with it at a distance from those regular and steady communities which have developed it. For, unless the system of law is equally developed, and the structure of society (upon which the law is founded) is equally perfected in every part of a country where the central source of labor is equally controlled by law-givers from every part, we must expect a general deterioration of morals, corresponding to the mixture of good and bad elements which are the active forces of the lawmaking power. Too many "territories," and too many new States at a distance from the older communities, tend, in our judgment, to unsettle the morals of the country, and, through the morals, the laws, and ultimately through the laws, the government itself. We have divided our people into fractions too fast. It would have been better for our own, and for the interests of humanity, if we had held more firmly together in better connected and more contiguous communities. Our people would not then have had the same wild ideas about "law" that many of them have to-day, and the better united interests of the country would have made a more loving and united people.

Unity, in the affairs of men, is certainly a great desideratum. Immense geographical and social divisions between people usually produce a spirit of alienation, and, in many instances, of absolute hostility. Mere navigable streams of water and railroad connections cannot so connect a people at the distance of many hundreds of miles from each other as to make them but one people. The nearest possible approach that can be made to a close social and sympathetic connection between peoples who are separated from each other by so much space, is to bridge the space over by densely packed masses of human beings, and then we establish lines of mental and social sympathy which will make them but one people. This is the only method, aside from the bond of religious unity, by which a close and hearty cooperation can be secured between people even of one blood and living under the same laws. The human bridge connecting together remote parts of a country is the most complete.

The true policy, then, is not to plant colonies or "settlements" at distances from the centres of settlement, and to bridge over, with human beings, the intervening space, by degrees. But on the contrary, for us to advance in a body, closely connected, and to carry, unbroken, our civilization with us as we go. There will then be no spasmodic disturbances of the law. The wild passions of the wild tribes who roam our borders will not then be incorporated (as is now too often the case) by our people, who go in fragmentary bodies to great distances from the solid settlements, and there make their dwellings amidst the rude timbers of nature. There would be, under this plan of settlement, an equipoise and a balance. It would be regular, steady, and not as now fragmentary. The arrangement of the State divisions—as a form of government—would not, in the least, be interfered with. We only propose that, instead of disjointed masses of human beings going off by themselves at great distances from the main settlements, people hold, as they go, more together as a body, and that we encourage wild schemes of emigration less. They have had upon our people, upon our laws, and upon society, a most disastrous and unsettling effect. The policy which we propose does not interfere with commerce or with healthy travel, but is only against the wild spirit of emigration which has seized upon the world, and which moves those not engaged in commerce to seek new homes.

The charms of nativity will be greatly increased by educating the mind to look upon our earlier homes as the theatres in which we are to act our parts in life. It will develop in us a more conformatory spirit in life, and will secure for us the measureless blessings of a compact and united society. A different training and a different practice are the fruitful sources of those wild idiosyncrasies in society which teach us that all men should be to us alike, and that there are no sacred fountains of the affections where the faith of the heart ever beams bright, and where the hallowed altars of love and confidence have established their holiest worship. In a word, the home-training, continuing through a life, and ending, for the most part, where begun, that is, under the genius of the same state laws, and amongst people of a kind, is indispensable to happiness, and to the natural enjoyment of life. It is equally, alas! indispensable to a full understanding of the genius of law and to the development of that conservative spirit in us which will teach us to value the blessings of social life far too much for us ever to interfere in their sacred enjoyment by other people. The man of home, then, as against the emigrant and the wanderer, is a man of peace, a man of law, a man of religion, and a man of society. He does not go with his rifle to destroy, nor with his individual will to make it the law of the surrounding country; but he is content to stay at home, and he accepts the developments of society there as he finds them, and labors conscientiously, when improvement is needed, to improve them; but always within the boundaries of those barriers which Christianity and conscience have set up as the landmarks of his labors. {673} If we would preserve our stability, then, as a people, and make our government and society what they ought to be, we must change our wandering habits, and must cultivate the flowers of home-love as the only sure guarantee of peace and happiness. We must not allow our wandering ambitions to stretch away into other domains; but we must put upon ourselves the bridle of wisdom, and must be content to people our fields at home with the laborers which we now offer to other lands, to other climes, and to other states. This policy will make us truly great.

A Mother's Prayer.

  The regent of a goodly realm,
      A sovereign wise and fair,
  Gazed fondly on her youthful son,
      And breathed her earnest prayer;
  The one wish of her loving heart,
      Her ceaseless, solemn thought,
  Sole boon her love had craved for him,
      The only prize she sought.

  Was it new conquests? blood-bought gems
      To deck his kingly hand?
  Fair realms by cruel triumphs wed
      Unto his rightful land?
  Rich trappings? robes of royal state?
      A fawning courtier throng?
  Or minstrels' ringing lays, to pour
      The flatteries of song?

  Nay, nay, no earthly leaven base,
      No worldly dross could cling
  Unto that pure, maternal prayer
      For France's youthful king.
  'My precious son! more dear than life,
      More prized than aught on earth,
  In all this false and fleeting world
      My only gift of worth!
{674}
  "Oh! loved and treasured as thou art,
      Far rather would I weep
  Above the bier where thou wert laid
      In thy last, dreamless sleep,
  Than live to know this form of thine
      Held, foully shrined within,
  A tarnished gem, a soul defiled,
      By e'en one mortal sin.."

  Well answered was that mother's prayer:
      No foul, polluting taint
  E'er marred the white and shining soul
      Of France's royal saint.
  His pure baptismal robe of grace
      Unstained through life he wore;
  The lily sceptre of the just
      King Louis brightly bore.

  O Christian matron! in thy heart
      This lesson fair enshrine;
  And let the blest, heroic prayer
      Of holy Blanche be thine.
  For what are all the gifts of earth,
      The charms of form and face,
  If the immortal soul hath lost
      Its bright, baptismal grace?

  Ay! what avails the wealth of worlds,
      If, lured by syren vice,
  God's heir hath sold his birthright fair,
      His only "pearl of price"?
  In vain may proud ambition grasp
      Vast realms to tyrants given,
  If from his guilty hand hath passed
      The heritage of heaven.

Two Months In Spain
During The Late Revolution.

We visit the "Museo" to-day—the richest picture-gallery in the world. Ten Raphaels, forty-six Murillos, sixty-two Rubens, sixty-four Velasquez, forty-three Titians, etc. But even Raphael's "Perla," (that holy family called the Pearl,) even his "Spasmo de Silicia," (Christ falling beneath the cross,) even Guido's exquisite Magdalen and Spagnoletto's "Jacob's Dream," even these great pictures sink to nothingness beside Murillo's "Annunciation," his "Adoration of the Shepherds," "Eleazar at the Well," "The Martyrdom of St. Andrew," the "Divine Shepherd," the Infant Saviour giving St. John to drink from a shell, called "Los Niños de la Concha," the "Vision of St. Bernard," and those wonderful "Conceptions" which embody "all that is most sublime and ecstatic in devotion and in the representation of divine love."

The more one sees of Murillo, the more one is convinced that he is the greatest painter of the world. Others may have points of excellence superior to his; but his subjects are so full of piety and tenderness, so fascinating in coloring, and appeal so at once to the heart and the common sense of mankind, that they please at once the learned and the unlearned. The Spaniards say of him that he painted "Con leche y sangre," with milk and blood, so wonderful are his flesh tints.

The "Spasmo de Silicia" is so called from the convent for which it was painted, "St. Maria della Spasima," in Palermo. "The Virgin's Trance on the way to Calvary" is considered by some critics only second to the "Transfiguration."

The "Perla" is so named because Philip IV., beholding it for the first time, exclaimed, "This is the pearl of my pictures." It belonged to the Duke of Mantua, was bought by Charles I., and was sold with his other pictures by the "tasteless puritans and reformers."

Spend another hour in the "Museo," looking at the pictures of the Flemish and Dutch schools—fifty-three Teniers, twenty-two Van Eycks, fifty-four Breughels, twenty-three Snyders, ten Wouvermans, etc. A wonderful gallery, so rich in great masters.

We then go to see the "House of the Congress," which is handsomely decorated. The ministers' bench is here blue, while the others are red.

The library is small but very handsome. From this we go to the interesting artillery museum, and then to see the coach-houses and stables of the palace, begun by Charles III. and finished by Ferdinand VII. One felt more than ever sorry for the poor fugitive queen, at sight of all this majesty. Beautiful Arabian and Andalusian horses and mules, over a hundred carriages of every hue and shape, from the black, cumbrous thing in which poor Jeanne la Folle carried about the coffin of her handsome husband, to the beautiful modern carriage in which the lovely Infanta went so lately to her bridal! All had a personal sort of interest; but most touching of all was the sight of the little carriages and perambulators which bore evidence of having been long used by the royal children.

The state carriages are very grand, many of them gifts from crowned heads: one from the first Napoleon; another from the present emperor to Queen Isabella; and a handsome plain English coach from Queen Victoria to her majesty. But even more than the carriages do the saddles and embroidered housings, the plumes, and harness, and trappings, and liveries, give one an idea of this splendor-loving court, especially those belonging to the days of Charles III. and Philip V. Above all these stood the crowned lion, with his feet on two worlds, significant of the greatness of Spain. And where is she, so lately the mistress of all this grandeur? The people told us that there had been thirteen thousand people dependent upon the queen's privy purse; that she had a school in the palace for all the children of her servants; and that there was no end to her generosity and kindness; and that, had she not been away, the revolution would never have occurred.

And just here we meet a long line of troops, horse, foot, and artillery, who proved to be the men who had fought so bravely for their queen at Alcolea, and at such fearful odds. The men of Novaliches!

And no man cried, "God bless them!" as they passed, weary and dispirited, through the streets; their enemies would not do them honor, and their friends dared not.

When we reached the hotel, General Prim was making a speech to a ragged, dirty mob, who were shouting for "Libertad." He told them it was his saint's day—that they need not work, he would give them money. So, after distributing some coppers, he got into a fine carriage and drove off. While we struggled to get in, one of our party heard some of the poor women exclaim softly, "Our poor queen!" and then the usual piteous exclamation, "Ay Dios mios!" "Ay Dios mios!"

Go this morning to "finish" the pictures in the Museo—if such a thing could be done—but the more one looks, the more one feels it impossible ever to finish with them.

The sculpture-gallery (gallery of Isabella II.) is very handsome, but contains only a few antiques of interest and a beautiful modern statue of St. John of God carrying a sick man out of his burning hospital. Next we go to the gallery of the Belli Arti, where, among other good pictures, are four of Murillo's, and first of these "St. Elizabeth of Hungary washing the Lepers," one of the greatest pictures in the world—by some considered Murillo's very best. It was painted for the "Caritad" of Seville, for which its subject made it peculiarly appropriate. The beautiful saint is the centre of a group of nine persons plainly dressed in black, an apron before her, the crown upon her head, and above and around a soft luminous halo seems to beam from her whole person. Her white hands are washing the head of a ragged boy who leans over the basin, and writhes with pain. A lovely young girl holds a pitcher, another the ointments, and an old woman with spectacles peers between them. In front of the picture, a beggar-man is taking off the dirty bandage from his leg, ready for his turn to be washed. On the other side, a withered old crone, with stick in hand, gazes eagerly on the saint, who speaks with her. A lame beggar on crutches is behind, and in the distance is the palace and a dinner-table upon the terrace, surrounded by beggars, upon whom the queen waits, showing her charity in another form. {677} An artist who was copying the picture made us remark the wonderful variety and harmony in the figure, the tender pity of the saint's expression, the natural and graceful grouping, and the soft light over all. Many critics find the sores too truly painted to be agreeable to look upon; but (as some Protestant traveller says of it) "her saint-like charity ennobles these horrors, on which her woman's eye dares not look; but her royal hand does not refuse to heal, and how gently! The service of love knows no degradation."

In another room are two semicircular pictures, taken also from Seville, (from the church of St. Maria de la Blanca,) representing the legend of the founding of the great church of St. Maria Maggiore in Rome, in the year 360.

The first picture represents the "Dream" of the Roman patrician and his wife, in which he sees the Blessed Virgin in the heavens, pointing out the spot where the church shall be built—upon which spot the snow will fall in August. In the companion picture, the founder and his wife are kneeling before the pope relating the vision, while in the dim distance is seen a procession advancing to the appointed place.

Coming from the Museo, we go to see the palace of the Duke of Medina Coeli, one of the richest nobles of Spain and one of the highest in rank. A regal establishment, with a greater air of comfort than prevails in most palaces. Gardens and picture-galleries, a theatre, suites of magnificent rooms—one in rose-colored satin, with walls hung in gray silk.

Set out for Toledo; pass the palace of "Aranjuez," the St. Cloud of Spain, as la Grandja, built by Philip V., is its Versailles. We mistake our way, and are left on the plains of la Mancha in a miserable "posada," or rather a "venta," (the lower grade of inn,) where we remain all day with nothing visible save one of Don Quixote's windmills, which we are sorely tempted to battle with after the fashion of that redoubtable hero. How truly it has been said of this sterile-looking country, the "old Castile of la Mancha," by a witty traveller—" the country is brown, the man is brown, his jacket, his mantle, his wife, his stew, his mule, his house—all partake of the color of the saffron, which is profusely cultivated, and which enters into the composition of his food as well as his complexion."

At length we are cheered by the arrival of a lovely Spanish woman and her daughter, who are returning from their estate near by, and come, like ourselves, to wait the train for Madrid.

The daughter had been educated in the Sacré Coeur Convent near Madrid. Spoke French well. She told us in her lively way that, though these plains looked so brown and desert-like, they brought good crops and "put money in the pocket," and that back from the roads were fine plantations of olive and vine.

Some Spanish friends come to show us some of the hospitals and other great charities of Madrid, which numbers forty in all. First, to the general hospital, attended by the Sisters of Charity—a city in itself, where are over eighteen hundred sick poor. It covers an immense extent of ground, and, like all Spanish hospitals, has shady courts, and gardens, and corridors running around the courts. All was clean and comfortable, the sisters tenderly feeding the sick children and old people, and reading or praying beside the beds.

From this we go to the most interesting of all, called the "Maison de la Providence," supported by the ladies of rank in Madrid, and under the care of the French Sisters of Charity, who wear the familiar "cornette." Here, besides enfants trouvés and orphans, they have (or had) six hundred poor children, taken out of the streets. Many of these are kept for the day, the parents seeking them at night: all of them are taught gratuitously. We were shown a room in which forty of the smallest (not one over two years) had been put to bed for the noonday sleep, perfect little cherubs, side by side, on the tiniest and whitest of beds, with fringed curtains above them. The sister opened the window-shutters to give us a look at this lovely picture; and the light woke many of them, who sat up rubbing their bright eyes, and looking with wonder at the strangers, but not one cried. In one corner were great basins and towels showing why the faces were so clean and rosy.

The sister then took us to the playground, where hundreds of little things, from the ages of three to six years, were playing; the boys on one side, the girls on the other; the sisters with them. We were invited to remain and see them go into school, that we might see the system of uniting instruction with amusement, which has been so successfully employed by these charitable teachers. At the sound of an instrument, (something like a castanet,) the little things fell into ranks, one behind the other, the hindmost holding on with both hands to the shoulders of the one who preceded him. In this way, and slowly keeping time with their little feet, they marched into the room, marching and countermarching with admirable precision. Three divisions of eight, headed by a "captain," (a well-drilled soldier,) form, and go to their seats; each captain helps to seat his division, and then counts to see if he has the correct number. The children then rise to say the Lord's Prayer, all in concert, slowly and reverently, preceding it with the "sign of the cross," made with, some, such tiny fingers! The sister next proceeds to give a lesson. Great black letters, on wooden blocks, (so large as to be seen by all,) are one by one laid in grooves upon an inclined plane, the children all (together) calling out the letter as it is placed, spelling the word, then reading (or rather, singing) the sentence. If the sister makes a mistake, a dozen little voices correct it. A child of six is next chosen to spell a sentence, and severe were the little critics when he misplaced a letter. Next came a lesson in Scripture history. A book of colored prints was opened here and there, and the stories were told by the children in their own pretty way, of Adam and Eve, David and Absalom, etc. We were presently shown the children old enough to be taught to work, little things of five and six years, knitting or sewing; and then a class making plain sewing; and then the larger orphan girls, working the finest needlework and embroidery.

And this is one of eight such institutions in Madrid! It is kept up by individual charity; and the fear is, that it must be curtailed if not closed on account of the revolution; the ladies who contributed most to it having been forced to leave with the queen's party, or having absented themselves from fear of getting into trouble. These high-born ladies have had also many schools in different parts of the city, where they taught the poor every Sunday, as in our Sunday-schools. The provisional government has stopped all these, on the pretext that they are "incendiary," as they have also that of the "Conferences of St. Vincent de Paul"!

Our Spanish friends tell us of the closing, yesterday, of the "royal school," (founded many centuries ago by one of the kings of Spain, and supported from the privy purse of the reigning king or queen,) for the daughters of the nobility who have met with reverse of fortune, orphans and others of good birth but of no means. Yesterday these poor girls were turned out, homeless, houseless; and as they passed along, the brutal rabble insulted them with cries of, "Come out, you thieves; you have eaten our bread long enough; come out, and let us have place." To-day, we see them tearing down the building. And this is "progress!"

We hear that the carriage of the Duchess Medina Coeli has been assaulted to-day, the crown upon her carriage pelted, the glasses broken, with the cry of "Down with the aristocrats!"—that fatal cry, which (with many other bad things) they borrow from the French, and which was the signal to spill so much "good" blood.

Only three hours' time (by rail) separate Toledo and Madrid, the old and new world of Spain! What a contrast between the two! Toledo towers like an eagle's nest on the steep rock, the "dark, melancholy" Tagus winding below, with walls and Moorish gates and steep crags, with Roman and Gothic and Arabic ruins, with glorious memories of the fierce and warlike Goths, and of its imperial renown under Charles V.; while the modern upstart, Madrid, has nothing of which to boast, save fine houses, and shops, bustle and traffic, noise and dirt, "progress" and revolution!

Toledo is said to have been a Phoenician or Grecian colony, then conquered by the all-absorbing Romans, 146 B.C., and the favorite resort of the Jews who fled from Jerusalem after its fall, and who became here rich and powerful, and exercised an important influence in the history of the country until expelled by Ferdinand and Isabella, in 1492.

In the fifth century, the Goths conquered Spain and founded that splendid and powerful kingdom which, after three hundred years, ended with Roderick in 712, when the Moors, under Taric, overthrew the Goths in the battle of the Guadalete, and overran all Spain. In 1085, it was reconquered by Alonzo V., and Toledo was the seat of the court until removed by Philip II. to Madrid in 1560, and (for a few years) to Valladolid.

Our first duty is to the cathedral, considered by many persons to be the finest building in the world. It was commenced by St. Ferdinand in 1227, on the site of a mosque, which, in turn, had been built upon a church founded in 587 by St. Eugenius, the friend and disciple of St. Denis, who introduced Christianity into Spain. It employed one hundred and forty-nine of the greatest artists of the world two hundred and sixty-six years to complete and render it the masterpiece it now is. The cathedral of Seville is grander, higher, more impressive from its austere simplicity; but this, from its greater lightness, the mingling of the early Gothic with the later and more florid style, from the Moorish carvings on the white stone of which it is built, is more graceful and beautiful; and from the thousand memories of great men and great deeds with which it is associated, its royal tombs and statues, its Muzurabic chapel, its great relics, its grand treasures, is infinitely more interesting.

We arrived in time to hear the high mass—the glorious organs, and fine voices, while the morning sunlight streamed through seven hundred and fifty stained windows and among eighty-eight colossal pillars. Picturesque groups knelt before the different shrines. We chose the chapel of St. Ildefonso, raised upon the spot where, according to the legend, he received the chasuble from the hands of the Blessed Virgin, which Murillo has made the subject of one of his finest pictures.

Near this chapel is the altar at which Ferdinand and Isabella heard mass after the conquest of Granada. The grand retablo of the main altar extends from the altar to the ceiling, and is considered a marvel of exquisite carving, representing the scenes in the passion of our Lord—the work of twenty-five artists, of whom John of Bologna was one.

On either side of this, (in niches,) are the tombs of Sancho the Brave, Alfonso VII., and Sancho the Wise, and, below these, that of the great Cardinal Mendoza. On each side of the altar are screens, of which the carvings in marble are exquisite, as are the seventy stalls of the choir, which are divided by jasper pillars. The two pulpits are of gilt metal resting on marble columns, and are of the finest workmanship. The chapels are exceedingly rich, especially that of Santiago, built by that worthless favorite of John II. of Castile, Don Alvaro de Luna, as the burial-place of his family. Upon his tomb was originally a statue which was contrived so as to rise and kneel at the time of the "elevation" during mass; but Queen Isabella, the wife of John II., (who was the means of bringing him to justice,) had it changed. He lies quietly enough now, with his sword between his legs, while kneeling figures of knights pray at each corner of the tomb.

The chapter-house contains portraits of all the archbishops of Toledo, many pictures, and a superb carved and inlaid ceiling of alerce wood. Here have been held all the important councils of Spain. There is a chapel filled with interesting relics, and the treasures of the church surpass those of all Spain in value. Among these is the cross which Cardinal Mendoza carried in procession at the surrender of Granada, and planted on the walls of the Alhambra; a custodia of gold and silver, weighing twenty-five arobas—about six hundred pounds—nine feet high, and covered with myriads of statuettes and exquisite ornaments. It was given by Queen Isabella, and made from the first gold sent by Columbus from America. There was one vestment covered with eighty-five thousand pearls; another with as great profusion of coral; a crown, and other ornaments of diamonds and other jewels; a missal, given by St. Louis; some silver plate carved by Benvenuto Cellini; and in the vestuario is the grandest display of vestments in the world. Those at St. Peter's are not so fine. Many of these were given by cardinals Mendoza and Ximenes, by Queen Isabella, and other sovereigns; and most of them many centuries old, yet preserving the brightness of the gold and silver work, and the colors of the embroidery. There were the chairs used by these great dignitaries, and the hangings used to adorn the church on the occasion of the thanksgiving for the victory of Lepanto.

But above all this is the interest felt in the "Muzarabic Chapel," built by Cardinal Ximenes, (Cisneros, as they call him in Spanish,) to preserve the ancient liturgy of the Muzarabes, (Muzarabes—mixed Arabs,) who were the Goths who, after the conquest of Spain by the Moors, agreed to live under the Moslem rule, retaining the Christian worship. This is the oldest ritual in Spain, introduced here by the apostles of this country, St. Torquatus and his companions. It was at first, in most respects, similar to the Roman liturgy; but underwent many changes after the conquest of Spain by the Visi-Goths and Vandals, who were Arians, and brought with them to Spain their liturgy, which was Greco-Arian, written in Latin.

This Gothic liturgy was almost exclusively adopted in Spain, after the fourth council of Toledo in 633, when St. Isidore of Seville and other celebrated Spanish bishops of this period, to put a stop to the disorders in the churches, arranged the ritual and obliged all to follow it. Even after the introduction of the Gregorian liturgy, the Spaniards retained their own, and it was universal up to the eighth century, when the Moors conquered Spain. By those Goths who submitted to the Moors, and who were promised freedom of their religion, it was guarded with the utmost vigilance; and even after Spain was conquered by the free Spaniards, (who had meantime adopted the Gregorian rite,) the Muzarabes retained their own Gothic rite, and it was allowed to them in six parishes, just as it had existed during the six hundred years of Moorish domination.

But as the Muzarabic families disappeared or mingled with others, their venerable and ancient liturgy gradually disappeared; and but for cardinals Mendoza and Ximenes, it must have been lost entirely. The first formed the design which Ximenes carried out—gathered up all the manuscripts of their liturgy, had them revised by their own priests, and printed a great number of the missals, and built this chapel in his own cathedral, (called "ad Corpus Christi,") and founded a college of thirteen priests to serve it, confiding to the chapter of the cathedral the protection of this religious foundation. Other bishops followed his example, and in the sixteenth century a chapel was founded in Salamanca, and another in Valladolid; but the one in Toledo seems to be the only one now existing: here the mass is said every day at nine o'clock; but few attend it, and it has become a mere liturgic curiosity.

It commences with a prayer very little different from the Roman liturgy; then the same psalm "Judica me," the introit, the "Gloria in Excelsis," a lesson from the Old Testament, then the gradual and epistle. The prayers of the offertory are almost identical with those of the Roman liturgy; then follow prayers like the Greek and Milanese liturgies; then the preface. But the canon of the mass is different; the trisagion is followed immediately by the consecration, and the credo is said at the "elevation." The host is divided into two parts; the priest then divides one part into five, and the other into four small bits; places them upon the paten, upon which is engraved a cross composed of seven circles, so that seven pieces of the host are placed in the seven circles. He then places (on the right) at the side of the cross upon the paten, the other two parts; each of these nine parts has a name corresponding to a mystery in the life of Christ, and they form, placed upon the paten the following figures,

Incarnation	Passion
Nativity	Death
Circumcision	Resurrection
Epiphany	Ascension

Eternal Kingdom

After this division, follows the "Pater," a prayer for the afflicted, for prisoners, the sick and the dead. The priest then takes a particle of the host corresponding to the words, "Eternal Kingdom," and lets it fall into the chalice, pronouncing the appropriate words; then he blesses the people, and communicates; then the particle of the host corresponding to the word "Ascension," recites a prayer for the dead, says the "Domine, non sum dignus," and communicates with the particle of the host just mentioned, and so successively with all the others; empties the chalice, takes the ablutions, says the post-communion, the "Salva Regina," blesses the people, and leaves the altar.

Over the altar of the Muzarabic chapel is a picture of the taking of Oran, (in Africa,) which Ximenes conquered at his own risk and his own expense, and made a gift of it to the crown of Spain.

Opposite the cathedral is the archbishop's palace, where is a library open to the public, and adjoining this is the "Casa del Ayuntamiento," house of the municipality, built by Del Greco, a Greek who came to Toledo in 1577, where he became famous as painter and architect.

We now travel through the narrow, precipitous streets, visiting curious and beautiful architectural remains of the Gothic and Moorish times, found in public and private buildings, strange projecting door-posts, with cannon-ball ornaments; traverse the "Zocodover," the market square, which is most Moorish looking, with irregular windows and balconies, and is as well the fashionable promenade, and lounging place as place of traffic. Among the many churches, two are especially interesting in arabesque remains—St. Maria de la Blanca and El Transitu, built in 1326, which were once synagogues; the latter was afterward given by Queen Isabella to the order of Calatrava.

Next to the cathedral in interest is the church of St. Juan de los Reyes, (St. John of the Kings,) St. John being the special patron of the kings of Spain. This was built by Ferdinand and Isabella in 1496, in thanksgiving for the victory of Toro, where they defeated the king of Portugal, who had set up a rival to the throne of Castile, in the person of Jeanne Beltranea, the natural daughter of Jeanne of Portugal, wife of Henry II., the elder brother of Isabella. Upon the outside walls of this church hang the chains taken off the Christians found in captivity in Granada. The interior has been much changed; but there still remain the high tribunes used by the royal family, and much of the curious and elaborate carving, whose richness was once past all description. The cloisters of the adjoining convent of Franciscans, now in ruins, were once one of the most splendid specimens of florid Gothic art in the world. The fine pointed arches and delicate arabesque carvings are now half covered by passion-vine and ivy, and the pretty garden is a desert wild. In this convent the great Cardinal Ximenes made his novitiate as a Franciscan monk, from which retirement he was called, by Cardinal Mendoza, to be the confessor of Queen Isabella; and this wonderful woman, who had the discernment to know and choose men who could aid her in her great designs, when Mendoza died, named as successor to the "great cardinal" the poor monk Francis Ximenes, who became at one time bishop of Toledo, primate of Spain, and grand chancellor of Castile; and though, in this position, the first personage of the court, and the greatest grandee of the kingdom, he still retained the simple habits of the Franciscan; and it was necessary to have an order from the pope to induce him to assume the appendages belonging to his rank. {683} Indeed, it is said that under his robes of silk and velvet he wore the "cilice" and the coarse brown habit of his order; and after his death was found the little box with the needles and thread with which the great primate of Spain mended his own garments. He concluded the treaties which made Spain at this time the greatest power of the world; and it is wonderful how this man, already old—for he was sixty when he assumed the primacy—how he could at once attend to the various and multiplied duties of which he is said never to have neglected anything. He lived in the age of great men, of Mendoza, (el gran cardinal,) of Gonzales de Cordova, (el gran capitan,) of Christopher Columbus, and many others, and took part in all the great events of this great age. Immediately upon the invention of printing, he had printed the celebrated polyglot Bible of Alcala, which cost him 500,000 francs of our money, and was in itself enough to immortalize him. He founded universities, built colleges, endowed professorships and scholarships, and built convents and schools for the education of poor children. Raumer, in his History of Europe, says of him, "His sagacity and his activity were equal to his sanctity. Embracing all the branches of administration, nourishing the grandest plans and projects, he neglected for these neither piety nor science. As a warrior, he commanded in 1509 the crusade which made a descent in Africa, and conquered Oran. He founded, upon principles which do honor to his intelligence, the university of Alcala, and directed the printing of the celebrated Bible to which this city gives its name. He is the only man admired by his contemporaries as a politician, a warrior, and a saint at the same time."

From the esplanade in front of the church of St. Juan de los Reyes is a fine view. The great manufactory of the "Toledo blades" lies below upon the wild and melancholy Tagus, which winds through the plain; beyond are the mountains. The bridge of St. Martin spans the Tagus on one side, with its Moorish towers at either end. The tower of Cambron, one of the great Moorish towers, is in front, in which is a lovely statue of St. Leocadia, and near the bridge of St. Martin, on the city side, is the site of the palace of the Gothic kings. Here are some arches of a ruin called "Los Vaños de Florinda"—she who was the daughter of the apostate Don Julian, and with whose unhappy fate is involved that of the last of the Gothic kings.

The Alcazar, which overlooks the whole city, was a Moorish palace, then a fortress, with additions made by Alonzo VI., in 1085. Improved by Don Alvarado de Luna, and then by Charles V. in 1548, and by Philip II.'s great architect, Herara, there only remains the great patio, with its fine columns and the magnificent staircase for which Philip sent directions from England. Burned in the war of the succession, it was repaired by Cardinal Lorenzana, a munificent patron of arts, and whose whole life was devoted to good works, who made it a silk factory for poor girls. The French injured it again in 1809, and it has been a ruin until now, when some repairs seem to be going on by order of the queen.

The esplanade in front commands a fine view. Just below is the military college, formerly the great hospital of Santa Cruz, founded by Cardinal Mendoza. On a height near are the ruins of the castle of Cervantes, not the author Cervantes, but one which belonged to the Knights Templars. We pass through the Puerta del Sol, one of the great Moorish gates, follow the steep and winding way by the remains of an old Roman bridge and fortress, cross the bridge of Alcantara, and so—leave Toledo.

All For The Faith.

There is a mystery, an evangel, in suffering; and this fiery evangel, God's message to our immortality, prepares and perfects the soul for the long hereafter.

In a humble room sat Sir Ralph de Mohun and the Lady Beatrice. The soft sunlight of Provence was fading, and athwart the rose leaves the dying flush rested on this fairest type of girlish loveliness. Absorbed in her rosary, she sat at the open window; while, bending near, Sir Ralph watched the gorgeous heavens, gazing with no thought of the surroundings, and thinking—thinking as we so often do in the hours that fate allows us for decision.

Glimpses of his proud English home stole upon the old man's vision; of the shadowy oak-lined halls and stately corridors where, as a boy, he had looked with childish pride upon portraits of a brave line that had passed their own childhood there; the cross of the old chapel glittered in his dreams, for beneath it the mother of his children slept. But now, homeless and an alien, he would never again see the white cliffs of the land his heart loved best.

The battle of the Boyne had crushed the lingering hopes of the Cavaliers who had forsaken home and kindred to follow the last Stuart king. If James had only possessed average tact, he might have retained the affection of his subjects; but strong-willed without discrimination, zealous without wisdom, his whole reign was a succession of errors which could not but alienate the middle classes, all ways practical and struggling against the encroachments of the aristocracy. Nobly did the Cavaliers rally to the rescue of this last Catholic king, when, forsaken even by those of his blood, he stood alone, held at bay by the same subjects who had sworn him fealty. All through the darkness of his mistaken flight, through the changeful, disastrous campaign, and, so trying to their haughty spirit, even unto the court of Louis, where sneering courtiers dared to greet them with slights and contumely, they neither swerved nor varied. All this had tested their loyalty, tried their faith; yet they neither changed nor forsook him: and of this band none had suffered more than gallant Sir Ralph de Mohun.

A very pleasant life was that of the Catholic gentry in England; they hunted, they were jovial at their meetings, but devout in the chapel; and no class of the English subjects were more orderly and refined. But when the old crown rested on other than the brow of a Stuart, they left the broad moors and sunny downs, and fled with the monarch who represented not only their government, but their faith, in old England.

Stripped of the wealth that had given him comfort, despoiled of all that makes a man's position a blessing, the brave knight steadily, defiantly met an adverse fate. "Noblesse oblige!" spoke in every phase of his stormy life; he would suffer, ay, die, as a gentleman, with no murmur to the world of the sorrow and strife within. But an uncontrolled, unsubdued feeling warred with the iron resolve which supported him, and this was his devotion to the last bairn left him by his fair Scottish wife.

Twenty summers had deepened her girlhood into that rare womanhood, refined through suffering, strengthened by discipline; and the sweet eyes shone with a softer light, a more earnest loveliness, as they gazed from under the long, dark lashes; while the gentle, low voice owned a subdued tone, very different from the lightsome carol that had gladdened bluff Sir Ralph at the gay meet in old Suffolk. But times were different now, and the table was becoming scantier, while the silver grew very low; and the soldier who had rallied the dragoons at the Boyne, had stood unmoved when advancing squadrons of the English, his own blood in the front ranks, swept on to attack him, felt his eyes dim as he watched his frail, last blossom, and knew that soon she would be in a strange land all alone.

The afternoon faded into night, and the scanty fire could not warm the chill and bare chamber in which the old man lay. He was dozing in the great arm-chair, and Beatrice was crouched on a low cushion near, when softly the door opened. Was the young girl dreaming, as with her large eyes larger still, she rose instinctively, rose as though swayed by an unseen spirit, and walked out upon the terrace?

"I have come to offer peace and comfort, my darling, and—dare I whisper the story which you used to listen to, under the elms at home?"

"Sir Philip Stratherne, you forget the past; you will not remember the blood that lies between us."

"My darling! my darling! we have no past save what you gave to me. Life belongs to honor, your own sweet voice has told me, and we are commanded to 'love without dissimulation;' therefore the logic of courts and battle-fields shall claim no power here."

"Philip! Philip!" was all the maiden could find speech to answer, uttered in a tone meant to be reproachful.

Two years of sorrow had passed since the fatal battle of the Boyne, and the heart of the maiden was very sore, very lonely, very hungry for the one love that made her life.

"Come and sing to me, little one; for I have been dreaming sad dreams of the old home." And so she sat on her cushion at his feet, and sang in her soft alto:

  "It was a' for our rightful king,
      We left fair Scotia's strand;
   It was a' for our rightful king,
      We e'er saw Irish land,
         We e'er saw Irish land!

  "The sodger frae the war returns,
      The sailor frae the main;
   But I hae' parted frae my love,
      Never to meet again,
         Never to meet again.

  "When day is done, and night is come,
      And a' things wrapt in sleep;
   I think o' one who's far away,
      The lee lang night, an' weep,
         The lee lang night, an' weep."

"The time was, Sir Philip, when I should have grasped your hand with all the feeling which my love for the boy inspired. Now, you are under the roof of what is left me, and therefore I am silent."

There was a stately courtesy in all this which embarrassed and wounded the young man.

"This, certainly, is not my former welcome; but the times have changed the manners, Sir Ralph, and we must accept the change."

"True, Sir Philip. There is little that I can offer you now; yet methinks there is a seat for you."

"I have not learned diplomacy on battle-fields, Sir Ralph, therefore I will without preamble tell you what is heavy on my heart. First, to be selfishly eager, I have come to ask you for what you promised years ago—your daughter. Sir Ralph de Mohun, you were once young, and blood coursed as fiery then as now. Can you find it in your heart to separate us? Then, secondly, your old friends at court offer entire restitution and pardon, if you will accept the new régime, with England's faith."

"If I have been true to my country, then must I still be true to my God! Philip Stratherne, if I had not loved you from your boyhood, the words that would come to my lips would tell you what my heart wills to speak to all who have proved false! For the rest, my daughter has the Mohun blood, and she knows what her church teaches."

And Beatrice sat silent, crushed as a lily powerless from the storm. She knew her duty, she felt her love. Reason—honor told her that even love could not span the chasm through which the blood of her gallant brothers flowed. They, too, had followed the fortunes of the Stuart king, and one lay dead before the bastions of Londonderry, while another gave up his young life with the war-shout on his fearless lips, in the van of his father's regiment at Newtown-butler.

It was Philip Stratherne who led the detachment of Enniskillen horse that rode down the mere handful of Irish dragoons, inspired by Guy Mohun's ringing cry; and Sir Ralph had listened to Philip Stratherne's voice, as, clear and steady, it rallied the Enniskilleners to the charge that had snatched that last son from him. Not only for the Stuart had he yielded his glorious life, but for the cross, for the faith, in the defence of which centuries had borne brave testimony for the Mohuns, not only in bonnie England, but on every battle-field in Christendom.

A stern self-control subdued the old man; but the girl, the woman was suffering; honor commanded, duty pleaded, but a wilder, stronger, stormier feeling fought within her now. The color crimsoned the fair face, and the sweet eyes turned, rested for one moment on the young man with all the girl's tenderness, all the woman's passion—a mute appeal, a dying cry for help; then with the delicate hands clasped tightly over her breast, as though to keep down the heart's mad struggling, she spoke so low that the words seemed almost inarticulate, yet to the man listening with such painful eagerness each sound knelled the death which knows no "resurgam!" Only the simple words came faltering forth, came sobbing as the wind soughs the prelude to destruction, ere the lightning scathes its fiery death; and so in this whisper he heard,

Then without a word she left them; and when the old man sought her, he found her lying as one dead before her crucifix. Tenderly he raised her, and from his lips sounded the prayer:

"May the Lord receive the sacrifice from thy hands, to the praise and glory of his name, and to the benefit both of us and of his holy church."

No murmur escaped her lips, no regret was ever spoken, but fairer and frailer in her rare loveliness, the old man trembled as he watched her, and he cried in the bitterness of his agony,

It was Holy-week, the most solemn of the Lenten season, and Beatrice Mohun knelt in the old cathedral during the impressive Tenebrae, and as the fourteen candles were extinguished, and the solemn Miserere rose, from the depths of her heart came the prayer:

And the pervading gloom corresponded with her own spirit; her life owned no brightness, and the one tie left her seemed fast wearing away. Trouble had weakened the iron constitution of Sir Ralph; for more exhausting than mere physical pain is the ceaseless care that preys upon the vitals, claiming life as its tribute.

He felt that he could buy back ease and comfort for his darling, and he knew that for him earth held but a very few years; but to obtain all this, he must barter his honor, yield his creed, and the old blood still owned the fierceness of a changeless fidelity. No Mohun had ever swerved, not even in the dark days of the last Tudor, nor after, when his graceless daughter held the sceptre. And now, though bereft of home, with his gallant sons lying far from their kindred, his fair young daughter life-wrecked, his own existence a burden, when even starvation mocked them, the loyal spirit knew no change; but staunchly by the old faith, true to the weak king, the brave knight still fought his adverse destiny.

And Beatrice came back through the darkness, and leaned against the couch on which her father lay.

"Come to me, little one; for I fear that you are not as strong as in the days when wild Bess bore you to the hunt. Have you any regrets for the past, my darling?"

"Duty gives us discipline, papa, and it would not be right to question Providence."

"Bravely spoken, my daughter; you nerve a courage which was growing too human to be strong. But you grieve at the choice which has kept you the slave of an old man's caprice?"

"O papa!" and a low quick sob stopped her; then with more control she quietly said, "You forget that it was not only to be with you, but to remain firm and loyal to holy church; and papa, I often think that earth is only the high road to a better world; therefore I only pray that the end may be very near."

"Little one, bring the light nearer—let me look upon your face; hold it nearer, darling. Ah God! this is the dimness which brings my warning. Quick, daughter mine, send for Father Paolo. Now, O God! my eyes, darkened with the mist of death, fix their last dying looks on thy crucified image. Merciful Jesus, have mercy on me!"

Father Paolo did come, and in the gray dawn of Good-Friday the old knight lay dying.

"Kyrie Eleison!" said the clear voice of the holy father, and, clasping closer the blessed crucifix, the old man's voice was steady as he responded, "Christe eleison!" And alone in her agony the young girl knelt.

A clattering of hoofs sounded in the court-yard, and a quick step, that startled her even then, broke the solemn stillness.

"Domine Jesu Christe, suscipe spiritum meum," in clear, earnest tones rung out the old man's voice; then the door was flung open, and Philip Stratherne entered.

"Not too late, thank God! Hold her not away from me. Say now that you die William's subject, and all your own shall be hers."

The closing eyes opened, the old strength came back to them, and a sweet smile illumed his face, as the words came,

"Maria, mater gratis, mater misericordiae, tu me ab hoste protege, et in hora mortis suscipe!" And with a long low sigh the spirit passed away to God.

With a sob that rent her heart in twain, Beatrice threw herself beside her father.

"My darling, come with me; the last obstacle has passed away, and God has given you as my legacy."

She made no answer. The solemn monotone of the priest alone was heard, "Requiem aeternam dona ei, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat ei."

But to all this the man was deaf; he only saw the prostrate girl, and listened to her sobs of agony.

His strong arms were around her, and the voice that thrilled her soul was sounding in her ears. How could she send him from her? "Ah! God help me!" she cried.

"Et ne nos inducas in tentationem," came in deep, sonorous tones from the priest.

"Et clamor meus ad te veniat!" and Beatrice fainted with these words upon her lips.

"Son, leave her to us," urged the priest, but he would not go till she opened her sweet eyes.

"Daughter!"—and she caught the hand of Father Paolo, as in the desperation of agonized despair. A shadow darkened Philip Stratherne's brow.

"The cursed priest again!" he muttered between his closed teeth. "Tell me when I may see you again, Beatrice, free from these fearful surroundings."

And when the Monday dawned, bright with the carol of birds, he sought her; but the old chateau by the valley was silent, the shutters barred, and the flowers drooping and dead. An aged woman came hobbling to him, who said, with the tears dimming her old eyes, "Ah! the sweet bird has flown, master, and St. Ursula guards her from behind the bars."

"Keep your gold for charity, master; for the truth is strong; and our holy Mother keeps her safe from all evil."

Wild with the horror of losing her, he strode across the valley to the convent near. The angelus was sounding, and over the hills, up the broad river, the holy prayer-call echoed, for the Easter season rejoiced the earth; her jubilate for the blessed link connecting the God-man with humanity.

Blade, and leaf, and blossom gloried in the new life, and the spring sun spread over the natural world the same light with which the resurrection gladdened the soul; but to all this was the young man blind and deaf and dumb—for surging and beating within his heart was the stormy, o'er-mastering human feeling. He only knew that the woman to whom he bent the knee in this mad, idolatrous love was lost to him, he only felt that fate had snatched her from him for ever! The sister started, as his deathly face presented itself. With scarcely human utterance, he asked for the Lady Beatrice, and after a few moments, the messenger returned, and a folded paper was put in his hand. He read:

  "The Lord keepeth thee from all evil:
   may the Lord keep thy soul!"

And she, with her intenser passion, clinging steadily, loving unselfishly, as only a woman can, gave him up; yielded her costly tribute to the faith which taught her that loyalty to God demands, if need be, all that life and love can give. Then, faint and weary, bruised and suffering, yet staunch and true to her faith as she was, the holy church opened its arms to her, comforting the broken spirit, healing the bleeding heart, and blessing her with the precious benediction that brings its calm to those who seek the life that dieth not. In deeds of unselfish love and sacrifice, she passed her days; all the strength within her clinging to the cross, all the human passion purified, glorified into the worship of the Lamb whose blood had made her whiter than snow. And safe in her haven, the dove of peace rested upon her heart; for the "fellowship of the Holy Ghost" had sanctified her: and thus, when her summers were yet in their flush, she passed away to God.

But he forgot her in the years that came after, and found happiness in the fair English Protestant, whose children heired the broad lands of the brave Mohuns. Verily man's love is fleeting, but in God is eternal life; and while we pay our tribute to one who was so strong in resisting, we pray that all who are thus tempted may likewise prove ready to yield all for the faith.

The Struggle Between Letter And Spirit In The Jewish Church.

Conference Preached In The Cathedral Of Notre Dame,
In Paris, By R. Pere Hyacinthe, January 3, 1869.

Littera occidit, spiritus autem vivificat.
"The letter killeth; but the spirit giveth life."

[It is due to R. P. Hyacinthe to say that the following translation is made from a short-hand report, published in the Semaine Religieuse de Paris. In style, in development of ideas, the compte rendu is incomplete. But to us who cannot listen to the great Carmelite's eloquence, in the nave of Notre Dame, even an outline of this conference, so full of fresh and healthy thought, will be acceptable.—TRANS.]

Rev. P. Hyacinthe takes this text from St. Paul, at once as the basis and the summary of his entire conference. On previous occasions he had pointed out two elements in the Jewish Church, opposed to each other yet equally essential to the aims of that church; the one exclusive, securing the preservation of the sacred deposit of revelation; the other universal, insuring the diffusion of this deposit throughout the whole human race. These two elements he now calls, in the language of the apostle, letter and spirit. According to the letter, the Bible—that is to say, the Old Testament, is exclusive; according to the spirit, it is universal. The internal struggle of these two elements forms the history of Judaism, thoughtfully viewed. Their startling rupture during the life of Jesus Christ introduced the Christian era, inaugurated the Catholic Church. As sons of that holy and infallible church, we need not fear the triumph of the letter; but as members of a church composed of and governed by imperfect men and sinners, we should not disregard the struggles of the letter for predominance. Let us, then, review the profitable history of these combats between letter and spirit in the bosom of Judaism, considering successively the representatives of the letter and the representatives of the spirit in the Jewish Church.

These were the kings and priests. The kings represented the letter in the political order; the priests, in the religious order.

I. David prophesied, "He shall rule from sea to sea, and from the river unto the ends of the earth. And all kings of the earth shall adore him; all nations shall serve him." And discerning in the far-off radiance that one among his sons whom he called the Anointed, the Christ par excellence, he said, or let the Lord say by his lips: "Sit thou at my right hand until I make thy enemies thy footstool. With thee is the principality in the day of thy strength: in the brightness of the saints: from the womb before the day star I begot thee."

In the throne of the son of David, the God-engendered, two royalties were united: a temporal royalty, created to reign over the house of Jacob, confined within the narrow limits of its own blood, regnabit in domo Jacob; and a royalty destined to extend throughout all humanity, within the wide boundary of the faith of Abraham, regnabit in aeternumn.

The danger lay in confounding these two royalties, in absorbing the celestial in the terrestrial royalty—an error so frequent in similar unions. To this danger succumbed the synagogue.

In a national church, or in a religious nation, no peril is more imminent, none more fatal, than the confusion of religious and political forms. [Footnote 168] Already great while remaining human, for such it is in character and origin, political thought becomes still greater in ascending to the heavenly spheres of morality and religion. But religion shrinks in dimensions, abdicating its true position, revolting against human instinct, and wounding the attributes of Divine Majesty, when it assumes political forms, adopting the ideas, the habits, the paltry interests of politics.

[Footnote 168: Lest those who may be unacquainted with previous conferences of Père Hyacinthe should interpret this passage as referring to the temporal power, we subjoin a quotation from a conference delivered by him in Notre Dame in the year 1867. Speaking of the complications caused by placing political power and religious power in the same hands, R. P. Hyacinthe says: "Nowhere under the sun of the Catholic world do I find this dreadful confusion. If you bid me look toward Rome, it is not the confusion, it is the exceptional alliance of the two powers that I hail in that place, itself exceptional as a miracle. Beneficent alliance, knot of the liberty of conscience, never to be united, because it unites there what it must separate elsewhere, never were you more fearfully necessary to us than now! You have received the testimony of French blood, shed by those who have been called mercenaries while they are simply heroes! You are defended by the eloquent words, the national words of our orators, by the energetic and loyal declarations of our government."

In a conference preached at Rome during the Lent of 1868, R. P. Hyacinthe compares those who urge the church to throw aside the temporal power, and lead a purely supernatural existence, to Satan tempting Christ to cast himself from the pinnacle of the temple, that angels may bear him up.]

Such, however, was the kingdom which kings, and the partisans of kings, persistently dreamed of giving to humanity. For one single instant, under David, that prophetic ideal foreseen and pictured by the prophet king shone with unblemished purity, soon to be veiled under the worldly, (we will speak in plain terms,) under the pagan ideal of Solomon.

Solomon was a great king, especially at the outset of his career. He was always great, even in his errors and crimes. But intoxicated with the science of nature, which he possessed, says the inspired text, from the cedar growing on the summit of Lebanon to the hyssop piercing the cracks of the walls, Solomon, not content with knowledge leading to God, wished to possess all the riches and the loves of earth. He built him palaces bearing little resemblance to the palm-tree beneath which Deborah administered justice, or to the tents where David camped with his soldiers; palaces so sumptuous that the queen of Sheba came from the depths of Arabia to admire them. He had harems filled with women, chiefly foreigners and idolaters; seven hundred sultanas and three hundred concubines! Then letting this inebriation mount, I will not say from heart, but from sense to brain, he fell down with his women at the feet of all their idols, venerating, under poetic symbols, that great nature which is the work of God and so easily takes the place of God.

Such was the spectacle presented by Jerusalem under the successor of David—a hideous spectacle, but made less repulsive in the days of Solomon by a glory he had no power to bequeath to his heirs in Judah and to his Israelitish emulators. He left them only his pride, his sensuality, his idolatry; and when the two inimical yet analogous monarchies succumbed at last beneath the blows of powerful neighbors, of those northern conquerors whose favors they had so often solicited, and whose arms they had so often braved, they left behind them, in the history of the holy nation, a long track of mire and blood.

Such was the royalty of Judea, such the royalty of Israel; promised to the world under the name of the kingdom of God!

So perverted were the Jews by their kings—or, to speak more justly, for we must not misjudge these kings, so perverted were they by national pride, that they could not throw aside this gross ideal, but contemplated still, under the profaned name of the kingdom of God, the domination of races with the sword and with a rod of iron. When the true Messiah, Jesus, came to them, they misunderstood him, chiefly because he rejected this low and narrow royalty, proclaiming the true principle of the kingdom of God—a spiritual kingdom which should be in the world, but not of the world; regnum meum non est de hoc mundo; a spiritual kingdom which comes to bear witness of the truth, ego in hoc natus sum et ad hoc veni in mundum, ut testimonium perhibeam veritati. They preferred, before him, the seditious Barabbas, who had fought in the streets of Jerusalem, shedding blood to deliver them from the Romans. They preferred, before him, all the false Messiahs, all the impotent and treacherous Christs, who closed their mad career by precipitating the ruin of the nation, the city, and the temple they had pretended to save.

Break, then, vase of Jewish nationality! formed so lovingly by God through the hand of Moses; royal and sacerdotal vessel, break! since thou wilt have it so. Thou wert formed to keep the treasures of religious life for all humanity; thou didst close upon thyself in jealous egotism; break! and let thy shivered atoms, scattered through the world, spread abroad the balm which shall intoxicate all nations. "The vase was shattered," says Holy Writ, "and the whole house was filled with the odor." Et domus impleta est ex odore unguenti.

What kings effected in the political order, priests accomplished in the religious order. Indeed, fatal as is the mistake of confounding religious with political forms, still more lamentable is the error of identifying, within the very heart of religion, accidental and accessory forms with essential forms. Every religion—above all, the true religion, the Christian religion—going back to Moses, Abraham, Adam, is not merely a religious idea, a religious sentiment, as it pleases contemporary rationalism to call it. It is a fact, and therefore has positive forms; it is a living fact, and therefore has a determined organism. But, placed amid time and space, the fact of religion must consider the varying conditions of space, the changing conditions of time. Its organism must discharge its functions amid dissimilar or even contradictory surroundings. Therefore, side by side with substantial, permanent forms, we find variable, accessory forms, clothing the first, so to speak, according to the exigencies of races and centuries. By trying to confound religion with accessory forms peculiar to certain countries or races, we should isolate it from the great current of humanity in the present. By trying to bind it to worn-out forms, we should isolate it from the great current of humanity in the future. We should misinterpret St. Paul's words to the ancient synagogue: "Quod autem antiquatur et senescit, prope interitum est." No worse service could be rendered to religious unity. On this shoal the Jewish priesthood stranded.

I would speak respectfully of that priesthood. Last Sunday we inhaled the perfume of its censers, we listened to the harmony of its canticles. The rod of Aaron had not blossomed in his hands in vain, and in the ancient tabernacle we almost adored the body of Christ Jesus prefigured in the manner, the word of Christ Jesus prepared in the decalogue. But however respectable in origin and essence the Levitical priesthood, it no longer merits respect, corrupted as it now is; or, at least, corrupted as are most of its members. This corruption bears a special name, pharisaism.

Is pharisaism hypocrisy? No. Whatever the dictionary may say, in the biblical sense pharisaism is not hypocrisy, unless in that subtle form, at once most innocent and most fatal, that unconscious hypocrisy which believes itself sincere. Jesus often said, "Pharisees, hypocrites," pharisaei, hypocriae; but he explained this expression by another, "Blind guides," pharisaee caece. And the great apostle Paul, himself a pharisee, reared, as he says, at the feet of the pharisee Gamaliel, bears witness in a striking manner to their sincere zeal for God, habent zelum Dei, but not according to knowledge, sed non secundum scientiam.

Pharisaism, thoughtfully considered, is religious blindness, the blindness of priestly depositaries of the letter, who think they guard it best by explaining it least; blindness bearing on all points of the sacred deposit—blindness in dogma, predominance of formula over truth; blindness in morals, predominance of external works over interior justice; blindness in worship, predominance of external rites over religious feeling. Blindness in dogma. They taught the truth. "The scribes and pharisees sit on the chair of Moses," said Christ; "all, therefore, whatsoever they shall say to you, observe and do: but according to their works do ye not; for they say, and do not."

There is no revealed idea enlightening and vivifying the world that has not words to contain it: lucerna verbum tuum, domine. But when speech compresses itself, when it encloses the idea as in a jealously narrow prison, obscuring and choking it, that is pharisaism. That is what the apostle Paul called guarding the word, but keeping it captive in iniquity. That is what forced from the meek lips of our Saviour Jesus the terrible anathema Vae vobis! "Wo to you who have taken the key of knowledge, and will not enter, and all those who would try to enter, you prevent."

In morals, it is exterior works, it is a multiplicity of human practices, resting like a despicably tyrannical load upon the conscience, making it forget, in unhealthy dreams, that it is an honest man's conscience, a Christian conscience. The pharisees said to Jesus Christ, "Why do thy disciples transgress the traditions of the ancients? for they wash not their hands when they eat bread." And our Saviour replied, "Why do you trample under foot the commandments of God, to keep the commandments of men?" Rites are essential to worship, as formula is essential to dogma—wo to him who tears the formula of biblical revelation, or the formula of the definitions of the church; and, since works are essential to morality, wo to him who sleeps in a dead and sterile faith, without works.

Worship! but worship is the expansion of the religious soul; it is the heart's emotion rising odorous and harmonious to God. It is action working from within outward; it is, also, the not less legitimate reaction from without inward. Rites elevate religious feeling, and arouse inspiration in heart and conscience.

But when there is no religious feeling, when heart and conscience bend beneath the weight of exterior practices; "Yea, verily," said Jesus Christ again, (for the gospels are full of these things; the gospels are the eternal reprobation of pharisaism,) yea, verily, the prophet Isaias spoke truly when he said, "This people honoreth me with their lips, and with their hands, but their heart is far from me."

This is the yoke of which St. Peter said, "You would impose it on the head of nations; neither our fathers nor we have been able to bear it." This is the smothered and exhausted breath with which they thought to renew the world. This is not the Judaism of Moses, but the decrepit Judaism of the scribes and pharisees. When the entire world, by the eloquent lips of Greece and Rome, asked of the East salvation; when, by the sudden stir of barbarians quivering in the depths of Germany and Scythia, the world demanded light and civilization, this was offered to them! Judaism became the more inadmissible as the world had more need of it. Pharisaism, in its blind fanaticism, stood before the gates of the kingdom of heaven to prevent generations from entering.

Away! men of the letter; away! enemies of humanity. Adversantur omnibus hominibus, says St. Paul. And thou, Jesus, arise, my Saviour and God!—thou who wert moved by wrath twice only in thy life! Jesus felt no anger against poor sinners. He sat at their table; and when the woman taken in adultery fell at his feet, burning with shame and weeping with remorse, he raised her up, thinking only of absolving her: "Go in peace, and sin no more." He felt no anger against heretics and schismatics. He sat by Jacob's well, beside the woman of Samaria, announcing to her, with the salvation which comes from the Jews, quia salus ex Judaeis est, worship in spirit and in truth. But Jesus was moved with wrath on two occasions: once, scourge in hand, against those who sold the things of God in the temple, and again, with malediction on his lips, against those who perverted the things of God in the law.

Arise, then, meek Lamb! arise in thy pacific wrath against the enemies of all men, and against the true enemies of God's kingdom! Arise and drive them from the temple! Thus did the synagogue perish, and the Christian Church come to life.

I have said (and you already knew it) that we have nothing to fear from the triumphs of the letter. Yet we cannot overlook the struggles and temptations, not only of every priesthood, but of all pious persons; the temptation of the faithful, as well as of priests, to allow the letter to predominate over the spirit. Let us glorify God because we are born in a holy and infallible church, which Jesus Christ protects, and will protect until the consummation of his work, in the course of ages, against the ignorance of our minds and the weakness of our wills.

But what voice strikes my ear? These are no longer the coarse tones of earthly domination, nor of carnal legislation. Nor yet is it a Christian voice, the voice of Christ speaking to us a moment ago; but, though anterior to Christ, how like to him it sounds:

"Hear the word of the Lord, ye rulers of Sodom; give ear to the law of our God, ye people of Gomorrha," saith the voice; and yet it is speaking to the church of Sion. "To what purpose do you offer me the multitude of your victims, saith the Lord? I am full; I desire not holocausts of rams, and fat of fatlings, and blood of calves, and lambs, and buck-goats. Offer sacrifice no more in vain: incense is an abomination to me. The new moons, and the sabbaths, and other festivals, I will not abide; your assemblies are wicked. My soul hateth your new moons, and your solemnities: they are become troublesome to me; I am weary of bearing them. And when you stretch forth your hands, I will turn away my eyes from you: and when you multiply prayer, I will not hear: for your hands are full of blood.

"Wash yourselves, be clean, take away the evil of your devices from my eyes: cease to do perversely, learn to do well: seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge for the fatherless, defend the widow. And then come and accuse me, saith the Lord: if your sins be as scarlet, they shall be made as white as snow: and if they be red as crimson, they shall be white as wool."

This is the voice of Mosaic spirituality in all its energy and light. How different from the pharisaism we were speaking of just now; from the letter, smothering beneath its murderous weight reason, conscience, and heart! How like the gospel, the law of Christ, with its two commandments: an insatiable hunger, an inextinguishable thirst after righteousness, and a heart ever open to mercy! Ah! I feel that this is no local law, no national organization, no restricted or temporary code. It is the law of all people and of all ages. It needs but the breath of St. Paul to bear it from one end of the world to the other.

But the voice of the Spirit still speaks—no longer, now, of the carnal law, but of the earthly kingdom:

"And in the last days, the mountain of the house of the Lord shall be prepared on the top of mountains, and it shall be exalted above the hills: and all nations shall flow into it, fluent ad eum omnes gentes. And many people shall go, and say: Come and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, and to the house of Jacob, and he will teach us his ways, and we will walk in his paths: for the law shall come forth from Sion, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem, quia de Sion exibit lex et verbum Domini de Jerusalem. Come, let us break our swords and make ploughshares; let us shatter our lances and turn them into sickles, for the anointed of the Lord will reign in justice and peace; all idols shall be broken, et idola penitus conterentur, and in those days the Eternal shall alone be great."

Such was the future disfigured by kings and the successors of kings. Understand it well; this is not oppression, but deliverance! It belongs to the letter to impose itself by force; this is its necessity; it has no other way, if this can be called a way. To the spirit belongs the appeal summoning us to the liberty of man and the liberty of God. Ubi spiritus, ibi libertas. "Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty." Therefore, I do not see in the Messiah's hands a sword besmeared and gory. I see nations rise up spontaneously, like a sea shuddering to its deepest abysses. Fluent ad eum omnes gentes; this is not servitude; it is deliverance. This is not the reign of the Messiah victor; but it is the reign of the Messiah liberator.

But you ask me whose is this voice preaching a spiritual kingdom to priests, a divine royalty to kings and nations? The voice shall interpret itself; it shall tell its origin and mission.

Here Père Hyacinthe relates the famous vision in which Isaiah receives his mission after a seraph has purified his lips with a burning coal. This is prophecy.

And were not prophets and saints; necessary to the Jewish Church, as they are necessary to the Catholic Church? The two beggars in the dream of Innocent III. upholding the crumbling Lateran basilica, as if symbolizing the decadence of the hierarchical church in the middle ages; those two mendicants, Dominic de Guzman and Francis of Assisi, what were they but prophets of the New Testament, sprung not from the hereditary tradition of ages, but from the living kiss of Jehovah? {696} Yes, we need saints, we need prophets—that is to say, men of love, martyrs; men of vision who read not only according to the letter but according to the spirit, who see God in the vision of their reason enlightened by faith; in the ecstasy of their conscience elevated by grace. "I have seen the Lord with my eyes"—Oculis meis vidi Dominum. We need men who speak to him face to face like Moses, and, above all, men who love him heart to heart, and pass through the struggles of days and ages, struggles only to be fully understood by contemplating them in the final future. Vidit ultima, et consolatus est lugentes in Sion. Such men were the prophets.

They were seers. They saw the future. They did not look only upon the present, so accurately fitted to the measure of narrow minds and hearts. They did not return with cowardly tears toward the past, never to be born again. It was for Gentiles, for pagan antiquity, to dream of a golden age for ever lost. The prophets, gazing into the future, saw the golden age of Eden reappear, under a form more full and lasting, at the gates of heaven, yet still upon the earth.

The prophets believed in the future because they believed in God. They believed in progress; they were in all antiquity the only men of progress. Antiquity did not believe in it, not even knowing its name. But the prophets believed in the most incredible and the most necessary of all progress, moral and religious progress. They believed in it despite the fall, or rather because of the fall and of the redemption. To them evil did not lie in radical vice, essential to our nature, or in the inflexible decree of destiny; it was in the liberty of man, and must find its remedy in the liberty of God. If God had allowed the starting-point of man to recoil, be cause of sin, into the abyss, it was in order to raise, through the redemption; his goal to the very heavens. From the summits to which their faith lifted them, they saw salvation spread from individuals to nations, from nations to the human race, from the human race to all nature.

Such was progress to the prophets; such the future universal Sion they hailed in the future? Isaiah prophesied it in the existence and in the relative prosperity of Jerusalem. Jeremiah mingled it with tears shed over the smoking ruins of his beloved city. Ezechiel in the bosom of captivity pictured Sion, no longer Jewish, but humanitarian, where all nations were to find their place. He engraved upon the pediment of the gates this immortal device, "The Lord is there;" Dominus ibidem.

II. This was what the prophets, men of faith in vision and men of vision in faith, believed and respected. This was the object of their love, for they were men of understanding, and also men of heart.

I do not love Utopians, I do not love thought which dwells exclusively in the future, feeding on sterile and chimerical dreams. I love men of the future who are also men of the present; contemplatives, but workers too. The prophets were workers. They did not love the future in the future, but in the present where it germinates. They did not love humanity in humanity—too abstract if it be an idea, too vast if it embrace all individuals; they loved humanity in their nation; they loved the typical Jerusalem of their vision in their terrestrial Jerusalem of their existence.

I love to follow them in their writings; to see them rise up in the face of every national fact, every religious fact of that gross people—rise up to meet every evil deed with anathema, to consecrate in the Lord's name every moral or religious act tending toward true progress. I love to see them go down into the deep ravines, to the borders of the torrent of Cedron, where the Messiah was to drink before lifting up his head; climb the abrupt acclivity to the citadel, to the temple where Jesus was to teach; traverse the public squares where ever and anon the wind from the desert, as if to mock their hopes, caught up the dust beneath the burning sun and flung it in their faces.

Now, in the ravine, in the citadel, and in the temple of Sion, in the streets possessed by the whirlwind, everywhere in that city environed with their love and their devotion, they saw that Sion which was to grow up in its bosom and embrace the world. They loved the future; they loved humanity in God; they loved them in the house of Abraham and in the church of Jesus Christ.

In the presence of these great examples, let me say to you of the love of country all that I have said of domestic love. We no longer know, or rather we no longer rightly know, what it is to love country and people; to see and love, in them, the city of humanity, the city of Jesus Christ, the city of time and eternity.

III. Men of vision and of love, the prophets were also men of combat, and, when necessary, martyrs, soldiers, and victims. No man passes without effort that Red Sea which separates present and future. The prophets crossed it bearing with them on their vigorous shoulders the ark of God and the ark of mankind. But what combats and struggles!—struggles majestic as their visions and their love. They shrunk from them in their infirm human nature; they dreaded these struggles. They knew that the word of God ends by slaying those who hear it: "I have slain them, saith the Lord, in the word of my mouth." "Ah Lord God!" cried Jeremiah, "behold I cannot speak, for I am a child;" and the Lord answered, "Say not, I am a child; for thou shalt go to all that I shall send thee: and whatsoever I shall command thee thou shalt speak. Behold, I have given my words in thy mouth. Lo, I have set thee this day over the nations, and over kingdoms, to root up and to pull down, and to waste and to destroy, and to build and to plant. For, behold, I have made thee this day a fortified city, and a pillar of iron, and a wall of brass, over all the land, to the kings of Judea, to the princes thereof, and to the priests and to the people of the land. And they shall fight against thee and shall not prevail, for I am with thee to deliver thee."

And to Ezechiel, colleague and successor of Jeremiah, God ever spoke the language of struggle: "Fear not; I send thee to an apostate people that hath revolted from me, ad gentem apostatricem; but I have made thy face stronger than their faces, and thy forehead harder than their foreheads; I have made thy face like an adamant and like flint. I will set thee up like a wall of iron and like a city of brass, for I will be with thee."

Thus did the prophets struggle for that Sion which fought against them, repudiating them. They never forsook it, they always loved and always served it.

We are about to part for another year. Let me entreat you now to unite yourselves with me in a consecration to that kingdom of God, to that church whose courts we have traversed. Christianity is not of today nor of yesterday. It belongs not merely to the historical period of Jesus Christ and his apostles. {698} It comes from David, from Abraham, it comes to us from Adam, our father, our king, our pontiff. In this unique religion, this church changeable in form, immovable in foundation, friends, brothers—let me use words which come from my heart—let us consecrate ourselves, following the example of the prophets, to the love and service of God's kingdom. The kingdom of God is for ever established in Christianity, in the Catholic, Apostolic, Roman Church. But, as I said just now, this church must ever pass from form to form—de forme en forme-from brightness to brightness—transformamur claritate in claritatem—until her pacific empire shall cover the whole earth, until with humanity she shall attain the age of the perfect man in Christ Jesus.

Do we not wish to work for this kingdom? What are we to do if not that? What are the works of our public and private life if they do not relate finally to the kingdom of truth, justice, charity, to all which constitutes Christianity, to the Catholic and Apostolic Roman Church? I do not ask you to love her as she does not wish to be loved—to love her as a sect is loved, as the gross Jews loved the synagogue, with a heart and mind restricted to the letter. I do not ask you to love our grand Catholic Church by glorifying the infirmities of her life, which are your infirmities and mine; or by condemning all the truths professed and all the virtues practised outside of her by men who are often her sons without knowing it. No; let us have no sectarian love! I ask you to love the church with the heart of the church herself; with a heart commensurate only with the heart of Jesus Christ, dilatamini et vos. "You are not straitened in us," said St. Paul to the Corinthians; "but in your own bowels you are straitened. But having the same recompense, (I speak as to my own children,) be you also enlarged." Dilatamini et vos.

Before leaving you, let me tell you the secret of my youth. Let me speak to you of the day of my priestly consecration, when in this nave, less crowded then than it is to-day, stretched upon that icy pavement, filled with burning palpitations, I was sustained, I was inebriated with one thought—the conviction that I had but one love and one service, the kingdom of God and humanity.

Yes, let us love the church in every man, and every man in the church! What matters condition? Rich or poor, ignorant or learned, omnibus debitor sum, I am every man's debtor, says St. Paul. What matters country? Whether Frenchman or foreigner, Greek or barbarian, omnibus debitor sum, I answer with St. Paul. I am the debtor of barbarism as of civilization. In a certain sense, what matters even religion, if we would love a man?

Ah! if he is not a son of the Catholic Church in the body, by external union, he is so, perhaps—he is, I hope, in the soul, by invisible union. If he is a son of the Catholic Church neither according to the body nor in the spirit, nor in the letter, he is so at least by preparation in the design of God. If the water of baptism is not on his brow, I grieve to know it; but I see there the blood of Jesus Christ, for Jesus Christ died for all, opening wide his arms to all the world upon the cross! The world belongs to Jesus Christ, therefore the world belongs to the church, if not in act, at least in power. Let me, then, love all men; and you, too, love all men with me—not only in person, not only in their narrow earthly individuality, but in the great Christian community, in the great divine community which summons each and all.

When Moses, founder of the Jewish church, died on the mountain within sight of the land of promise, the Hebrew text says that he died in the kiss of Jehovah. Before dying let us learn to live in the kiss of Jehovah, which is also the kiss of all humanity. O holy Church! thou art more than man and thou art more than God—than God alone in heaven, than man alone on earth. O holy Church! thou art the kiss of God to man, the kiss of man to God; the embrace of all men, all races, all ages, in the flame of universal and eternal love. "He who abideth in love abideth in God, and God abideth in him."

A Sketch Of Leo X. And His Age.

In the annals of literature and art, the name of Florence peers above that of any other Italian city, Rome excepted. Here were the poets who tuned the Italian language and made it the most musical of modern idioms; here was the illustrious astronomer, who was not the discoverer of a planet, but the revealer of the whole celestial machinery; and here, too, were the artist and politician who were not only the first sculptors and statesmen of their time, but the inventors of the very art and craft in which they excelled. Every day the pilgrim scholar arrives at her gates and requests to be shown the monuments of her great men, and every day genius worships at the shrine of genius.

At the time of which we write, the middle ages had seen their palmiest days, when a Charlemagne courteously entertained ambassadors from the Mussulmans of Florence and the Caliphs of Bagdad, and when the flower of chivalry, headed by a valiant Philip, a lion-hearted Richard, and a sainted Louis, rushed to the plains of the east to battle with the Moslem foe; they had presided over the erection of those great Gothic piles whose sublime architecture towered to the clouds, and had beheld the pontiffs of Rome issuing orders for the foundation of universities not only in Italy, but on the very outskirts of the civilized world; [Footnote 169] and finally they had seen the laborious and prolific genius of the schoolmen multiplying inventions and discoveries, fathoming the profound depths of theological science, and disserting on those great metaphysical problems, which, like so many apples of discord, have caused endless dissension and controversy among modern philosophers. [Footnote 170]

[Footnote 169: Gibbon tells us in a foot-note to his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire that, "at the end of the fifteenth century, there were about fifty universities in Europe." Though this is indeed a glorious tribute, considering from whom it came, paid to the mediaeval ages, we are, however, more inclined to believe with the New American Cyclopaedia that, "before the year 1500, there were over sixty-four universities in Europe."]

[Footnote 170: Mackintosh says, "Scarcely any metaphysical controversy agitated among recent philosophers was unknown to the schoolmen." (Dissertation on the Progress of Ethical Philosophy.)]

But before these great medieval ages had reached their terminus, they again shone forth with brilliant splendor. That, indeed, was a glorious epoch in the world's history, when the most important invention recorded in the annals of mankind came forth from the brain of Guttenberg; when the stormy Atlantic was first ploughed by adventurous keels, and new worlds discovered; when letters, philosophy, and the fine arts were cultivated in such schools as the Medicean palaces, and were patronized by such men as Cosmo and Lorenzo de' Medici.

Under the enlightened patronage of these princely merchants, Florence became the Athens of Italy, and one of the favorite retreats of the muses. Her public halls were crowded with youths eager to listen to an eloquent hellenist, expatiating upon the beauties of Homer; her poets sang in the idiom of the great Mantuan; her philosophers were smitten with love for the divine Plato; and her scholars were so well read in antiquity, that students from every country came thither, to slake their thirst at what was then considered the fountain-head of ancient lore. The gardens of the Medici recalled the groves of the Academies in which the Athenian philosopher descanted upon human and divine things, and the shady porches of the Lyceum, in which the Stagirite perambulated whilst delivering his sublime lessons.

A great bustle might have been observed in these gardens on the 11th of December, 1475; artists and humanists were vieing with one another in congratulating Lorenzo the Magnificent on the birth of his second son, who, in memory of his paternal uncle, was christened Giovanni. Lorenzo was proud of his little Benjamin, and he listened with complacency to those who admired his keen, restless eye, his pure and noble forehead, his flowing hair and snowy neck. In contemplating the sweet expression of his countenance, the poet declared that he would revive classic literature; and the Neoplatonician predicted a bright era for philosophy; whilst a fugitive Hellene read in the Greek profile of the infant happy days for his dispersed countrymen; and an old sage, endowed with Simeon-like prophecy, exclaimed, "My soul, praise the Lord! Giovanni shall be the honor of the sanctuary."

The education of the young child's heart and the embellishment of his mind were, for his enlightened parents, objects of supreme importance. The former duty necessarily devolved upon themselves; and how well they succeeded was best shown by the mild and placable temper, polished manners, and kind and affable disposition of their little favorite; the latter they entrusted to scholars whose names even then were running through the schools of Europe, especially to Politiano, one of the best classical writers of the renaissance, and the preceptor of a pleiad of illustrious men. Naturally docile, well endowed with parts, in constant intercourse with men of rank and talent, Giovanni acquired a dignity of deportment, a facility of conversation, and a fund of knowledge, much beyond his years. At sixteen, he had completed the curriculum of Pisa, was graduated doctor and invested with the insignia of the cardinalate, and thus entitled to take his seat among the princes of the church. These precocious acquirements and early preferments ought to have ripened into days of serenity; but no, they were more like the calm that precedes the storm. Brought up in the school of prosperity, he was to acquire his last finish amidst the rude trials of adversity. Before attaining the highest dignity that can adorn the brow of man, he was destined to experience the instability of human affairs and the fickleness of men. The death of his father, and the demise of his munificent protector, Innocent VIII., inflicted deep wounds on his sensitive heart. {701} In the mean time, a terrific storm was gathering in Florence. The inhabitants of this metropolis, exasperated at the seemingly unpatriotic conduct of Piero de' Medici, his elder brother, expelled from within their walls even the last scion of their noblest family; something like the ungrateful Athenians, who ostracized the very man on whom they had conferred the title of just. To cheer the dreary hours of exile, no less than to enrich his mind with useful knowledge, the expatriated cardinal resolved upon visiting the principal cities of Europe. Even here, difficulties and disquietudes unforeseen lurked in the background of the smiling ideal that he had formed of his itinerary. The suspicious authorities of Ulm and Rouen arrested the little caravan, and ordered him and his companions to confinement; the foaming billows deterred him from proceeding to England, and thus deprived him of the pleasure of visiting the land of Bede and of King Alfred. On his return, he was cast by a storm on the Genoese coast, and, thinking it advisable to relinquish his voyage, proceeded by land to Savona, where he met the celebrated Cardinal Della Rovere—a remarkable coincidence, if we consider that Della Rovere, Giulio de' Medici, and he himself were afterward raised to the dignity of the tiara. Notwithstanding all the afflictions that poured in on him, the future pontiff invariably preserved that equanimity of mind and amenity of manners which were the prominent features in his character. Better and brighter days were now about to dawn. The premature death of Piero, partially disarmed the hostility of the Florentines, and they finally threw open their gates to the illustrious representative of the time-honored family of the Medici. A year had hardly elapsed after his restoration before Rome was plunged into mourning by the death of that wary and energetic pontiff, Julius II. The conclave assembled immediately after the obsequies, and Cardinal de' Medici was called by the unanimous vote to the see of St. Peter. Giovanni de' Medici was now Leo X., and the choice of that name, as Erasmus spiritually remarks, was not without its significance. If Leo I. saved the eternal city from the ravages of the "scourge of God;" if Leo IV. again repelled from her walls the barbaric bands of Saracens, Leo X. was to make her the capital city of the republic of letters, as she was already the starry centre of the Christian world.

Italy had already taken the lead in the restoration of ancient learning, and supplied the fire from which the other nations lighted their torches. [Footnote 171] As may easily be fancied, the elevation to the pontificate of the son of Lorenzo the Magnificent spontaneously awoke the most sanguine expectations of the artists and literati. In their fervor, they imagined that genius, worth, and talent could not remain unnoticed or unremunerated. "Under these impressions," says a Protestant writer, [Footnote 172]

"Rome became, at once, the general resort of those who possessed or had pretensions to superior learning, industry, or ability. They all took it for granted that the supreme pontiff had no other objects of attention than to listen to their productions and to reward their labors." That their hopes were to be realized, was evident to all from the very first act of the new pontiff's administration, the selection as apostolic secretaries of Bembo and Sadoleti, two scholars who resume in themselves the intellectual life of the time—Sadoleti, a profound philosopher and the best exegete of his age; and Bembo, who emulated Virgil and Cicero with equal success, and recalled in his writings the elegance of Petrarch and Boccaccio. [Footnote 173]

[Footnote 173: Bettinelli. It is to Bembo that we are indebted for the restoration of the long-lost art of abbreviated or shorthand writing.]

A new era in literature and art was about to dawn; its first bright rays were for Italy, that "land of taste and sensibility." With a pontiff who could say, "I have always loved accomplished scholars and belles-lettres; this love was born with me, and age has but increased it; for literature is the ornament and glory of the church; and I have always remarked that it knits its cultivators more firmly to the dogmas of our faith;" with such a pontiff, the intellectual movement that then pervaded Italian society was nobly sustained and enlivened, until at last the golden age again reappeared on earth. All sorts of encouragements, such as honorary employments, lucrative offices, pecuniary gratuities, and even ecclesiastical preferments, were lavished upon talent and genius. Every latent energy luxuriantly budded forth and blossomed in the genial sunshine of such munificence.

The academies of literary men philosophized on the banks of the Tiber or in the cool recesses of a fragrant villa. The lovers of the arts, the votaries of the muses, and the cultivators of polite literature sat side by side at the sumptuous banquets frequently given in the Vatican. At these grand entertainments all topics were convivially canvassed, and fancy soared aloft to delight the guests by her sublime improvisations. Popular favorites, like the poet of Arezzo and the "celestial" Accolte, read their productions in public halls to admiring multitudes; while the best scholars of the age, yielding to the invitation of Leo, filled the professorships of the great universities. Italy was then, in the beautiful words of Audin, "the promised land of the intellect;" [Footnote 174] and Rome the centre of learning and the nursery of great men. No wonder, then, that the snow-capped Alps presented but a feeble barrier to the transalpine scholar, and that every day some new Hannibal descended their craggy flanks and pushed forward to the seven-hilled city, to pay a courteous visit to the accomplished pontiff, and gratify a long-entertained desire of conversing with the celebrities of the age. The whole world thus recognized that

    "The fount at which the panting mind assuages
  Her thirst of knowledge, quaffing there her fill,
  Flows from th' eternal source of Rome's imperial hill."
  [Footnote 175]

Since the days of Petrarch, the Italian muse had all but hushed her lovely strains; her lyre was silent and unstrung. Politiano came, swept its music-breathing chords, and sent its sweet notes on the wings of the zephyrs throughout the Italian peninsula. All listened with rapture to the enchanting strains of the Tuscan siren, and, after a moment of hesitation, prepared their pens to write on every theme and to illustrate every department of science and letters. The classic models of heroic poetry, fresh from the Aldine presses or half consumed by the dust of ages, were taken down from their shelves and studied with passionate ardor. The children of song were delighted with the epic muse, and were now hard at work at their great poems. {703} Mozarello elaborates his Porsenna; Querno, the archpoet, cadences the twenty thousand verses of his Alexias; Vida, like Horace of old, draws up the rules of the metrical art, and sings his Christiad in verses of Augustan purity and elegance; Ariosto, the Homer of Ferrara, condenses into his Orlando Furioso a vein of poetry so remarkable for its grace and energy as to leave it doubtful whether the palm of superiority should be awarded to him, or to the author of the Jerusalem Delivered. [Footnote 176] The terrible eventualities of tragedy and the more pleasing casualties of comedy were brought upon the stage by Trissino, Ruccellai, and Bibbiena; the protean burlesque assumed its most humorous forms under Berni's magic pen, and the shafts of satire were keenly pointed by Aretino, whose virulent epigrams drew upon him such an amount of physical retaliation that a contemporary writer calls him "the loadstone of clubs and daggers." [Footnote 177]

Guicciardini wrote the history of his country with the elegant diction of the great historians of Rome; Giovio's periods were so flowing as to make Leo X. declare that next to Livy he had not met with a more eloquent writer. The Prince of Macchiavelli enjoys a world-wide reputation, and his History of Florence is so remarkable for the beauty of its style, that it is said to have had more influence on Italian prose than any other work, except the Decameron of Boccaccio. Besides these reigning stars, there was a host of other literary celebrities who shed a brilliant lustre on Leo's golden reign. There was Fracastoro, who, at the early age of nineteen, had won the highest academic degree of the Paduan university, and was nominated to the professorship of logic; Navagero, whose aversion to an affected taste was so intense that he annually consigned to the flames a copy of Martial; Aleandro, who was only twenty-four when the celebrated Manuzio dedicated to him his edition of the Iliad, alleging as a reason for conferring this honor on a person so young, that his acquirements were beyond those of any other person with whom he was acquainted, and it is well known that the Venetian typographer was the friend and correspondent of almost all the literary characters of the day; Augurelli, whom a contemporary historian calls the most learned and elegant preceptor of his time; Castiglione, who was called by Charles V. the most accomplished gentleman of the age; Leonardo da Vinci, who, long before the philosopher of Verulam, proclaimed experiment the base of the physical sciences, and, before the astronomer of Thorne, taught the annual motion of the earth; and Calcagnini, who wrote an elaborate work to defend this startling thesis. The correction of the calendar was investigated by Dulciati, and even hieroglyphics found an expounder in the encyclopedic Valeriaro, who wrote no less than fifty-eight books on that abstruse subject. Literature, indeed, was a universal hobby; it was the royal road to distinction in an age when the love of the well-turned period and the mellifluous sonnet was epidemic. The lady cultivators of polite letters were numerous, and not only accomplished proficients but formidable rivals. The sonnets of Veronica Gambara rank among the best; Vittoria Colonna, in lively description and genuine poetry, excelled all her contemporaries with the sole exception of the inimitable Ariosto; and Laura Battifera is represented as the rival of Sappho.

Notwithstanding this general enthusiasm for the amenities of literature, great attention was bestowed upon the more arid study of languages. Already the Latin muse had come to dwell again beneath the beautiful sky of Ausonia; and the humanists, fleeing from the savage fury of the triumphant Ottomans, sang, in the gardens of Florence and on the banks of the Tiber, the fall of Troy and the adventures of Ulysses. Leo X. was not only a Latin scholar, he was also a refined hellenist. Moreover, he knew what vast treasures of patristic lore are contained in the Greek fathers, and hence, as a lover of sacred and profane literature, he lavished his treasures on the revival of that beautiful tongue. A little colony, fresh from the Morea, was installed in a magnificent mansion on the Esquilian hill, and a Greek seminary was opened to impart to the Italians the true pronunciation and the very genius of the Homeric idiom. The famous Lascaris, at the invitation of Leo X., relinquished his position at the French court, in order to direct the studies of his young countrymen and superintend the editions of the Greek classics that were issued from the Roman press. The Hebrew was taught at Rome by Guidacerio, who published a grammar of that language and dedicated it to Leo X.; the Syriac and Chaldaic were taught at Bologna by Ambrozio, a regular canon of the Lateran, who at fifteen could converse in Greek and Latin with as much ease and fluency as any of his contemporaries, and who subsequently mastered eighteen languages. A useful and authentic lexicon was first given to the learned world by Varino. A new Latin version of the Bible from the Hebrew having been announced by Pagnini, Leo X. requested an interview with the author, and was so well pleased with his competency as well as with the elegance and accuracy of the work, that he defrayed all the expenses of transcription and publication. Erasmus, who corresponded with Leo, and, more than any one else, knew his great desire to promote biblical studies, inscribed to him his New Testament in Greek and Latin with corrections and annotations. Giustiniani commenced, in 1516, a new edition of the Bible in Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, and Chaldaic. If to this we add that the famous Cardinal Ximenes dedicated to Leo X. his herculean work, the Complutensian Polyglot, we shall have some idea of the efforts made in the beginning of the sixteenth century toward the promotion of scriptural and philological studies. [Footnote 178]

[Footnote 178: It may here be remarked, in passing, that, before the Reformation, the Bible was translated into not only the classic and oriental languages, but also the vernacular of every nation of Europe. For particulars, see Cantu, Histoire Universelle, vol. xv. p. 12.]

It has been said that a genuine love of literature invariably evinces its existence by an insatiable thirst for books, "those souls of ages past." This love Leo X. possessed to an eminent degree; he was a second Nicholas V. At his request and under his patronage, sterling bibliophiles set out from Rome to overrun the world in quest of manuscripts. The monasteries of Britain and Germany and the ruins of the Byzantine libraries were diligently searched; ample pecuniary remuneration was everywhere offered for unpublished works; and as kings and princes encouraged this hunt after books, it may easily be fancied that volumes teemed in from every quarter. The Vatican was made the recipient of these literary treasures; and, thanks to the zeal of the popes, it now possesses the most valuable collection of manuscripts in the world.

Leo X. was not only a man of letters, he was also well versed in antiquities. Prior to his elevation to the pontificate, his greatest delight was to shut himself up in his library or museum, and there pore over his hoarded treasures. This antiquarian taste he inherited from his illustrious ancestors, whose collections were famous throughout all Italy. One day, while he was yet a cardinal, a statue of Lucretia was exhumed; his joy was supreme, and in the heat of his enthusiasm, he strung his lyre and commemorated the happy event in beautiful iambics. On another occasion, a piece of sculpture, representing the ship of AEsculapius, was, owing to his exertions, discovered in the Tiber. This was considered by his omen-liking friends as an augury of his future dignity. The discovery of the famous group known as the Laocoön was an epoch in Rome. That evening, the bells were rung to announce the event; the poets, among whom was Sadoleti, lucubrated all night, preparing their hymns, sonnets, and canzoni, to welcome the reappearance of the masterpiece. Next morning, all Rome was on foot, and the public works were suspended while the antique statue, festooned with flowers and verdure, was carried processionally to the capitol, amidst the sound of vocal and instrumental harmony. Such was the joy of the Roman artists on the discovery of a relic of ancient art.

The twin arts painting and sculpture shared largely in the munificence of the pontiff. Bramarte, Michael Angelo, Raphael, and Leonardo da Vinci, the princes of modern art, were the worthy emulators of Phidias and Apelles. In immortalizing their names and that of their patron, they immortalized their age and their country. At their call, genius again returned to earth, and exhibited, in the chiselled marble and on the glowing canvas, such animated representations as filled the eye with wonder and stirred the deep foundations of the heart. Bramarte planned and commenced St. Peter's, which, in the estimation of the sceptic Gibbon, is the most glorious structure that has ever been applied to religion; for

                           "Majesty,
  Power, glory, strength, and beauty, all are aisled
  In the eternal ark of worship undefiled."

Michael Angelo, whose very fragments have educated eminent artists, continuing the noble structure, placed the pride of Roman architecture in the clouds, and drew the design of the Last Judgment, which connoisseurs pronounce a miracle of genius. Raphael covered the Vatican with his inimitable frescoes and sketched his Transfiguration, which was hailed by the Roman people as the type of the beautiful, a paragon of art, and the masterpiece of painting. The profound Da Vinci painted the Last Supper and thus afforded Christian families a neat ornament for their refectories and a piece of artistic finish for their drawing-rooms. Sansovino's productions, according to the historian of the arts, were among the finest specimens of the plastic art, and Romano's were worthy of his "divine" master.

Such was the flourishing state of the arts and the great impulse given to all branches of learning just before the memorable epoch when the fetters of the human intellect were, forsooth, burst asunder by the great Saxon hero, the unfrocked monk of Wittemberg, against whom Leo X. hurled the bolt of excommunication. If this grand impetus was not followed up, if the pen was forgotten for the sword, and the altars of Apollo were deserted for those of the homicide Mars; if the era of the reformation "was truly a barbarous era," [Footnote 179] it most certainly was not owing to incapacity on the part of the Roman pontiffs, since sectarians themselves proclaim them "in general superior to the age in which they lived," [Footnote 180] while historians of the depth of Neander are struck with admiration to find the popes "ever attentive to the moral and religious wants of their people;" [Footnote 181] but it must be attributed to the immediate effects of the so-called Reformation, that spirit of blind fanaticism which was equalled only by the wholesale brigandage and all-destroying vandalism of the sainted evangelicals.

[Footnote 181: Neander, General History of the Christian Religion and Church.]

A kind dispensation of Providence it was, that saved Leo X. the sight of the harrowing scenes that Europe then presented. He had already occupied the throne of St. Peter eight years, eight months, and nineteen days, during all which time he had faithfully guarded the interests of the church against royal encroachments, and the liberty of his dominions against foreign aggression; he had presided over the last seven sessions of the oecumenical council of Lateran, and conferred on an English monarch the title of Defensor fidei; and now, in the forty-seventh year of his age, cruel death takes him from the affection of his subjects, the love of his cardinals, and the veneration of men of letters. Sad was the day when it was told that Leo X. was no more. Artists and humanists dropped a tear for their friend and benefactor; the sculptor and the painter commemorated their deceased Maecenas in the virgin marble and on the glowing canvas, while the historian wrote the annals of his reign and the poet embalmed his memory in immortal verse. Rome erected his monument, and posterity, admiring the virtues of the Christian, reverencing the eminent qualities of the pontiff, and idolizing the protector of letters and art, has called the age in which he lived the golden age of Leo the Tenth.

Translated From The Spanish.

Little Flowers Of Spain.

By Fernan Caballero.

"Humble flowers of religious poetry, and derivations of popular expressions and proverbs," is the title given by the authoress to the article headed "Cosas (humildes) de España" —Humble Things of Spain.

If there exists an individual who has read all that we have written—and the case, though not probable, is nevertheless not impossible—he must have noticed that our zeal, our labor, and our specialty is to find out origins and causes, draw inferences and conclusions, and trace things to their why and wherefore. We are really apprehensive lest in this branch we may become too notable.

Our system is the same that is followed nowadays by writers of history. Let it be understood that we do not meddle with such weighty subjects, nor venture into profound depths, and that our employment of the aforesaid modern system is solely in questions of the humble schools. Our information is all obtained from popular traditions, romances, and beliefs. The data which it is our delight to place in relief, all the world has handled as the Indians did gold before their conquerors gave it value; as future generations will give value to the things of which we treat when they lament their loss.

Our explorations in these rich mines have been rewarded. We have ascertained that the first tree that God planted was the white poplar; therefore the white poplar is the most ancient of trees—the vegetable Adam. We have learned that the serpent went straight, erect, and proud of his triumph in Paradise, until the flight into Egypt, when, encountering the Holy Family, he attempted to bite the child Jesus, and the indignant St. Joseph prevented him with these words, "Fall, proud one, and never rise again!" From that good day to this he has crawled. We have learned, moreover, that snakes and toads are permitted to exist solely for the purpose of absorbing the poisons of the earth. We have found out that the evergreen trees are endowed with their privileges of life and beauty in recompense for having given shelter and shade to the Mother and Child whenever they stopped to rest in their flight from the sword of Herod; that the rosemary enjoys its fragrance and always blossoms on Friday, the day of Our Lord's Passion, because the Blessed Virgin, when she washed the little garments of the babe, used to hang them to dry upon its branches; also, that for this very reason it has the gift of attracting peace and good-hap to the dwellings that are perfumed with it on Holy-night. That everybody has sympathy, affection, and even reverence for the swallows, because compassionately and with such sweet charity they pulled out the thorns that were piercing the temples of the divine Martyr. That the red-owl, which, grieved and appalled, witnessed the cruel crucifixion of the God-man, has done nothing ever since but repeat the melancholy cry "Cruz! Cruz!" That the rose of Jericho, which was white before, owes its purple hue to a drop of the wounded Saviour's blood that fell into its cup. That on Mount Calvary, and all along the way of agony, the gentle plants and fresh herbs wilted and died when our Lord passed by bearing his cross, and that these places were presently covered with briers. That the lightning loses its power to hurt in the whole circumference that is reached by the sound of praying. That at High Mass on Ascension-day, at the moment of the elevation, the leaves of the trees incline upon each other, forming crosses, in token of devotion and reverence. When newborn infants smile, in dreams or waking, we know that it is to angels, visible only to them. A murmur in the ears is the noise made by the falling of a leaf from the tree of life. When silence settles all at once upon several persons forming a company, it is not, as the wise ones say, because "the carriage is running upon sand," but because an angel has passed over them, and the air that is moved by his wings communicates to their souls the silence of respect, though their comprehension fails to divine the cause. Likewise, we have ascertained that the tarantula was a woman extravagantly fond of the dance, and so inconsiderate that when, on one occasion, she was dancing, and His Divine Majesty [Footnote 182] passed by, she did not stop, but continued her diversion with the most frightful irreverence. For this she was changed into a spider with the figure of a guitar delineated upon its back, and possessed of a venom that causes those who are bitten by it to dance and dance until, fainting and exhausted, they fall down in a swoon.

In effect, we have learned many other things: some of them we have already written; the rest we mean to write; that is to say, "If the rope does not break, all will go on as usual."

But, among these things, there is one which we are going to communicate immediately, for fear lest we die of cholera, and it descend with us into the tomb; for it barely survives at present, and with it would perish its remembrance.

In times when faith filled hearts to overflowing, offerings and ex-votos were brought by thousands to the house of God. Now that we are enlightened, we have other uses for our gold, our rare objects, and fine arts; for, as the poet says,

  "En el sigh diez y nueve
   Nadie á tener fé se atreve,
   Y no huy que en milagros cred."
   [Footnote 183]

[Footnote 183: In the nineteenth century, no one dares to have faith and there is no one who believes in miracles.]

The first ostrich eggs procured by the Spaniards, in their voyages to Africa, were regarded as marvels, and deposited, either as offerings or ex-votos, in the churches, where, bound and tied with gay ribbons, they hung before the altars and were looked upon as ornaments of great value. And even now, before modest altars in humble villages are sometimes seen these enormous eggs; presenting with their worn and faded decorations the appearance of porcelain melons. By whom were they brought? where were they found? who hung them here? are questions that assault the mind of the beholder, and send his thoughts and fancy into the vast field of conjectures impossible to verify, but all sweet, romantic, and holy.

The imagination of the Spanish people is an instinct. They cannot see a material object without attaching to it an ideal. Out of the fervor of their own heart they made a symbol of this.

The belief adapted to the ostrich egg, hung in front of the altar, is one that will be sagely qualified by sanctimonious devotees of literal truth as superstitious and fanatical. We offer it to the Protestant missionaries who favor us with their propaganda, as a killing weapon against the benighted and malignant papists.

It is said that the mother-bird cannot hatch these eggs, which appear to be of marble, because it is impossible for her to cover them, and because there is not heat enough in her body to warm them through; but that she has in her look such fire, kindled by her great desire to free her offspring, that by keeping her eyes continuedly and without distraction fixed upon the eggs, the ardor and concentration of her love penetrates the hard shell and delivers her little ones. And they hung these eggs before the places where the holy sacrifice of the mass is offered, to teach us to keep our eyes fixed upon the altar with equal desire, equal love, and exclusive attention and devotion. O poets! if you would fulfil your mission, which is to move the heart, learn less in palaces, and more from the people who feel and believe.

Among sayings and proverbs that have been accepted everywhere without having to show their parentage, is the well-known expression, Ahi me las den todas: May I get them all there.

One of the creditors of a certain dishonest fellow, that owed all the world and paid nobody, laid his complaint before the judge, who sent an alguacil to suggest to the debtor the necessity of paying at once.

For response to the intimation, the debtor gave the alguacil, who was a very dignified man, a slap on his face. The latter, returning to the tribunal, addressed the magistrate thus: "Sir, when I go to notify an individual on the part of your worship, whom do I represent?" "Me," answered the judge. "Well, sir," proceeded the alguacil, touching his cheek, "to this cheek of your worship they have given a slap." "May I get them all there," replied the judge.

Here is the etymology of another saying, Quien no te conozea te compre: Let some one buy you that don't know you. Three poor students came to a village where there was a fair. "What shall we do to amuse ourselves?" asked one as they were passing a garden in which an ass was drawing water from a well. "I have already hit upon a way," answered another of the three. "Put me into the machine, and you take the ass to the fair and sell him." As it was said, so it was done. When his companions had gone, the student that had remained in the place of the ass stood still. "Arre!" [Footnote 184] shouted the gardener, who was at work not far off.

The improvised ass neither started nor shook his bell, and the gardener mounted to the machine, in which, to his great consternation, he found his ass changed into a student. "What is this?" he cried. "My master," said the student, "some ill-natured witches transformed me into an ass, but I have fulfilled the term of my enchantment and returned to my original shape."

The poor gardener was disconsolate, but what could be done? He unharnessed the student, and, bidding him go with God-speed, set out sorrowfully for the fair to buy another beast. The very first that presented itself was his own, which had been bought by a company of gipsies. The moment he cast his eyes upon it, he took to his heels, exclaiming, "Let some one buy you that don't know you."

Yo te cono cí ciruelo—I knew you when you were a plum-tree—is a common saying. The people of a certain village bought a plum-tree of a gardener, for the purpose of having it converted into an effigy of St. Peter. When the image was finished and set up in the church, the gardener went to see it, and, observing the somewhat lavish coloring and gilding of its drapery, exclaimed:

  "Gloriosisimo San Pedro,
   Yo te cono cí ciruelo,
   Y de tu fruta comi;
   Los misagros que tu hagas
   Que me me los cuelgan á mi!"

  "Most glorious Saint Peter!
   I knew you when you were a plum-tree,
   and ate of your fruit;
   the miracles you do,
   let them hang upon me."

Ya saco raja—He has got a share—is often said, and we trace it to Estremadura, where the live-oak groves are divided into rajas; raja being the name of an extension yielding acorns enough to feed a given number of hogs. When the rajas are public property, they are distributed at a trifling rent to the poorer householders, who are, as will be supposed, very anxious to have them. But to obtain one is difficult, for the ayuntamientos, or town councils, generally give them to their protégés and hangers-on; and, from this circumstance, "He has got a hog-pasture," has come to be said of any person that by skill, cunning, audacity, or good luck succeeds in obtaining an advantage difficult to get, or of which the getting depends upon some one else.

El que tiene capa escapa—He that wears a cloak escapes—dates from the giving way of the new bridge at Puerto Santa Maria, under the weight of the great crowd that had collected upon it. To prevent thefts and disturbances, Captain-General O'Kelly issued an order to the effect that no person wearing a cloak should be allowed to cross the bridge. In consequence of this order, no one wearing a cloak fell into the river.

It is usual to indicate that a person is poor by saying, El esta á la cuarta pregunta—He is at the fourth question. This assertion is derived from the interrogation of witnesses for the defence in suits when, among other circumstances, that of poverty is wished to be proved. This extreme being comprehended in the fourth question, as follows: "Does the witness know, of his own knowledge, that the party he represents is poor, and possesses neither landed property nor income; so that he has absolutely no means of support except the product of his own labor?"

The Pearl And The Poison.

From The French.

  Chanced it, where along the strand
      Softly foaming broke the sea,
  Lay an oyster on the sand
      'Mid her neighbors merrily:
  And her shelly doors, ablaze
  With the sapphire's thousand rays,
  She had opened to the sigh
  Of the zephyrs flitting by.
  Fell into her bosom there
      Just a single drop of rain—
      Just a rain-drop dull and plain:
  When, behold! a jewel rare—
  A sudden pearl exceeding fair!

  Chanced it on the heath hard by
      That a viper, lurking dread,
  Uttered then her hissing cry—
      To the zephyr raised her head:
  When upon her dart accurst
  Fell a rain-drop like the first:
  Just a drop of poison more
  To recruit her venom's store.

  With twofold nature are our hearts endued,
  Nor open less to evil than to good:
  Responding kindly to the tiller's care,
  The soil becomes what skilful hands prepare.
  Dear parents, take you heed. If yours the will
      To guard your children's sacred innocence,
      Be timely care and foresight the defence;
          And drop by drop instil
      Into their little spirits thoughts of good,
          To be their daily food.
      If you are wise, through years to come
          A pearl of a child will make you blest:
      If not, you'll cherish in your home
          A very poison to your rest.

Foreign Literary Notes.

The testimony of so distinguished an authority as M. E. Littré, of the French Institute, is now added to that of Digby, Maitland, Montalembert, and so many others, to show that the middle ages were not "barbarous." M. Littré, as is well known, is very far from being a Catholic; but, treating the subject with his great erudition from a purely historical point of view, he shows, in his Etudes sur les Barbares et le Moyen Age, that, after the frightful degeneration of the Roman world—a degeneration aggravated and precipitated by the violent immixtion of barbarous peoples—the period of the middle ages was an era of renovation in institutions, in letters, and in morals; a renovation, slow, it is true, but certain and continuous; a renovation entirely due to Catholicity, revivifying by powerful and fecund impulsion the antique foundation formed by pagan society, and augmenting it by all that Christianity possesses superior to paganism. On this beneficial and constantly civilizing influence of the church, which formed the moral unity of a world whose material unity had disappeared, re-educating people fallen into infancy, rescuing letters by her schools, clearing the forests by her monks, founding social and political institutions worthy of the name, and the like of which the Roman empire had never seen—for the reason that all its conceptions of man and of liberty were false, and it could never raise itself to the idea of a spiritual power that was independent of the lay power—on all these points, so worthy the attention of the historian, there are, particularly in the first two chapters, some admirable pages. M. Littré speaks with admiration of the spread of monachism in the west, and distinctly recognizes the many great blessings that followed in its train. He (p. 3) reproaches Gibbon with having ignored the importance of the religious fact of Christianity. And yet his "naturalism" has led him astray from the conclusion to which the invincible logic of his own presentation of facts must bring him.

A valuable addition to biblical criticism is, unquestionably, the lately published Saint Paul's Epistle to the Philippians. A revised text, with introduction, notes, and dissertations. By J. B. Lightfoot, D.D., Hulsean Professor of Divinity, and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. London, Macmillan. 8vo, 337 pp. This book forms the second volume of an exegetical work that is to embrace all the epistles of St. Paul. Galatians has already been published. The present volume is particularly valuable for its introduction of the results of the latest archeological and historical research. The commentaries on Seneca and the doctrines of the Stoics are interesting, as also the remarks on the [Greek text]

in verse 13 of first chapter.

A distinguished priest of the Oratory, H. de Valroger, has recently published an able and learned disquisition on biblical chronology. He terminates it thus: "No more than the Bible has the church laid down a dogmatic system of precise dates strictly connected and confining the primitive history of the world and of man within narrow and inflexible limits. No more than the Bible does the church deprive astronomers, geologists, paleontologists, archaeologists, or chronologists of the liberty of ascertaining scientifically the period of time elapsed since the creation of the world and of man, or since the deluge, which terminated the first of the reign of humanity."

In the Foreign Literary Notes of our number for June, we noticed an important publication by the Abbé Lamy on the Council of Seleuciae, a translation from one of the numerous productions of early Syrian literature, so rich in works relative to the church, its history, its discipline, and its dogmas. And, in this connection, it may be proper here to note a typographical transposition seriously interfering with a correct reading of the notice in question, namely, the six paragraphs of the first column of p. 432 that precede "Concilium Seleuciae et Ctesiphonti," etc., should follow the second paragraph on the second column of the same page.

This work of the Abbé Lamy is one out of many recent publications showing the great attention lately given to the monuments of early Syrian literature by theologians of Europe. Especially in Germany is the activity great in this new field. It has long been known that a serious chronological break existed in this literature, covering a period of nearly three hundred years, stretching from the translation of the Scriptures to the classical period of Syrian patristic literature.

Only of late years has this void been partially filled by the important work of Cureton, (W.,) entitled, Ancient Syriac Documents relative to the earliest Establishment of Christianity in Edessa. With a preface by W. Wright. London: Williams & Norgate. 1864. This work of Cureton was preceded by his Spicilegium Syriacum, containing remains of Bardesan, Meliton, Ambrose, and Mara bar Serapion. London: Francis & Rivington. 1855.

In connection with these may be mentioned Cardinal Wiseman's Horae Syriacae, Rome, 1828; Pohlmann, S. Ephraemi Syri Commentariorum in S. Scripturum; Lamy, Diss. de Syrorum fide et disciplina in re eucharistica; S. Ephraemi Syri Rabulae, Balaei aliorumque opera selecta. Oxford, Clarendon. 1865.

An interesting historical controversy has for some time been going on between M. Cretineau Joly, of Paris, and the Rev. Father Theiner, Prefect of the Archives of the Vatican, concerning the authenticity of the memoirs of Cardinal Consalvi, published by M. Cretineau Joly, in 1864. Father Theiner, in his History of the Concordat, throws serious doubts upon the genuineness of these memoirs. On the other hand, M. Joly, in his lately published Bonaparte, the Concordat of 1801, and the Cardinal Consalvti, defends his position, and declares that he translated with the most conscientious exactitude the memoirs in question, "such as they were confided to me at Rome, such as I now possess them in MSS. at Paris, such as any one is free to test by examination."

Logicae, Metaphysicae, Ethicae Institutiones quas tradebat Franciscus Battaglinius, Sacerdos, Philosophiae Lector. Bologna, typogr. Felsinea. 1869. 1 vol. in 8vo, 712 pp. This work is a collection of the lectures delivered at the Seminary of Bologna, by Professor Battaglini. The spirit of the learned professor's philosophy is, as he himself states, secundum divi Thomae doctrinas. No slight task, certainly, to bring the "Angelic Doctor" within the grasp of the young theological student.

The work has attracted the attention of many of the French clergy, and is highly approved by them.

There appears to be serious danger that the French people are in a way soon to know all about the Bible. Besides the numerous copies of the sacred Scriptures already in existence in France, the publisher Lethielleux now has in press the first volume of a new edition of the entire Bible, which will give the Latin text of the Vulgate, with the French translation, and a full body of commentaries—theological, moral, philological, and historical, edited so as to include the results of the best works in France, Italy, Germany, and elsewhere, with a special introduction for each book, by the Abbé Drach, D.D., and the Abbé Bayle, Professor of the Faculty of Aix.

The mantle of Mai and of Mezzofanti has fallen upon Cardinal Pitra, recently appointed to the important position of librarian of the Vatican. The office could not be filled by one more erudite and worthy of it in every respect, and his holiness could hardly have made a better choice. Cardinal Pitra is well known as the author of several learned works in theological and canonical science. Like a true Benedictine, his life has been devoted to study and scientific

A succession of articles lately given in the Revue des Deux Mondes, by M. d'Haussonville, [Footnote 185] has thrown fresh light on the long and interesting struggle between Pope Pius VII. and Napoleon; between moral and physical force, between the inspiration of heaven and the inspiration of the world. M. d'Haussonville, by the publication of numerous documents until now unpublished, and by the letters and despatches of Napoleon the First, lately given to the world by the present imperial government, has added a new interest to the sad story of the captivity of the holy father, and the negotiations at Savona.

The dignity, firmness, and elevated piety of the noble pontiff stand out in more striking relief from their necessary comparison with the rude and merciless tyranny of his oppressor, and have wrung the strongest expression of admiration from sources the most unexpected. In an article entitled, "The Papacy and the French Empire," the Edinburgh Review (October, 1868) says:

"The meek resistance of Pius VII. to the overwhelming force which had crushed every independent power on the continent of Europe, was therefore a protest worthy of the sacred character of the head of the Latin Church in favor of the dignity and liberty of man; and, by the justice of Heaven, the victim survived the conqueror, the feeble endured, the mighty one perished."

Great activity prevails throughout Europe in the search for and publication of documents, long buried in libraries and private collections of MSS., which are calculated to throw light upon the history and workings of the so-called Reformation. And this activity is probably greatest in Switzerland, where every canton, separately or with an adjoining canton, has its historical society in active and industrious operation. German and French, Catholic and Protestant, vie with each other in their praiseworthy efforts to rescue from decay and ruin old parchments, chronicles, protocols, and letters, that are calculated to throw any light on the events of past centuries. In this direction works the Protestant Berner in the Helvetia Sacra, and the Pius Verein promises great results in a collection of which the first volume has lately appeared, entitled, Archiv für die Schweizerische Reformnationsgeschichte. Herausgegeben auf Veranstaltung des Schweizerischen Piusvereins. Erster Band. Solothurn. 8vo, 856 pp. The central committee of this society consists of Count Scherer Beccard, of Lucerne, and Prebendary Fiala and Professor Barmwart, both of Solothurn. The volume announced contains chronicles, monographs, and extracts from the archives of Lucerne, the mere enumeration of which would be too much for our space.

The old Benedictine abbey of La Cava, in Italy, has long been known to possess in its archives a mass of documents and MSS. said to contain treasures of diplomatic and archaeological erudition. They cover the period from Pepin le Bref to Charles V. Father Morcaldi, one of the most distinguished savants of Italy, has undertaken their classification and publication. They will fill, when printed, eight or ten folio volumes, and require from five to seven years for publication.

A recent number of the Literarischer Handweiser, edited at Münster by Dr. Franz Hülskamp and Dr. Herrmann Rump, contains an article on Catholic journalism in the United States. Here is an extract:

"Since the cessation of the well-known Quarterly, edited by Dr. Brownson, American Catholics possess but one really first-class periodical, namely, The Catholic World, founded some four years since, and published at New York, in handsomely printed monthly numbers. This monthly, founded by Father Hecker, of the Congregation of the Paulists, a zealous convert, distinguished for his effective dialectic and polemic ability, is one of the most welcome manifestations in the field of North American periodical literature. Already, during the short period of its existence, it has gained numberless friends, and bears favorable comparison with the best productions of the European press. The influence and writings of Father Hecker and his collaborators are sufficient warrant that The Catholic World has an important future before it in the field of defence and polemics, and that it will most probably be for many the guide to the bosom of the church."

Among new English books announced is Mary, Queen of Scots, and her Accusers; embracing a Narrative of Events from the Death of James V., in 1552, until the close of the Conference at Westminster, in 1569. By John Hosack, Barrister in Law. The work is to contain the "Book of Articles" produced against Queen Mary at Westminster, which, it is said, has never hitherto been printed, and will be published by Blackwood & Sons, Edinburgh.

If this work be in Mary's defence, it is not the first one—to their credit be it said—produced by the Protestants of Scotland. We confess to some surprise that some one of the many English Catholic writers, with their peculiar facilities for reference to authorities, have not taken up and exposed the scandalous malice of Mr. Froude's attack on the memory of the unfortunate queen. His desperate attempt to advocate the genuineness of the silver casket letters, bold and ingenious though it be, is nevertheless a failure, and its unfairness and sophistry should be exposed.

New Publications.

Life Of Mother Margaret Mary Hallahan, O.S.D., Foundress of the English Congregation of St. Catherine of Sienna, of the Third Order of St. Dominic. By her religious children. With a preface by the Right Rev. Dr. Ullathorne. New York: The Catholic Publication House, 126 Nassau street. 1869.

All who are interested in the extraordinary, not to say miraculous, revival of the Catholic faith in English-speaking countries, will hail with delight the appearance of this book. It is a simple and evidently a truthful narrative of the life of one of those providential personages who, in all great movements, stand out as beacon lights to mark their progress. Margaret Mary Hallahan was born in London in 1802, of Irish parents, who had fallen from a respectable position in life to honorable poverty. She was their only child, and became a complete orphan at the age of nine years. Her education had been provided for, as well as circumstances would permit, by her kind-hearted father, in the schools established in London by the Abbé Carron, a refugee priest of the French revolution. Slender, indeed, were the prospects of a poor Catholic orphan girl in the capital of a country so full of bigotry as was England in 1811. Having spent a short time in the orphan asylum at Somerstown, she was placed under the care of a Madame Caulier, whose harsh discipline was hardly compensated by occasional acts of kindness. In her twentieth year, she was introduced by this lady to the family of Doctor Morgan, once physician to George III. Being then an invalid, he was attended by Margaret during the last six months of his life; and after his death she became the bosom friend of his daughter, Mrs. Thompson, whom she served, rather as a sister than as a domestic, for twenty years. Five years of this time were spent in England and fifteen in Belgium. In the latter country she became a member of the Third Order of St. Dominic, on the feast of St. Catherine of Sienna, in the year 1835.

On her return to England, in 1842, she took charge of the Catholic schools of Coventry, where Father Ullathorne, of the Benedictine order, was pastor. Her days were spent in the education of young children, and her evenings in the instruction, religious and secular, of the poor factory girls of the place. {715} In a short time, there was a visible improvement in the Catholic community of Coventry; and Sister Margaret had the happiness of beholding a religious procession, the first of the kind seen in England since the change of religion, at the head of which was borne her own image of the Blessed Virgin, the only treasure she had carried with her from Belgium. A few pious companions, having united with Sister Margaret in the performance of good works, she and three others, by the advice of Father Ullathorne, and with the authorization of the general of the Dominican order, received the habit of the Third Order of St. Dominic, with a view to living in community, on the 11th of June, 1844. On the 8th of December, 1845, they made their religious profession. Soon after this, Father Ullathorne was appointed by the holy see vicar apostolic of the western district; and, having established his residence at Bristol, it was deemed advisable for the young community, of which he was the father and protector, to remove to Clifton, near his episcopal city. This was in 1848; and when, in 1850, the Catholic hierarchy was reestablished in England, Bishop Ullathorne, now transferred to Birmingham, founded the second convent of the Dominican Sisters at Stow. This became the general novitiate of the order in England, and here were established by Mother Margaret her boarding and free schools, her orphanage, and hospital for incurables. In 1858, she went to Rome to obtain of the holy see the canonical erection of her community into a congregation governed by a provincial prioress. Her request was granted by a brief given in 1859, by which she was named provincial prioress, which office she retained until her death, in 1868. Here we may be allowed to quote the words of her friend, Bishop Ullathorne, in his preface to her life:

"And now behold this lonely and poor woman, made ripe in spiritual wisdom and in human experience, returning, a stranger and unknown, to the land of her birth. Yet God has already prepared a way for her, and she begins a spiritual work which slowly rises under her hands, from humble beginnings, into the highest character, and surrounds itself with numerous institutions of mercy and charity. Foundress of a congregation of the ancient Dominican order, she trained a hundred religious women, founded five convents, built three churches, established a hospital for incurables, three orphanages, schools for all classes, including a number for the poor; and, what is more, left her own spirit in its full vigor to animate her children, whose work is only in its commencement."

The history of her life will amply repay perusal. It is a continual exemplification of her great maxim, All for God. The most prominent feature in her administration of the affairs of her order was, that she never allowed external employments, undertaken for the benefit of her neighbor, to encroach in the least upon the hours assigned for prayer and meditation. Her zeal in decorating altars, and in providing all things necessary for the decency of divine worship, knew no bounds.

Die Jenseitige Welt.
Eine Schrift Über Fegefeuer,
Hölle Und Himmel.
Von P. Leo Keel, Capitular des
Stiftes Maria Einsiedeln.
Einsiedeln, New York,
and Cincinnati: Benziger. 1869.

The first two books of this work are out, and we anxiously expect the third, on Heaven, a topic on which it is very difficult to write anything worth reading, and on which very little has been written in our modern languages. German books are generally better than others, and a work which merits the praise of German critics is sure to be solid. The present work is highly esteemed in Germany, and we have examined the part which treats of purgatory sufficiently to convince us that the author has written something far superior in learning, and vigor of thought, to the ordinary treatises on religious doctrines which are to be met with. To those clergymen who are Germans, or who read the language, we can recommend this book as well worth its price. It is printed in the neatest and most attractive style.

Warwick;
or, the Lost Nationalities of America: A Novel.
By Mansfield Tracy Walworth.
New York: Carleton. 1869.

This novel is a remarkable production, exhibiting vivid imagination, extensive and curious research, descriptive power of a high order, chivalrous sentiments, and a lofty moral ideal, in the author. Its principal scenes, events, and characters belong to an ideal world entirely beyond the possibilities of real and actual life, with an intermingling of some minor sketches drawn from nature which show the author's power to depict the real if he pleases to do so. It seems to us that the serious arguments which are interspersed through the book, and the curious speculations respecting the original inhabitants of America, which are not without at least historical and scientific plausibility, would be presented with far greater effect if they were detached from a plot which is too absorbing to leave the mind leisure to give them due attention. The moral effect intended to be produced by the story itself would be also greater if the characters were more real, the events more natural and probable, and the scenes drawn more from real life. The great praise, so seldom deserved, must be given to the author, that he inculcates high moral and religious principles in an eloquent and attractive manner, and will therefore undoubtedly exercise a refining and elevating influence over the mind of many a young reader who would reject graver lessons. Highly-wrought works of fiction have become a necessity to a large class of readers, and here is one which will give their imagination a wild ride on a racer over a safe road. The young and accomplished author of Warwick, will, we trust, follow up his literary career, and produce other and maturer fruits of his genius, which will add more renown to the illustrious name he bears.

The Life Of John Banim, the Irish novelist, author of Damon and Pythias, etc., and one of the writers of Tales by the O'Hara Family.
With extracts from his correspondence, general and literary.
By Patrick Joseph Murray.
Also selections from his poems.
New York: D. & J. Sadlier & Co. 1869.

The Ghost-hunter And His Family. By the O'Hara Family. New York: D. & J. Sadlier& Co. 1869.

John Banim was born in the city of Kilkenny, on the 3d day of April, 1798. His parents were in humble life, but, through industry and economy, were enabled to bestow upon their son the inestimable advantage of a good literary education, while their precepts and example united to secure for him a thorough Christian training. His genius for novel writing manifested itself at an early age. While in his sixth year, his ready fancy gave birth to a story of no little merit.

"He was not sufficiently tall to write conveniently at a table, even when seated, and having placed the paper upon his bedroom floor, he lay down beside it and commenced the construction of his plot. During three months he devoted nearly all his hours of play to the completion of his task; and when at length he had concluded, the writing was so execrable that he alone could decipher it. In this dilemma he obtained the assistance of his brother Michael, and of a school-fellow; they acted as amanuenses, relieving each other when weary of writing from John's dictation. When the tale was fully transcribed, it was stitched in a blue cover, and John determined that it should be printed. But here the important question of expense arose to mind, and, after long deliberation, the youthful author thought of resorting to a subscription publication. Accordingly the manuscript was shown to several of his father's friends, and, in the course of a week, the subscribers amounted to thirty, at a payment of one shilling each. Disappointment was again the lot of our little genius; for in all Kilkenny he could not induce a printer to undertake the issuing of his story. This was a heavy blow to his hopes; but honorable even as a child, he no sooner found that he could not publish the tale than he waited upon his subscribers for the purpose of restoring to them their shillings. {717} All received him kindly and refused the money, telling him that they were quite satisfied with reading the manuscript."

In this little incident of his boyhood, the salient features of the character of John Banim, the man and the author, are easily discernible. His extreme facility of conception, his hurrying energy of execution, his confidence in the merits of his productions, his indomitable persistence in commanding public attention, his patience and courage under defeat and disappointment, and his scrupulous honesty of purpose, which controlled alike his writings and his business relations, are all contained and foreshadowed in the circumstances of this almost infantile enterprise. Maturer years darkened the shadows, deepened the lines, heightened the lights of Banim's character; but such as he was, when he ran home from his school-mates in their hours of play, "to see that 'Farrell the Robber' had not stolen his mother," such also was he, till, in his last hours, he begged of his brother,

"That I would stand by while his grave was digging, and that, when his body was lowered to its last resting place, I should be certain the side of his coffin was in close contact with that of his beloved parent."

Of the literary life and achievements of Banim, of his privations and discouragements, of his physical sufferings, and his premature decay and death, the pages of Mr. Murray's book contain a tolerably full description. It is to be regretted, however, that the task did not fall into the hands of Michael Banim, his brother and co-laborer in the O'Hara Tales. The work before us is too evidently the accomplishment of "an outsider"—of one who draws his information from letters, from books, from the accounts and descriptions of others, and not of one who "knew his man," and delineates the results of his own personal sight and hearing. John Banim was a man whose biographer should have been his most intimate and dearest friend, whose choicest qualities those who knew him most thoroughly could alone adequately value, and whom a distant public can be taught fully to appreciate only by a writer who himself has learned the lesson through long and close association.

Of the works of Banim, (one of the best of which we have also just received,) it is needless for us to make particular mention. They are worthy to be classed among the standard fictions of the century, whether for their rhetorical or dramatic power, and are almost wholly free from the loose sensationalism which disgraces the pages of so many modern tales. We have found them to inculcate virtue and industry, to do honor to purity and devotion, to abound in filial affection and religious fidelity to duty; and there is no half-heartedness in our wish that they, and such as they, may supplant, at least among Catholic readers, the noisome volumes which come swarming faster and faster both from the American and English press.

Problematic Characters: A Novel.
By Freidrich Spielhagen.
New York: Leypoldt & Holt. 1869.

It seems unnecessary, to say the least, to translate from the German pictures of life like those contained in this romance, since there are innumerable English and American novels, filled with the same sensuous details, and teeming with shameless descriptions of illicit love. In all the family life introduced to our notice in the course of this thick volume, the only married pairs that are described as living comfortably together are objects of ridicule, while men who make love to their neighbors' wives, and the married women who respond to these advances, are made to appear exceedingly interesting and lovely, and their wicked words and deeds justified on the ground, so popular in these days, incompatibility in the conjugal relations.

As might be expected from such immoral teaching, utter infidelity follows in its wake.

Responsibility to God or man is ignored throughout these pages, though much is said about the great eternal laws of nature, which seems to mean, according to this author, unbelief in the God of revelation; since the only persons who profess to have any faith in the life beyond are proved arrant hypocrites, and excite only our disgust by their assumed piety.

Such reading should be condemned without qualification, although the style may be, as in this volume, graceful and polished, the language vigorous, often piquant, the descriptions of natural beauties glowing with light and warmth, social questions discussed with equanimity and calmness—but the trail of the serpent is over them all. We unhesitatingly pronounce this a dangerous book—not problematically, only, but positively bad reading.

Walter Savage Landor. A Biography. By John Forster. 8vo, pp. 693. Boston: Fields, Osgood & Co.

Mr. Forster has led us to expect so much from him, by his excellent biography of Goldsmith and other works, that we are not only disappointed but a great deal surprised by the defects of the present bulky volume. Landor's life was a tempting theme to one who knew it so well as Mr. Forster. Stretching far beyond the ordinary limit of human longevity, crowded not perhaps with very stirring incidents, yet with figures of deep historical and literary interest, and curious for its extraordinary manifestations of a strong character, it was a subject of which an accomplished writer might have made one of the best biographies in the language. Mr. Forster has committed a grave fault, however, in being too diffuse, and, valuable as his book must be to the student of Landor's history and times, it certainly cannot be called very interesting. What with the prolixity of the narrative, and the prolonged summaries and analyses of Landor's writings, the reader is too often tempted to close the book from utter weariness. Yet there is a remarkable attraction in the life of that violent, wrongheaded, wonderful old man of genius, who left so many enthusiastic friends, though, it has been truly said, nobody could possibly live with him, and who has enriched English literature with poetry worthy of the classic ages of Greece, and prose among the purest and most eloquent in the language, though there is probably no other author of equal pretensions of whom the mass of readers are so completely ignorant. For this reason, Mr. Forster's biography, cumbrous as it is, deserves an extensive circulation, and it contains so much merit, that we hope he may be induced to bring it into better shape.

Wandering Recollections Of A Somewhat Busy Life:
An Autobiography.
By John Neal.
Boston: Roberts Brothers. 1869.

If the Messrs. Roberts had desired to issue a book "for the season," they could hardly have selected one more appropriate than this pleasant autobiography of John Neal. Like the life of its author and subject, it is full of variety, "everything by starts, and nothing long," and runs as naturally from the piling up of bricks and mortar in the resurrection of Portland from the ashes of 1866, to the traditions and incidents of two centuries ago, as Mr. Neal himself seemed to slip from shop-keeping into authorship, and from peddling into law.

It is a book that one can take up anywhere, and find somewhat of amusement and instruction; and can lay down anywhere without fearing to lose the train of thought or the thread of narrative. There is method enough in it to entitle it to be called an autobiography; there is also a complete justification of the title which its author has appropriated to it. It is the pleasant chat of an old man of seventy-three, over events and personages into contact with whom extensive travel and a long life have brought him; a "potpourri" of the memories and observations of two continents and of over three-score years. Its publishers have done for it in print and paper what the matter and the manner of the work deserved; and if it finds its way into the portmanteau of the summer tourists whether by mountain-side or sea-side, it will hardly fail to be read, and so put to good use otherwise perhaps wasted hours.

Sogarth Aroon; Or, The Irish Priest.
A Lecture. By M. O'Connor, S.J.
Baltimore: Murphy & Co. 1869.

The author of this lecture was once the bishop of Pittsburg, a prelate hardly second to any member of the American hierarchy in learning and all the highest qualities of a bishop; and, as all know, he resigned his dignity to become a simple Father in the Society of Jesus, where, in spite of his broken health, he has ever since been zealously laboring for the salvation of souls. Father O'Connor has always been remarkable for his intense devotion to his native country and to the best interests of Irishmen. More than once, his learned and powerful pen and voice have been employed in their cause. In this lecture he has once again given a just and glowing tribute to the Irish priesthood. There are some, both here and in Ireland, who are fearing lest the tie which has bound the Irish people to their priests should be weakened by the efforts of demagogues seeking political influence, and by other causes of like nature. We trust this may never be the case; but it behooves all who love the Irish people truly to imitate Father O'Connor, and do everything in their power to strengthen this tie, and keep alive the spirit of Catholic faith in the bosoms of the children of the Martyr Church of Ireland. We recommend this lecture to general circulation both here and in Ireland, as an antidote to the poison which some traitors to their race and their religion are seeking to disseminate.

Young Christian's Library, containing the lives of more than eighty eminent saints and servants of God.
12 vols.
Philadelphia: Henry McGrath. 1869.

This miniature library should be found in every Catholic household. While necessarily abbreviated, "The Lives" it contains are by no means mutilated condensations, and can be read, not alone with much spiritual benefit, but with real pleasure, in so admirable a manner has the editor performed his allotted task. Hence, although specially designed for youth, we have no hesitation in recommending it to persons advanced in years as an excellent substitute for the Rev. Alban Butler's more elaborate work, from which they are severally abridged. The series is very beautifully got up, and reflects great credit on the taste and liberality of the publisher.

This well-known annual sustains its reputation as a valuable repertory of contemporaneous history. One great merit it has, is the careful manner in which authentic documents are reproduced in extenso. In regard to Catholic matters, it is, as usual, guardedly respectful, evidently intending to be impartial to every body. This is, of course, attempting the impossible, and it is easy to see which way the drift and current of the work do run. We say this in order that the younger and more inexperienced Catholic students may understand that works of this kind, proceeding from non-Catholic sources, are only to be used as lexicons and books of reference, but never to be trusted as guides or authorities for forming their opinions.

The Habermeister.
Translated from the German of H. Schmid.
New York: Leypoldt & Holt.
Price, $1.50.

In this novel we have a vivid picture of German peasant life. The plot rests upon the assumption of unlawful authority, in the name of an ancient custom, the necessity of which has long since disappeared; and the catastrophe is brought about by the use made of it by infamous persons. The characters are well delineated. The rag-picker's ride and the grave scene will be found to exhibit to advantage the talents of an author whose greatest success lies in his description of men. The denouement is satisfactory, although brought about by slightly distorting the truth in regard to the convent reception-room. But the changes in the butcher's character were impossible, if we regard terror as the cause, for terror brings only degradation.

The Irish Brigade, And Its Campaigns:
with some account of the Corcoran Legion, and sketches of the principal officers.
By Capt. D. P. Conyngham, A.D.C.
Boston: Patrick Donahoe. Pp. 559. 1869.

In this, the second edition of Captain Conyngham's well-known work, the publisher has left nothing to be desired, but has given us a book which, with its clear type, good paper, handsome and substantial binding, will compare not unfavorably with any recent issue of the press.

THE CATHOLIC PUBLICATION SOCIETY will have ready, in a few days, a new edition of St. Liguori's Way of Salvation, and a new edition of the Douay Bible, 12mo, printed on fine paper. Also an 8vo edition, on superfine paper, illustrated.

THE CATHOLIC PUBLICATION SOCIETY is now printing a cheap edition of Challoner's Catholic Christian Instructed, 24mo, to be done up in strong paper covers, and sold at 20 cents per copy, or ten dollars for one hundred copies. This will enable clergymen and others to distribute this valuable book among non-Catholics. The Society will also print a cheap 12mo edition (large type) of the some book, which will be sold at a low price. At the same time, cheap editions will be issued of The Poor Man's Catechism, (two editions,) Poor Man's Controversy, Bossuet's Exposition. Gallitzin's Defence of Catholic Principles, and Gallitzin's Letters on the Bible. Also cheap editions, bound, of The Following of Christ are in press. These, with several other new editions of valuable books, will be printed during the fall. The new edition of Bishop Bayley's History of the Church on New York Island will be enriched by several new notes, and portraits on steel of Bishops Concannon, Connolly, Dubois, and Archbishop Hughes.

Messrs. John Murphy & Co., Baltimore,
will soon publish The Life of the Very Rev. Frederick W. Faber, D.D.

Mr. Patrick Donahoe, Boston,
has in press a Life of Christopher Columbus, translated from the French.

D. & J. Sadlier & Co.
are preparing for publication Ten Working Designs for Catholic Churches. The work is highly recommended by several archbishops and bishops.

Books Received.

Credo; an American Woman in Europe. Patty Gray's Journey from Boston to Baltimore.

The Catholic World.

Vol. IX., No. 54. September, 1869.

Daybreak

Chapter XV.

"The Coming Of The Messenger."

All through that terrible day, the two staid by Mr. Granger's bedside, holding his hands, cooling his fevered face, and watching for a sign of consciousness that came not. At evening there was a struggle, short but sharp, and before they had breathed forth the breath they caught as he started up, the soul had broken loose, and a lifeless form sank back upon the pillow.

Do they listen to us when they are gone? Could he, in the first surprise of sudden freedom, hear the cry, like that of a bereaved Lear, that sought to follow him, "Oh! stay a little!" or the weeping testimony of the other, "There stopped the noblest, kindest heart that ever beat"?

But, listen though he might, from one he heard no word of mourning or appeal after that. Since he was happy, and had no longer any need of her, and since she had done all in her power to do for him, she could now remember herself. That his humiliating offer of an empty hand had been kindly meant, did not lessen her resentment, but rather increased it. However confident he had been that his interpretation of her perfectly frank conduct was the true one, he should never have allowed her to know it, she said. Her heart seemed hardened toward him, and all her friendship dead. "How I have wasted myself!" was the bitter comment with which she turned away from taking her last look at him.

More than once, in the first days of their loss, that fiery anger of an insulted heart broke forth. On their way home, as she sat on the steamer-deck at night, slowly touching bead after bead of her rosary, not praying, but waiting for a prayerful feeling that might come, there came, instead, a recollection of the year before. It rose and painted itself, like a picture, between her and the wide, cool shade and sparkle of midnight sea and sky. There was the home parlor, the window where she sat that day after her retreat was over, so happy, half with heaven and half with earth, the curtain fanning her, the vines swinging in and out in the light breeze. She saw Mr. Granger come to her side and drop a rosary into her hands, saw the silver glitter of his pretty gift, and heard the words that accompanied it, "And indeed, it should have been of gold, had not Jupiter been so poor."

"If not gold, then nothing!" she exclaimed; and, leaning over the rail, flung his gift as far as she could fling it out over the water.

The waning moonlight ran around the frosted chain and pearl beads, as if some spirit hand had swiftly told every Pater and Ave of them in expiation of that rash act. Then the waters caught them, and they slipped twinkling down through the green deeps.

Margaret left the deck, and went down to where Mr. Lewis walked to and fro, keeping his mournful watch. His face was pale, and his eyes heavy. He looked perfectly grief stricken.

"No; but I have been thinking." She leaned on his arm, and looked down upon the casket at their feet. "That man thought that I wanted him to marry me. Is it only a wicked pride, I wonder, that rises up in revolt when I remember it? Should not there be a better name? I could not be angry then, because he was dying; and I forgot it till the next night, after all was over, when I went in to see him. I was full of grief then, and had some silly notion, just like me! of telling him, and that he would hear. The wind had blown the hair over his forehead, and just as I started to put it back, I recollected, and caught my hand away and left him. I had nothing to say to him then, nor since. What did he want to kill my friendship so for? His memory would have been sweet to me.

It is poisoned." "Well," Mr. Lewis said, with a sort of despair, "women are queer beings, and you are ultra womanish. One day you will risk your life for a man, and the next you will look with scorn upon him in his coffin. A better name than pride, do you say? I call it the most infernal kind of pride. Where is your gratitude, girl, toward the man who never had any but a kind word and thought for you? He arranged everything for you, that first night, just as much as he did for Dora, and made me promise that you should never want for a friend while I live. You ought to humble yourself, Margaret, and beg his pardon."

"Do you think so?" she asked faintly. "I hope that you are right. I would rather blame myself than him."

"Of course I think so!" he answered indignantly. "Did he ever give you one unkind look, even? Did he ever prefer any one else before you? Did he ever allow any one to speak against you in his presence? I never, before nor since, saw him take fire as he did once when some one criticised you to him."

"Did he? Did he?" exclaimed Margaret, kneeling by the casket, and laying her cheek to the cold wood. "Ah! that was indeed friendship!"

When death, in visiting a household, is unaccompanied by sordid cares, the lost one being necessary to our hearts alone; when the living have no remorse for the past and no terror for the future of their friend; when the silent face is peaceful; and when the earth that opens to receive it is warm and full of life, like the bosom of a mother where a sleeping child hides its face—then death is more beautiful than life.

Thus this celestial visitant came to the Granger household; and if an angel had alighted visibly in their midst, and folded his white wings to tarry there a day, the presence could not have been more sacred or more sweet. Every sign of gloom was banished. The light was no more shut out than it always was in summer; all the rooms were perfumed with flowers; and the master of the house was not left alone, but lay at the front end of the long parlor suite, in full sight of the family as they came and went.

Among the many callers who came that day was the Rev. Dr. Kenneth, the old minister with whom we have seen Mr. Southard taking theological counsel. This gentleman listened with astonishment and indignation while Mrs. Lewis told him that Mr. Granger had died a Catholic, and would have a requiem mass the next morning.

"He must have been unduly influenced, madam!" said the minister excitedly. "Mr. Granger would never have taken such a step of himself. It is impossible!"

Somewhat embarrassed, Mrs. Lewis drew back, and disclosed Miss Hamilton sitting in the shadow behind her, and, at the first word of reply, gladly left the room, having no mind to stand between two such fires, though the doctor's opponent looked too pale and quiet to be very dangerous.

"With God all things are possible, Dr. Kenneth," was what Margaret said. He regarded her sternly; yet after a moment softened at sight of the utter mournfulness of her face.

"Please don't!" she said. "I can not bear anything; and we don't want any harsh words while he is here."

"While I saw you standing out there and looking at him, I remembered how often you used to come to my grandfather's, and how you petted me when I was a little girl. One day I was trying to carry you the large Bible, and I fell with it. Grandfather scolded me; but you patted my head when you saw that I was on the point of crying, and said that the Highest and the Holiest fell, not once only, but thrice, under his burden. And you pulled my curls, and said, laughing, that if strength dwelt in length of locks, then I ought to be able to carry not only the Bible, but the house. What makes the difference now? Are you harder? or am I in less need of charity?"

"Not so," she replied. "I have those in this house; but in the church I had only him out there. My church, here, at least, does not receive converts as yours does. I suppose it must be because they know that we are only coming home to our own Father's house, and they think it would be presumptuous in them to come to meet us, as if we needed to be welcomed."

"Scarcely a decent civility," she replied. "But no matter about that. Only, I want you to remember it, and to send my old friends back to me. If they will not come, then their talk of religious freedom is hardly sincere; and if you do not tell them, then I shall think you unchristian. Indeed, doctor, when you have passed me ill the street, without any notice, I haven't thought that you were very good just then."

The doctor looked at her keenly. "I will be friends with you on one condition," he said.

The day crept past, and the night, and another day; and then there was nothing for them to do but take up their life, and try to make the best of it.

The first event to break the monotony came in September, when Dora was baptized. All the family attended the ceremony, for the time putting aside whatever prejudices they might feel. Then they began to look eagerly for Mr. Southard's return.

He might be expected on the first Sunday of October, he wrote most positively, but, for the rest, was very indefinite. He wrote so vaguely, indeed, that his congregation were rather displeased. His leave of absence had expired, yet he seemed to consider his coming home a furlough. Rather extraordinary, they thought it.

Mr. Southard was not one of those pastors who live in a chronic deluge of worsted-work from their lady friends. On his first coming to the pulpit, there had been symptoms of such an inundation; but he had checked them with characteristic promptness, representing to the fair devotees the small need he had of four-score pairs of pantoufles, even should his life be prolonged as many years, and suggesting that those who had so much leisure might profitably employ it in visiting and sewing for the poor. But the repulse was given with such simplicity and candor, and so utterly unconscious did he appear that any motive could have prompted their labors save a profound conviction that their pastor was shoeless, that even the most inveterate needle-woman forgave him. He was not in the least sentimental, he was indeed strict, and often cold, though never harsh.

Still, though he lacked many of the qualities of a modern popular minister, his people were much attached to him. They trusted him thoroughly, and they were proud of him. He had talent, culture, and a high character and reputation. He was not a sensational preacher; but his directness and earnestness were unique, and occasionally his hearers were electrified by some eloquent outburst, full of antique fire kindled at the shrines of the prophets. It also did not go against him that he was the handsomest man in the city, a bachelor, and rich enough in his own right to dispense with a salary.

Great, therefore, was their delight when his return was positively announced, and they set about preparing for it with a good will.

The church was renovated, a new Bible and a sofa were purchased, and a beautiful Catharine-wheel window, full of colored glass, was put in over the choir. Receptions were arranged, flowers bespoken, committees appointed, the barouche which was to take him home from the depot was chosen, and the two dignitaries who were to occupy it with him were, after due deliberation, selected. All this was done decently and in order. Mr. Southard's people were far from being of the vulgar, showy sort, and prided themselves on being able to accomplish a good deal without any fuss whatever. Even the newspaper chorus which proclaimed each progressive step of the minister's homeward journey, as Clytemnestra the coming of the sacred fire, sang in subdued language and unobtrusive type. At last, all that was wanting was the final announcement, in the Saturday evening papers, that the reverend gentleman had arrived. {725} Indeed, the notice had been written, with all particulars, the evening before, and had almost got into print, when it was discovered that Mr. Southard had not arrived. The barouche had returned from the depot without him, the two dignified personages who went as escort suffering a temporary diminution of dignity and an access of ill-temper. It is rather mortifying to see people look disappointed that it is only you who have come, and to know that not only have you lost the glory which was to have been reflected on you from the principal actor in the scene, but that your own proper lustre is for the time obscured. +

It was found, however, that a letter had been written by Mr. Southard, not a pleasing one, by any means, to his disappointed masters of ceremonies. He would be in his pulpit on Sunday morning, he informed them; and after Sunday would be happy and grateful to see any of his dear and long-tried friends who would be so kind as to call on him. But till that time he did not feel equal to the excitement of any formal reception. He had scarcely recovered his strength after a long illness, he was fatigued with travel, and also, he was returning to a house made desolate by the death of one of his oldest and dearest friends.

"They are terribly wilted," Mr. Lewis said, as the family sat around the centre-table that evening. "You never saw anybody so grumpy as the deacons are. They are scandalized, moreover, in view of the only way in which he can come now. Of course, he will have to travel all night, and come into town Sunday morning. There's Sabbath-breaking for you."

"One good thing," Mrs. Lewis said; "they have stopped ringing the door-bell. I do believe there have been a hundred people here to-day to ask if Mr. Southard had come."

"Auntie," said Aurelia, with a look of mild horror, "you don't know what uncle said to the last gentleman who came. He told him that when the minister made his appearance, he would hang out a flag over the portico, and fire rockets from the front windows."

The three ladies were sewing, and Dora sat beside Margaret with a catechism in her hand, learning the Acts.

"Aunt Margaret," whispered the child, "what do you think God told me when I said, 'O my God! I firmly believe'? Says he,' Oh! what a lying little girl you are!'"

"Because I told him that I believed all the sacred truths; and how can I believe when I don't know 'em? This is what I did; I said, 'Please don't listen to me now, O Lord! I'm not talking to you. I'm only learning my lesson.'"

"I did not expect Mr. Southard to show so much feeling," Mrs. Lewis said, when the two had gone out. "He received the news of Mr. Granger's change of religion with such silent displeasure that I supposed he would discard even his memory. He shows courage, too, in still speaking of him as a friend; for some of his people will be displeased."

"I'm sure, aunt," Aurelia replied rather hastily, "no one can say that Mr. Southard ever lacked the courage to utter his sentiments."

"No," Mrs. Lewis said in a very moderate tone, but looked sharply into her niece's drooping face.

Aurelia had not looked up in speaking, and seemed to be engrossed in her work; but there was a glistening of tears through the thick lashes, and the delicate rose in her cheeks had grown crimson-hearted. She seldom spoke with spirit; but when she did, it always woke that rich bloom.

The bell rang again, and in a few minutes the parlor-door opened, and the Rev. Doctor Kenneth came in.

"The servant told me that Mr. Southard has not arrived," he said; "but as she did not absolutely forbid me, I came in to see the rest of you."

They welcomed him cordially. The doctor had got in the way of dropping in occasionally, and they were always glad to see him. The venerable gentleman was something of a courtier, and knew how to make himself all things to all men.

"I have my colleague at last," he said, "and to-morrow I promise myself the pleasure of hearing Mr. Southard, if he comes."

Margaret returned to the parlor, and was pleasantly saluted by the doctor who made room for her to sit beside him. She took the place willingly, being especially pleased with him just then; for, by his influence, her old friends were beginning to gather about her, coldly at first, it is true, but that would mend in time.

"I have never denied that Mr. Maurice Sinclair might possess some noble qualities," the doctor said, in his stateliest manner. "And I have never said nor thought that he could rightly be called a base man. But I have said, and I still think that he was a dangerous man; and moreover, that last letter of his, instead of softening my judgment, makes me condemn him all the more; for it shows unmistakably what light he sinned against."

"But, doctor," interposed Aurelia's soft voice, "he seemed to be a Christian at last."

"By no means, my dear," the doctor answered decidedly. "His unbelief was nobler, that is all. The Christian soul strains upward, and drops off the earthly; the pagan soul strains outward, and grasps what is greatest on earth. He was a pagan. I have always, during my whole ministry, had more fear of those who stand on the border-lands between good and evil, than of those who are clearly in the enemy's country. Do you want to take wine with a drunkard? Certainly not. The faithful can resist a glaring tempter; but let one of these gallant chieftains come up with his mouth full of fine sentiments, and presto,

But what can we preachers do when the ladies decide to canonize a man? I'm afraid they are disposed to believe that a fine head must deserve a fine crown."

The lady appeared not to notice the allusion to herself, but spoke in a musing, silvery voice, her eyes fixed dreamily on space.

"What a wise arrangement of Providence it is, that interesting masculine penitents should awaken the gushing philanthropy of ladies, gentlemen standing aloof; while interesting feminine penitents almost as invariably excite the pious charity of men, ladies, in their turn, holding off. In both cases, there are the feast and the skeleton quite correct. I recollect, doctor, hearing you preach, years ago, a sermon on the Magdalen. It was very edifying; but I was sorry that you found it necessary to mention her golden hair. Indeed, I have always thought that the old painters would have made a better point if they had represented her as a plain, middle-aged woman, with great haggard eyes, like pits of darkness through which the soul was struggling, only a spark, but kindled to a conflagration which should consume with holy fire that poor, desecrated clay of hers. That is the true Magdalen; not your light Correggio, who might be a danseuse reading a French novel after the ballet."

The lady had dropped her careless air, and was speaking almost vehemently. It seemed, indeed, that some personal experience lent a poignancy to her convictions on the subject.

"I am glad of the chance to express my opinions," she said, "and glad that you have made me angry enough to have courage to speak. I protest against this pernicious indulgence which latter-day Christians show to vice, persuading themselves that they are charitable.'Swear him, and let him go,' as the soldier said of the rattlesnake. When I see these sentimentalists seek out real penitence where it hides speechless and ashamed, then I will call them charitable, and not before. But no; real penitence is not interesting. It cannot attitudinize, it stammers, it has red and swollen eyes, it shrinks almost from being forgiven, it never holds its head up again."

"But, madam," said the doctor, somewhat disconcerted, "all are liable to mistakes; and in being too strict with doubtful penitents, we may discourage the true ones."

"They are easily distinguished," she said curtly. "Besides, you lose sight of another risk you run. You appear to take for granted that none are tempted save those who fall. How do you know how many may be holding on to their integrity by a mere thread, struggling desperately but silently, needing every help, in so precarious a condition that a breath, a word, may destroy them? Such people do not speak; you hear nothing of them but the crash of their fall. Or, if they fall not, you never know. To me, that conflict is more pathetic, more tragical, than all the paraded sighs and tears of those who have found that dishonesty doesn't pay. Those who do right simply and purely for God's sake are few and far between. Most people need the support of public opinion and the approbation of those whom they look up to. Let it be seen that, do what they may, if only they can excuse themselves prettily and plausibly, they will be easily forgiven, and set still higher than before, and what will be the result? You can see it in society to-day. Charity, so-called, has increased; has virtue increased?"

"If good women would not make themselves so disagreeable, as they often do," Mr. Lewis said gruffly.

"Try to please them," his wife replied. "Praise them a little; be agreeable yourselves, and see if they don't improve in that respect. Meet a person with a glum face, and if that person is sincere and sensitive, you are not likely to get smiles in return."

Aurelia leaned toward her aunt, put an arm around her, and whispered, "Dear auntie, you're an angel; but please don't say any more."

"I do not like to hear men and women criticise each other," the doctor said calmly, introducing a switch into the track of the conversation. "They are neither of them fitted to think for and judge the other. They, in the moral universe, are like earth and sea in the physical. And as air is common to earth and sea, so spirit, and all higher influences, are common to man and woman alike."

"Yes," Miss Hamilton said, "and while the earth has gold, and silver, and iron, and gems, the sea has only pearls, and they are tears, woman's proper parure. And while the earth maintains its place, and is not moved, the sea goes moaning about, breaking itself on rocks, and climbing even to heaven, only that it may fall again upon the land."

"Blessed showers!" said the doctor, who had watched her smilingly while she spoke. "Be sure, Margaret, sooner or later those for whose sakes you and your sisters have climbed to heaven with such toil and pain will see some heavenly likeness in you, and hail you as welcome messengers. Don't lose courage, dear. Don't join the bitter waves that break themselves against the rocks, or the sly, insidious waves that steal away the land and drag it down. But let your part be with those who visit us by the way of heaven. Wouldn't you rather we should look up when we want you, though it were seldom, than look down, though it were often?"

She looked up, bright and blushing for a moment, like her old self, trembling with gladness, she knew not why. It seemed to be a prophecy of good tidings.

Into the silence that followed a deep sigh broke. They all looked up, then rose, speechless, changed suddenly into a group of mourners. For Mr. Southard stood before them with that in his countenance which showed how much more plainly than even their living faces he saw the shadow of one who was gone for ever.

Pallid with sickness, fatigue, and trouble, he came forward to receive their almost voiceless welcomes.

"God knows," he said, "that if the choice had been with me, my place, rather than his, should have been made vacant."

Bostonians have been accused of putting too much Sabbath into their Sundays; but long may it be before the noisy waves of business or pleasure shall wash away that quiet island in the weary sea of days. There is a suggestion of peace, if not of sacredness, in the silence almost like that of the country, in the closed doors and empty streets; and when the bells

  "Sprinkle with holy sounds the air, as the priest with the hyssop
   Sprinkles the congregation, and scatters blessings upon them,"

he must be insensible indeed who does not—at least, momentarily—remember that there is another world than this.

On the morning after his return, Mr. Southard resumed his old Sunday habit of breakfasting in his own room, and none of the family saw him before service. He always went to his church early, and alone, and never spoke to any one on the way.

"Margaret, you really ought to go with us this time," Mrs. Lewis said. "I think you might unbend for once."

"To stoop from the presence of God to the presence of a creature is bending too far," was the reply. "Such bending breaks. I and my pet are going to see the heavens open, and the Lord descend; are we not, Dorothea, gift of God?"

Mrs. Lewis turned herself about before the cheval-glass to see the effect of a superb toilet that she had made in honor of the occasion. "Ah! well," she said. "You may be right. I have indeed a faithful heart, but a woefully skeptical head; shall we go now?"

The night had been very sharp for the season; but when they all went out together, the sun was shining warmly through the morning haze, the air was still, and the dripping, splendid branches of the October trees were hesitating between hoarfrost and dew, and glittering with both. People in holiday attire, and with holiday faces, went past, the bells clanged out, then paused, and left only a tremulous murmur in the air, the very spirit of sound. Far away, a chime rang an old-fashioned hymn, in that quaint, stiff way that chimes have.

As the Lewises entered their own church, they involuntarily exchanged a smile. Nothing could be prettier than that interior. The side-lights were all shut out, and for the first time the new window was unveiled, and threw its rich light over the choir, and up the nave, kindling the flowers that profusely draped the pulpit and platform, and edging with crimson the garnet velvet cushions. The people in this church had usually easy elbow-room, but to-day they permitted themselves to be crowded a little by visitors. There were even chairs brought into the galleries; and when the hour for service arrived, there was a row of gentlemen standing behind the last pews. But there was no sound save the soft rustle of ladies' dresses, and now and then a hushed whisper. There was the most perfect decorum and composure, and a silence that was respectful if not reverential. No belligerent mutterings ever rose through the voice of prayer or praise within these walls; no belated worshipper ever went tramping up to the very front after service had begun; and moreover, neither in this, nor in any other Protestant church, did visitors come with opera-glasses and chattering tongues, to turn what was meant as a place of worship into a place of amusement.

Quite late, Dr. Kenneth came up the aisle, and seated himself in the Lewis pew; and while every one looked at him, the door leading back from the platform to the vestry was opened, and almost before they were aware, Mr. Southard had entered and taken his place.

There was a soft stir and rustle all through the church, and the choir sang an anthem—that beautiful one of Brasbury's:

  "How beautiful is Zion
     Upon the mountain's brow,
   The coming of the messenger,
     To cheer the plains below."

Mr. Southard sat with his eyes fixed on the cornice-wreath, and let his congregation stare at him, and they did not scruple to take advantage of the opportunity. The impression was not the one they had expected to receive. He was too pale and spiritual, and his expression was too much that of some lofty martyr fronting death unmoved, a St. Sebastian, pierced with arrows, his soul just pluming itself for flight through those lifted eyes.

Moreover, not only were all their flowers invisible to him, but he never looked at their new window, though the light from one of its golden panes streamed full in his face as he sat. Where was the smiling glance that might, surely, have made one swift scrutiny of their familiar faces, unseen so long? Where was the prayer of thanksgiving that he had been brought safely back to his people, after such an absence, and through so many dangers? Where was the joyful hymn of praise?

When Mr. Southard rose, he repeated only the Lord's prayer; and the first hymn he read was anything but joyful:

  "Nearer, my God, to thee,
     Nearer to thee,
   E'en though it be a cross
     That raiseth me."

"Dear me! doctor," Mrs. Lewis could not help whispering, "I do wish that for to-day, at least, he could have hidden the cross under the crown."

Not a single war-note, not a word of that Aceldama from which he had but just come, but an impassioned exhortation that, casting aside all differences, dissensions, and uncharitableness, they should love each other even as Christ had loved them.

Mr. Southard seldom displayed any strong feeling except indignation or a lofty fervor; but now he seemed deeply moved, and full of a yearning tenderness toward those whom he addressed. And they, after the first, forgot their disappointment, and were almost as much affected as he.

"Why do I choose for my text words which recall the sufferings of our divine Lord?" he asked. "And why do I select words of parting exhortation rather than words of greeting? Because the passion is not yet ended; because Christ is no more a king to-day than he was nineteen centuries ago; because even among those who call upon his name, his commands, his entreaties are disregarded. Still his sceptre is but a reed, his purple still covers the marks of the lash, his brow still bleeds under its crown. Lastly, because I am not a pastor returning joyfully to his flock, hoping for no more partings, but one who comes sorrowfully to say farewell, scarcely daring to hope for any other meeting with you.

"A pastor? And who is he that leadeth the flocks of the Lord? He to whom the divine Shepherd hath given the charge, bidding him go. Brethren, he has not spoken to me, save in rebuking. Instead of green pastures, I have led you in the desert. For still waters, I have brought you to the banks of Marah. Who is he in whose hands the baptismal waters are cleansing, who can bind man and woman as husband and wife, who can consecrate the bread and wine, who can loosen its burden from the penitent soul? He who, looking up the line of his spiritual descent, sees the tongues of fire alighting upon his ancestors in the Lord. Bear with me, my friends! At the head of my line stands the traitor who sat at meat with Christ, and ate the bread he broke, and drank the wine he blessed, and then betrayed him."

The congregation were too much startled and puzzled by this sudden turn to notice that Doctor Kenneth's head was bowed forward on the front of the pew, and that Aurelia Lewis was leaning with her face hidden on her aunt's shoulder.

But Mr. Southard saw them, and grew yet paler. When he spoke again, it was with difficulty.

"This is no place for me to stand and advocate doctrines denied by you. Yet surely it is no treason to the trust you reposed in me when you invited me to become your pastor, if I ask, if I entreat that you will examine fairly and prayerfully before you condemn my course.

"I dare not trust myself to thank you for all your past friendship for me, to utter my wishes for your future good, or to tell you how my heart is torn by this parting. I have only strength to go.

"Do you ask whither I am going? After years of mental torment unsuspected by you, and when at last my strength was deserting me, and the waters were going over my soul, where did I find refuge and safety? In that glorious old ship whose sails are full of the breath of the Spirit, who has faith for an anchor, the cross as her ensign, and St. Peter at the helm. Brethren, I am a Roman Catholic, thank God!"

Immediately the congregation were in confusion, and one gentleman stood up and called, "Stop, sir!"

The light that had sprung to Mr. Southard's face at the last words dropped out again. He leaned over the pulpit, and commanded silence with a gesture at once imploring and imperative.

"One word more!" he said. "Believe in my unaltered affection for you; and believe also that though my hands are not anointed to give benediction, I fervently pray that God may bless you now and for ever. Farewell!"

He turned away from them, and walked slowly toward the vestry-door. Before he had closed it behind him, a silence fell, and he heard Doctor Kenneth's trembling voice exclaim, "Let us pray!" Glancing back, Mr. Southard saw the old minister standing with upraised hands in his deserted pulpit.

Where he passed the rest of that day, the family did not know. It was early twilight when they saw him coming up the street toward the house. By that time they had recovered from their first excitement, all but Aurelia. She still kept her room.

Mr. Southard walked with a firm and dignified step, and his face was perfectly serene. He even smiled when he saw Margaret standing in the parlor window, watching for him.

"No servant shall open the door for him this time, at least," she thought, and hastened to open it herself.

"Welcome home!" she said exultingly, holding out both hands to him. "You did that nobly! A thousand times, welcome!"

Mr. Southard closed the door, then looked at her boldly, putting her hands back. "Do not mock my empty life with so slight a gift as mere kindness," he said. "If you give me your hand, give it to me to keep."

She stood one instant wavering, then gave him her hand again. "Keep it," she said.

Lingering behind him as he went to meet Mr. and Mrs. Lewis, Margaret flung her pledged hand upward as if she flung a gauge. "Louis Granger, you shall not look down and think that I am breaking my heart for you!"

Some one tells of a wind so strong that he could turn and lean his back against it, as against a post. Mr. Southard found some such effect as this in the excitement caused by his change of religion. For there are times when a strong opposition is wonderfully sustaining. It fans the flame, and keeps the soul in a lively glow, without any expenditure of our own breath.

Being thus saved the pains of maintaining his fervor, the new convert took up tranquilly his religious studies, viewing from the inside that church which heretofore he had seen only from the outside. The study was an ever fresh delight; and as, one after another, new beauties were revealed, and new harmonies unfolded themselves, the miracle seemed to be, not that he should see now, but that he should have been blind so long.

No one knows, save those who have been born away from this home of the soul, the full delight of that succession of surprises and discoveries in the search made by him who comes late to his father's house. The first dawn or flash of faith, come as faith may, shows only the door, and a dim and long-stretching perspective. But once inside, with what wonder, what curiosity, what incredulity, even, we wander about examining the treasures of this new-found inheritance of ours. {732} Surely, we say, here we shall be disappointed. Here there will be a shade on the picture. But, looking closely, we find instead a still more eminent beauty. Nor are these varied discoveries exhausted in a few months, nor in a few years, nor in many years. Even when the noon of life has been spent in the quest, and twilight comes, still there are

             "such suites to explore,
  Such closets to search, such alcoves to importune."

But the most spiritual of us are not all spirit; and when, after a few weeks, the storm of denunciation against him subsided a little, weary of its own violence, Mr. Southard began to feel the vacuum left by his loss of occupation, and to depend more on the home life.

Here the prospect was not without shadows. Mr. and Mrs. Lewis had behaved nobly, and, after the first shock, had stood by him through every trial. "Not that I am so fond of Catholicism," Mr. Lewis said. "But I like to see a man who has a mind of his own, and isn't afraid to speak it."

The shadow in this case was Mr. Lewis's niece, who showed an unconquerable coldness toward her former minister. This was not to him a matter of vital consequence, certainly, though it troubled him more than he would have expected. She had always looked up to him with undoubting faith as her religious guide. Now he perceived with pain and mortification that he had not only destroyed her respect for his own authority, but had made her distrustful of all authority.

"I do not occupy myself in criticising your conduct and opinions, Mr. Southard," she said; "and I would rather say nothing about it."

Neither was Miss Hamilton just what Mr. Southard wished his promised wife to be to him, though he could scarcely have told in what she was lacking. Her evident desire that for the present the engagement should be unsuspected, even by their own family, he did not find fault with, though it prevented all confidential intercourse between them; but he would have preferred that she had not been quite so positively friendly, and no more. It seemed a little odd, too, that he should never, even by accident, find her alone, though they had frequently met so in the old times.

Weary, at length, of waiting on chance, he requested an interview, and stated his wishes. He would like to go to Europe as soon as possible, and stay there a year. He could not feel himself settled in the church, till he had been in Rome a Catholic, having once been there an unbeliever. Of course he would expect to take his wife with him. Why should they delay. Why not be married at Christmas, and start so as to reach Rome before Easter?

Margaret grew pale. "It is so soon," she said in a frightened way. "And you know I cannot leave Dora. You might go without me." Then, as his countenance fell, she added, trying to smile, "I love my freedom, and want to keep it as long as I can. But when I do take bonds on myself, I shall be very dutiful."

"I do not think that you will lose any freedom which you need greatly desire to keep," he said gently, but with a shade of disapproval. "And as to Dora, Mrs. Lewis would take good care of her."

"Dora is a sacred charge to me, Mr. Southard," Margaret said hastily; "not only her person, but her faith. I cannot intrust her to any one else. Besides, she would break her heart if parted from me. No one else can comfort her when—when she needs comfort."

"I approve of your being careful to do your duty by the child," he said presently. "But, you know, some priest could have her religious education under his supervision while we are gone. I would not, on any account, urge you to violate a scruple of conscience. Possibly, however, if you should consult your confessor, he might decide that your duty to the child should bend to your duty to me."

Margaret's face blushed up crimson, and her eyes emitted a spark. "The confessor whom I shall consult when I name my wedding-day, will be my own heart," she said, in anything but a humble tone of voice.

Mr. Southard looked at her searchingly. "Can it be," he asked, "that a lack of affection on your part is the cause of this reluctance?"

"I esteem you highly, Mr. Southard," she replied faintly, shrinking a little. "But I am not very reasonable, and you must have patience with me. Please don't say any more now. This is very sudden. I will think of it."

"Very well," he replied. "Perhaps when you have thought, you may accede to my first proposal. It is not worth while to delay, you know, when one's mind is made up."

"I must go now with Dora to make her first confession," Margaret said, anxious to change the subject. "Will you excuse me? I am afraid the storm may grow worse. The rain is falling gently now; but you know the old proverb:

  'When the wind comes before the rain,
   You may hoist your topsails up again;
   But when the rain comes before the winds.
   You may reef when it begins.'"

"And a true proverb it is in more ways than one," Mr. Lewis said, appearing at that moment. "When my wife begins by flying at me and tearing my hair out, and then goes to crying afterward, I hope for fair weather soon. But when she starts with a gentle drip of tears, I always look out for squalls before it is over. Remember that for your future guidance, Mr. Southard."

Margaret escaped from the room, and in a few minutes was on her way to the church, with Dora half hidden under her cloak, and nestled close to her side. As she rode along, feeling, some way, as if they were flying from pursuit or from a prison, she experienced one of those tender touches of recollection with which the Spirit, ever following us, seeks to recall our wayward hearts. "What should I do if I had no church to go to?" was the thought that came; and as it came, the altar toward which she was approaching, glowed through the chill November rain like the fire in happy homes.

Outside, in the corridor leading to that familiar chapel of St. Valentine, endeared by so many sacred and tender memories, they paused a moment and recollected themselves.

"Do you truly think that he likes me?" whispered Dora apprehensively, glancing askance at the lambent little flame that burned inside.

"Oh! yes," was the confident answer. "He is very fond of you when you are good."

After an act of contrition on her own account, and a prayer for the child, Margaret led Dora to the confessional, placed her on her knees there, and, dropping the curtain behind her, retired to wait at a distance.

Verifying the proverb, it was blowing quite violently when the two started for home again. Margaret went directly up to her chamber, having need to be alone. What was it striving within her, what memory, almost at the surface of her mind, yet unseen, like a flower in spring just ready to burst through the mould that feels but knows it not? On her table was a bunch of English violets that some one had left there for her. At the sight of them, her trouble sharpened to pain that had yet some touch of delight in it. The wind was full of voices, it caught the rain, and lashed the windows, it shook the doors, and called sighingly about the chimneys, and swung the vines against the panes. As she leaned there wondering and troubled, a faint, sweet perfume from the violets stole into her face. It was magical. She sank on her knees and drew the flowers to her bosom.

How it came back, that rainy day at the seaside, the terror of the tempest, the fire she had kindled, the watch she had kept, the presentiment of sorrow, then the muffled figure coming down the road, the rain, the wind, and his smile, all meeting her at the door, and the perfume of the violets he had brought her!

Who knows not the power that perfumes have over the memory? The influence of sound is evanescent, that which the eyes have seen the imagination changes in time; but a perfume is the most subtile and indestructible of reminders. You have walked in the world's beaten ways many a year, till the country home of your childhood is a picture almost effaced from your mind. Its tones echo no more, its faces are faded, its scenes forgotten.

Some sultry summer day, wandering from the city, but only half weaned from the thoughts of it, your listlessly straying feet crush the warm, wild herbage, and a thick perfume of sweet-fern rises about you. What does it mean? Thrilling to your finger-tips, you bend and inhale that strange yet familiar scent. Its touch is as potent as the touch of the rod of Moses.

  "A score of years roll back their tide
     Of mingled joy and pain;
   Dry-shod I cross the torrent's bed,
     And am a child again."

Old scenes come up: gray rocks start out, lichen-jewelled; there are billows of butter-cups, mayweed, and clover, over which your young fancies sailed moth-winged, and brought rich freights from every port; the long lines of pole and stone fences are built up again in a twinkling; the boiling spring leaps bubbling into the heart of the sunshine; in the woods the cold, bright waters run hurrying over the pebbles; there is the homestead, the smoke from the chimney, the open windows, some one standing in the door, some one calling you with a voice as real as your breath; there are faces with eyes that see you, every feature plain, there are hands stretched out.

How it rises and tramples on your present, that past that hides but never dies! How your heart-strings strain with the vain longing to stay for ever in this bright, recovered country, and look no more on the desert and the land of bondage!

  "Flow back, O years! into your channel,
     Flow, and stop the way!
   Let me forget how vain the fancies
     Of that childish day."

If we did not know that every hope and sweetness in the past were but seeds for future blossom and fruit; if we did not know that childhood is but a bee's load of honey, but a babe's sip of milk, to those flowing streams in the promised land; if we did not believe that God's denial is brief, his bounty endless; that surely he sees and marks every pain; and that he holds the fulfilment of our utmost wish just at the verge of our utmost endurance—if we were not sure of this, could human nature bear the cross that sometimes is laid upon it? It could not!

Miss Hamilton did not appear at the dinner-table that day; but in the evening Mr. Southard was summoned to her in the library. She met him with an April face full of a grieved kind of joy, or a joyful grief, crossed the room toward him when he came in, and held out her hands to him.

"Forgive me!" she said hurriedly. "But, Mr. Southard, I cannot marry you. I made a mistake. Don't be angry with me. I cannot help it. And I think, too, that you mistook also."

"I should never have thought of marrying, if I had not been angry with him," she said. "That was wicked and foolish, and I have got over it now. We are reconciled. I shall never forget him."

"Am I to understand that your remembrance of Mr. Granger is a bar to your union with me?" asked Mr. Southard, regaining his composure.

She watched him go; and when the door had closed, broke into a soft laugh. "In exitu Israel;" she said. "I am free!"

The door opened again, and Mr. Lewis came in. "You here?" he said. "I want to get the first volume of—But what's the matter with you? I just met Mr. Southard going into his room. Have you promised to marry him?"

"I'm glad of it, Maggie," he said. My wife and Aurelia were sure that you and he would make a match; and I couldn't say anything against it. But I hated the thought of your forgetting him."

There was no danger, indeed, of her forgetting him. It was impossible for her. She had not one of those facile hearts that rest here and there, on whatever offers, growing worn and threadbare at last, till there is nothing left to give. Hers was an imperious constancy which, having once chosen, did not know how to change, and perpetually renewed itself, like a fountain, as fresh to-day as it was a century ago. Such affection does not absolutely need the happiness of earth; for its root is in the soul, not in the flesh, and the time of its perfecting is hereafter.

As there are plants that need crushing to bring out their perfume, so there are natures that become thoroughly amiable only through pain and humiliation. Mr. Southard's was one of these. Every blow that struck him made some breach in his puritanic severity, and revealed some hidden grace of mind or heart. He had possessed an intellectual humility, and had submitted himself with all the force of his reason. {736} But such humility is like the weight of snow that in winter presses the head of the slender sapling to earth, whence it is ever ready to spring back again at the first fiery sun-touch. It savored too much of the arrogant self-accusation of those who, as Mr. Lewis said, think they are the sun because they have spots on them. Now, he seemed really humble, he distrusted himself, and he accepted kindness with a gratitude that touched the hearts of those who gave it.

To Mrs. Lewis's surprise, he made a confident of her, and spoke quite freely of his disappointment.

"I do not blame Margaret," he said. "It was ungenerous of me to take advantage of her first moment of enthusiastic sympathy for me to exact a promise from her. But the temptation was strong. Existence with her would never be mere vegetation. She always gets at the inside of life. However, since God has willed it otherwise for me, I shall try to act like a Christian and like a sensible man. All the difference it makes in my plans is that I shall go away a little sooner."

They were sorry to have him go; for their esteem for him had insensibly grown into affection, and their affection constantly increased.

"I declare, I had no idea that I should feel so bad about it," Mr. Lewis said when the time came for good-byes. "Give me your shawl to take out. I am going to the depot with you."

Margaret and Dora had taken leave of Mr. Southard, and were standing in one of the front windows, watching to see him off. Mrs. Lewis walked slowly out of the parlor with him.

"Oh! she told me to say good-by for her," answered Mrs. Lewis carelessly. He hesitated, and looked hurt. "I suppose she doesn't care to take the trouble to see me," he said. "Tell her I said good-by, and God bless her."

"'Doesn't care to take the trouble!" she repeated indignantly. "It is rather you who haven't cared to treat her with common gratitude or civility. You have had eyes for only Miss Hamilton, who didn't care a fig for you; while Aurelia, the poor simpleton! who made a hero of you, and broke her heart because you were in disgrace with the world and disappointed in love—you hadn't a glance for. No; I won't say good-by to her. I will let her believe that you went without remembering her existence, as you came near doing. It will help her to forget you. There, take that with my blessing, and good-by. The carriage is waiting."

"Where is she?" he exclaimed, his whole face changed, and become alive all at once. "I shall not stir from the house till I have seen her, if I have to wait a year."

"What will Miss Hamilton think of your constancy?" asked Mrs. Lewis with a toss of the head.

"Madam," said Mr. Southard, "for me there is but one woman in the world, and that is she who loved me without waiting to be asked. Will you be so good as to tell Aurelia that I wish to see her in the library?"

He went toward the library, and Mrs. Lewis leisurely returned to the parlor, a curious little smile on her lips.

Aurelia Lewis was seated before the library fire, with her hands folded in her lap.

As Mr. Southard paused an instant at sight of her, then came hastily in and shut the door after him, she rose and looked at him with an air of dignified composure. Her face was perfectly colorless.

"Is it true," he began at once, "that you have sympathized with me more than I knew? Tell me! A disappointment now would be too cruel."

Aurelia's full bright eyes opened a little wider, and a faint color warmed her cheeks; but she seemed too much astonished or too indignant to speak. Yet after the first glance, she drooped a little, and leaned on the back of her chair, as if, like that fair Jewish queen, for delicateness and overmuch tenderness, she were not able to bear up her own body.

How pure and sweet she was! Silent as dew. How utterly womanly her untainted loveliness!

After ten minutes Mr. Lewis put his head out of the carriage door, and made a sign to his wife, who was benevolently contemplating him from the parlor. She raised the window.

"He is saying good-by to Aurelia," was the reply; and the window went down again.

Minutes passed, but no Mr. Southard appeared. It was the day before Christmas, and the air was too sharp to make a long tarrying out doors agreeable.

"I've heard of eternal farewells, but I never before had the honor of assisting at one," muttered Mr. Lewis; and having waited as long as endurance seemed a virtue, he went into the house.

"Will you tell me what she means? I don't believe her. She always puts on that truthful look when she tells a lie."

In something less than half an hour Mr. Southard and Aurelia made their appearance. They were received with great cordiality.

"I hope you liked your journey to Europe," said Mr. Lewis with immense politeness. "Is the pope in good health?"

Mr. Southard was beyond the reach of mocking. "I have postponed my journey till this lady can be ready to accompany me," he said. "And I have convinced her that four weeks will be enough for her preparation."

Aurelia went to lean on Margaret's shoulder. She was trembling, but her face showed full contentment. "I would rather be Esther than Vashti," she whispered.

"I'm delighted enough to forgive you even a greater impertinence than that, if greater could be," was the whispered answer. "I am not Vashti, though you are Esther."

The next day, after coming home from early mass, Margaret sat in her chamber toward the east, with Dora and her two friends, Agnes and Violet, leaning on her lap, and watching her face. She had been telling them the story of that miraculous birth, and, finishing, looked up into the morning sky, and forgot them; forgot the sky, too, presently, with all its vapory golden stretches, and glimpses of far-away blue, and saw instead her life past, present, and to come. Looking calmly, she forgave herself much, for had not God forgiven her? and hoped much, for there was no room for despair; and grew content, for all that she could desire was within her reach.

Beginning at the lowest, she had an assured home, kind friends, and a dear and sacred duty in the care of this child. So far, all was peace.

One step higher then. Could the friend who still lived on in her heart forget her in that heaven to which her love had led him? And, weak and childish though she was, with her impatience, her scarcely broken pride, her obstinately clinging affection, could she be altogether unlovely to him? Some strong assurance answered no.

Higher yet her thought took its stand. There was faith, that second sight by which the soul sets her steps aright as she climbs, never missing the way. There was an unfading hope, and a charity that embraced the world. There was God. And all were hers!

As Margaret sat there, the three children leaned motionless, hushing themselves lest they should break that beautiful trance. It was no momentary glow of enthusiasm, no mere uprising of feeling; for mounting slowly, through pain, and doubt, and weakness, she had reached at last the heights of her soul, and saw a wide, bright daybreak over the horizon of a loftier life.

A Glimpse Of Ireland.

I had long cherished the desire to visit Ireland, a country for many reasons so interesting to every American Catholic. The opportunity of making a brief tour in Europe during a summer vacation having unexpectedly presented itself, I determined, therefore, to leave the steamer at Queenstown and make the journey to London by way of Dublin. On the 29th of July, 1867, after a remarkably pleasant passage, we found ourselves, at an early hour of the morning, in sight of the famous Skellig rocks—called by sailors the Bull, Cow, and Calf—and thus gained the welcome advantage of sailing all day in sight of the Irish coast. The first impression one receives from the appearance of the country between Valentia and Cork is sad and desolate; in harmony with the tragic history of the suffering, oppressed race, whose home is seen for the first time, by the voyager from the New World, under one of its most barren and lonely aspects. The only interest which can attract the eye and the mind is that of a sort of wild and rugged grandeur, coupled with the historical associations which give a charm to the names of Bantry and Dingle. The lonely waters, where scarcely a sail was to be seen during the live-long day, told of the suppression of the industrial and commercial life of the Irish nation by the long-continued tyranny of that power which absorbs all its resources to feed its own greatness.

The long, barren stretches, showing scarcely a sign of vegetable, animal, or human life, where for miles one could see only here and there a little shealing and a few sheep cropping the brown, scanty herbage, seemed to give the lie to the well-known, and, as I afterward saw, well deserved appellation of "the Emerald Isle." {739} Expressions of surprise escaped from some of my fellow-passengers, agreeable and intelligent American gentlemen, who, like myself, were on their maiden trip to Europe; and from some others of the party who were children of Irish parents, looking for the first time on the land of their exiled ancestors. The coast is frequently steep and precipitous, suggesting to the memory the many tales of shipwreck in wild nights of tempest one has read in boyhood. The Martello towers stand at intervals along the horizon, like gigantic watchmen looking out seaward to spy the smuggler or the foreign invader, and in the distance the line of the Kerry Mountains completes the view of the wild, desolate landscape. The heights of Bantry are rendered for ever sacred and memorable by the martyrdom of the Franciscan fathers, Donald and Healy, in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. They were revisiting the ruined monastery of Bantry, for the purpose of ministering to the spiritual wants of their poor, persecuted flock, when they were seized by the agents of the glorious reformation, tied back to back, and hurled headlong down the precipice into the ocean. What a wonder that the Irish people are so insensible to the value of a gospel brought to them with so much pains and trouble, so kindly presented to them, enforced by such lovely examples of Christian virtue, and supported so long, notwithstanding their obstinacy, at such great expense!

Early in the morning, we stopped our engines off the Cove of Cork, a little steamer boarded us, the freight and baggage were speedily, though, in the case of rocking-chairs, not very safely, tumbled aboard of her decks, under the herculean direction of our fat boatswain. Three cheers went up from the City of Paris, which steamed off grandly for Liverpool, and we puffed in, not grandly but very pleasantly, toward Queenstown. The Cove of Cork is world-renowned for its beauty and excellence as a haven for ships, but desolate-looking from the fact that it is better supplied with fortresses, cannon, and ships of war than with the peaceful, plenty-bringing steamers and sailing-vessels of commerce. I once heard a little American boy utter the exclamation, as we were entering the port of Havana and espied the soldiers on duty, "How afraid they must be, guarding everything that way!" It appears to be the same case in Ireland. The English government is very much afraid of its Irish subjects, if we may measure its fears by the display of force which meets the eye everywhere. The only consolation which a sincere lover of the Irish people can find in looking upon this state of things is, that, since the endurance of this coercive tyranny is for the time a necessary evil, the force is so very irresistible as effectually to prevent the bloody horrors which would follow a general insurrection. A young English officer, whom I met at the hotel in Cork, expressed his regret that an open rebellion had not broken out, which, he said, would have been an affair of a month, and which of course would only have increased the miseries and riveted the chains of the Irish people. For myself, I could not help shuddering at the thought of the fearful tragedy which would have been enacted if the people had been goaded by demagogues to such an attempt, and blessing God that the efforts of these madmen had failed. It is plain enough that Ireland cannot be governed in this way much longer. {740} There is but one hope and one method for the English crown to retain Ireland as a portion of the British empire; which is, to win the willing loyalty of the people by an ample redress of their grievances, and the inauguration of a policy which has in view the real good of the Irish people.

Our little steamer landed us at about eight in the evening; the officers were very polite and obliging, and we were soon ashore on the sacred soil, with our luggage in the hands of a couple of lively gossoons, and our steps free to go anywhere we pleased.

As soon as one steps ashore on the Irish soil, he feels that he is in the land of frolic and drollery. The irrepressible and indomitable spirit of the Celtic race rebounds under the strokes of adversity like an india-rubber ball under the blows of a bat. "The harder you do knock him down, the higher he do bounce." My fellow-voyagers who came ashore at Queenstown fell into a state of hilarity at once which was wonderful to behold, and which continued during their whole stay in Ireland. They held their sides and laughed uproariously, not, be it understood, with any feeling of contempt or ridicule—for they were gentlemen, and altogether free from snobbish prejudice or religious bigotry—but from pure, genial sympathy with the comedy which was going on in the crowd that pressed eagerly around the welcome passengers from America, contending for their luggage. Old women whose vivacity old age had only sharpened, and little boys who were so many Flibbertigibbets in fun and smartness, with huge cars drawn by diminutive donkeys, on which they piled pyramids of trunks, if they were lucky enough to get them; boys with barrows, and boys with only hands and shoulders—struggled and jibed and danced and scolded, and rushed upon every passenger as he emerged from the barrier, in a good humored and tumultuous manner that can only be appreciated by one who has seen it. We pushed off for the last train to Cork, followed by a dozen runners of the Queenstown hotels, vociferating the praises of their several houses, assuring us that the train had left five minutes before, and urging us most affectionately to go up the next morning after a good night's sleep, by the boat, that we might enjoy the scenery of the beautiful river Lee. This piece of advice was good, and I recommend every traveller to follow it. We turned a deaf ear to it, however, reached the train in time, and in half an hour were comfortably deposited in the well-known and most excellent Imperial Hotel of Cork.

The rather singular English name of Cork is not, as one is apt to suppose, our common word designating a certain very light substance, and applied without any reason or propriety that anybody can see to a very substantial city and county. It is a corruption of the Irish word Carroch, signifying a valley, which has been Anglicized, like many other foreign words, by a most perverse and stupid English custom of changing them into English words of somewhat similar sound. The first beginning of the city was a monastery founded in the seventh century by St. Finnbar, whom I recognized as an old acquaintance, from the cathedral dedicated to his honor at Charleston, S. C., by the illustrious Bishop England, who was a native of Cork. The old cathedral of St. Finnbar, which was rebuilt in 1735, has been demolished, to make way for a new one, which I most devoutly hope may never be built on the sacred spot consecrated by the ancient Irish monk until this shall revert to its rightful possessors. {741} Another holy site, that of Gil Abbey, which is extremely picturesque and beautiful, is occupied by the Queen's College. The Sisters of Mercy are fortunate enough to possess another pleasant spot, rising to a wooded hill, which was also the seat of an ancient monastery, and where is now situated their very neat and commodious convent. There are three very good Catholic churches in the city—St. Patrick's, St. Mary's, and Holy Trinity; the latter founded by F. Matthew, and containing a stained glass window as a memorial of O'Connell. The Mardyke, an avenue shaded with elms for the distance of a mile, is a pleasant walk, and I passed an hour there in company with a small party of friends, from New York, in a most amusing and agreeable manner, surrounded by a group of children with whom we soon established a most intimate friendship by means of plums. The Irish children are remarkable for their beauty, their blooming health, and for a mixture of fun and innocence, of brightness and simplicity, of boldness and modesty, indicating a state as near to that of unfallen childhood as I can imagine. The pranks of the young Corkonians afford a source of unfailing amusement to the stranger within their gates; but I was most amused by the boys with donkeys, who were to be seen riding in state to school in the morning, and, in the afternoon, all about the environs scattered in groups on the grass, ready to exchange a biting sarcasm with every passing coachman, while their dear little friends, the donkeys, fed quietly near by. It would be useless, however, to attempt to describe all that is droll and comic in the population of Cork, for it seems as if it were the business of their lives to be as funny as they can, for their own delight and that of the beholder.

Cork is a fine, well-built town, of 90,000 inhabitants, the third in importance in Ireland. The environs are extremely beautiful. I was there at midsummer; the weather was perfect, and I could see to the best advantage the tilth and verdure which make the Emerald Isle so famous. Certainly, they have not been exaggerated, and no one can wonder at the praise which the Irishman bestows upon his soil, or the intense love which he cherishes for it. I only wonder that those who were born and bred there can ever be contented elsewhere; and surely nothing but the most unendurable poverty and want would ever drive such numbers of them into exile. Perhaps the most picturesque objects which meet the eye, in the country, are the white farm-houses with thatched roofs, standing in their neat little flower-gardens, their walls covered with honeysuckle or other creeping vines. The only thought which mars the pleasure of looking on the rich meadows, the waving fields, the herds of superb cattle, and flocks of fat sheep, is, that the outward show of beauty and prosperity is obtained by the sacrifice of the poor people, and enjoyed by a small number only. If you drive out, your carriage is followed by a troop of ragged, fleet-footed young beggars; and if you chance to pass a factory when the hour for stopping work has come, you may see a long procession of young women, bareheaded, barefooted, ragged, and emaciated, who are glad to work for a shilling a day.

The most interesting place to visit in the neighborhood of Cork is Blarney Castle. I am ashamed to say that I was afraid to go on a jaunting-car, although at Dublin I made the experiment with great success and pleasure. It seemed to me, when I looked at the jaunting-car for the first time, that it would shake one off as soon as it turned a corner. {742} We accordingly drove out to Blarney in an open carriage, going by the road to Kanturk, and returning by Sunday-Well road. Aside from the merely jocose associations of the Blarney-stone, the old, ivy-clad tower is an extremely interesting and picturesque object, and the grounds of the demesne, so celebrated in Irish lyrics, are charming. The cromlech and pillar stones, on which are inscriptions in the ancient Ogham characters, carry back the imagination to an antiquity almost without limits, and suggest the thought that perhaps as long ago as the time of King David, or even the Exodus, Druids may have performed their sacred rites in these still groves. Our guide was a poor little sickly humpbacked boy of sixteen rejoicing in the sobriquet of Lord John Russell, and possessing very sharp wits and inexhaustible good-humor. Every one about the castle seemed to take especial delight in a standing joke at his expense, that he was an old man with a heavy family. The poor fellow seemed to enjoy our company very much, and expressed the intention of emigrating to America. The only reason he could give was that the weather was too warm in summer at Blarney. At the castle gate his jurisdiction terminated, and we were handed over to another amusing original, the lame old gardener, who has many a story to tell of Walter Scott, and Tom Moore, and Father Prout. As for the Blarney-stone, I will not say how many of our party kissed it. In Lord John Russell's opinion, there was no need of our doing so; he was sure we had one of our own in America which we had all kissed frequently before leaving home. Whoever has spent an afternoon at Blarney, in genial company, will admit that it was one of the pleasantest days of his life, if his soul is not too full of steam and railroads to be capable of simple and natural enjoyments.

The journey by rail from Cork to Dublin is a most tantalizing one. Flying at full speed through several counties, one catches glimpses at every moment of places and scenes of historic interest and natural or artificial beauty, which he longs to visit and inspect at leisure. The distance is one hundred and sixty-five miles; the railway is an admirable one; everything about the way stations is neat and attractive, and the route passes in a direct line through the counties of Cork, Limerick, Tipperary, King's, Queen's, and Kildare. Among the objects of interest which are passed are the abbeys of Mourne, Bridgetown, Kilmallock, Knocklong, Holy Cross, Thurles, Templemore, Moore Abbey, Old Connell, Kildare Cathedral, with St. Bridget's chapel; the castles of Barrett, Carrignacenny, Kilcolman, which the poet Spenser received as his share in the spoliation; Charleville; the Rock of Dunamase, with the ruins of Strongbow's Castle; the Rock of Cashel; the Hill of Allen, where Fin McCoul lived; several round towers; the famous bog of Allen; the Curragh of Kildare; and quantities of others—which keep one perpetually, and to a great extent vainly, looking out of window, first on one side, then on the other, while you are hurried over a country every step of which is rich in history, poetry, and legend, and should be slowly traversed on foot and at leisure. Three of my agreeable companions of the voyage were with me in the same carriage; a very pleasing gentleman, with his son, a bright youth of sixteen, joined us an hour or two before reaching Dublin, and they were as curious about America, especially Indians, and our sea-voyage, as we were about the antiquities and curiosities of Ireland. {743} Our trip was therefore wanting in nothing to make it lively and agreeable, and we were finally deposited at the Gresham Hotel, Sackville street, Dublin, in high good humor, and quite ready for a good dinner.

As I had only that evening and the following day to remain in Dublin, I was obliged to content myself with a superficial view of the city, and a visit to a few places of particular interest. In its general features, Dublin is at least equal to our finest American towns of the same class, although more quiet, and showing signs of stagnation in commercial prosperity. Its agreeable climate makes it a delightful place of residence at all seasons of the year, especially in the summer.

My first visit was made to the scene of the life and labors of the saintly Catherine McAuley, foundress of the Sisters of Mercy, the convent in Baggott street, where also repose her mortal remains—a lovely spot for the cradle of a religious order, and suggestive of the time, I hope not far distant, when Ireland shall once again be full of these sacred homes of the monastic life, as she was before the spoliation of her holy places by the ruthless minions of Henry and Elizabeth. I visited also Clontarf, the scene of Brian Boru's decisive victory over the Danes, and death, and went to see what is said to have been his harp, and is undoubtedly a relic of very ancient times, at the museum of Trinity College. The college is a most attractive place, and delightfully situated, on ground of course originally stolen from the Catholic Church, and endowed out of the spoils of monasteries. Quite in keeping with its origin is the fact that its library contains a large number of valuable manuscript records, originally stolen from the papal archives. The learned body which rules within its classic halls has also made itself remarkable by sustaining a claim, perhaps the most absurd ever advanced by persons professing to be scholars, namely, that the Protestant Church of Ireland is the lineal and legitimate successor, in a direct, unbroken line, of the ancient church of Saint Patrick. This is adding insult to injury. As if it were not enough to rob the Irish people of their property, to persecute, torture, exile, and massacre them by millions, on account of their fidelity to their hereditary faith, their title to the very name of Catholic must be denied to them, and arrogated for the intruders who have forced themselves into their heritage by the point of the bayonet and the violation of treaties. Two terrible antagonists have arisen, however, out of their own camp to smite these pretenders; Dr. Maziere Brady, an Irish Protestant clergyman, and Froude, the English historian. The former gentleman, in several learned and unanswerable works, has demonstrated the regular, unbroken succession of the present Catholic hierarchy and people of Ireland, from the bishops and faithful who preceded the reign of Henry VIII., and has shown that the Irish Protestant Church is nothing but an English colony. The learned and accomplished Dr. Moran, also, whom I had the pleasure of meeting, has written with great ability and research upon the same topics.

Stephen's Green, which is near by Trinity College, witnessed the burning of the heroic martyr Archbishop O'Hurley, tortured and put to death, at the instigation of the infamous Loftus, archbishop of Dublin. A few days later, I saw in the private chapel of Archbishop Manning, at London, a cloth stained with the blood of Archbishop Plunkett, another illustrious martyr, who was publicly executed by the English government on false charges. {744} I venerate the relics of the older martyrs, and the places made sacred by the hallowed memories of other countries and ages far remote; but nothing stirs my blood like the holy mementoes of the men who suffered in Ireland and England, for the faith, under the tyranny of the apostate sovereigns and bishops of Great Britain. These men are our fathers in the faith, the heroes who fought our battles, from whom we have received the precious heritage we enjoy in comparative peace. Their memory ought to be kept alive and honored among us, in every possible way, as a powerful incitement to imitate their example, and a means of endearing to our people that religion which has been handed down, bathed in the blood of so many noble Christians.

St. Patrick's Cathedral is the most interesting and venerable monument of antiquity in Dublin. My fellow-travellers were astonished at seeing a Protestant St. Patrick's, with a statue of the great apostle over the principal door. Probably most Americans who have not made themselves specially familiar with Irish history fancy that most of the fine churches of Dublin are Catholic churches. Perhaps many of them are not aware that every church, graveyard, glebe-house, abbey, every rood of land, every building, and every farthing of revenue belonging to the Catholic Church in Ireland, has been confiscated by the English government. In Dublin, out of eighty-four churches, forty belonged to the English church, and only twenty to the Catholics, in 1866. At the close of the last century there was not a Catholic church in Dublin, nor could there be one according to law. All the churches and other institutions in Dublin are therefore the creation of the present century, the fruit of the free-will offerings of the poor people, and a few wealthy persons, such as Catherine McAuley, who consecrated her handsome fortune entirely to religion.

St. Patrick's dates from the year 1190, though the spire was added in the fourteenth century. It has been thoroughly repaired and renovated, at a cost of one hundred thousand pounds, which was given by the well-known brewer, Mr. Guinness. It contains one of St. Patrick's holy wells, which is visible through an opening in the floor, and guarded with great respect. Tradition says that the saint baptized the first Irish convert in this fountain. This is probably not true; but it is very likely that he did use it for baptism, and perhaps baptized in it the first converts in that part of the country. There are some ancient monuments of bishops and knights, and some modern ones of persons who have figured during the Protestant ascendency—Brown and Loftus, Swift, Stella, and the late Dr. Whately, who was Dr. Trench's immediate predecessor. It is painful enough to see the old churches and abbeys of England in the hands of aliens from the faith, although the mass of the people have fallen away and cannot appreciate the fearful loss they have suffered, in the substitution of a creature of parliament in the place of the spouse of Christ. In Ireland, where the people remain fervently and devoutly Catholic, it is a far more painful sight to witness their ancient shrines and holy places in the hands of the descendants of their spoilers, who are unable to make any use, even for Protestant worship, of the greater part of them. {745} While the respectable sexton, whose appearance was that of a faded dean, was showing me the church for the consideration of a shilling, I was busily occupied in my own mind invoking St. Patrick to take his own again, bring back the altars, restore the unbloody sacrifice, and cause the chants of High Mass to resound once more within the walls of the venerable cathedral dedicated to his honor. It is a great consolation to reflect that since then the death-blow has been levelled at the state church by the same power which created it. And although justice has not yet been done to the Catholic people of Ireland, or any step taken to restore to them the sacred property of which they have been robbed, there is the greatest reason to hope that, in the course of events, they will yet regain it by fair and peaceable means, without violence or revolution.

Two other objects which interested me greatly, were the chamber of the Irish House of Lords, preserved still in the same state as when the last session was held in it, and the tomb of O'Connell, at the beautiful cemetery of Glasnevin.

The next morning I bade adieu to Ireland from the deck of the Kingstown and Holyhead steamer, and although it was only a passing glimpse I had obtained of this fair island, I shall always be thankful to have had even this glimpse.

Ireland has the strongest claims on the love and gratitude of all Catholics throughout the English-speaking world. Her Celtic race, although distinct in character, language, and history from the people whose mother tongue is English, has been brought into such close relations with it, and is now blending with it to such a remarkable extent in this country, and other British colonies, that its history becomes as interesting to us as the early history of England. Moreover, although a handful of English and Scotch remained true to the faith during the revolution of the sixteenth century, it is to Ireland that is due the honor of holding aloft the banner of religion, around which are now grouped one fifth of the bishops owning allegiance to St. Peter. American converts are especially bound to gratitude to that Irish people who, above all others, have been the founders of the Catholic Church throughout the largest portion of our republic. For fourteen centuries, that people has handed down and witnessed to the faith which St. Patrick brought from France and Rome in the fifth century, when St. Augustine was yet scarcely cold in his grave. Without disparaging the great services which other nationalities have rendered to religion in our country, it is undoubted that, in our portion of it, it is through the Irish succession chiefly that we communicate with past ages, and through their rich life-blood that our Catholicity has become vigorous. As Catholics and as Americans, we are the natural friends of Ireland and the Irish. One very good and pleasant way of showing this friendship is, for those who have money enough to travel, to spend a portion of their time and money in Ireland. The advantage will be mutual. Those who are in search of health, pleasure, and improvement, cannot spend a month or two more delightfully or beneficially than on such a tour. On the other hand, the money spent, whether in purchases or in alms to the poor, will do great good, and the sympathy, kindness, respect for their religion and themselves, manifested toward the people so long borne down by the peine forte et dure of oppression and contempt, will be fully appreciated by their warm hearts, and encourage them to hope for the full coming of that better day whose dawning already appears in the horizon.

It is much to be desired that the good beginning already made by several excellent writers, in publishing books on the religious history of Ireland, should be actively followed up. A well-written, popular history, with illustrations, of all the principal places of interest in the secular and ecclesiastical history of the country, with sketches of the monastic institutions formerly flourishing; of the old churches, and episcopal sees; and lives of the saints and great men who have flourished, especially the martyrs, would be of the greatest service to religion. Such a volume would enable the Catholic tourist to visit the country with the greatest possible advantage and pleasure, beside the more important help it would give in strengthening the faith and devotion of the rising generation in Ireland, and the countries to which she has sent her colonies. The richest and most abundant field is open to literature of all kinds, both of the lighter and the more solid character, and it is to be hoped that it will be thoroughly explored and well worked by those who are true and faithful to the ancient, valiantly defended faith of the Island of Saints.

Primeval Man.

[Footnote 186: Primeval Man. An Examination of some Recent Speculations. By the Duke of Argyll. New York: Routledge & Sons. 1869. 16mo, pp. 210.]

There are few more active or able members of the English House of Lords or of the British ministry than the Scottish Duke of Argyll, and, if we could forget the treason to the Stuarts and the Scottish nation of some of his ancestors, there are few scholars and scientific men in the United Kingdom whom we should be disposed to treat with greater respect. He is at once a statesman, a scientist, and a theologian; and in all three capacities has labored earnestly to serve his country and civilization. In politics, he is, of course, a whig, or, as is now said, a liberal; as a theologian, he belongs to the Kirk of Scotland, and may be regarded as a Calvinist; as a man of science, his aim appears to be to assert the freedom and independence of science, without compromising religion. His work on the Reign of Law, reviewed and sharply criticised in this magazine for February, 1868, was designed to combat the atheistic tendencies of modern scientific theories, by asserting final causes, and resolving the natural laws of the physicists into the direct and immediate will of God.

In the present work, quite too brief and sketchy, he treats of the primeval man, and maintains man's origin in the creative act of God, against the developmentists and natural selectionists, which is well, as far as it goes. He treats, also, of the antiquity of man, and of his primeval condition. He appears disposed to allow man a higher antiquity than we think the facts in the case warrant; but, though he dissents, to some extent, from the theory of the late Anglican Archbishop of Dublin, we find him combating with great success the savage theory of Sir John Lubbock, who maintains that man began in the lowest form of barbarism in which he can subsist as man, and has risen to his present state of civilization by his own spontaneous and unassisted efforts—a theory just now very generally adopted in the non-Catholic world, and assumed as the basis of the modern doctrine of progress—the absurdest doctrine that ever gained currency among educated men.

The noble duke very properly denies the origin of species in development, and the production of new species by "natural selection," as Darwin holds, and acceded to by Sir Charles Lyell and an able writer in The Quarterly for last April. The duke maintains that man was created man, not developed from a lower species, from the tadpole or monkey. But, while he asserts the origin of species in the creative act of God, he supposes God supplies extinct species by creating new species by successive creative acts; thus losing the unity of the creative act, placing multiplicity in the origin of things, and favoring that very atheistical tendency he aims to war against. His Reign of Law, though well-intended, and highly praised by our amiable friend, M. Augustin Cochin, of Le Correspondant, showed us that the noble author has failed both in his theology and philosophy. In resolving the natural laws into the will of God enforcing itself by power, he fails to recognize any distinction between first cause and second cause, and, therefore, between the natural and the supernatural. God does all, not only as first cause, or causa eminens, as say the theologians, but as the direct and immediate actor, which, of course, is pantheism, itself only a form of atheism. Yet we know not that his grace could have done better, with Calvinism for his theology, and the Scottish school, as finished by Sir William Hamilton, for his philosophy. To have thoroughly refuted the theories against which he honorably protests, he must have known Catholic theology, and the Christian view of the creative act.

We have no disposition, at present, to discuss the antiquity either of man or the globe. If the fact that God, in the beginning, created heaven and earth, and all things therein, visible and invisible, is admitted and maintained, we know not that we need, in the interest of orthodoxy, quarrel about the date when it was done. Time began with the externization of the divine creative act, and the universe has no relation beyond itself, except the relation of the creature to the creator. Considering the late date of the Incarnation, we are not disposed to assign man a very high antiquity, and no geological or historical facts are, as yet, established that require it for their explanation. We place little confidence in the hasty inductions of geologists.

But the primitive condition of man has for us a deeper interest; and we follow the noble duke with pleasure in his able refutation of the savage theory of Sir J. Lubbock. Sir John evidently holds the theory of development, and that man has been developed from a lower species. He assumes that his primitive human state was the lowest form of barbarism in which he can subsist as man. With regard to man's development from lower animals, it is enough to say that development cannot take place except where there are living germs to be developed, and can only unfold and bring out what is contained in them. But we find in man, even in the lowest form of savage life, elements, language or articulate speech, for instance, of which there are no germs to be found in the animal kingdom. We may dismiss that theory and assume at once that man was created, and created man. But was his condition in his primitive state that of the lowest form of barbarism? Is the savage the primitive man, or the degenerate man? {748} The former is assumed in almost every scientific work we meet; it is defended by all the advocates of the modern doctrine that man is naturally progressive. Saint-Simon, in his Nouveau Christianisme, asserts that paradise is before us, not behind us; and even some who accept the Biblical history have advanced so little in harmonizing their faith with what they call their science, that they do not hesitate to suppose that man began his career, at least after the prevarication of Adam, in downright savagism. Even the learned Döllinger so far falls in with the modern theory as to make polished gentilism originate in disgusting fetichism.

The noble duke sufficiently refutes the theory of Sir John Lubbock, but does not seem to us to have fully grasped and refuted the assumptions on which it is founded. "His two main lines of argument," he says, (page 5,) "connect themselves with the two following propositions, which he undertakes to prove, First, that there are indications of progress even among savages; and second, that among civilized nations there are traces of barbarism."

The first proposition is not proved or provable. The characteristic of the savage is to be unprogressive. Some tribes may be more or less degraded than others. The American Indian ranks above the New Hollander; but, whether more or less degraded, we never find savages lifting themselves by their own efforts into even a comparatively civilized state. Niebuhr says there is no instance on record of a savage tribe having become a civilized people by its own spontaneous efforts; and Heeren remarks that the description of the tribes eastward of the Persian Gulf along the borders of the Indian Ocean, by the companions of Alexander, applies perfectly to them as we now find them. No germs of civilized life are to be found among them, or, if so, they are dead, not living germs, incapable of development. The savage is a thorough routinist, the slave of petrified customs and usages. He shows often great skill in constructing and managing his canoe, in making and ornamenting his bow or his war-club; but one generation never advances on its predecessor, and the new generation only reproduces the old. All the arts the savage has have come, as his ideas, to a stand-still. He is stern, sad, gloomy, as if oppressed by memory, and exhibits none of the joyousness or frolicsomeness which we might expect from his fresh young life, if he represented the infancy or childhood of the race, as pretended.

Even in what are called civilized heathen nations we find a continual deterioration, but no indication of progress in civilization, or in those elements which distinguish civilized from barbaric or savage life. Culture and polish may be the concomitants of civilization, but do not constitute it. The generations that built the pyramids, Babylon, Nineveh, Thebes, Rome, were superior to any of their successors. No subsequent Greek poet ever came up to Homer, and the oldest of the Vedas surpass the powers of the Indian people in any generation more recent than that which produced them. The Chinese cannot to-day produce new works to compare with those of Confucius. Where now are the once renowned nations of antiquity whose ships ploughed every sea, and whose armies made the earth tremble with their tread? Fallen, all have fallen, and remain only in their ruins, and the page of the historian or song of the bard. {749} If these nations, so great and powerful, with many elements of a strong civilization, could not sustain themselves from falling into barbarism, how pretend that the lowest and most degraded savages can, without any foreign assistance, lift themselves into a civilized state?

The second proposition, that civilized nations retain traces of barbarism, proves nothing to the purpose. These traces, at most, prove only that the nations in which we detect them have passed through a state of barbarism, as we know modern nations have; not that barbarism was, in any form, the primitive condition of the race. It is not pretended that no savage tribe has ever been civilized; what is denied is, that the race began in the savage state, or that, if it had so begun, it could ever have risen by its own natural forces alone to civilization. There is no evidence that the cruel and bloody customs, traces of which we find in civilized nations, were those of the primeval man. The polished and cultivated Romans were more savage in their customs than the northern barbarians who overthrew their civilization, much to the relief of mankind. When the late Theodore Parker drew a picture of the New Zealander in order to describe Adam, he proceeded according to his theory of progress, but without a shadow of authority. We find a cruelty, an inhumanity, an oppression, bloody and obscene rites, among polished nations—as Rome, Syria, Phoenicia, and modern India—that we shall look in vain for among downright savages; which shows that we owe them to cultivation, to development, that is, to "development," as the noble duke well says, "in corruption."

But these traces of so-called barbarism among civilized nations are more than offset by remains of civilization which we find in savage tribes. Sir J. Lubbock and others take these remains as indications of progress among savages; but they mistake the evening twilight deepening into darkness, for that of the morning ushering in the day. This is evident from the fact that they are followed by no progress. They are reminiscences, not promises. If germs, they never germinate; but have been deprived of their vitality. To us, paganism bears witness in all its forms that it has degenerated from its normna, or type; not that it is advancing toward it. We see in its incoherence, its incongruities and inequalities, that it is a fall or departure from something higher, more living and more perfect. Any one studying Protestantism, in any of its forms, may see that it is not an original system of religion; that it is a departure from its type, not an approach to it; and, if we know well the Catholic Church, we see at once that in her is the type that Protestantism loses, corrupts, or travesties. So paganism bears unmistakable evidence of what we know from authentic history, that, whether with polished gentiles or with rude savages and barbarians, its type, from which it recedes, is the patriarchal religion. We know that it was an apostasy or falling away from that religion, the primitive religion of the race, as Protestantism is an apostasy or falling away from the Catholic Church. Protestantism, in the modern world, is what gentilism was in the ancient; and as gentilism is the religion of all savage or barbarian tribes, we have in Protestantism a key for explaining whatever is dark or obscure in their history. We see in Protestant nations a tendency to lose or throw off more and more of what they retained when they separated from the church, and which before the lapse of many generations, if not arrested, will lead them to a hopeless barbarism. The traces of Catholic faith we find in them are reminiscences, not prophecies.

We find with the lowest and most degraded savages, language, and often a language of great richness, singular beauty and expressiveness. Terms for which savages have no use may sometimes be wanting, but it is rare that the language cannot be made to supply them from its resources. In the poorest language of a savage tribe, there is always evidence of its having been the language of a people superior in ideas and culture to the present condition of those who speak it. Language, among savage tribes, we take to be always indicative of a lost state far above that of barbarism; and it not only refutes the theory of natural progress, but, as far as it goes, proves the doctrine of primitive instruction by the Creator, maintained by Dr. Whately, and only partially accepted by his Grace of Argyll.

Language is no human invention, nor the product of individual or social progress. It requires language to invent language, and there is no individual progress out of society, and no society is possible without language. Hence, animals may be gregarious, but not sociable. They do not, and never can, form society. Max Müller has disposed of the bow-wow theory, or the origin of language in the imitation of the cries of animals, and also of the theory that supposes it to originate in the imitation of the sounds of nature, as buzz, rattle, etc.; for if a few words could originate in this way, language itself could not, since there is much more in language than words. The more common theory, just now, and which has respectable names in its favor, is that God is indeed the author of language, but as causa eminens, as he is of all that nature does; that is, he does not directly teach man language, but creates him with the power or faculty of speaking, and making himself understood by articulate speech. But this theory will not bear examination.

Between language and the faculty of using it there is a difference, and no faculty creates its own object. The faculty of speaking could no more be exercised without language, than the faculty of seeing without a visible object. Where there is no language, the faculty is and must be inoperative. The error is in supposing that the faculty of using language is the faculty of creating language, which it cannot be; for, till the language is possessed and held in the mind, there is nothing for the faculty of speech to operate on or with. To have given man the faculty of speech, the Creator must have begun by teaching him language, or by infusing it with the meaning of its words into his mind. We misapprehend the very nature and office of language, if we suppose it can possibly be used except as learned from or taught by a teacher. Man, as second cause, can no more produce language than he can create something from nothing. If God made us as second causes capable of creating language, why can we not do it now, and master it without a long and painful study? Since the faculty must be the same in all men, why do not all men speak one and the same dialect?

We will suppose man had language from the first. But there is no language without discourse of reason. A parrot or a crow may be taught to pronounce single words, and even sentences, but it would be absurd to assert that either has the faculty of language. To have language and be able to use it, one must have knowledge, and the sense of the word must precede, or at least be simultaneous with the word. Both the word and its meaning must be associated in the mind. {751} How then could the Creator give man the faculty of language, without imparting to him in some way the ideas and principles it is fitted to express, and without expressing which it cannot be language? He must do so, or there could be no verbum mentis, and the word would be spoken without meaning. Moreover, all language is profoundly philosophical, and conforms more nearly to the reality of things than any human system yet attained to, not only by savages, but by civilized and cultivated men; and whenever it deviates from that reality, it is when it has been corrupted by the false systems and methods of philosophers. In all languages, we find subject, predicate, and copula. The copula is always the verb to be, teaching those who understand it that nothing existing can be affirmed except by being and in its relation to being, that is God, who is QUI EST. Were ignorant savages able distinctly to recognize and embody in language the ideal formula, when no philosopher can ever apprehend and consider it unless represented to him in words? Impossible.

We take language, therefore, as a reminiscence among savages of a previous civilization, and a conclusive proof that, up to a certain point at least, the primeval man, as Dr. Whately maintains, was and must have been instructed by his Maker. As language is never known save as learned from a teacher, its existence among the lowest and most degraded barbarians is a proof that the primeval man was not, and could not have been an untutored savage. The Anglican archbishop, having, as the Scottish duke, no proper criterion of truth, may have included in the primitive instruction more than it actually contained. An error of this sort in an Anglican should surprise no one. Truth or sound philosophy from such a source would be the only thing to surprise us. We do not suppose Adam was directly instructed in all the mechanic arts, in the whole science and practice of agriculture, or in the entire management of flocks and herds, nor that he had steam-engines, spinning-jennies, power-looms, steamboats, railroads, locomotives, palace-cars, or even lightning telegraphs. We do not suppose that the race, in relation to the material order, received any direct instructions, except of the most elementary kind, or in matters of prime necessity, or high utility to his physical life and health. The ornamental arts, and other matters which do not exceed man's natural powers, may have been left to man to find out for himself, though we have instances recorded in which some of them were taught by direct inspiration, and many modern inventions are only the reproduction of arts once known, and subsequently lost or forgotten.

It is not difficult to explain how our modern advocates of progress have come to regard the savage as the primeval man, and not as the degenerate man. Their theory of natural progress demands it, and they have always shown great facility in accommodating their facts to their theories. They take also their starting-point in heathenism of comparatively recent origin, and study the law of human development in the history of gentilism. They forget that gentilism originated in an apostasy from the patriarchal or primitive moral and religious order, and that, from the first, there remained, and always has remained, on earth a people that did not apostatize, that remained faithful to tradition, to the primitive instruction and wisdom. {752} They fail to consider that, language confounded and the race dispersed, those who remained nearest the original seats of civilization, and were separated by the least distance from the people that remained faithful, became the earliest civilized or polished gentile nations, and that those who wandered further into the wilderness—receding further and further from light, losing more and more of their original patrimony, cut off from all intercourse with civilization by distance, by difference of language, and to some extent, perhaps, by physical changes and convulsions of the globe, degenerated gradually into barbarians and savages. Occasionally, in the course of ages, some of these wandering and degenerate tribes were brought under the influence of civilization by the arts, the arms, and the religion of the more civilized gentile nations. But in none has the gentile civilization, in the proper sense of the term, ever risen above what the gentiles took with them from the primitive stock, when they apostatized. Protestant nations are below, not above, what they were at the epoch of the Reformation. The reformers were greatly superior to any of their successors.

But our philosophic historians take no account of these things, nor of the fact that history shows them no barbaric ancestors of the Egyptians, Indians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Syrians, Phoenicians, etc. They find, or think they find, from the Greek poets and traditions, that the ancestors of the Greeks and Romans, each a comparatively modern people, were really savages, and that suffices them to prove that the savage state is the primeval state of the race! They find, also, that a marvellous progress in civilization, under Christianity has been effected, and what hinders them from concluding that man is naturally progressive, or that the savage is able, by his own efforts, to lift himself into civilized life? Have not the northern barbarians, who overthrew the Roman empire of the west, and seated themselves on its majestic ruins, become, under the teachings and the supernatural influences of the church, the great civilized nations of the modern world? How, then, pretend to deny that barbarians and savages can become civilized by their own spontaneous efforts and natural forces alone?

Whether any savage tribe was ever civilized under gentilism is, perhaps, doubtful; but if the philosophers of history would take the right line, instead of a collateral line or bastard branch of the human family, and follow it from Adam down, through the patriarchs, the synagogue, and the Catholic Church, they would find that there has always been a believing, a faithful, an enlightened, and a civilized people on earth, and they never would and never could have imagined any thing so untrue as that man began "in the lowest form of barbarism in which he can subsist as man." We have no indication of the existence of any savage or barbarous tribes before the flood; nor after the flood, till the confusion of language at Babel, and the consequent dispersion of the human race; that is, till after the gentile apostasy, of which they are one of the fruits. Adam, by his fall, lost communion with God, became darkened in his understanding, enfeebled in his will, and disordered in his appetites and passions; but he did not lose all his science, forget all his moral and religious instruction, and become a complete savage. Besides, his communion with God was renewed by repentance and faith in the promised Messiah, or incarnate Son of God, who should come to redeem the world, and enable man to fulfil his destiny, or attain his end.

We do not by any means deny progress. We believe in it with St. Paul, and struggle for it in individuals and in society. We only do not believe in progress or perfectibility by the simple forces of nature alone, or that man is naturally progressive. Existences have two movements or cycles: the one, their procession, by way of creation, from God as first cause; the other, their return, without absorption in him, to God as their final cause or beatitude, as we have on several occasions very fully shown. In the first cycle, man is explicated by natural generation, and his powers are determined by his nature, or the physical laws of his existence. In the second cycle, his explication is by regeneration, a supernatural act; and his progress is directed and controlled by the moral law prescribed by God as final cause, and is limited only by the infinite, to which he aspires, and, by the assistance of grace, may attain. The first cycle is initial, and in it there is no moral, religious, or social progress; there is only physical development and growth. It is under the natural laws of the physicists, who never look any further. The second cycle is teleological, and under the moral law, or the natural law of the theologians and the legists. In this teleological cycle lies the whole moral order, as distinguished from the physical; the whole of religion; its means, influences, and ends; and, consequently, civilization, in so far as it has any moral or religious character, aims, or tendency.

Civilization, we are aware, is a word that has hardly a fixed meaning, and is used vaguely, and in different senses. It is derived from a word signifying the city—in modern language, the state—and relates to the organization, constitution, and administration of the commonwealth or republic. It is used vaguely for the aggregate of the manners, customs, and usages of city life, and also for the principles and laws of a well ordered and well-governed civil society. We take it chiefly in the latter sense, and understand by it the supremacy of the moral order in secular life, the reign of law, or the subjection of the passions and turbulent elements of human nature in the individual, the family, and society to the moral law; or, briefly, the predominance of reason and justice over passion and caprice in the affairs of this world, and therefore coincident with liberty, as distinguished from license. The race began in civilization, because it began with a knowledge of the law of human existence, man's origin and destiny, and of the means and conditions of gaining the end for which he exists; and because he was placed in the outset by his Maker in possession of these means and conditions, so that he could not fail except through his own fault. Those who reject, neglect, or pervert the moral order, follow only the natural laws, separate from the communion of the faithful, and remain in the initial cycle, gradually become barbarians, superstitious, the slaves of their own passions, cruel and merciless savages, even if still cultivated, refined, and mild-mannered.

We place civilization, then, in the second cycle or movement of existences, under the moral law, and must do so or deny it all moral basis or moral character. What is not moral in its aims and tendencies, or is not in the order of man's return to God as his last end, we exclude from civilization, as no part of it, even if called by its name. There is no civilization where there is no state or civil polity; and there can be no state or civil polity, though there may be force, tyranny, and slavery, out of the moral order. {754} The state lies in the moral or teleological order, and is under the moral law—the law prescribed by God as final cause. It derives all its principles from it, and is founded and governed by it. Its very mission is the maintenance of justice, freedom, and order; and, as far as it goes, to keep men's faces towards the end for which they are created. And hence the concord there is, or should be, between the state and the church.

Most of those things, it will be seen from this, after which the gentiles seek, and which the moderns call civilization, may be adjuncts of civilization, in the sense of our Lord, when he says, "Seek first the kingdom of God and his justice, and all these things shall be added unto you;" but they do not constitute civilization, are not it, nor any part of it. Here is where modern gentilism errs, no less than did the ancient. Take up any of the leading journals of the day, and you will find what with great emphasis is called modern civilization is in the initial order, not the teleological; and is only a development and application of the natural laws of the physicists, not the natural or moral law of the theologians and legists. The press and popular orators called, a few years ago, Cyrus W. Field, who had taken a leading share in laying a submarine telegraph from the western coast of Ireland to the eastern coast of Newfoundland, a "second Messiah." When, after much urging and some threats, President Lincoln proclaimed, as a war measure, the emancipation of the slaves in certain States and parts of States then at war with the general government, the press and orators that approved, both at home and abroad, forthwith pronounced him also a "second Messiah," and without stopping to inquire whether the emancipation would be any thing more than the exchange of one form of compulsory physical labor for another, perhaps no better. Now, when a new Atlantic cable is laid from France to Massachusetts, we are told in flaring capitals and lofty periods that it is another and a glorious triumph of modern civilization—of mind over matter, man over nature. If our San Francisco friend succeeds in constructing an aerial ship, with which he can navigate the air, it will be a greater triumph still of modern civilization, and the theologians and moralists will have to hide their heads. All this shows that civilization, by the leaders of public opinion in our day, is placed wholly in the physical order, and consists in the development and application of the natural laws to the accomplishment of certain physical ends or purposes of utility only in the first cycle of our existence, and without the least moral significance. So completely have we become devoted to the improvement of our condition in the initial order, that we forget that life does not end with it, or that the initial exists only for the teleological, and that our development and application of the physical laws of nature imply no progress in civilization, or the realization of a moral ideal.

But whatever success we may have in developing and applying to our own purposes the physical laws of man and the globe he inhabits, we must remember that no success of that sort initiates us into the second cycle, or the life of our return to God. To enter that life we must be regenerated, and we can no more regenerate than we can generate ourselves. Here, we may see why even to civilization the Incarnation of the Word is necessary. The hypostatic union of the divine and human natures in the divine person of the Word carries the creative act to its summit, completes the first cycle, and initiates the second, into which we can enter only as we are reborn of Christ, as we were born in the first cycle of Adam. {755} Hence, Christ is called the second Adam, the Lord from heaven. Civilization, morality, salvation, are in one sense in the same order and under one and the same law.

Progress being possible, except in the sense of physical development, only in the movement of return to God as final cause, and that movement originating in the Incarnation only, it follows that those nations alone that are united to Christ by faith and love, either united to him who was to come, as were the patriarchs and the synagogue, before the Incarnation, or to him in the church or the regeneration, as are Catholics since, are or can be progressive, or even truly civilized nations. They who assert progress by our natural forces alone, confound the first cycle with the second, generation with regeneration, and the natural laws, which proceed from God as first cause, with the natural or moral law which is prescribed by God as final cause. It is a great mistake, then, to suppose, as many do, that the mysteries of faith, even the most recondite, have no practical bearing on the progress of men and nations, or that it is safe, in studying civilization, to take our point of departure in gentilism.

In accordance with our conclusion, we find that gentile nations, ancient or modern, are really unprogressive, save in the physical or initial order; which is of no account in the moral or teleological order. We deny not the achievements of Protestant nations in the physical order; but, in relation to the end for which man exists, they not only do not advance beyond what they took with them from the church, but are constantly deteriorating. They have lost the condition of moral and spiritual progress, individually and collectively, by losing communion with Christ in his church; they have lost Christ, in reality, if not in name; and by losing the infallible word preserved by the church alone, they have lost or are losing the state, civil authority itself, and finding themselves reduced to what St. Paul calls "the natural man." They place all their hopes in physical success, always certain to fail in the end, when pursued for its own sake.

We have raised and we raise here no question as to what God might have done, or how or with what powers he might have created man, had he chosen. We only take the plan he has chosen to adopt; and which, in his providence and grace, he carries out. In the present decree, as say the theologians, he has subjected the whole teleological order to one and the same law; and civilization, morality, and Christian sanctity are not separable in principle, and depend on one and the same fundamental law. Gentilism divorces religion and the state from morality; and modern heresy recognizes no intrinsic relation between them. It tells us religion is necessary to the stability of the political order; that Christianity is the basis of morality, and that it is the great agent of progress; but it shows us no reason why it is or should be so, and in its practical doctrine it teaches that it is not so. Every thing, as far as it informs us, depends on arbitrary appointment, and without any reason of being in the system of things which God has seen proper to create. Hence, people are unable to form to themselves any clear view of the relation of religion and morality, of morality and civilization, or to arrive at any satisfactory understanding of the purpose and law of human existence; and they either frame to themselves the wildest, the most fanciful, or the most absurd theories, or give the whole up in despair, sink into a state of utter indifference, and say, "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die." {756} They simply vegetate in vice or crime, or, at best, only take themselves to the study of the physical sciences, or the cultivation of the fine arts. We have shown that their difficulties and discouragements are imaginary, and arise from ignorance of the divine plan of creation, and the mutual relation and dependence of all its parts. One divine thought runs through the whole, and nothing does or can stand alone. We study things too much in their analysis, not enough in their synthesis.

Translated From The German
Of Conrad Von Bolanden.

Angela.

On the following day, Richard went to the weather-cross. He did not meet Angela. She must have been unusually early; for the flowers had evidently just been placed before the statue.

"May 14th.—She did not meet me today, and probably will not meet me again. I should have left the book where it was; it might have awakened her gratitude; for I think she left it purposely, to give me an opportunity to make her acquaintance.

"How many young women would give more than a book to get acquainted with a wealthy party. The 'Angel' is very sensitive; but this sensibility pleases me, because it is true womanly delicacy.

"She will now avoid meeting me in this lonely road. But I will study her character in her father's house. I will see if she does not confirm my opinion of the women of our times. It was for this purpose alone that I accepted Siegwart's invitation. Angela must not play Isabella; no woman ever shall. Single and free from woman's yoke, I will go through the world."

At three o'clock precisely, Richard with the punctual doctor left Frankenhöhe. They passed through the chestnut grove and through the vineyard toward Salingen. The doctor pushed on with long steps, his arms swinging back and forth. He was evidently pleased with the subject he had been reading. He had, on leaving the house, shaken Richard by the hand, and spoken a few friendly words, but not a syllable since. Richard knew his ways, and knew that it would take some time for him to thaw.

They were passing between Siegwart's house and Salingen when they beheld Angela, at a distance, coming toward them. She carried a little basket on her arm, and on her head she wore a straw hat with broad fluttering ribbons. Richard fixed his eyes attentively on her. This time, also, she did not wear hoops, but a dress of modest colors. He admired her light, graceful movement and charming figure. The blustering doctor moderated his steps and went slower the nearer he came to Angela, and considered her with surprise. Frank greeted her, touching his hat. She did not thank him, as before, with a friendly greeting, but by a scarcely perceptible inclination of the head; nor did she smile as before, but on this account seemed to him more charming and ethereal than ever. She only glanced at him, and he thought he observed a slight blush on her cheeks.

These particulars were engrossing the young man's attention when he heard the doctor say,

"The Angel of Salingen," returned Klingenberg. "You are surprised at this appellation; is it not well-merited?"

"But she deserves acknowledgment. Let me explain. The maiden is the daughter of the proprietor Siegwart, and her name is Angela. She is a model of every virtue. She is, in the female world, what an image of the Virgin, by one of the old masters, would be among the hooped gentry of the present. As you are aware, I have been often called to the cabins of the sick poor, and there the quiet, unostentatious labors of this maiden have become known to me. Angela prepares suitable food for the sick, and generally takes it to them herself. The basket on her arm does service in this way. There are many poor persons who would not recover unless they had proper, nourishing food. To these Angela is a great benefactor. For this reason, she has a great influence over the minds of the sick, and the state of the mind greatly facilitates or impedes their recovery.

"I have often entered just after she had departed, and the beneficial influence of her presence could be still seen in the countenances of the poor. Her presence diffused resignation, peace, contentment, and a peculiar cheerfulness in the meanest and most wretched hovels of poverty, where she enters without hesitation. This is certainly a rare quality in so young a creature. She rejoices the hearts of the children by giving them clothes, sometimes made by herself, or pictures and the like. Her whole object appears to be to reconcile and make all happy. I have just seen her for the first time; her beauty is remarkable, and might well adorn an angel. The common people wish only to Germanize 'Angela' when they call her 'Angel.' But she is indeed an angel of heaven to the poor and needy."

"I have accidentally discovered a singular custom of your 'angel,' doctor. There is at the weather-cross a Madonna of stone. Angela has imposed upon herself the singular task of adorning this Madonna, daily, with fresh flowers."

"You are a profane fellow, Richard. You should not speak in such a derisive tone of actions which are the out-flowings of pious sentiment."

"Every one has his hobby. What will not people do through ambition? I know ladies who torture a piano for half the night, in order to catch the tone of the prima-donna at the opera. I know women who undergo all possible privations to be able to wear as fine clothes, as costly furs, as others with whom they are in rivalry. This exhaustive night-singing, these deprivations, are submitted to through foolish vanity. Perhaps Angela is not less ambitious and vain than others of her sex. As she cannot dazzle these country folk with furs or toilette, she dazzles their religious sentiment by ostentatious piety."

"Radically false!" said the doctor. "Charity and virtue are recognized and honored not only in the country, but also in the cities. Why do not your coquettes strive for this approval? Because they want Angela's nobility of soul. {758} And again, why should Angela wish to gain the admiration of the peasants? She is the daughter of the wealthiest man in the neighborhood. If such was her object, she could gratify her ambition in a very different way."

"Then Angela is a riddle to me," returned Richard. "I cannot conceive the motives of her actions."

"Which are so natural! The maiden follows the impulses of her own noble nature, and these impulses are developed and directed by Christian culture, and convent education. Angela was a long time with the nuns, and only returned home two years ago. Here you have the very natural solution of the riddle."

They arrived at the platform. Klingenberg stood silent for some time admiring the landscape. The view did not seem to interest Richard. His eyes rested on Angela's home, whose white walls, surrounded by vineyards and corn-fields, glistened in the sun.

"Angela's work," said Richard as he drew near the statue. The doctor paused a moment and examined the flowers.

"Do you observe Angela's fine taste in the arrangement of the colors?" said he. "And the forget-me-nots! What a deep religious meaning they have."

"Angela's pious work," began Richard after a long pause, "reminds me of a religious custom against which modern civilization has thus far warred in vain. I mean the veneration of saints. You, as a Protestant, will smile at this custom, and I, as a Catholic, must deplore the tenacity with which my church clings to this obsolete remnant of heathen idolatry."

"Ah! this is the subject you alluded to yesterday," said the doctor. "I must, in fact, smile, my dear Richard! But I by no means smile at 'the tenacity with which your church clings to the obsolete remnants of heathen idolatry.' I smile at your queer idea of the veneration of the saints. I, as a reasonable man, esteem this veneration, and recognize its admirable and beneficial influence on human society."

This declaration increased Frank's surprise to the highest degree. He knew the clear mind of the doctor, and could not understand how it happened that he wished to defend a custom so antagonistic to modern thought.

"You find fault," continued Klingenberg, "with the custom of erecting statues to these holy men in the churches, the forest, the fields, the houses, and in the market?"

"If you had objected to the lazy Schiller at Mayence, or the robber's poet Schiller, as he raves at the theatre in Mannheim, or to the conqueror and destroyer of Germany, Gustavus Adolphus, whose statue is erected as an insult in a German city, then you would be right."

"Schiller-worship has its justification," retorted Frank. "They erect public monuments to the genial spirit of that man, to remind us of his services to poetry, his aspirations, and his German patriotism."

"It is praiseworthy to erect monuments to the poet. But do not talk of Schiller's patriotism, for he had none. But let that pass; it is not to the point. The question is, whether you consider it praiseworthy to erect monuments to deserving and exalted genius?"

"Without the least hesitation, I say yes. But I see what you are driving at, doctor. I know the remorseless logic of your inferences. But you will not catch me in your vise this time. You wish to infer that the saints far surpassed Schiller in nobility and greatness of soul, and that honoring them, therefore, is more reasonable, and more justifiable, than honoring Schiller. I dispute the greatness of the so-called saints. They were men full of narrowness and rigorism. They despised the world and their friends. They carried this contempt to a wonderful extent—to a renunciation of all the enjoyments of life, to voluntary poverty and unconditional obedience. But all these are fruits that have grown on a stunted, morbid tree, and are in opposition to progress, to industry, and to the enlightened civilization of modern times. The dark ages might well honor such men, but our times cannot. Schiller, on the contrary, that genial man, taught us to love the pleasures of life. By his fine genius and his odes to pleasure, he frightened away all the spectres of these enthusiastic views of life. He preached a sound taste and a free, unconstrained enjoyment of the things of this beautiful earth. And for this reason precisely, because he inaugurated this new doctrine, does he deserve monuments in his honor."

"How does it happen then, my friend," said the doctor, in a cutting tone that was sometimes peculiar to him, "that you do not take advantage of the modern doctrine of unconstrained enjoyment? Why have you preserved fresh your youthful vigor, and not dissipated it at the market of sensual pleasures? Why is your mode of life so often a reproach to your dissolute friends? Why do you avoid the resorts of refined pleasures? Why are the coquettish, vitiated, hollow inclinations of a great part of the female sex so distasteful to you? Answer me!"

"These are peculiarities of my nature; individual opinions that have no claim to any weight."

"Peculiarities of your nature—very right; your noble nature, your pure feelings rebel against these moral acquisitions of progress. I begin with your noble nature. If I did not find this good, true self in you, I would waste no more words. But because you are what you are, I must convince you of the error of your views. Schiller, you say, and, with him, the modern spirit, raised the banner of unrestrained enjoyment, and this enjoyment rests on sensual pleasures, does it not?"

"I knew and know many who followed this banner—and you also know many. Of those whom I knew professionally, some ended their days in the hospital, of the most loathsome diseases. Some, unsatiated with the whole round of pleasures, drag on a miserable life, dead to all energy, and spiritless. They drank the full cup of pleasure, and with it unspeakable bitterness and disgust. Some ended in ignominy and shame—bankruptcy, despair, suicide. Such are the consequences of this modern dogma of unrestrained enjoyments."

"The proper bounds? Stop!" cried the doctor. "No leaps, Richard! Think clearly and logically. Christianity also allows enjoyment, but—and here is the point—in certain limits. Your progress, on the contrary, proclaims freedom in moral principles, a disregard of all moral obligations, unrestricted enjoyment—and herein consists the danger and delusion. I ask, Are you in favor of restricted or unrestricted enjoyment?"

Frank hesitated. He felt already the thumbscrew of the irrepressible doctor, and feared the inferences he would draw from his admissions.

"Good; there you leave the unlimited sphere which godless progress has given to the thoughts and inclinations of men. You admit the obligation of self control, and the restraint of the grosser emotions. But let us proceed; you speak of industry. The modern spirit of industry has invoked a demon—or, rather, the demoniac spirit of the times has taken possession of industry. The great capitalists have built thrones on their money-bags and tyrannize over those who have no money. They crush out the work-shop of the industrious and well-to-do tradesman, and compel him to be their slave. Go into the factories of Elfeld, or England; you can there see the slaves of this demon industry—miserable creatures, mentally and morally stunted, socially perishing; not only slaves, but mere wheels of the machines. This is what modern industry has made of those poor wretches, for whom, according to modern enlightenment, there is no higher destiny than to drag through life in slavery, to increase the money-bags of their tyrants. But the capitalists have perfect right, according to modern ideas; they only use the means at their command. The table of the ten commandments has been broken; the yoke of Christianity broken. Man is morally and religiously free; and from this false liberalism the tyranny of plutocracy and the slavery of the poor has been developed. Are you satisfied with the development, and the principles that made it possible?"

"No," said Frank decidedly. "I despise that miserable industrialism that values the product more than the man. My admissions are, how ever, far from justifying the exaggerated notions of the saints."

"Wait a bit!" cried Klingenberg hastily. "I have just indicated the cause of this wretched egotism, and also a consequence—namely, the power of great capitalists and manufacturers over an army of white slaves. But this is by no means all. This demon of industry has consequences that will ruin a great portion of mankind. Now mark what I say, Richard! The richness of the subject allows me only to indicate. The progressive development of industry brings forth products of which past ages were ignorant, because they were not necessary for life. The existence of these products creates a demand. The increased wants increase the outlay, which in most cases does not square with the income, and therefore the accounts of many close with a deficit. The consequences of this deficit for the happiness, and even for the morals of the family, I leave untouched. The increased products beget luxury and the desire for enjoyment; the ultimate consequences of which enervate the individual and society. Hence the phenomenon, in England, that the greater portion of the people in the manufacturing towns die before the age of fifteen, and that many are old men at thirty. Enervated and demoralized peoples make their existence impossible. They go to the wall. This is a historical fact. Ergo, modern industry separated from Christian civilization hastens the downfall of nations."

"I cannot dispute the truth of your observations. But you have touched only the dark side of modern industry, without mentioning its benefits. If industry is a source of fictitious wants, it affords, on the other hand, cheap prices to the poor for the most necessary wants of life; for example, cheap materials for clothing."

"Very cheap, but also very poor material," answered Klingenberg. "In former times, clothing was dearer, but also better. They knew nothing of the rags of the present fabrication. And it may be asked whether that dearer material was not cheaper in the end for the poor. When this is taken into consideration, the new material has no advantage over the old. I will freely admit that the inventions of modern times do honor to human genius. I acknowledge the achievements of industry, as such. I admire the improvements of machinery, the great revolution caused by the use of steam, and thousands of other wonders of art. No sensible man will question the relative worth of all these. But all these are driven and commanded by a bad influence, and herein lies the injury. We must consider industrialism from this higher standpoint. What advantage is it to a people to be clothed in costly stuffs when they are enervated, demoralized, and perishing? Clothe a corpse as you will, a corpse it will be still. And besides, the greatest material good does not compensate the white factory-slaves for the loss of their liberty. The Lucullan age fell into decay, although they feasted on young nightingales, drank liquified pearls, and squandered millions for delicacies and luxuries. The life of nations does not consist in the external splendor of wealth, in easy comfort, or in unrestrained passions. Morality is the life of nations, and virtue their internal strength. But virtue, morality, and Christian sentiment are under the ban of modern civilization. If Christianity does not succeed in overcoming this demon spirit of the times, or at least confining it within narrow limits, it will and must drive the people to certain destruction. We find decayed peoples in the Christian era, but the church has always rescued and regenerated them. While the acquisitions of modern times—industrialism, enlightenment, humanitarianism, and whatever they may be called—are, on the one hand, of little advantage or of doubtful worth, they are, on the other hand, the graves of true prosperity, liberty, and morality. They are the cause of shameful terrorism and of degrading slavery, in the bonds of the passions and in the claws of plutocracy."

"Let us," continued Klingenberg, "consider personally those men whose molten images stand before us. Schiller's was a noble nature, but Schiller wrote:

  "'No more this fight of duty, hence no longer
      This giant strife will I!
    Canst quench these passions evermore the stronger?
      Then ask not virtue, what I must deny.

  "'Albeit I have sworn, yea, sworn that never
      Shall yield my master will;
    Yet take thy wreath; to me 'tis lost for ever!
      Take back thy wreath, and let me sin my fill.'

Is this a noble and exalted way of thinking? Certainly not. Schiller would be virtuous if he could clothe himself in the lustre of virtue without sacrifice. The passionate impulses of the heart are stronger in him than the sense of duty. He gives way to his passions. He renounces virtue because he is too weak, too languid, too listless to encounter this giant strife bravely like a strong man. Such is the noble Schiller. In later years, when the fiery impulses of his heart had subsided, he roused himself to better efforts and nobler aims.

"Consider the prince of poets, Goethe. How morally naked and poor he stands before us! Goethe's coarse insults to morality are well known. His better friend, Schiller, wrote of him to Koerner, 'His mind is not calm enough, because his domestic relations, which he is too weak to change, cause him great vexation.' Koerner answered,' Men cannot violate morality with impunity.' Six years later, the 'noble' Goethe was married to his 'mistress' at Weimar. Goethe's detestable political principles are well known. He did not possess a spark of patriotism. He composed hymns of victory to Napoleon, the tyrant, the destroyer and desolator of Germany. These are the heroes of modern sentiment, the advance guard of liberty, morality, and true manhood! And these heroes so far succeeded that the noble Arndt wrote of his time, 'We are base, cowardly, and stupid; too poor for love, too listless for anger, too imbecile for hate. Undertaking every thing, accomplishing nothing; willing every thing, without the power of doing any thing.' So far has this boasted freethinking created disrespect for revealed truth. So far this modern civilization, which idealizes the passions, leads to mockery of religion and lets loose the baser passions of man. If they cast these representatives of the times in bronze, they should stamp on the foreheads of their statues the words of Arndt:

"'We are base, cowardly, and stupid; too poor for love, too listless for anger, too imbecile for hate. Undertaking every thing, accomplishing nothing; willing every thing, without the power of doing any thing."'

"How does it happen that a people so weak, feeble, and base could overthrow the power of the French in the world?"

"That was because the German people were not yet corrupted by that shallow, unreal, hollow twaddle of the educated classes about humanity. It was not the princes, not the nobility, who overthrew Napoleon. It was the German people who did it. When, in 1813, the Germans rose, in hamlet and city, they staked their property and lives for fatherland. But it was not the enlightened poets and professors, not modern sentimentality, that raised their hearts to this great sacrifice; not these who enkindled this enthusiasm for fatherland. It was the religious element that did it. The German warriors did not sing Goethe's hymns to Napoleon, nor the insipid model song of 'Luetzows wilder Jagd,' as they rushed into battle. They sang religious hymns, they prayed before the altars. They recognized, in the terrible judgment on Russia's ice-fields, the avenging hand of God. Trusting in God, and nerved by religious exaltation, they took up the sword that had been sharpened by the previous calamities of war. So the feeble philanthropists could effect nothing. It was only a religious, healthy, strong people could do that."

"Not at all! We have thrown some light on inimical shadows; the light can now shine. The lives of the saints exhibit something wonderful and remarkable. I have studied them carefully. I have sought to know their aims and efforts. I discovered that they imitated the example of Christ, that they realized the exalted teachings of the Redeemer. You find fault with their contempt for the things of this world. But it is precisely in this that these men are great. {763} Their object was not the ephemeral, but the enduring. They considered life but as the entrance to the eternal destiny of man--in direct opposition to the spirit of the times, that dances about the golden calf. The saints did not value earthly goods for more than they were worth. They placed them after self-control and victory over our baser nature. Exact and punctual in all their duties, they were animated by an admirable spirit of charity for their fellow-men. And in this spirit they have frequently revived society. Consider the great founders of orders--St. Benedict, St. Dominic, St. Vincent de Paul! Party spirit, malice, and stupidity have done their worst to blacken, defame, and calumniate them. And yet, in a spirit of self-sacrifice, the sons of St. Benedict came among the German barbarians, to bring to them the ennobling doctrines of Christianity. It was the Benedictines who cleared the primeval forests, educated their wild denizens, and founded schools; who taught the barbarians handiwork and agriculture. Science and knowledge flourished in the cloisters. And to the monks alone we are indebted for the preservation of classic literature. What the monks did then they are doing now. They forsake home, break all ties, and enter the wilderness, there to be miserably cut off in the service of their exalted mission, or to die of poisonous fevers. Name me one of your modern heroes, whose mouths are full of civilization, humanity, enlightenment--name me one who is capable of such sacrifice. These prudent gentlemen remain at home with their gold-bags and their pleasures, and leave the stupid monk to die in the service of exalted charity. It is the hypocrisy and the falsehood of the modern spirit to exalt itself, and belittle true worth. And what did St. Vincent de Paul do? More than all the gold-bags together. St. Vincent, alone, solved the social problem of his time. He was, in his time, the preserver of society, or rather, Christianity through him. And to-day our gold-bags tremble before the apparition of the same social problem. Here high-sounding phrases and empty declamation do not avail. Deeds only are of value. But the inflated spirit of the times is not capable of noble action. It is not the modern state—not enlightened society, sunk in egotism and gold—that can save us. Christianity alone can do it. Social development will prove this."

"I do not dispute the services of the saints to humanity," said Frank. "But the question is, Whether society would be benefited if the fanatical, dark spirit of the middle ages prevailed, instead of the spirit of modern times?"

"The fanatical, dark spirit of the middle ages!" cried the doctor indignantly. "This is one of those fallacious phrases. The saints were not fanatical or dark. They were open, cheerful, natural, humble men. They did not go about with bowed necks and downcast eyes; but affable, free from hypocrisy, and dark, sullen demeanor, they passed through life. Many saints were poets. St. Francis sang his spiritual hymns to the accompaniment of the harp. St. Charles played billiards. The holy apostle, St. John, resting from his labors, amused himself in childish play with a bird. Such were these men; severe toward themselves, mild to others, uncompromising with the base and mean. They were all abstinent and simple, allowing themselves only the necessary enjoyments. They concealed from observation their severe mode of life, and smiled while their shoulders bled from the discipline. Pride, avarice, envy, voluptuouness, and all the bad passions, were strangers to them; not because they had not the inclinations to these passions, but because they restrained and overcame their lower nature.

"I ask you, now, which men deserve our admiration—those who are governed by unbounded selfishness, who are slaves to their passions, who deny themselves no enjoyment, and who boast of their degrading licentiousness; or those who, by reason of a pure life, are strong in the government of their passions, and self-sacrificing in their charity for their fellowmen?"

"The preference cannot be doubtful," said Frank. "For the saints have accomplished the greatest, they have obtained the highest thing, self-control. But, doctor, I must condemn that saint-worship as it is practised now. Human greatness always remains human, and can make no claims to divine honor."

The doctor swung his arms violently. "What does this reproach amount to? Where are men deified? In the Catholic Church? I am a Protestant, but I know that your church condemns the deification of men."

"I meant no rebuke. I would only give conclusions. Catholicism is precisely that power that combats with success against the deifying of men. You have in the course of your studies read the Roman classics. You know that divine worship was offered to the Roman emperors. So far did heathen flattery go, that the emperors were honored as the sons of the highest divinity—Jupiter. Apotheosis is a fruit of heathen growth; of old heathenism and of new heathenism. When Voltaire, that idol of modern heathen worship, was returning to Paris in 1778, he was in all earnestness promoted to the position of a deity. This remarkable play took place in the theatre. Voltaire himself went there. Modern fanaticism so far lost all shame that the people kissed the horse on which the philosopher rode to the theatre. Voltaire was scarcely able to press through the crowd of his worshippers. They touched his clothes—touched handkerchiefs to them—plucked hairs from his fur coat to preserve as relics. In the theatre they fell on their knees before him and kissed his feet. Thus that tendency that calls itself free and enlightened deified a man—Voltaire, the most trifling scoffer, the most unprincipled, basest man of Christendom.

"Let us consider an example of our times. Look at Garibaldi in London. That man permitted himself to be set up and worshipped. The saints would have turned away from this stupidity with loathing indignation. But this boundless veneration flattered the old pirate Garibaldi. He received 267,000 requests for locks of his hair, to be cased in gold and preserved as relics. Happily he had not much hair. He should have graciously given them his moustaches and whiskers."

"Such is the man-worship of modern heathenism. This humanitarianism is ashamed of no absurdity, when it sinks to the worship of licentiousness and baseness personified."

"The senseless aberrations of modern culture do not excuse saint worship. And you certainly do not wish to excuse it in that way. There is, however, a reasonable veneration of human greatness. Monuments are erected to great men. We behold them and are reminded of their genius, their services; and there it stops. It occurs to no reasonable man to venerate these men on his knees, as is done with the saints."

"The bending of the knee, according to the teaching of your church, does not signify adoration, but only veneration," replied Klingenberg. "Before no Protestant in the world would I bend the knee; before St. Benedict and St. Vincent de Paul I would willingly, out of mere admiration and esteem for their greatness of soul and their purity of morals. If a Catholic kneels before a saint to ask his prayers, what is there offensive in that? It is an act of religious conviction. But I will not enter into the religious question. This you can learn better from your Catholic brethren—say from the Angel of Salingen, for example, who appears to have such veneration for the saints."

"You will not enter into the religious question; yet you defend saint-worship, which is something religious."

"I do not defend it on religious grounds, but from history, reason, and justice. History teaches that this veneration had, and still has, the greatest moral influence on human society. The spirit of veneration consists in imitating the example of the person venerated. Without this spirit, saint-worship is an idle ceremony. But that true veneration of the saints elevates and ennobles, you cannot deny. Let us take the queen of saints, Mary. What makes her worthy of veneration? Her obedience to the Most High, her humility, her strength of soul, her chastity. All these virtues shine out before the spiritual eyes of her worshippers as models and patterns of life. I know a lady, very beautiful, very wealthy; but she is also very humble, very pure, for she is a true worshipper of Mary. Would that our women would venerate Mary and choose her for a model! There would then be no coquettes, no immodest women, no enlightened viragoes. Now, as saint-worship is but taking the virtues of the saints as models for imitation, you must admit that veneration in this sense has the happiest consequences to human society."

"Let us take a near example," continued Klingenberg. "I told you of the singular qualities of Angela. As she passed, I beheld her with wonder. I must confess her beauty astonished me. But this astonishing beauty, it appears to me, is less in her charming features than in the purity, the maidenly dignity of her character. Perhaps she has to thank, for her excellence, that same correct taste which leads her to venerate Mary. Would not Angela make an amiable, modest, dutiful wife and devoted mother? Can you expect to find this wife, this mother among those given to fashions—among women filled with modern notions?"

While Klingenberg said this, a deep emotion passed over Richard's face. He did not answer the question, but let his head sink on his breast.

"Here is Frankenhöhe," said the doctor. "As you make no more objections, I suppose you agree with me. The saints are great, admirable men; therefore they deserve monuments. They are models of virtue and the greatest benefactors of mankind; therefore they deserve honor. 'Quod erat demonstrandum.'"

"You will allow Protestants to judge reasonably," replied Klingenberg. "My views are the result of careful study and impartial reflection."

"I am also astonished—pardon my candor—that with such views you can remain a Protestant."

"There is a great difference between knowing and willing, my young friend. I consider conversion an act of great heroism, and also as a gift of the highest grace."

"If Angela should be what the doctor considers her! According to my notions, such a being exists only in the realm of the ideal. But if Angela yet realizes this ideal? I must be certain. I will visit Siegwart to-morrow."

From The German

The Flight Into Egypt.

  Greenwood tent, new splendors wear,
     Let thy festal tree-tops glisten;
     Stag, come here to look and listen;
  For the world's joy draweth near!
     Flowers, unclose your lids, that clearer
     Light your dew-wet eyes may mirror.
        Blossom! blossom!
	On her bosom
  Lo! the mother bears the Child!

  Glad-winged birds, from forest dim,
     Hither fly, where peace long-sought is;
     Sing melodious jubilates,
  With the blessèd cherubim.
     Morning airs, come quick! with tender
     Thrill breathe on the branches slender;
        Breathe and hover!
	Rough ways over
   Comes the mother with the Child!

   Stag, birds, trees, and breezes blest,
      Triumph in harmonious numbers—
      Fear not to disturb the slumbers
   Of the Babe upon her breast.
      Gently lull him with your voices,
      O'er whom all the world rejoices!
         Sing, adore him!
         Bend before him!
   Hail the mother with the Child!

Hon. Thomas Dongan,
Governor of New York.

[Footnote 187: Authorities: O'Callaghan's Documentary and Colonial Histories of New York. Bancroft's History of the United States. Lingard's History of England. Bishop Bayley's History of the Catholic Church in New York. O'Callaghan's Journal of the Legislature of New York, especially a note thereto, by George H. Moore, Esq. Shea's History of the Catholic Missions. Campbell's Life and Times of Archbishop Carroll. DeCourcy and Shea's Catholic Church in the United States, etc.]

The student of Catholic history may be permitted to recall, with an honorable pride, the illustrious name and recount the eminent public services of Colonel Thomas Dongan, who, while the only Catholic, was one of the most able and accomplished, of the colonial governors of New York. His life and exploits are but little known, even among Catholics; and while his merits place him without a superior in the honored list of our governors, it yet remains, for the Catholic historian especially, to rescue his fame from obscurity, and to weave together, from scattered historical fragments, the story of a career at once brilliant and useful, checkered and romantic. As soldier, ruler, exile, nobleman, or Christian gentleman, he is equally entitled to a distinguished place among the remarkable men of his age. His position was a most difficult and delicate one—a Catholic ruler over Protestant subjects, at a time when religious rivalries and animosities formed the mainspring of public and private political action. It is no small achievement that, in so trying an office, he acquitted himself to the satisfaction of friend and foe; and that Protestant and Catholic historians unite in commending his wise and honorable course. As a patriot, he has won our national gratitude; for it is to his courage and address that we are indebted for the invaluable service of having extended the northern frontier of our republic to the great lakes. His devotion to civil and religious liberty places his name with that of Calvert, in the hearts of Catholics; while both should be hallowed together by all lovers of free government.

The subject of this memoir was descended from a noble and ancient Irish family, distinguished for an energy of character and enterprising spirit which he did not allow to expire with his ancestors. His father was Sir John Dongan, baronet, of Castletoun, in the county of Kildare, Ireland. He was also nephew to Richard Talbot, Earl of Tyrconnel, who figured conspicuously in the reign of Charles II., as he did in that of James II. This Earl of Tyrconnel, uncle to Governor Dongan, was one of those against whom Titus Oates informed. He was made lieutenant-governor of Ireland, and afterward lord deputy, on the recall of Clarendon, by James II.; and he aimed at rendering Ireland independent of England, in the event of the Prince of Orange succeeding in his efforts to gain the throne. In furtherance of his patriotic designs, Earl Tyrconnel solicited of James permission to hold an Irish parliament; but that monarch, suspecting his purpose, rejected the measure.

Thomas Dongan was born in 1634; and, after being well-grounded in his religion, and in secular learning, was trained to the profession of a soldier. He entered the military service of France, and served as colonel of a French regiment, under Louis XIV.[Footnote 188]

[Footnote 188: We find his name rendered in French documents as Colonel D'Unguent.]

His services there were so highly prized that it was with great difficulty and at considerable sacrifice that he was able to withdraw from it. In 1677-8, after the English parliament had forced Charles II. to break with Louis XIV., an order was issued commanding all British subjects in the service of France to return home. Colonel Dongan obeyed the order of his own sovereign; and he himself informs us that he was obliged to quit "that honorable and advantageous post, and resisted the temptations of greater preferment, then offered him, if he would continue there; for which reason the French king commanded him to quit France in forty-eight hours, and refused to pay him a debt of sixty-five thousand livres, then due him for recruits and arrears, upon an account stated by the intendant of Nancy." No subsequent efforts of Colonel Dongan succeeded in appeasing the French king's resentment, or in securing the payment of his claim.

On his return from the French service to England, he was appointed, by Charles II., a general officer in the English army, then destined for Flanders, and had an annual pension of £500 settled on him for life, in consideration of his losses in France. But it is regarded as quite certain that he did not go to Flanders under this appointment, to defend and support the English garrisons in that country, then menaced by the French; for, in the same year, he was appointed lieutenant-governor of Tangier, a position which he accepted, and continued to fill until the year 1680.

At this time, the American province of New York was under the proprietary government of James, Duke of York, whose deputy's administration of the affairs of the colony had produced great discontent among the people. His governor, Andros, had been recalled to answer the charges of the people; had returned to New York, acquitted by the duke, and resumed the imposition of the heavy system of taxation which had weighed so heavily on the citizens, and produced such discontent. But the resistance of the people, not stopping short even of calling in question the supreme authority of the duke, seconded by the remonstrances of William Penn, finally had the desired effect. Andros was recalled, and Colonel Dongan appointed to succeed him as governor of New York. His commission from the Duke of York, bearing date September 30th, 1682, contains the following appointing clause:

"And whereas, I have conceived a good opinion of the integrity, prudence, ability and fittness of Coll. Thomas Dongan, to be employed as my Lieutent there, I have therefore thought fitt to constitute and appoint him ye said Coll. Thos to be my Lt and Govr within ye lands, islands, places aforesaid (except the said East and West New Jersey) to performe & execute all and every the powers wch are by the said lettrs pattents granted unto me to be executed by me, my Deputy, Agent or Assignes."

The written instructions received by the new governor from the Duke of York, bearing date January 27th, 1683, direct him: First, to call together the council of the duke, consisting of Fredericke Phillipps, Stephen Courtland, and other eminent inhabitants, not exceeding ten councillors. Second, and most important of all, to issue warrants to the sheriffs of the counties for an election of a general assembly of all the freeholders of the province, to pass laws "for the good weale and government of the said Colony and its Dependencyes, and of all inhabitants thereof." {769} The assembly was not to exceed eighteen members, and was to assemble in the city of New York. Third, to give or withhold his assent to such laws as the general assembly might pass, as he might approve or disapprove of the same, etc. Fourth, the laws so passed to be permanent. Fifth, "And I doe hereby require and command you yt noe man's life, member, freehold, or goods, be taken away or harmed in any of the places undr yor government but by established and knowne laws not repugnant to, but as nigh as may be agreable to the laws of the kingdome of England." Sixth, to repress "drunkennesse and debauchery, swearing and blasphemy," and to appoint none to office who may be given to such vices; and to encourage commerce and merchants. Seventh, to exercise general discretionary powers, except that of declaring war, without the duke's consent. The eighth relates to assessment of the estates of persons capable of serving as jurors. Ninth, to establish courts of justice, and to sell the royal lands. Tenth, to pardon offences. Eleventh, to erect custom-houses and other public buildings. Twelfth, to organize the militia. Thirteenth, to settle the boundaries of the province. Fourteenth, to encourage planters, and to lay no tax on commerce, except according to established laws. Fifteenth, to purchase Indian lands. Sixteenth relates to the granting of a liberal charter to the city of New York. Seventeenth, to send reports, by every ship, of the progress of the colony, and to regulate internal trade; and eighteenth, to devote his life, time, etc., to the faithful discharge of his duties.

The admirable document of which the foregoing is a brief synopsis, containing as it does the general principles of all good government, was, no doubt, designed to meet the former evils complained of by the people of New York. That the influence of Colonel Dongan, during the eight months or so that he remained in England between his appointment and departure for New York, was wholesomely exerted in impressing a liberal and enlightened character upon the policy and instructions of the home government, cannot be doubted. No one was better fitted by experience, good judgment, and inclination, for such a task. The document itself, the most just and liberal that ever emanated from an English sovereign, goes far to vindicate the name and character of James II.

The new governor arrived at New York on the 25th of August, 1683, and entered upon the duties of his office—duties rendered more delicate and embarrassing by the excitement through which the community had just passed, the high and extravagant expectations built upon a new appointment, made with the view of remedying old complaints, and by the fact that he himself was a professed and zealous Catholic, while the community whose destinies he was commissioned to guide were almost without exception Protestants, and peculiarly inclined, at that time, to look with distrust and hatred upon all "Papists." That such was the case, we are told by all the historians of the state and city; but that, by his address, good government, and enlightened policy, Governor Dongan soon removed this difficulty, we have the same authority for asserting. Smith says of him, "He was a man of integrity, moderation, and genteel manners, and, though a professed papist, may be classed among the best of our governors;" and adds "that he surpassed all his predecessors in a due attention to our affairs with the Indians, by whom he was highly esteemed." {770} Valentine writes, that "he was a Roman Catholic in his religious tenets, which was the occasion of much remark on the part of the Protestant inhabitants of the colony. His personal character was in other respects not objectionable to the people, and he is described as a man of integrity, moderation, and genteel manners, and as being among the best of the governors who had been placed in charge of this province." And Booth also writes of him, "He was of the Roman Catholic faith, a fact which rendered him, at first, obnoxious to many; but his firm and judicious policy, his steadfast integrity, and his pleasing and courteous address, soon won the affections of the people, and made him one of the most popular of the royal governors." Colden, in his history of the Five Nations, calls him an "honest gentleman," and "an active and prudent governor."

The governor at once organized his council, which, as well from necessity as from prudent policy, was composed of gentlemen of the Dutch Reformed and English churches. Regarding his functions as purely civil, he did not, in the government of the colonists, who were Protestants, advance his views upon subjects not connected with civil government offensively before them, as they feared he would do. He might have induced over from the old country members of his own church to form his council; but neither duty nor prudence recommended this measure. Catholics, however, were no longer excluded from office, nor from the practice of their religion. The governor had a chapel, in which himself, his suite, his servants, and all the Catholics of the province, could attend divine service according to their own creed. A Jesuit father, who accompanied him from England, was his chaplain.

He proceeded at once, according to his instructions, to issue his warrants for the election of a general assembly. This was an auspicious beginning of his administration, as it was a concession from the Duke of York for which the people had long struggled. This illustrious body, consisting of the governor, ten councillors, and seventeen representatives elected by the people, assembled in the city of New York, on the 17th of October, 1683. As he was the first, so he was the most liberal and friendly royal governor, that presided over the popular legislatures of New York; and the contests between arbitrary power and popular rights, which distinguished the administration of future governors, down to the Revolution, did not have their origin under his administration. The first act of the general assembly was the framing of a charter of liberties—the first guaranty of popular government in the province; and Governor Dongan, as he was the first governor to sign the charter of civil and religious liberty in New York, was, not many years afterward, the first citizen persecuted for his religion after its adoption. This noble charter ordained,

"That supreme legislative power should for ever reside in the governor, council, and people, met in general assembly; that every freeholder and freeman might vote for representatives without restraint; that no freeman should suffer but by the judgment of his peers, and that all trials should be by a jury of twelve men; that no tax should be assessed, on any pretext whatever, but by the consent of the assembly; that no seaman or soldier should be quartered on the inhabitants against their will; that no martial law should exist; that no person, professing faith in God, by Jesus Christ, should, at any time, be in any way disquieted or questioned for any difference of opinion in matters of religion."

It was provided that the general assemblies were to convene at least triennially; new police regulations were established; Sunday laws were enacted; tavern-keepers were prohibited from selling liquor except to travellers; children were prohibited from playing in the street, citizens from working, and Indians and negroes from assembling, on the Sabbath; twenty cartmen were licensed, on condition that they should repair the highways gratis, when called on by the mayor, and cart the dirt from the streets beyond the limits of the city. The inhabitants were required to sweep the dirt of the streets together every Saturday afternoon, preparatory to its removal by the cartmen. On the 8th of December, 1683, the city was divided into six wards, each of which was entitled to elect an alderman and councilman annually, to represent them in the government of the city. The appointment of the mayor was reserved to the governor and council, and was not made elective by the people until after the American Revolution.

In 1685, on the death of Charles, the Duke of York succeeded to the English crown, under the title of James II. Governor Dongan, by special orders from the home government, proclaimed King James throughout the province. Indian and French disturbances having ceased, all was now quiet along the northern frontier, and the governor, skilfully availing himself of the opportunity, caused the king's arms to be put upon all the Indian castles along the Great Lake, and they, he writes to Secretary Blathwayt, submitted willingly to the king's government. In 1686, Governor Dongan received a new commission, bearing date on the 10th of June of that year. This was a very different document from his first commission, and manifests the change in favor of arbitrary power which took place in the sentiments and policy of James on his accession to the throne. The general assembly was abolished and the legislative power was vested in the governor and council, subject to the approval of the king; they were also authorized to proclaim and enforce martial law, to impose taxes, etc. It has been erroneously stated by one of our historians that James, in this document, instructed Governor Dongan "to favor the introduction of the Roman Catholic religion into the province—a course of policy which the governor, himself a Catholic, was reluctant to adopt;" whereas, the only provision therein relating to religion is in these words:

"And wee doe, by these presents, will, require, and command you to take all possible care for the Discountenance of Vice and encouragement of Virtue and good-living, that by such example the Infidels may bee invited and desired to partake of the Christian Religion."

According to this commission, the general assembly was dissolved on the 6th of August, 1685, and no other was convened during the reign of James. Notwithstanding this radical change in the organic law of the province, the mild, liberal, and judicious administration of the governor caused the exercise of arbitrary power to be but lightly felt by the people.

In 1686, Governor Dongan signalized his administration by granting, in the name and by the authority of the king, the celebrated charter of the city of New York known as the Dongan Charter, bearing date the 22d of April of that year. This document constitutes to this day the basis and foundation of the municipal laws, rights, privileges, public property, and franchises of the city. It was confirmed and renewed by Governor Montgomery, on the 15th day of January, 1730, in the reign of George II. {772} This charter was granted on the petition of the mayor and common council of the city of New York, addressed "To the Right Honorable Colln. Dongan, Esqr., Lieutennant & Governor & Vice Admirall under his Royall Highness, James Duke of York and Albany, &c., of New York and Dependencyes in America." In this petition are recited the ancient privileges and incorporation of the city, and especially the fact that the whole island of Manhattan had been made a part of the corporation, and all the inhabitants thereof were subject to the government of the city; and praying a re-grant and confirmation of the same, and of all their ancient rights and privileges. The charter itself confirms all the ancient franchises and grants to the city, and confers many new ones upon it; it grants to the city the waste or unappropriated lands on the island, and concedes the right of local or municipal legislation, the ferries, markets, docks, etc., and covers thoroughly the whole ground of municipal government. It would seem, from an endorsement made on the petition in the office of the home government, by the secretary through whose hands it passed, that the new charter should be granted on the express condition that the old charter be surrendered; "otherwise, they may keep all their Old Priviledges by virtue of that, and take ye additions by this new one, without Subjecting their Officers, &c., to the approbation & Refusall, &c., of ye governors."

Among other public measures and acts of Governor Dongan may be mentioned, that he proposed to the home government the establishment of post-offices, or "post-houses," as they were called, all along the Atlantic coast within the English dominions, and the establishment of a mint. French Protestants, resorting to the colony for trade or business of any kind, were not to be molested. The fort was supported for one year at his private expense, during the insufficiency of the public revenue under Collector Santen. He obtained a release from the Ranseleers to the lands in Albany, and then granted a charter to that town; and he endeavored to bring about the union of New Jersey and Connecticut, under one and the same government with New York, as a measure of public safety and strength. In 1686, the governor's salary was raised from £400 to £600 per annum. The governor's residence was at the fort, and there was attached to the office the products or rents of a farm, called, at various times, the governor's, duke's, or king's farm, and of another smaller piece of land, called the queen's garden, which were subsequently granted to and remain to this day the property of the corporation of Trinity Church. It may also be mentioned, as an evidence of Governor Dongan's popularity, that there is to be found, in a list of the titles of acts passed by the general assembly in 1684, the following title, "A Bill for a present to the Governor."

We are told by the historians that "considerable improvements were made in the city in Governor Dongan's time." [Footnote 189]

The city wall, erected in 1653, on the present line of Wall street, which derived its name from this circumstance, ran through the farm of Jan Jansen Damen; and from Broadway to Pearl street, the lands north of the wall were, in Governor Dongan's time, in possession of Damen's heirs, who were now induced to part with the same, so that the wall was removed and these valuable lots brought at once into the market, and were soon improved. {773} Afterward, Governor Dongan determined still further to enlarge the city, to demolish the old fortifications, which were in a state of decay, and to erect new defences further out. Wall street was laid out on the site of the old city wall. "The street was afterwards favored by the erection of the city hall on the site of the present custom-house, and of Trinity Church, facing its westerly extremity, and soon became one of principal streets of the city." In 1687, a new street was laid out between Whitehall street and Old Slip, and the corporation sold the lots on condition that the purchasers should build the street out toward the water and protect it against the washing of the tide. These improvements were not carried into effect until several years afterward. This is the present Water street. In the second year of Governor Dongan's administration, 1684, the vessels of New York consisted of three barques, three brigantines, twenty-six sloops, and forty-six open boats; facts which convey some notion of the commerce and prosperity of New York at that time.

Governor Dongan manifested great activity and energy in the conduct of public affairs. His report on the condition of the colony is a document replete with intelligence, vigor, and practical experience, and shows that no part of the colony, however remote, escaped his attention and care; and no branch of the public service was neglected by him. Mr. Santen, the collector of the port, became a defaulter to the amount of £3000, and was the occasion of great embarrassment and loss to Governor Dongan, who, however, on his part, acted promptly in the premises, by seizing the books of the delinquent official, causing him to be arrested and brought before the council for trial, and, on his proving refractory, sending him to England. While in England, the displaced collector preferred charges against Governor Dongan, who defended himself in that able and conclusive document, or report, on the condition of the colony, addressed to the lords of the home government, to which allusion has just been made. The following extract will show how characteristically he defended himself against one of Mr. Santen's charges:

"To the Tenth: Concerning my Covetousness, as hee is pleased to term it. Here, (if Mr. Santen speaks true, in saying I have been covetous,) it was in the management of this small Revenue to the best advantage, and had Mr. Santen been as just as I have been careful, the King had not been in debt, and I had more in my pocket than now I have."

This document also shows how active Governor Dongan was to secure the beaver and other Indian trade for the province; his zeal would not stop short of confining the French to the other side of the great lakes, and William Penn and his people south of a line drawn from a point on the Delaware "to the falls in the Susquehanna." [Footnote 190]

The report is also full of valuable suggestions on the future as well as the past and present government of the province, and contains valuable statistics relating to the courts of justice, the public revenues, trade and commerce, population, the Indians, shipping, agriculture, and every other public interest.

Governor Dongan distinguished his administration in an especial manner by his attention to the relations and interests of the province connected with the Indian tribes within and adjoining it; and he is admitted by historians to have surpassed all his predecessors in this department of public affairs, and to have been held in the greatest esteem by the Indians themselves. {774} While seeking their alliance, their trade, and their submission to his government, he ever treated them with frankness, generosity, and true friendship. The grateful savages always addressed him by the friendly name of "Corlear;" [Footnote 191] "and the name of 'Dongan, the white father,' was remembered in the Indian lodges long after it had grown indifferent to his countrymen at Manhattan." His master-stroke of Indian policy was in gaining the alliance of the Five Nations, securing their submission to the English government in preference to that of France, and carrying our northern frontier to the great lakes.

[Footnote 191: This was the name of one of the old Dutch inhabitants, who had conferred a great boon upon the Indians, and by his timely intervention saved a large number of them from a contemplated massacre in one of their wars. Whenever afterward they wished to address a person in terms of strong attachment and confidence, they called him "Corlear."]

The Five Nations were a confederacy of the five most powerful Indian tribes of the north: the Mohawks, the Oneidas, the Onondagas, the Cayugas, and the Senecas. They were usually called, by the French, by the name of "Iroquois." Their confederation dates back beyond the limits of their history, as known to the white race; and both, like that of other nations in their origin, are only known to us through dim traditions and fabulous exaggerations. They were united when the French came to Canada; for we are told, that, "when Champlain arrived in Canada, he found them united in a war against the Adirondacks, or Algonquins; and, as he settled in the country of the latter, he accompanied them in one of their hostile incursions, and, by the assistance of the French, a body of the Five Nations was defeated." They long felt a resentment for this act of hostility, although they received missionaries from the French, and, in a great measure, embraced the Christian faith. On the arrival of the Dutch, a trade sprang up between the inhabitants of New Amsterdam and the Indians of the Five Nations; and the latter, by exchanging their furs for fire-arms, became more powerful and more terrible to their enemies. It does not seem that the Dutch government laid any claim to their country, or to their allegiance; though Governor Dongan, in his controversy with the French, claimed that his pretensions were based upon a Dutch title. Their form of government was federal, like our own. Each nation had its own separate government, for the regulation of their local and individual affairs, and a general government in all things relating to their common interests. They were the most powerful, the most permanent, and the most capable Indian organization in America. Like the Romans, they incorporated the nations they conquered into the confederacy, with equal rights; or, if this were impracticable, they destroyed their enemies entirely. Such was their power that they exacted tribute from neighboring tribes. In 1715, the Tuscaroras of North Carolina were aggregated to the original confederacy, which was thereafter known by the name of the Six Nations.

Governor Dongan soon perceived the importance of securing the friendship and alliance of these powerful and warlike tribes. The Dutch had made a treaty of peace with the Five Nations, which had never been openly broken; but as it was necessary to keep treaties with the Indians constantly renewed, in order to prevent them from being forgotten; and, as the Indians had considered themselves, on several occasions, slighted by the English governors, they had more than once invaded the territories of the latter. {775} The French in Canada, as the first Europeans who had visited their country, claimed it and the allegiance of the tribes. French missionaries, men of heroic self-sacrifice and profound piety, were among them, preaching the Gospel, receiving their confessions of faith, offering up the Christian sacrifice in their midst, and doing all in their power to improve their temporal and spiritual condition. It was natural, it was probably necessary, that these pious missionaries should bring their flocks in contact with their own government; and, while their mission and holy office among the Indians were utterly divested of all political or worldly motives, they could not avoid being powerful instruments, with the French government, in securing the advancement of French interests among those nations. Governor Dongan, on the other hand, had by his kindness and frankness completely gained their confidence, and was succeeding well in cementing the relations between himself and the Five Nations. He soon discovered the presence of the French missionaries in their midst an obstacle to this policy; and, at the same time, as a Catholic, he felt a profound interest in their religious enlightenment, and in their adherence to the church of which he was himself a devoted member. To avoid the conflict which might arise between the duty he owed, on the one hand, to his church and his conscience, and, on the other, to his king, he resolved on the plan of insisting upon his claim to the allegiance of the Five Nations, claiming the country to the great lakes, and upon the withdrawal of the French missionaries, and the substitution of English Jesuit missionaries in their place. Though receiving little encouragement from the home government in these measures, Governor Dongan carried them so far into effect as to secure the withdrawal of the French missionaries from three of the Five Nations, and to obtain the services of English Jesuits at New York, destined for the Indian missions, in the place of French priests. Father Harrison arrived in New York in 1685, and Father Gage arrived there in 1686. But, in consequence of their ignorance of the Indian language, they were compelled to remain in the city while studying it and preparing for the mission. War, too, soon rendered the field of their missionary zeal and labor inaccessible to them, and the sequel of events shows that it was neither their own nor the good fortune of the Indians that they should ever reach it. A Catholic writer [Footnote 192] thus alludes to Governor Dongan's position on this, to him, delicate subject:

"There can be no doubt that Governor Dongan, on coming among the New Yorkers, found that if the measures for converting the Indians were to proceed, the political interests of his own country required that English missionaries should take the place of the French Jesuits, some of whom were incorporated among the Five Nations. The historians of New York assert that no previous governor had made himself so well acquainted with Indian affairs, or conducted the intercourse between the settlers and Indians with so much ability and regard to the interests of the subjects of Great Britain; while, at the same time, he was held in high esteem by the Indians themselves. And it is mentioned, to his honor, by the same historians, who are unsparing in their condemnation of his religion, that he did not permit the identity of his faith with that of the Catholic missionaries of France to prevent him from opposing their residence among the Indian tribes in his province; their influence being calculated to promote the interests and policy of France, and weaken the authority of the English. But it was loyalty to his own government, and a just regard for the interests confided to him, and not indifference to the pious work of Christianizing the Indians, that induced Governor Dongan to oppose the missions of the French."

"The English colony of New York had now passed under the sway of Colonel Dongan, one of the most enterprising and active governors that ever controlled the destinies of any of the English provinces. His short but vigorous administration showed that he was not only thoroughly acquainted with the interests of England, but able to carry them out. A Catholic, who had served in the French armies, he was biassed neither by his religion nor his former services in the duties of the station now devolved upon him. … Claiming for England all the country south of the great lakes, he it was who made them a boundary. His first step was to extend the power of New York over the five Iroquois cantons, and bind those warlike tribes to the English interest. His next, to recall the Caughnawagas to their ancient home, by promises of a new location on the plains of Saratoga, where a church should be built for them, and an English Jesuit stationed as their missionary. In this plan he found his efforts thwarted by the missionaries, who, French by birth and attachment, looked with suspicion on the growing English influence in the cantons, as fatal to the missions which had cost so much toil, and who relied little on Dongan's fair words, and subsequent promise to replace them by English members of their society."

The same author, in another work, expresses his confidence in the sincerity of Governor Dongan's intentions and promises, and points to the three English Jesuits brought to New York by him, as proof of both. [Footnote 194]

The French government of Canada was equally bent on reducing the Five Nations to subjection to the king of France. It required no serious pretexts to induce the French to carry their plans into effect by open war; and pretexts were not long wanting. The murder of a Seneca chief at Mackinaw; an attack by the Iroquois on a French post in Illinois; the seizure of a flotilla—fanned the embers of war into a flame, and the subjugation of the Five Nations seemed to be at hand. A large Canadian army was organized for this purpose. It is said by historians, and with probable truth, that the French king had remonstrated with James II. against Colonel Dongan's interference with the French missions, and that James had instructed his governor to desist from this policy; also, that James, on hearing of the designs of the Canadians on the Five Nations, supposing that these warlike and refractory tribes, either as subjects or enemies, would be always a thorn in the side of his province, while within its limits, ordered Colonel Dongan not to interfere with those designs. But Colonel Dongan entertained very different views on these subjects. Not only did he insist on replacing the French Jesuits with English members of the same society, but he also proposed, both to the home government and to the governors of Maryland and Virginia, that these two provinces should unite with New York in resisting the encroachments of the French. He also proposed to the home government a plan of emigration from Ireland to New York, and that one of his own nephews should be appointed to conduct and manage the enterprise. He wrote to the home government on this subject as follows:

"It will be very necessary to send over men to build those forts [the proposed forts along the northern frontier.] … My lord, there are people enough in Ireland, who had pretences to estates there, and are of no advantage to the country, and may live here very happy. I do not doubt, if his majesty think fit to employ my nephew, he will bring over as many as the king will find convenient to send, who will be no charge to his majesty after they are landed."

Governor Dongan, notwithstanding his instructions to the contrary, "was far too honorable to see his allies, (the Five Nations,) murdered in cold blood, in obedience to the will of his superiors." He sent his messengers to warn the Iroquois of the impending danger, and invited them to meet him at Albany, to renew the old treaty of peace, which had been long ago made between them and the Dutch, and which had almost faded from the memories of the chiefs.

Both met punctually at the appointed rendezvous; and Colonel Dongan made one of his most characteristic and effective speeches to them, in which he explained his claims upon them, demonstrated the hostility of the French and his own friendship for them, made promises of future aid, and proposed an alliance. The treaty here entered into "was long respected by both parties." The clouds of war now burst upon the Five Nations, but found them not unprepared. Two invasions of the French were repelled, and finally the invaders, weakened by sickness and unacquainted with the Indian modes of war, returned with scattered ranks to their own country, to await the terrible retaliation of an injured foe. The warriors of the Five Nations burst with fury on the Canadian settlements, "burning, ravaging, and slaying without mercy, until they had nearly exterminated the French from the territory. The war continued until, of all the French colonies, Quebec, Montreal, and Three Rivers alone remained, and the French dominion in America was almost annihilated; Governor Dongan remaining," says the historian, "a firm friend of the Indians during his administration, aiding them by his council, and doing them every good office in his power." [Footnote 195]

By his bold and independent course, so much at variance with the views of his royal master, Governor Dongan incurred the displeasure of James II., who suspended him from his functions, and about April, 1688, the governor resigned his office. The functions of the office of governor then devolved upon the deputy-governor, Nicholson. Smith, the historian, says of Dongan's removal from the office which he had graced so well, and in which he had done so much for the good of his king and his fellow-citizens, that "he fell into the king's displeasure through his zeal for the true interest of the province."

The voluminous correspondence between Governor Dongan and Mons. Denonville, governor of Canada, on the relations of the two rival English and French colonies, published in the Colonial and Documentary histories of New York, is replete with interest, as containing valuable information concerning the affairs of the day, and as fairly illustrating the character of our governor. Though frequently running into bitter personalities and irreconcilable conflict, the letters of these two officials were not devoid of personal courtesies and amenities. Thus, we see the French governor acting as a mediator with his sovereign in behalf of Governor Dongan, in order that he might recover his claim for services rendered in the French army; and we find Governor Dongan, at one time, regretting that distance prevented him from meeting and interchanging social civilities with his rival; and, at another, sending to the Canadian governor a present of oranges, which, he had heard, were a great rarity in Canada, and regretting that the messenger's want of "carriage" prevented him from sending more.

There was one point, however, upon which Governor Dongan was ever uncompromising; this was his determination to claim the great lakes as his boundary, and to submit to nothing short of this. He carried his point even in his own day; for the royal arms of England were emblazoned on the Indian castles along that border, English forts defended it, and the Five Nations recognized the king of England as their father. Though wars intervened, this boundary was afterward recognized, by solemn treaty, as the line dividing the English and French dominions in our day, the visitor to the great lakes, and the tourist at the falls of Niagara, sees the American flag floating where Governor Dongan planted its predecessor, the standard of our English ancestors. Then,

  "Proudly hath it floated
     Through the battles of the sea,
   When the red-cross flag o'er smoke-wreaths played
     Like the lightning in its glee."
                       Hemans.

  "When Freedom from her mountain height
     Unfurled her standard to the air,
   She tore the azure robe of night,
     And set her stars of glory there."
                         Drake.

After his retirement from office, Governor Dongan spent his time in New York and on Staten Island, in both of which places he had acquired some property, but resided mostly on his estate on Staten Island. He was offered the commission of a major-general in the British army, and the command of a regiment in the service of James II., all of which he declined to accept.

From the time that James II. ascended the English throne, discontents began to arise among his Protestant subjects, on both sides of the ocean, at the transfer of power from the Protestants to the Catholics. The appointment of Governor Dongan, "a professed papist," was offensive at first to the people of the province of New York; but his upright administration, his devotion to the best interests of the colony, and his personal popularity, quelled all actual disturbance during his term of office. We have seen that, soon after his arrival, civil and religious liberty were guaranteed, and that he selected the council from members of the Dutch Reformed Church, in order to disarm all prejudices. He certainly was not disposed, however, to debar himself and his fellow-Catholic subjects from the enjoyment of that religious liberty which he had done so much to secure for others. He had been accompanied to New York, in 1683, by Father Thomas Harvey, S.J., who performed the divine services in the governor's chapel, in the fort, and attended to the spiritual wants of the governor, and of such Catholics as were in New York during his administration. Fathers Harrison and Gage were sent for, and arrived in New York afterward, with the view of superseding the French missionaries among the Indians. It does not appear that large numbers of Catholics emigrated to New York, during his administration, for his plan for encouraging emigration from Ireland was not carried into effect; yet it is reasonable to suppose that the number of Catholics increased somewhat under the favorable auspices of a Catholic governor. And, although Matthias Plowman, the successor to Mr. Santer, the late collector, was a Catholic, we do not find that Governor Dongan filled many of the public offices in his gift with Catholics. Mr. Nicholson, the deputy-governor, into whose hands Governor Dongan resigned his office, was not appointed by him, but was the deputy of Governor Andros, who had been appointed by the home government governor of New England and New York, and whose headquarters were at Boston; this Mr. Nicholson was said to have been "an adherent of the Catholic faith." Religious controversies ran high, however, during this period, and historians generally inform us that plots were formed by the Protestants, not only in England, under James, but also in the province of New York, under Governor Dongan. {779} This seems probable from the readiness with which the people on both sides of the Atlantic rose on their Catholic rulers as soon as the opportunity presented itself. This opportunity was afforded not long after Governor Dongan's retirement from office, in 1689, on the invasion of England by William Prince of Orange, and the abdication and flight of James II. from England.

The tone of public sentiment in New York in 1689 is thus described by Bishop Bayley, in his treatise on the History of the Catholic Church on the Island of New York:

"Smith, describing the disposition and temper of the inhabitants of the colony at the time, shows that, notwithstanding the personal popularity of the governor, the increase of Catholics was looked upon with a suspicious eye. 'A general disaffection,' he says,'to the government prevailed among the people. Papists began to settle in the colony under the smiles of the governor. The collector of the revenues and several principal officers threw off the mask, and openly avowed their attachment to the doctrines of Rome. A Latin school was set up, and the teacher strongly suspected for a Jesuit; in a word, the whole body of the people trembled for the Protestant cause.' The news of the revolution in England, and the subsequent proceedings under Leisler, probably caused such Catholics as were in a situation to get away, to withdraw at the same time with the governor. The documents connected with Leisler's usurpation of authority, as published by O'Callaghan in his Documentary History of New York, show how studiously he appealed to the religious prejudices of the people, in order to excite odium against the friends of the late governor, and establish his own claims. The 'security of the Protestant religion,' and the 'diabolical designs of the wicked and cruel papists,' are made to ring their changes through his various proclamations and letters. Depositions and affidavits were published, in which it was sworn that Lieutenant-Governor Nicholson had been several times seen assisting at mass; that the papists on Staten Island 'did threaten to cut the inhabitants' throats,' and to come and burn the city; 'that M. De La Prearie had arms in his house for fifty men; that eighty or a hundred men were coming from Boston and other places, that were hunted away, (no doubt, not for their goodness,) and that there were several of them Irish and papists; that a good part of the soldiers that were in the fort already were papists,' etc. Among other depositions, is one of Andries and Jan Meyer, in which they declare that, 'being delivered from a papist governor, Thomas Dongan, they thought that the deputy-governor in the Fort would defend and establish the true religion; but we found to the contrary. There was a cry that all the images erected by Col. Thomas Dongan in the fort would be broken down and taken away; but when we were working in the fort with others, it was commanded, after the departure of Sir Edmond Andros, by said Nicholson, to help the priest, John Smith,' (supposed to be a name assumed for the sake of safety by one of the Jesuit fathers of New York,) 'to remove, for which we were very glad; but it was soon done, because said removal was not far off, but in a better room in the fort; and ordered to make all things ready for said priest, according to his will, and perfectly, and to erect all things as he ordered, from that time,'" etc.

Mr. Graham says of the state of public feeling prevailing at this time in New York, that

"An outrageous dread of popery had invaded the minds of the lower classes of the people, and not only diminished real and substantial evils in their esteem, but nearly extinguished common sense in their understandings, and common justice in their sentiments."

Deputy-Governor Nicholson took possession of the government in August, 1688. On the 24th of that month, Governor Andros issued a proclamation for a general thanksgiving throughout the English provinces for the birth of a prince, the son of King James, and heir to the English throne. But by the next mail news of quite a different character arrived: the invasion of England by the Prince of Orange, the flocking of the people to his standard, the abdication and flight of King James, and the proclamation of William and Mary as king and queen of England. {780} Mr. Nicholson and his followers recognized the authority of William and Mary, and, claiming that the commissions issued under James II. still held good, proposed to exercised the functions of the public offices under them, until instructions should be received from the new government at home. They were supported by the more respectable and wealthy part of the citizens. But the popular party took the opposite ground, and contended that all the commissions were now invalid, and that the people should take the government into their own hands until the will of their present majesties should be heard from. They were led on by one Jacob Leisler, a successful merchant, but a bitter bigot and ambitious demagogue, and the leader of such as refused all social intercourse with Catholics. Leisler had been appointed as early as 1683, by Governor Dongan, commissioner of the Admiralty; but, while holding this office, he was deeply disaffected, and had previously gained some notoriety by his opposition to Rensselaer, an Episcopal minister and suspected papist, at Albany, who had been sent to the province by the Duke of York.

The revolution commenced in New York by the refusal of Leisler and others to pay revenue and taxes to Mr. Plowman, the collector, because he was a Catholic. The people of Long Island deposed their magistrates and elected new ones, and despatched a large body of militia to New York, "to seize the fort, and keep off popery, French invasion, and slavery." The public money, amounting to £773 12s., had been deposited, for safe keeping, in the fort which was garrisoned by a few soldiers commanded by a Catholic ensign. In order to secure this treasure, the popular party assembled on the 2d of June, 1689, and seized the fort. Leisler, who had refused to lead them to attack, on hearing of its seizure, went, with forty-seven men, to the fort, was welcomed by the citizens, and acknowledged as their leader. At a meeting of the people, a so-called "Committee of Safety" was appointed for the immediate government of the province, and Leisler was appointed to the chief command. Then followed the reign of terror described by Smith, Graham, and other historians. Catholics were hunted down in every direction, and many Protestants, suspected of being "papists" at heart, were treated in the same manner. Orders were issued for the arrest of Governor Dongan—who, since his retirement from office, had been quietly residing on his estate at Staten Island—and all other Catholics, who were compelled to fly for safety. Governor Dongan and other Catholics took shelter on board of a vessel in the harbor, where they remained for weeks, during the height of the excitement. He probably was obliged to keep himself concealed. He fled to Rhode Island, and soon afterward returned to Staten Island; his servants were arrested, his personal effects—charged, in the frenzy of the hour, to embrace a number of arms—were seized at his mill on Staten Island; and all who pretended to hold commissions under him were ordered to be arrested. So effectually were the Catholics driven from the province that, in 1696, seven years afterward, on a census of Catholics, taken by the mayor of the city by order of Governor Fletcher, only nine names were returned, namely, Major Anthony Brockholes, William Douglass, John Cooley, Christiane Lawrence, Thomas Howarding, John Cavalier, John Patte, John Fenny, and Philip Cunningham.

Whether Governor Dongan returned to England, and again came out to the province after the excitement had abated, or remained concealed in the province or neighborhood, seems not to be clear. It is certain, however, that he was in New York in 1791 [sic]. It need only be added here that the "Charter of Liberties," passed in 1683, under a Catholic governor, was, with all other laws passed by the late general assembly, repealed by the Protestant assembly of New York, in 1691, and a so-called "Bill of Rights" passed, which expressly deprived Catholics of all their political and religious rights. In 1697 this "Bill of Rights" was repealed by King William, "probably as being too liberal," says Bishop Bayley; and, in 1700, an act was passed which recited that "Whereas, divers Jesuits, priests, and popish missionaries have, of late, come, and for some time have had this province, and others of his majesty's adjacent colonies, who, by their wicked and subtle insinuations, industriously labored to debauch, seduce, and withdraw the Indians from their due obedience to his most sacred majesty, and to excite and stir them up to sedition, rebellion, and open hostility against his majesty's priest, etc., remaining in or coming into the province after November 1st, 1700, should be "deemed and accounted an incendiary and disturber of the public peace and safety, and an enemy of the true Christian religion, and shall be adjudged to suffer perpetual imprisonment," that, in case of escape and capture, they should suffer death, and that harborers of priests should pay a fine of two hundred pounds, and stand three days in the pillory. If it is alleged that the law of 1691 was the result of high party excitement and public alarm, what excuse, it may be asked, is to be alleged for the more illiberal and persecuting law of 1700? It is but justice to James II., to point to the "Charter of Liberties" of 1683, passed with his own approbation, and at his suggestion, and then to the laws of 1691 and 1700, passed under William and Mary, and remark that, though the revolution gave the colonies William and Mary in the place of James, it also gave penal and odious laws, and a deceptive "Bill of Rights," in exchange for a "Charter of Liberties" that gave what its title professed to confer. In Maryland, too, whose Catholic founders proclaimed civil and religious liberty as the basis of their commonwealth, the same scenes, on a more extended scale, were at the same time being enacted; the persecutors in New York were in intimate correspondence with their co-laborers in Maryland and New England.

In 1691, when Governor Dongan saw, from the passage of the "Bill of Rights," that Catholics were excluded from the benefits of government, and subjected to persecution, he returned to England.

While he was governor of New York, in 1685, his brother William, who had, in 1661, been created Baron Dongan and Viscount Claine in the Irish peerage, was advanced to the earldom of Limerick, with remainder, on the failure of direct issue, to Colonel Thomas Dongan. On the breaking out of the revolution and the flight of James II., William, Earl of Limerick, adhered to that monarch, and followed him into France; whereupon his estates were forfeited, and granted to the Earl of Athlone, an adherent of William. {782} This grant was confirmed by an act of the Irish parliament, but with a clause saving the right of Colonel Thomas Dongan. Colonel Dongan, on his return to England, made every effort to recover some portion of his brother's estates. His brother, the Earl of Limerick, died at St. Germain in 1698, whereupon Colonel Dongan was introduced to William III. as successor of the late Earl of Limerick, and the new earl did homage to the king for his earldom, and, according to the feudal custom, kissed the king's hand on succeeding to the rank. He was allowed by the government, about the same time, £2500, in tallies, in part payment for advances made by him for public purposes while governor of New York. His persevering efforts to recover the estates of his deceased brother so far finally succeeded as to induce the passage of an act of parliament for his relief, on the 25th of May, 1702. He subsequently offered himself for service in the American colonies, but it does not appear that he was ever in the service of the crown after his return to England. He died in London, on the 14th day of December, 1715, and was interred in the church-yard of St. Pancras, Middlesex. The inscription on his tombstone reads as follows:

"The Right Honble Thomas Dongan,
Earl of Limerick.
Died December 14th,
aged eighty-one years,
1715.
Requiescat in Pace. Amen."

In addition to the encomiums passed upon him both by Catholic and Protestant historians, the following, from De Courcy and Shea's Catholic Church in the United States, is here inserted:

"This able governor was not long enough in office to realize all his plans for the good of the colony, where he had expended, for the public good, most of his private fortune. In this, as in many other points, the Catholic Governor Dongan forms a striking contrast with the mass of colonial rulers, who sought their own profit at the expense of the countries submitted to them. To Dongan, too, New York is indebted for the convocation of the first legislative assembly, the colony having been, till then, ruled and governed at the good pleasure of the governor; and this readiness to admit the people to a share in the government is a fact which the enemies of James II. should not conceal in their estimate of that Catholic monarch."

Mr. Moore gives us the following particulars in his note, cited among the authorities to this article:

"This nobleman died without issue. His estates in America were settled chiefly on three nephews, John, Thomas, and Walter Dongan. Lieutenant-Colonel Edward Vaughan Dongan, of the third battalion of New Jersey Volunteers, who died of wounds received in an attack on the British posts on Staten Island, in August, 1777, was son of the last-mentioned gentleman. John Charlton Dongan, another collateral relative of the Earl of Limerick, represented Richmond County in the New York Assembly, from 1786 to 1789. Representatives of this ancient family are still to be found in New York."

[NOTE.—The above article is condensed from a forthcoming work of Mr. R. H. Clarke, to be entitled, Lives of Eminent Catholics of the United States.]

Beethoven

His Warning.

Years passed on, and Beethoven continued to reside at Vienna with his two brothers, who had followed him thither, and took the charge of his domestic establishment, so as to leave him entirely at leisure for composition. His reputation had advanced gradually but surely, and he now stood high, if not highest, among living masters. The prediction was beginning to be accomplished.

It was a mild evening in the latter part of September, and a large company was assembled at the charming villa of the Baron Raimond von Wetzlar, situated near Schönbrunn. They had been invited to be present at a musical contest between the celebrated Wolff and Beethoven. The part of Wolff was espoused with great enthusiasm by the baron; that of Beethoven by the Prince de Lichnowsky, and, as in all such matters, partisans swarmed on either side. The popular talk among the music-loving Viennese was, everywhere, discussion of the merits of the rival candidates for fame.

Beethoven was walking in one of the avenues of the illuminated garden, accompanied by his pupil, Ferdinand Ries. The melancholy that marked the composer's temperament seemed, more than ever, to have the ascendency over him.

"I confess to you, Ferdinand," said he, apparently in continuation of some previous conversation, "I regret my engagement with Sonnleithner."

"I have completed it, but not to my own satisfaction. And I shall object to its being produced first at Vienna."

"For that very reason I will not appeal to their judgment; I want an impartial one. I distrust my genius for the opera."

"It is my intimacy with Salieri that has inclined me that way; nature did not suggest it; I can never feel at home there. Ferdinand, I am self-upbraided, and should be, were the applause of a thousand spectators sounding in my ears."

Beethoven hesitated; his impressions, his convictions, would seem superstition to his companion, and he was not prepared to encounter either raillery or ridicule. Just then the host, with a party of the guests, met them, exclaiming that they had been everywhere sought; that the company was all assembled in the saloon, and every thing ready for the exhibition.

"You are bent on making a gladiator of me, dear baron," cried the composer, "in order that I may be mangled and torn to pieces, for the popular amusement, by your favorite Wolff."

"Heaven forbid I should prejudge either combatant!" cried Von Wetzlar. "The lists are open; the prize is not to be awarded by me."

"Oh! as to that, I must frankly own I prefer the good old school to your new-fangled conceits and innovations. But come—the audience waits."

Each in turn, the two rivals played a piece composed by himself, accompanied by select performers. Then each improvised a short piece. The delight of the spectators was called forth in different ways. In the production of Wolff a sustained elevation, clearness, and brilliancy recalled the glories of Mozart's school, and moved the audience to repeated bursts of admiration. In that of Beethoven there was a startling boldness, an impetuous rush of emotions, a frequency of abrupt contrasts—and withal a certain wildness and mystery—that irresistibly enthralled the feelings, while it outraged, at the same time, their sense of musical propriety. There was little applause, but the deep silence, prolonged even after the notes had ceased, told how intensely all had been interested.

The victory remained undecided. There was a clamor of eager voices among the spectators; but no one could collect the suffrages, nor determine which was the successful champion in the contest. The Prince Lichnowsky, however, stood up, and boldly claimed it for his favorite.

"Nay," interrupted Beethoven, advancing, "my dear prince, there has been no contest." He offered his hand to his opponent. "We may still esteem each other, Wolff; we are not rivals. Our style is essentially different; I yield to you the palm of excellence in the qualities that distinguish you."

"You are right, my friend," cried Wolff; "henceforth let there be no more talk of championship between us. I will hold him for my enemy who ventures to compare me with you—you so superior in the path you have chosen. It is a higher path than mine—an original one; I follow contentedly in the course marked out by others."

"But our paths lead to the same goal," replied Beethoven. "We will speed each other with good wishes; and embrace cordially when we meet there at last."

There was an unusual solemnity in the composer's last words, and it put an end to the discussion. All responded warmly to his sentiment. But amidst the general murmur of approbation, one voice was heard that seemed strangely to startle Beethoven. His face grew pale, then flushed deeply; and the next moment he pressed his way hastily through the crowd, and seized by the arm a retreating figure.

No one had observed his entrance; the host knew him not, and though most of the company remarked the composer's singular emotion, none could inform him whither the unbidden guest had gone. Beethoven remained abstracted during the rest of the evening.

The opera of Leonore was represented at Prague; it met with but indifferent success. At Vienna, however, it commanded unbounded applause. Several alterations had been made in it; the composer had written a new overture, and the finale of the first act; he had suppressed a duo and trio of some importance, and made other improvements and retrenchments. Not small was his triumph at the favorable decision of the Viennese public. A new turn seemed to be given to his mind; he revolved thoughts of future conquests over the same portion of the realm of art; he no longer questioned his own spirit. It was a crisis in the artist's life, and might have resulted in his choice of a different career from that in which he has won undying fame.

Beethoven sat alone in his study; there was a light knock at the door. He replied with a careless "come in," without looking up from his work. He was engaged in revising the last scenes of his opera.

The visitor walked to the table and stood there a few minutes unobserved. Probably the artist mistook him for one of his brothers; but, on looking up, he started with indescribable surprise. The unknown friend of his youth stood beside him.

"So you have kept your word," said the composer, when he had recovered from his first astonishment; "and now, I pray you, sit down, and tell me with whom I have the honor of having formed acquaintance in so remarkable a manner."

"My name is of no importance, as it may or may not prove known to you," replied the stranger. "I am your good genius, if my counsel does you good; if not, I would prefer to take an obscure place among your disappointed friends."

There was a tone of grave rebuke in what his visitor said that perplexed and annoyed the artist. It struck him that there was affectation in this assumption of mystery, and he observed coldly,

"I shall not attempt, of course, to deprive you of your incognito; but if you assume it for the sake of effect, I would merely give you to understand that I am not prone to listen to anonymous advice."

"Oh! that you would listen," said the stranger, sorrowfully shaking his head, "to the pleadings of your better nature!"

"Ask your own heart. If that acquit you, I have nothing to say. I leave you, then, to the glories of your new career; to the popular applause—to your triumphs—to your remorse."

The composer was silent a few moments, and appeared agitated. At last he said, "I know not your reasons for this mystery; but whatever they may be, I will honor them. I entreat you to speak frankly. You do not approve my present undertaking?"

"Frankly, I do not. Your genius lies not this way," and he raised some of the leaves of the opera music.

"How know you that?" asked the artist, a little mortified. "You, perhaps, despise the opera?"

"I do not. I love it; I honor it; I honor the noble creations of those great masters who have excelled in it. But you, my friend, are beckoned to a higher and holier path."

"Because I know you; because I know the aspirations of your genius; because I know the misgivings that pursue you in the midst of success; the self-reproach that you suffer to be stifled in the clamor of popular praise. Even now, in the midst of your triumph, you are haunted by the consciousness that you are not fulfilling the true mission of the artist."

His piercing words were winged with truth itself. Beethoven buried his face in his hands.

"Woe to you," cried the unknown, "if you suppress, till they are wholly dead, your once earnest longings after the pure and the good! Woe to you, if, charmed by the syren song of vanity, you close your ears against the cry of a despairing world! Woe to you, if you resign unfulfilled the trust God committed to your hands, to sustain the weak and faltering soul, to give it strength to bear the ills of life, strength to battle against evil, to face the last enemy!"

"I once predicted your elevation, your world-wide fame," continued the stranger; "for I saw you sunk in despondency, and knew that your spirit must be aroused to bear up against trial. You now stand on the verge of a more dreadful abyss. You are in danger of making the gratification of your own pride, instead of the fulfilment of Heaven's will, the aim—the goal of your life's efforts."

"We shall meet no more. I watched over you in boyhood; I have now come forth from retirement to give you my last warning; henceforth I shall observe your course in silence. And I shall not go unrewarded. I know too well the noble spirit that burns in your breast. You will—yes, you will fulfil your mission; your glory from this time shall rest on a basis of immortality. You shall be hailed the benefactor of humanity; and the spiritual joy you prepare for others shall return to you in full measure, pressed down and running over!"

The artist's kindling features showed that he responded to the enthusiasm of his visitor; but he answered not.

"And now, farewell. But remember, before you can accomplish this lofty mission, you must be baptized with a baptism of fire. The tones that are to agitate and stir up to revolution the powers of the human soul come not forth from an unruffled breast, but from the depths of a sorely wrung and tried spirit. You must steal the triple flame from heaven, and it will first consume the peace of your own being. Remember this—and droop not when the hour of trial comes! Farewell!"

The stranger crossed his hands over Beethoven's head, as if mentally invoking a blessing—folded him in his embrace, and departed. The artist made no effort to follow him. Deep and bitter were the thoughts that moved within him; and he remained leaning his head on the table, in silent revery, or walking the room with rapid and irregular steps, for many hours. At length the struggle was over; pale but composed, he took up the sheets of his opera and threw them carelessly into his desk. His next work, Christ in the Mount of Olives, attested the high and firm resolve of his mind, sustained by its self-reliance, and independent of popular applause or disapprobation. His great symphonies, which carried the fame of the composer to its highest point, displayed the same triumph of religious principle.

Once more we find Beethoven, in the extreme decline of life. In one of the most obscure and narrow streets of Vienna, on the third floor of a gloomy-looking house, was now the abode of the gifted artist. For many weary and wasting years he had been the prey of a cruel malady, that defied the power of medicine for its cure, and had reduced him to a state of utter helplessness. {787} His ears had long been closed to the music that owed its birth to his genius; it was long since he had heard the sound of a human voice. In the melancholy solitude to which he now condemned himself, he received visits from but few of his friends, and those at rare intervals. Society seemed a burden to him. Yet he persisted in his labors, and continued to compose, notwithstanding his deafness, those undying works which commanded for him the homage of Europe.

Proofs of this feeling, and of the unforgotten affection of those who knew his worth, reached him in his retreat from time to time. Now it was a medal struck at Paris, and bearing his features; now it was a new piano, the gift of some amateurs in London; at another time, some honorary title decreed him by the authorities of Vienna, or a diploma of membership of some distinguished musical society. All these moved him not, for he had quite outlived his taste for the honors of man's bestowing. What could they—what could even the certainty that he had now immortal fame—do to soften the anguish of his malady, from which he looked alone to death as a relief?

"They wrong me who call me stern or misanthropic," said he to his brother, who came in March, 1827, to pay him a visit. "God knoweth how I love my fellow-men! Has not my life been theirs? Have I not struggled with temptation, trial, and suffering from my boyhood till now, for their sakes? And now if I no longer mingle among them, is it not because my cruel infirmity unfits me for their companionship? When my fearful doom of separation from the rest of the human race is forced on my heart, do I not writhe with terrible agony, and wish that my end were come? And why, brother, have I lived, to drag out so wretched an existence? Why have I not succumbed ere now?

"I will tell you, brother. A soft and gentle hand—it was that of art—held me back from the abyss. I could not quit the world before I had produced all—had done all that I was appointed to do. Has not such been the teaching of our holy church? I have learned through her precepts that patience is the handmaid of truth; I will go with her even to the footstool of the eternal."

The servant of the house entered and gave Beethoven a large sealed package directed to himself. He opened it; it contained a magnificent collection of the works of Handel, with a few lines stating that it was a dying bequest to the composer from the Count de N——. He it was who had been the unknown counsellor of Beethoven's youth and manhood; and the arrival of this posthumous present seemed to assure the artist that his own close of life was crowned with the approval of his friend. It was as if a seal had been set on that approbation, and the friendship of two noble spirits. It seemed like the dismissal of Beethoven from further toil.

The old man stooped his face over the papers; tears fell upon them, and he breathed a silent prayer. After a few moments he arose, and said, somewhat wildly, "We have not walked to-day, Carl. Let us go forth. This confined air suffocates me."

The wind was howling violently without; the rain beat in gusts against the windows; it was a bitter night. The brother wrote on a slip of paper, and handed it to Beethoven.

"A storm? Well, I have walked in many a storm, and I like it better than the biting melancholy that preys upon me here in my solitary room. Oh! how I loved the storm once; my spirit danced with joy when the winds blew fiercely, and the tall trees rocked, and the sea lashed itself into a fury. It was all music to me. Alas! there is no music now so loud that I can hear it.

"Do you remember the last time I led the orchestra at Von ——'s? Ah! you were not there; but I heard—yes, by leaning my breast against the instrument. When some one asked me how I heard, I replied, 'J'etntends avec mes entraillies.'"

Disturbed by his nervous restlessness, the aged composer went to the window, and opened it with trembling hands. The wind blew aside his white locks, and cooled his feverish forehead.

"I have one fear," he said, turning to his brother and slightly shuddering, "that haunts me at times—the fear of poverty. Look at this meanly furnished room, that single lamp, my meagre fare; and yet all these cost money, and my little wealth is daily consumed. Think of the misery of an old man, helpless and deaf, without the means of subsistence!"

"It depends upon the bounty of those who bestowed it; and the favor of princes is capricious. Then again, it was given on condition I remained in the territory of Austria, at the time the king of Westphalia offered me the place of chapel-master at Cassel. Alas! I cannot beat the restriction. I must travel, brother—I must leave this city."

"You-leave Vienna?" exclaimed his brother in utter amazement, looking at the feeble old man whose limbs could scarcely bear him from one street to another. Then, recollecting himself, he wrote down his question.

"Why? Because I am restless and unhappy. I have no peace, Carl! Is it not the chafing of the unchained spirit that pants to be free, and to wander through God's limitless universe? Alas! she is built up in a wall of clay, and not a sound can penetrate her gloomy dungeon."

Overcome by his feelings, the old man bowed his head on his brother's shoulder, and wept bitterly. Carl saw that the delirium that sometimes accompanied his paroxysms of illness had clouded his faculties.

The malady increased. The sufferer's eyes were glazed; he grasped his brother's hand with a tremulous pressure.

"Carl! Carl! I pardon you the evil you did me in childhood. Pray for me, brother!" cried the failing voice of the artist.

His brother supported him to the sofa and called for assistance. In an hour or two, his friend and spiritual adviser, summoned in haste, had administered the last rites of the church, and neighbors and friends had gathered around the dying man. He seemed gradually sinking into insensibility.

Suddenly he revived; a bright smile illumined his whole face; his sunken eyes sparkled.

"I shall hear in heaven!" he murmured softly, and then sang in a low but distinct voice the lines from a hymn of his own:

  "Brüder! über'm Sternenzelt,
   Muss ein lieber Vater wohnen."

Thus died Beethoven, a true artist, a good and generous man, a devout Catholic. Simple, frank, loyal to his principles, his life was spent in working out what he conceived his duty; and though his task was wrought in privation, in solitude, and distress, though happiness was not his lot in this world, doth there not remain for him an eternal reward?

The Viennese gave him a magnificent funeral. More than thirty thousand persons attended. The first musicians of the city executed the celebrated funeral march composed by him, and placed in his heroic symphony; the most famous poets and artists were pall-bearers, or carried torches; Hummel, who had come from Weimar expressly to see him, placed a laurel crown upon his tomb. Prague, Berlin, and all the principal cities of Germany, paid honors to his memory, and solemnized with pomp the anniversary of his death. Such was the distinction heaped on the dust of him whose life had been one of suffering, and whose last years had been solitary, because he felt that his infirmities excluded him from human brotherhood.

The Assumption Of Our Lady.

  If sin be captive, grace must find release;
    From curse of sin the innocent is free.
  Tomb prison is for sinners that decease;
    No tomb but throne to guiltless doth agree.
  Though thralls of sin lie lingering in the grave,
  Yet faultless corse with soul reward must have.

  The dazzled eye doth dimmèd light require,
    And dying sights repose in shrouding shades;
  But eagles' eyes to brightest light aspire,
    And living looks delight in lofty glades.
  Faint-wingèd fowl by ground do faintly fly:
  Our princely eagle mounts unto the sky.

  Gem to her worth, spouse to her love ascends;
    Prince to her throne, queen to her heavenly king;
  Whose court with solemn pomp on her attends,
    And choirs of saints with greeting notes do sing.
  Earth rendereth up her undeservèd prey:
  Heaven claims the right, and bears the prize away.

			                    Southwell.

The Conversion of Rome.

[Footnote 196:
1. History of European Morals, from Augustus to Charlemagne. By W. E. H. Lecky. London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1869. 2 vols. 8vo.
2. History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe. By the same. From the London edition. New York: Appleton & Co., 1868. 2 vols. 8vo.]

Two irreconcilable systems of morals have disputed the empire of the earliest times. The one is founded on the fact that God creates man; the other on the assumption that man is himself God, or, at least, a god unto himself. The first system finds its principle in the fact stated in the first verse of Genesis, "In the beginning God created heaven and earth;" the second finds its principle in the assurance of Satan to Eve, "Ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil." The first system is that of the Biblical patriarchs, the synagogue, the Christian church, and all sound philosophy as well as of common sense—is the theological system, which places man in entire dependence on God as principle, medium, and end, and asserts as its basis in us, HUMILITY, "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." The other system is the gentile or pagan system, or that which prevailed with the Gentiles after their falling away from the patriarchal religion. It assumed, in its practical developments, two forms, the supremacy of the state and the supremacy of the individual; but in both was asserted the supremacy of man—or man as his own lawgiver, teacher, and master, his own beginning, middle, and end, and therefore, either individually or collectively, man's sufficiency for himself. Its principle or basis, then, is PRIDE.

Mr. Lecky adopts, as we have shown in our former article, the pagan, or, more properly, the satanic system of morals, at least as to its principle, though in some few particulars he gives the superiority to Christian morals, particulars in which Christians advanced further than had advanced the best pagan school before the conversion of Rome, but in the same direction, on the same principle, and from the same starting-point. He nowhere accepts the Christian or theological principle, and rejects everywhere, with scorn, Christian asceticism, which, according to him, is based on a false principle—that of appeasing the anger of a malevolent God. He accepts Christianity only so far as reducible to the pagan principle.

The only points in which Christian morals—for Christian dogmas, in his view, have no relation to morals, and are not to be counted—are a progress on pagan morals, are the assertion of the brotherhood of the race and the recognition of the emotional side of human nature. But even these two points, as he understands them, are not peculiar to Christianity. He shows that some of the later Stoics, at least, asserted the brotherhood of the race, or that nothing human is foreign to any one who is a man—that all good offices are due to all men; and whoever has studied Plato at all, knows that Platonism attached at least as much importance, and gave as large a scope to our emotional nature, as does Christianity. Christian morals have, then, really nothing peculiar, and are, in principle, no advance on paganism. The most that can be said is that Christianity gave to the brotherhood of the race more prominence than did paganism, and transformed the Platonic love, which was the love of the beautiful, into the love of humanity. {791} This being all, we may well ask, How was it that Christianity was able to gain the victory over the pagan philosophers, and to convert the city of Rome and the Roman empire?

Mr. Lecky adopts the modern doctrine of progress, and he endeavors to prove from the historical analysis of the several pagan schools of moral philosophy, that the pagan world was gradually approaching the Christian ideal, and that when Christianity appeared at Rome it had all but attained it, so that the change was but slight, and, there being a favorable conjuncture of external circumstances, the change was easily effected. The philosophers of the empire had advanced from primitive fetichism to a pure and sublime monotheism; the mingling of men of all nations and all religions in Rome, consequent on the extension of the empire over the whole civilized world, had liberalized the views, weakened the narrow exclusiveness of former times, and gone far towards the obliteration of the distinction of nations, castes, and classes, and thus had, in a measure, prepared the world for the reception of a universal religion, based on the doctrine of the fraternity of the race and love of humanity.

All this would be very well, if it were true; but it happens to be mainly false. The fact, as well as the idea of progress, in the moral order, is wholly foreign to the pagan world. No pagan nation ever exhibits the least sign of progress in the moral order, either under the relation of doctrine or that of practice. The history of every pagan people is the history of an almost continuous moral deterioration. The purest and best period, under a moral point of view, in the history of the Roman republic, was its earliest, and nothing can exceed the corruption of its morals and manners at its close. We may make the same remark of every non-Catholic nation in modern times. There is a far lower standard of morals reached or aimed at in Protestant nations to-day than was common at the epoch of the Reformation; and the moral corruption of our own country has increased in a greater ratio than have our wealth and numbers. We are hardly the same people that we were even thirty years ago; and the worst of it is, that the pagan system, whether under the ancient Greco-Roman form or under the modern Protestant form, has no recuperative energy, and the nation abandoned to it has no power of self-renovation. Pagan nations may advance, and no doubt, at times, have advanced, in the industrial order, in the mechanic arts, and in the fine arts, but in the moral, intellectual, and spiritual order, never.

Mr. Lecky confines his history almost entirely to the moral doctrines of the philosophers; but even in these he shows no moral melioration in the later from the earlier, no progress towards Christian morals. In relation to specific duties of man to man, and of the citizen to the state, the Christian has, indeed, little fault to find with the De Officiis of Cicero; but we find even in him no approach to the Christian basis of morals. The Greeks never have any conception of either law or good, in the Christian sense. The [Greek text]

was only a rule or principle of harmony; it had its reason in the [Greek text]

, or the beautiful, and could not bind the conscience. The Latins placed the end, or the reason and motive of the moral law, in the honestum, the proper, the decent, or decorous. The highest moral act was virtus, manliness, and consisted in bravery or courage. {792} The rule was, to be manly; the motive, self-respect. One must not be mean or cowardly, because it was unmanly, and would destroy one's self-respect. We have here pride, not humility; not the slightest approach to the Christian principle of morals, either to the rule or the motive of virtue as understood by the Christian church.

Yet Mr. Lecky tells us the moral doctrines of the philosophers were much superior to the practice of the people. He admits the people were far below the philosophers, and were very corrupt; but we see no evidence that he has any adequate conception of how corrupt they were. What the people were we can learn from the satirists, from the historians, Livy, Sallust, and Tacitus, especially from the De Civitate Dei of St. Augustine, and the writings of the early Greek and Latin fathers. Our author acknowledges not only that the philosophers were superior to the people, but also that they were impotent to effect their moral elevation or any moral amelioration of their condition. Nothing more true. How, then, if Christianity was based on the pagan principle of morals, was in the same order with paganism, and differed from it only in certain details, or, as the schoolmen say, certain accidents—how explain the amelioration of morals and manners which uniformly followed whenever and wherever it was received?

If, as the author holds, Christianity was really only a development of the more advanced thought of the pagan empire, why did it not begin with the philosophers, the representatives of that advanced thought? Yet nothing is more certain than that it did not begin with them. The philosophers were the first to resist it, and the last to hold out against it. It spread at first among the people, chiefly among the slaves—that is, among those who knew the least of philosophy, who were least under the influence of the philosophers, and whose morals it is confessed the philosophers did not and could not elevate. This of itself refutes the pretence that Christianity was an offshoot of heathen philosophy. If it had been, and its power lay in the fact that the empire in its progress was prepared for it, its first converts should have been from the ranks of the more advanced classes. But the reverse was the fact. "You see your calling, brethren," says St. Paul to the Corinthians, "that not many are wise according to the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble; but the foolish things of the world hath God chosen, that he may confound the wise; and the weak things of the world hath God chosen, that he may confound the strong; and the mean things of the world, and the things that are contemptible, hath God chosen, and things that are not, that he might destroy the things that are; that no flesh should glory in his sight." [Footnote 197] So said the great teacher of the Gentiles, as if anticipating the objection of modern rationalists. Evidently, then, the pretended preparation of the Roman empire for Christianity must count for nothing, for Christianity gained its first establishments among those whom that preparation, even if it had been made, had not reached.

We cannot follow step by step the author in the special chapter which he devotes to the conversion of Rome, and the triumph of Christianity in the empire. We have already indicated the grounds on which he explains the marvellous fact. {793} He denies all agency of miracles, will recognize no supernatural aid, and aims to explain it on natural principles or by natural causes alone. Thus far he has certainly failed; but let us try him on his own ground. We grant that the breaking down of the hundred nationalities and fusing so many distinct tribes and races into one people, under one supreme political authority, did in some sense prepare the way for the introduction of a universal religion. But it must be remembered that the fusion was not complete, and that the work of amalgamating and Romanizing the several nations placed by conquest under the authority of Rome was only commenced, when Christianity was first preached in the capital of the empire. Each conquered nation retained as yet its own distinctive religion, and to a great extent its own distinctive civilization. Gaul, Spain, and the East were Roman provinces, but not thoroughly Romanized, and it was not till after Christianity had gained a footing in the empire that provincials out of Italy were admitted to the rights and privileges of Roman citizenship. The law recognized the religion of the state, but it tolerated for every conquered nation its own national religion. There was as yet nothing in the political, social, or religious order of the empire to suggest a universal religion, or that opened the way for the introduction of a catholic as distinguished from a national religion. All the religions recognized and tolerated were national religions. Christianity was always catholic, for all nations, not for any particular nation alone. If, then, at a subsequent period, the boasted universality of the empire favored the diffusion of Christianity, it did not favor its introduction in the beginning. In all other respects there was, as we read history, no evangelical preparation in Rome or the Roman empire. The progress, if progress it may be called, of the Gentiles, had been away from the primitive religion reasserted by Christianity, and in a direction from, not towards, the great doctrines and principles of the Gospel. What of primitive tradition they had retained had become so corrupted, perverted, or travestied as to be hardly recognizable. They had changed, even with the philosophers, the true basis of morals, and the corrupt morals of the people were only the practical development of the principles adopted by even the best of the Gentile philosophers, as rationalism is only the development of principles adopted by the reformers, who detested it, and asserted exclusive supernaturalism. Even the monotheism of some pagan philosophers was not the Christian doctrine of one God, any more than simple theism—the softened name for deism—or even theophilanthropy is Christianity. The Christian God is not only one, but he is the creator of the world, of all things visible and invisible, the moral governor of the universe, and the remunerator of all who seek him. The God of Plato, or of any of the other philosophers, is no creative God, and the immortality of the soul that Plato and his master Socrates defended had hardly any analogy with the life and immortality brought to light through the Gospel. The Stoics, whom the author places in the front rank of pagan moralists, did not regard God as the creator of the world, and those among them who held that the soul survives the body, believed not in the resurrection of the flesh, nor in future rewards and punishments. Their motive to virtue was their own self-respect, and their study was to prove themselves independent of the flesh and its seductions, indifferent to pleasure or pain, serene and unalterable, through self-discipline, whatever the vicissitudes of life. {794} The philosophers adopted the morality of pride, and aimed to live and act not as men dependent on their Creator, but as independent gods, while the people were sunk in the grossest ignorance and moral corruption, and subject to the most base and abominable superstitions. Such was the pagan empire when Christianity was first preached at Rome, only much worse than we venture to depict it.

Now, to this Roman world, rotten to the core, the Christian preachers proclaimed a religion which arraigned its corruption, which contradicted its cherished ideas on every point, and substituted meekness for cruelty, and humility for pride, as the principle of morals. They had against them all the old superstitions and national religions of the empire, the religion of the state, associated with all its victories, supported by the whole power of the government, and by the habits, usages, traditions, and the whole political, military, social, and religious life of the Roman people. They could not move without stepping on something held sacred, or open their mouths without offending some god or some religious usage; for the national religion was interwoven with the simplest and most ordinary usages of private and social life. If a pagan sneezed, no Christian could be civil enough to say, "Jupiter help you," for that would recognize a false god. Yet the Christian missionaries did succeed in converting Rome and making it the capital of the Christian world, as it was, when they entered it, the capital of the heathen world. You tell me this mighty change was effected, circumstances favoring, by natural and human means! Credat Judaeus Appelles, non ego.

The cause of the success, after the preparation named, which turns out to have been no preparation at all, were, according to the author, principally the zeal, the enthusiasm, and the intolerance or exclusiveness of the Christians, the doctrines of the brotherhood of the race and of a future life, and their appeals to the emotional side of human nature. He does not think the conversion of Rome any thing remarkable. The philosophers had failed to regenerate society in the moral order, the old religions had lost their hold on men's convictions, the old superstitions were losing their terrors, and men felt and sighed for something better than any thing they had. In fact, minds were unsettled, and were ready for something new. This description, not very applicable to Rome at the period in question, is not inapplicable to the Protestant world at the present time. Protestants are no longer satisfied with the results, either dogmatic or moral, of the Reformation, and the thinking portion of them wish for something better than any thing they have; yet not, therefore, can we conclude that they can easily, or by any purely human means, be converted to the Catholic Church; for they have—with individual exceptions, indeed—not lost their confidence in the underlying principle of the Reformation, or opened their minds or hearts to the acknowledgment of the principle, either of Catholic dogma or of Catholic morals. It is not so much that they do not know or misconceive that principle, but they have a deep-rooted repugnance to it, detest it, abhor it, and cannot even hear it named with patience. So was it with the pagan Romans. The whole pagan world was based on a principle which the Christian preacher could not speak without contradicting. {795} The Christian ideal was not only above, but antagonistic to the pagan ideal, and, consequently, the more zealous the Christian missionary, the more offensive he would prove himself. His intolerance or exclusiveness might help him whose faith was strong, yet little heeded in practice; but when faith itself was not only wanting but indignantly rejected, it could only excite anger or derision.

The apostle had no point d'appui in the pagan traditions, and it was only rarely that he could find any thing in heathen authors, poets, or philosophers that he could press into his service. The pagan, no doubt, had natural reason, but it was so darkened by spiritual ignorance, so warped by superstition, and so abnormally developed by false principles, that it was almost impossible to find in it anything on which an argument for the truth could be based. The Gospel was not in the pagan order of thought, and the Christian apologists had to support it by appealing to a line of tradition which the Gentiles had not, or had only as corrupted, perverted, or travestied. The only traditions they could appeal to were those of the Hebrews, and they found it necessary, in some sort, to convert the pagans to Judaism, before they could convince them of the truth of the Gospel. This was any thing but easy to be done; for the Gentiles despised the Jews and their traditions, and the Jews themselves were the most bitter enemies of the Christians, had crucified the founder of Christianity, and rejected the Christian interpretation of their Scriptures.

The doctrine of the brotherhood of the race taught by the church was something more than was taught by the philosophers, in fact, another doctrine; and, though it had something consoling to the poor, the oppressed, the enslaved, yet these are precisely the classes with whom old traditions linger the longest, and prejudices are the most inveterate and hardest to be overcome. They are the classes the most opposed to innovations, in the moral or spiritual order. The Protestant reformers proved this, and the peasantry were the last to accept the new gospel they preached, and rarely accepted it at all but through the influence or compulsion of their princes and nobles. We see, also, now, in Protestant countries, that, the peasantry having become Protestant, are far more difficult to convert than persons by birth or education belonging to the upper classes. Yet, it was precisely among the lower classes, or rather the slave class, that the Christian missionary had his greatest success; though the emancipation and equality he preached were spiritual only, not physical or social.

The doctrine of future life the church taught was coupled with two other doctrines hard for pagans to receive. The mere continuance of the spirit after the death of the body was, in some form, no doubt, held by the whole pagan world, a few sceptics excepted; but the resurrection of the body, or that what had once ceased to live would live again, was a thing wholly foreign to the pagan mind. Plato never, to my recollection, once hints it, and could not with his general principles. He held the union of the soul with the body to be a fall, a degradation from its previous state, the loss of its liberty; regarded the body as the enemy of the soul, as its dungeon, and looked upon death as its liberation, as a restoration to its original freedom and joy in the bosom of the divinity. The pagans had, as far as I can discover, no belief in future rewards and punishment in the Christian sense. {796} They believed in malevolent gods, who, if they failed to appease their wrath before dying, would torture them after death in Tartarus; but the idea that a God of love would doom the wicked to hell, as a punishment for their moral offences or sins, was as hard for them to believe as it is for Mr. Lecky himself. Yet Christianity taught it, and brought the whole empire to believe it. Christianity, while it delivered the pagans from the false terrors of superstition, replaced them by what to the pagan mind seemed even a still greater terror.

In what the author says of appeals to the emotional side of our nature, he shows that he has studied paganism with more care and less prejudice than he has Christianity. The emotions, as such, have for the Christian no moral or religious value. The love the Gospel requires is not an emotional love, and Christian morals have little to do with the moral sentiment which Adam Smith asserted, or the benevolence which Hucheson held to be the principle of morality. There is no approach to the Christian principle in the fine-spun sentiment of Bernardine Saint-Pierre, Madame de Staël, or Chateaubriand. Sentimentalism, in any form, is wholly foreign to Christian morals and to Christian piety, and neither has probably a worse or a more dangerous enemy than the sentimentalism so rife in modern society, and which finds its way even into the writings of some Catholics. The sentiment of benevolence may be a mobile, but it is never the motive of Christian virtue. No doubt, one of the great causes of the success of Christianity was the inexhaustible charity of the early Christians, their love for one another, their respect for and tenderness to the poor, the forsaken, the oppressed, the afflicted, the suffering. But that charity had not its origin in our emotional nature, and though it may be attended by sentiment, is itself by no means a sentiment; for its reason and motive was the love of God, especially of God who had assumed our nature, and made himself man for man's sake, and died on the cross for man's redemption. The Christian sees God in every fellow-man who needs his assistance, or to whose wants he can minister. "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me." The Christian finds his Lord, the Beloved of his soul, wherever he finds one for whom Christ died, to whom he can be of service.

This charity, this love, may be mimicked by the sentiment of benevolence, but it does not grow out of it, is not that sentiment developed or intensified; it depends on the great central mystery of Christianity, that of "the Word made flesh," and can never be found where faith in the Incarnation is wanting, and faith is, always and everywhere, an intellectual act, not a sentimental affection. If it were a natural sentiment or emotion, why was it to be found among Christians alone? The heathen had all of nature that Christians have; they even recognized the natural brotherhood of the race, as does the author; how happens it, then, if Christianity is only a development of heathenism, and Christian charity is only a natural sentiment, that you find no trace of it in the pagan world? There is no effect without a cause, and there must have been something operating with Christians that was not to be found in paganism, and which is not included even in nature.

The pagans, like modern Protestants, worshipped success, and regarded success as a mark of the approbation of the gods. Misfortune, ill-luck, failure was a proof of the divine displeasure. Cromwell and his Roundheads interpreted uniformly their victories over the royalists as an indisputable proof of the divine approval of their course. {797} It never occurred to them that the Almighty might be using them to chastise the royalists for their abuse of his favors, or to execute vengeance on a party that had offended him, and that, when he had accomplished his purpose with them, he would break them as a potter's vessel, and cast them away. The heathen looked upon the poor, the needy, the enslaved, the infirm, the helpless, and the suffering, as under the malediction of the gods, and refused to offer them any aid or consolation. They left the poor to struggle and starve. They did not do even so much for them as to shut them up in prisons called poor-houses. They looked with haughty contempt on the poor and needy, and if they sometimes threw them a crust, it was from pride, not charity, without the least kindly sympathies with them. As with modern non-Catholics, poverty, with them, was regarded and treated as a misfortune or as a crime.

Yet the Christians looked upon the poor with love and respect. Poverty, in their eyes, was no misfortune, no crime, but really a blessing, as bringing them nearer to God, and giving to the Christian more abundant in this world's goods an opportunity to do good, and lay up treasures in heaven. The Christian counts what he gives to the poor and needy as so much treasure saved, and placed beyond the reach of thieves and robbers, or any of the vicissitudes of fortune. Whence this difference between the pagan and the Christian, we might say, between the Catholic and non-Catholic? It cannot come from the simple recognition of the natural brotherhood of the race, for the natural ties of race and of kindred fail to call forth a love so strong, so enduring, so self-forgetting as Christian charity. Indeed, Christian charity is decidedly above the forces of nature. The brotherhood that gives rise to it is not the brotherhood in Adam, but the closer brotherhood in Christ; not in generation, but in regeneration. Give, then, as large a part as you will to Christian charity, in the conversion of Rome, you still have offered no proof that the conversion was effected by natural causes, for that charity itself is supernatural, and not in the order of natural causes.

Mr. Lecky wholly fails to adduce any natural causes adequate to the explanation of the conversion of Rome and the triumph of Christianity over paganism. He cannot do it, for this one sufficient reason, that paganism was impotent to reform itself, and yet it had all the natural causes working for it that Christianity had. The Christians had no more of nature than had the pagans, while all the natural advantages, power, wealth, institutions, human learning and science, the laws, habits, customs, and usages of the entire nation, or aggregation of nations, were against them. How, then, not only do by nature what the same nature in paganism could not do, or by nature alone triumph over nature clothed with so many advantages, and presenting so many obstacles? Why should nature be stronger, and so much stronger, in Christians than in Pagans, that a few illiterate fishermen from the lake of Genesareth, belonging by race to the despised nation of the Jews, could change not only the belief, but the moral life of the whole Roman people? Clearly, the Christians could not succeed without a power which paganism had not, and therefore not without a power that nature does not and cannot furnish.

The author denies the supernatural, and seeks to combat the argument we use by showing that several eastern superstitions, especially the worship of Isis, were introduced into Rome about the same time with Christianity, and gained no little currency, in spite of the imperial edicts against them. This is true, but there was no radical difference between those eastern superstitions and the state religion, and they demanded and effected no change of morals or manners. They were all in the order of the national religion, were based on the same principle, only they were a little more sensual and corrupt. Their temporary success required no other basis than Roman paganism itself furnished. And the edicts against their mysteries and orgies were seldom executed. It needs no supernatural principle to account for the rapid rise and spread of Methodism in a Protestant community, for it is itself only a form of Protestantism. But Christianity was not, and is not, in any sense, a form or development of paganism; in almost every particular, it is its direct contradictory. It was based on a totally different principle, and held entirely different maxims of life. A worshipper of Bacchus or Isis could without difficulty conform to the national or state religion, and comply with all its requirements. The Christian could conform in nothing, and comply with no pagan requirements. He could take no part in the national festivities, the national games, amusements, or rejoicings, for these were all dedicated to idols. There is no analogy in the case.

Mr. Lecky denies that the conversion of Rome was a miracle, and that it was effected on the evidence of miracles. He admits that miracles are possible, though he confounds miracles with prodigies, and says there is five times more proof in the case of many miracles than would be required to prove an ordinary historical fact; but he rejects miracles, not for the want of proof, nor because science has disproved them, but because the more intelligent portion of mankind have gradually dropped them, and ceased to believe in them, as they have dropped the belief in fairies, dwarfs, etc. The enlightened portion of mankind, it must be understood, are those who think like Mr. Lecky, and profess a Christianity without Christ, moral obligation without God the creator, and hold effects are producible without causes. We confess that we are not of their number, and probably shall never be an enlightened man in their sense. We believe in miracles, and that miracles had not a little to do with the introduction and establishment of Christianity. As the author admits them to be possible, and that many are sustained by far greater proof than is needed to prove ordinary historical events, we hope that it will be allowed, that, in believing them, we are not necessarily involved in total darkness. But we have no space, at present, to enter upon the general question of miracles—a question that can not be properly treated without treating the whole question of the natural and the supernatural.

The author tells us that the early Christians at Rome rarely appealed, if at all, to miracles as proofs either of their doctrines or their mission. Yet that they sometimes did would seem pretty certain from the pains the pagans took to break the force of the Christian miracles by ascribing them to magic, or by setting up analogous or counter miracles of their own. Certain it is, however, that they appealed to the supernatural, and adduced not only the miracle of the resurrection of our Lord, which entered into the very staple of their preaching, and was one of the bases of their faith, but to that standing miracle of prophecy, and of a supernatural providence—the Jewish, people. {799} The very religion they preached was supernatural, from beginning to end, and they labored to prove the necessity of faith in Christ, who was crucified, who rose from the dead, and is Lord of heaven and earth. There is no particular miracle or prophecy adduced to prove this that cannot, indeed, be cavilled at; but the Hebrew traditions and the faith of the Jewish people could not be set aside. Here was a whole nation whose entire life through many thousand years had been based on a prophecy, a promise of the Messiah. This prophecy, frequently renewed, and borne witness to by the national organization, the religious institutions, sacrifices, and offerings, and the entire national and moral life through centuries, is a most stupendous miracle. When you take this in connection with the traditions preserved in the Hebrew Scriptures, which go back to the creation of the world—developing one uniform system of thought, one uniform doctrine, one uniform faith, free from all superstition; one uniform plan of divine providence, and throwing a marvellous light on the origin, duty, and end of man—you find a supernatural fact which is irresistible, and sufficient of itself to convince any unprejudiced mind that Christianity is the fulfilment of the promises made to Adam after his expulsion from the Garden, to the patriarchs, to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and to the Jewish people.

We have no space here to develop this argument, but it is the argument that had great weight with ourselves personally, and, by the grace of God, was the chief argument that brought us to believe in the truth of Christianity, and in the church as the fulfilment of the synagogue. The apostles and early apologists continually, in one form or another, appeal to this standing miracle, this long-continued manifestation of the supernatural, as the basis of their proof of Christianity. They adduced older traditions than any the pagans could pretend to, and set forth a faith that had continued from the first man, which had once been the faith of all mankind, and from which the Gentiles had fallen away, and been plunged, in consequence, into the darkness of unbelief, and subjected to all the terrors of the vilest, most corrupt, and abominable superstitions. They labored to show that the Gentiles, in the pride of their hearts, had forsaken the God that made them, creator of heaven and earth, and all things therein, visible or invisible, for Satan, for demons, and for gods made with their own hands, or fashioned by their own lusts and evil imaginations. They pursued, indeed, the same line of argument that Catholics pursue against Protestants, only modified by the fact that the Protestant falling away, so clearly foretold by St. Paul in his Epistles, is more recent, less complete, and Protestants have not yet sunk so low as had the Gentiles of the Roman empire.

But it was not enough to establish the truth of Christianity in the Roman mind. Christian morals are above the strength of nature alone; yet the pagans were not only induced to give up their own principle of morals, and to accept as true the Christian principle, but they gave up their old practices, and yielded a practical obedience to the Christian law. Those same Romans changed their manner of life, and attained to the very summits of Christian sanctity. The philosophers gave many noble precepts, preserved from a purer tradition than their own, but they had no power to get them practised, and our author himself says they had no influence on the people; yet they enjoined nothing above the forces of nature. {800} The Christians came, taught the people a morality impracticable to nature even in its integrity, and yet what they taught was actually practised even by women, children, and slaves. How was this? It was not possible without supernatural aid, or the infusion of grace which elevates the soul above the level of nature, enabling it at once to act from a supernatural principle, and from a supernatural motive. All who have attempted the practise of Christian perfection by the strength of nature alone, have sadly failed. Take the charitable institutions, societies for relieving the poor, providing for the aged and infirm, protecting the fatherless and widows, for restoring the fallen, and reforming the vicious or criminal, established by non-Catholics—they are all comparative, if not absolute failures. Though modelled after institutions of the church, and supported at lavish expense, none of them succeed. They lack some essential element which is efficacious in Catholic institutions, and that element is undoubtedly supernatural grace, for that is all Catholics have that they have not in far greater abundance. They have humanity, natural benevolence, learning, ability, and ample wealth—why do they not succeed? Because they lack supernatural charity, and the blessing of God that always accompanies it. No other reasons can be assigned.

Mr. Lecky thinks the persecutions by the state, which the early Christians had to endure, or that the spread of Christianity in spite of them, are not worth anything in the argument. In the first place, he pretends that the persecutions were not very severe, and were for the most part confined to particular localities, and rarely became general in the empire; they were of brief duration, and came only at distant intervals, and the number of martyrs could not have been great. In the second place, the persecutions rather helped the persecuted religion, as persecution usually does. Rome, in reality, was tolerant, and most of the pagan emperors were averse to harsh measures, and connived at the growth of the new religion, which they regarded as one of the innumerable superstitions hatched in the East, and which must soon pass away.

Rome tolerated for conquered nations their national religion, or worship, but no religion except the state religion for Romans. The national gods recognized by the senate, and whose images were allowed to stand by the side of the Roman gods, might be worshipped; but no Roman citizen was allowed to desert the state religion, and nowhere in the empire was any religion tolerated that was not the national worship of some people subject or tributary to Rome. Now, Christianity was no national religion, and was hostile to the state religion, and utterly irreconcilable with it; for it there was no toleration; it was prohibited by the laws of the empire as well as by the edicts of the emperors. The Christians might at first be overlooked as too insignificant to excite hostility, or they might have been regarded, since they were chiefly Jews, as a Jewish sect; they might also, as they were a quiet, peaceable people, obeying the laws when not repugnant to the law of God, performing all their moral, social, and civil duties, and never mingling in the affairs of state, have been connived at for a time. But they had no legal protection, and if complained of and brought before the tribunals, and proved to be Christians, they had no alternative but to conform to the national religion or suffer death, often in the most excruciating forms; for the Romans were adepts in cruelty, and took delight in watching the writhings and sufferings of their victims. {801} Even Trajan, while he prohibited the search for them, ordered, if accused and convicted of being Christians, that they should be put to death. Such being the law, the prefect or governor of a province could at any time, without any imperial edict, put the law in force against the Christians, if so disposed; and that they did so in all the provinces of the empire, frequently and with unsparing severity, we know from history. The Christians were safe at no time and nowhere in the empire, and it is probable that the number of victims of the ten general persecutions were by far the smaller number of those who suffered for the faith prior to the accession of Constantine. We place no confidence in the calculations of Gibbon or our author, and we have found no reason for believing that the Christian historians, or the fathers, exaggerated the number of those who received the crown of martyrdom.

It is a great mistake to suppose that paganism had lost its hold on the Roman mind till long after the Christians had become a numerous body in the empire. There were, no doubt, individuals who treated all religions with indifference, but never had the pagan superstitions a stronger hold on the mass of the people, especially in Rome and the western provinces, than during the first two centuries of our era. The republic had been transformed into the empire, and the government was never stronger, or the worship of the state more intolerant, more fervent, or more energetically supported by the government. The work of Romanizing the various conquered nations was effected under the emperors, and the signs of decline and dissolution of the empire did not appear till near the close of the third century. The Roman state and paganism seemed to be indissolubly linked together—so closely that the pagans attributed to the rise and progress of Christianity the decline and downfall of both. Certain it is, that paganism lost its hold on the people or the state only in proportion to the progress of Christianity; and the abandonment of the heathen gods and the desertion of the heathen temples were due to the preaching of the Gospel, not a fact which preceded and prepared the way for it. Converts are seldom made from the irreligious and indifferent classes, who are the last, in any age, to be reached or affected by truth and piety.

The fact is, that paganism fought valiantly to the last, and Christianity had to meet and grapple with it in its full force, and when supported by the strongest and most effective government that ever existed, still in the prime and vigor of its life. The struggle was harder and longer continued than is commonly supposed, and by no means ended with Constantine. Paganism reascended the throne—in principle, at least—under Constantius, the son, and avowedly under Julian, the nephew of the first Christian emperor. Every pagan statesman saw, from the first, that there was an irrepressible antagonism between Christianity and paganism, and that the former could not prevail without destroying the latter, and, of course, the religion of the state, and apparently not without destroying the state with it. The intelligent and patriotic portion of the Roman people must have regarded the spread of Christianity very much as the Protestant leaders regard the spread of Catholicity in our own country. They looked upon it as a foreign religion, and anti-Roman. {802} It rejected the gods of Rome, to whom the city was indebted for her victories and the empire of the world. We may be sure, then, that the whole force of the state, the whole force of the pagan worship, backed by the passions and fanaticism of the people, whether of the city or the provinces, was exerted to crush out the new and offensive worship; and, whether the numbers of martyrs were a few more or a few less, the victory obtained by Christianity against such fearful odds is not explicable without the assumption of supernatural aid—especially when that victory carried with it a complete change of morals and manners, and the practice in not a few who underwent it of a heroic sanctity, or virtues which are confessedly above our natural strength.

No false or merely natural religion could have survived, far less have vanquished, such opposition as Christianity encountered at every point. The very fact that it thrived, in spite of the fearful persecution to which it was subjected, is a proof of its truth and divinity. We grant the blood of the martyrs was the seed of the church, but persecution fails only when it meets truth, when it meets God as the resisting force. We know the strength of superstition and the tenacity of fanaticism; but we deny that persecution has ever increased or multiplied the adherents or aided the growth of a false religion. There is no example of it in history. It is only the truth that does not succumb; and even they who profess the truth, when they have lost the practice of it, have yielded to the spirit of the world, and have ceased to be faithful to God, fail to stand before persecution, as was seen in the almost entire extinction of Catholics in the European nations that accepted the Protestant Reformation. The inefficacy of persecution to extinguish the doctrine persecuted is a commonplace of liberalism; but history proves the contrary, and hence the fact that Christianity, instead of being extinguished by the heathen persecution, spread under it, and even gained power by it, is no mean proof of its truth and its supernatural support.

The author obtains his adverse conclusion by substituting for the Christianity to which Rome was actually converted, and which actually triumphed in the empire, a Christianity of his own manufacture, a rationalistic Christianity, which has nothing to do with Christ Jesus, and him crucified; a Christianity despoiled of its mysteries, its doctrinal teachings, its distinctive moral precepts, and reduced to a simple moral philosophy. It is with him a theory, a school; not a fact, not a law, not an authority, not a living organism, nor of an order essentially different from paganism. His Christianity has its starting point in paganism, and only marks a particular stage in the general progress of the race. He does not see that it and paganism start from entirely different principles, and come down through separate and hostile lines, or that they have different ancestors. He does not understand that Christianity, if a development at all, is not the development of paganism, but of the patriarchal and Jewish religion, which placed the principle of duty in man's relation to God as his creator and final cause, not in the assumption of man's own divinity or godship. Hence he finds no need of supernatural aid to secure its triumph.

The author, placing Christianity in the same line with paganism, supposes that he accounts sufficiently for the conversion of Rome by the assumption that the Christians placed a stronger emphasis on certain doctrines held by the pagan philosophers, and were actuated by a greater zeal and enthusiasm than were those philosophers themselves. {803} Yet he does not show the origin of the greater zeal, nor its character; and he entirely misapprehends the enthusiasm of the early Christians. They were, in no received sense of the word, enthusiasts, nor were they, in his sense of the word, even zealots. They in no sense corresponded to the character given them in The Last Days of Pompeii. They were neither enthusiasts nor fanatics; and their zeal, springing from true charity, was never obtrusive nor annoying. We find in the earlier and later sects enthusiasts, fanatics, and zealots, who are excessively offensive, and yet are able to carry away the simple, the ignorant, and the undisciplined; but we never find them among the early orthodox Christians, any more than you do among Catholics at the present day. The early Christians did not "creep into houses and lead away silly women," nor assault people in the streets or market-place, and seek to cram Christianity down their throats, whether they would or not, but were singularly sober, quiet, orderly, and regular in their proceedings, as Catholics have always been, compelling not people to hear them against their will, and instructing in the faith only those who manifested a desire to be instructed. The author entirely mistakes both the Christian order of thought and the character of the early Christians who suffered from and finally triumphed over the pagan empire.

Translated From The French.

Paganina.

Master Aloysius Swibert was an organist in a small Austrian town; but from afar his perfect knowledge of harmony, and freshness and delicacy of inspiration, were known and praised; and many a stranger artist, having heard him, wondered that he did not seek renown and even glory in larger cities, and saw with astonishment how his art and his simple friendships contented and ornamented a life requiring nothing more.

He gave his time to the study of the great masters, a study full of pure enjoyment, but laborious and difficult, and, with a singular simplicity of character, he never approached them without the greatest reserve and respect.

Obstinately he worked, allowing himself but little respite to indulge the flights of his fancy, or the inspiration which, now and then, came to him so luminously, so brightly that the brave artist cried out his thanks in ecstasy, in the fulness of his joy.

His musical thoughts are all in a tiny volume. No long fantasies—half pages mostly—sometimes only lines, short and excellent and original; blessed originality, not coarse or confusing, but healthy and true—the daughter and messenger of inspiration!

Thus rolled the weeks, returning ever the Sunday so ardently desired; for to Master Swibert each Sunday was an event. He thought of the one passed, and looked forward to the coming one; all were equally dear. From the Saturday evening previous, all things sang to him his feast-day songs, and the next morning, collected and serious, in his best clothes, he sought his church and his organ.

He had his own ideas, considered extreme by some, on the ministry of the musician in the services of the church, on the respect due the place and the instrument. His heart beat when he approached the organ, and he played, following his conscience, sometimes well, sometimes better, never seeking success—on the contrary, dreading it.

His work accomplished, he walked with his sister, serious and happy. The people loved to see them pass, and, from the doors of their houses, saluted them amicably. In return, they gave each a pleasant smile, and rejoiced that men and things should wear their holiday robes, their Sunday colors. If the trees were green and the weather fine, their happiness was complete. It made the good man sad, though, if men or children worked, or even planned their occupations. "Poor creatures!" he said, "is not even Sunday for them?" And his heart beat as he spoke. But when he met whole families enjoying themselves, the fathers important, the mothers busy and happy, and the children gay and prattling, he entered his lodging so happily, kissed his sister, and awaited his friends.

He had but two—that is too many—and these could only remember having passed one Sunday evening away from Master Swibert. On their arrival, there were three just men under the same roof—one more than is necessary in order that our Lord may be in the midst of them.

They supped, and the organist's sister, twelve years younger than he, a fresh and graceful girl, waited on his guests, and offered them some nice white cakes, prepared the day before. Each one paid her his heartfelt compliments, while, smiling and silent, with pleasure she received them.

After supper, Master Swibert seated himself at his piano and played for his friends his studies of the past week. The music was mingled with conversation, and art and philosophy beguiled the hours. Seated around a good-sized pot of beer, with consciences at ease, with active bodies and cheerful spirits, these companions pursued endless conversations in all that interested their honest hearts until, as night closed round them, their souls were elevated and they spoke of heaven. There seemed to be a marvellous contact between their natures and all that is spiritual.

Such was Master Swibert's interior on Sunday evenings. Could chance have led thither some growing youth, all ardor and enthusiasm, and had he essayed the eternal temptations of love and glory, his answer would have been a smile. There they had no place. The three friends were happy.

But in this world every thing passes, happiness especially. The day came when Master Swibert had to part from all he loved—his quiet habits, his home, and his country.

He was tall, and looked strong and healthy; yet his friends were disquieted about him, for he seemed restless, like a tree which outwardly appears vigorous, but at heart decayed and liable to fall with the first rough wind. His physicians gave a reason for their uneasiness, and ordered him south.

The organist and his sister set out one day, hurrying their adieus as people who run away. When they were at the foot of the Alps in Italy, they stopped at a sunny little town, a day's journey from Milan, which we will call Arèse. Master Swibert was then forty-four.

How this man, who, till now, had lived more like a priest than a man of the world, could be led by his passions to marry an Italian and a singer, is difficult to explain. Besides, it is superfluous to look for a reason for any unreasonable act. Perhaps the good old sun was the cause, laughing behind the trees at the follies of which he makes us guilty.

But the girl was pretty, reputed good, and dedicated to her parents every moment her vanity did not require. So the organist married her.

They say love lives by contrasts; the god of such a union should have been well fed. But his life was short, for, after a few months only, he died. Perhaps of a fit of indigestion.

The Italian did not like the retired and exclusive life demanded of her, and the German could not accept the free behavior of his wife. He could not believe in the purity of a soul that sought vulgar homage and common admiration.

He was wrong to judge her by the ideas of his own country. His name there had been so honorably borne that, if it was for the singer too heavy a burden, death only could release her. This death took place under peculiar circumstances.

Paganini was just then being heard at Milan, and exercising that singular fascination that made his artistic personality the most characteristic of our time.

This age, which believes in no thing, accords him a legend, and, in truth, his power with the instrument he used was surprising and unequalled.

The fascination he possessed by his eccentric and well-executed performances is well known; how, for instance, he only appeared in a demi-obscurity, in some romantic scene; or, in some fit of inspiration, broke rudely the three strings of his instrument, and performed on the remaining one his most astonishing variations.

Whether it was skill, or a want of genius, no matter; the effect produced was marvellous. On the wife of Master Swibert the result was astonishing. Her child was born before its time, and in one of the side-scenes of the theatre of La Scala.

Its life seemed so feebly assured that it was baptized immediately with the name of Rose Marie; but Paganini, flattered by the adventure, insisting upon being godfather on the occasion, the little one was only known by the name of Paganina.

Thus was born the singular artist whose history we relate. We know the exterior facts, the accidents, we may say, of her life. Popular imagination has made of them an interesting legend; but these facts were produced by interior emotions little understood, and would be perfectly unintelligible could we not trace in her the two tendencies, the two natures, which she inherited from her parents.

Master Swibert arrived in time to say adieu to his wife, who did not survive her confinement. Then, as a miser with his treasure, he carried off his daughter. The child was feeble, but the organist felt within himself such an intensity of paternal love that he could not doubt she would live; "for," said he, "the vital forces of a creature are not wholly in itself, but in the love of its parents."

The sister of Master Swibert had married and left him. Therefore alone with his daughter, he entered an unoccupied house, where their new lives should develop themselves.

Happy the children born of Christian parents! They alone understand the integrity of affection that addresses itself to the soul, the delicacy of love which envelops the infant, from the bosom of its mother, conducting it through every danger, and, even in spite of maternal instinct, to the port of safety.

The organist could put in practice no personal theories of education. He thought a father and mother (he was both) have but one thing to do—to love and love on, to watch on their knees near the cradle of their child, to observe attentively the movements of the soul in its dawning light, to direct it on high, always on high, guard it from all that is impure, (triviality, even, he considered so;) and so, in fine, enforce the impressions of a saintly and ideal character, before even the child has consciousness of its perceptions.

Give your imagination to the interior of a family where such sentiments prevail; one sees marvellous things, that no painter can paint in colors true enough to render public. O pure and holy family joys! If we hesitate to describe you, it is from respect. We know with what discretion we should touch on holy things, and we hardly dare to make ourselves understood, to those who are fathers, by sketching the scenes of these first years of childhood between Master Swibert and his daughter.

Night has come; the child is going to sleep. Her father, pursuing his studies, is seated at the piano near the little being who has all his heart, and is now his inspiration; the waves of harmony go out into the night, white apparitions encircle the cradle, graze the earth, and fly away. The child sleeps.

Attentive and listening, her angel looks at her, opening slightly its wings to better protect her, and throwing over her closed eye-lids the bluish and transparent veil. The little face smiles sweetly.

In the morning she awakes, her soul filled with the joys of the night. She hears the birds sing, and the bright morning sun with heavenly rays gilds the cover of her little bed. She watches it play on her white curtains and turns toward her father, her eyes filled with tears, a weight on her heart. "Why do you weep, my daughter?" "Because, my father, I love you dearly, and I am too happy."

Yes, well may we discuss the joys of childhood. To sing them, poets lose their breath; to paint them, exhaust the colors of their palettes; and heap image upon image as their heated fancies may suggest, yet what have they done? Nothing. Yet the subject is worth their study. And how is it that there are so many who have known these joys in all their purity, who in their manhood gaze on into the future, and so seldom look to that past which made them so happy? Would they not, at times, give worlds to be again that little child at its mother's knee?

Paganina was nearly seven years old, when she found a companion; the organist's sister died, leaving her only child to the care of her brother.

The little boy, named André, seemed to be of a gentle and even weak character. He was the same age as his cousin, but never was presented a more perfect contrast.

Paganina had not yet acquired that marvellous beauty that afterward became so celebrated, but something there was about her very strange and very attractive.

She was reticent and retiring, nonchalant in gesture and careless in behavior. Her face was always sad, an indescribable, almost ferocious ennui seeming completely to overpower her. But if some recital, some sudden expression touched her imagination, or music entranced her, her deep black eyes threw out a violet flame, and even sparkled. But that was all. The calm of an affected, scornful carelessness returned immediately.

Master Swibert trembled to see the worldly and theatrical genius of the mother develop in the child; he knew well that, in a nature strong and deep as hers, such tastes would make terrible ravages. And the development of each successive year was not calculated to dispel his fears.

Everything in the child alarmed him, from her habitual concentration to her fits of passionate tenderness—the outburst of the moment, volcano-like, a jet of brilliant flame which sparkles and goes out.

Master Swibert could boast in his dying hours of never having deserted the child for an hour even. After having devoted the early hours of the day to her and her cousin's education, he superintended and guided their recreations—an important part, in good hands, of the training of a child.

He had the habit of taking every day a long walk. The route they loved best he called the German road. It was that by which the organist had come to Italy. The sight of it revived his memories, and flattered the melancholy love he gave his country.

On the way, the children listened to the stories of the good musician, who so willingly related them. They spoke of Germany; for on this chapter Master Swibert never tired. He led his little auditors into the world of ballads and legends, and we can readily imagine the pretty curiosity and happy astonishment which, at their age, he awakened. Their favorite legend was that of the great emperor Barbarossa, who slept so many centuries in an obscure grotto, leaning on a table of stone into which his beard had grown. These stories were better than our nurses tell; for the organist related them, not to impose on the credulity of his youthful auditory, but to extract the poetry they contained; and this he did wonderfully. Poetry never did harm to any one.

But the children loved, even better than the legends, the recitals suitable for them from the German poets. The story of Mignon delighted them. What could be told them sufficed; and they loved the little girl who had no other language than song, who took the face of an angel and aspired to heaven, where she went without scarcely having lived on earth.

Their imagination was inflamed. They longed to see the country of their dreams. Sometimes, at the turn of the road, they began to run, in the unavowed hope of seeing, at last, what was behind the mountain; but, the circuit passed, and only a long road, apparently without end, presenting itself, the poor little things cried with disappointment. {808} Their father, ready to weep with them, took them in his arms to control them, and told them for the hundredth time one of his pretty ballads.

The route into Germany is through a beautiful country. After traversing a plain for some distance, one enters into a deep gorge in the mountain and then begins to ascend.

This gorge gives passage to a torrent, dry in summer, but, becoming furious during the rains of autumn, uproots trees, carries away bridges, and, undermining the stones at their base, lowers, each year, the level of the neighboring elevations. The route accommodates itself poorly to this terrible neighbor, and follows it as far off as possible. Around on the left shore, it turns quickly at a certain height, and crosses the torrent over a very high bridge. There, continuing to ascend, it makes a circuit over a plain of moderate extent, while a narrow and badly constructed road, bordering the sides of the ravine, leaves it to descend to the magnificent residence which, from time immemorial, belongs to the family of the Ligonieri. It is called the Château Sarrasin.

A view unequalled presents itself from this elevation. Below it, on the first ladder of the heights, is seen the black mass of the chateau, so near that one can almost penetrate into the interior of the edifice; and beyond, the plain, displaying under the silvery net-work of its water-courses the richness of its vegetation; and finally, on the left, the wooded slopes of the mountain, crowned with glaciers, and developing into a gigantic hemicycle. When the dazzled eye is at rest, or gazing afar, it ever returns to the Chateau Sarrasin; and worthy is it of the closest regard.

Its name indicates its antiquated pretensions; but it has no uniformity of style; each age has given it a stone, and from the labor of centuries has resulted a whole of a character grand and majestic.

Proudly encamped on a perpendicular rock, accessible only on one side, it commands the plain and defies the mountain with its black and menacing tower, that seems to have been placed there to protect the other less hardy constructions.

From the road, the traveller raises his eyes to this eagle's nest; he contemplates with pleasure the terraces which shelve below, suspending over the precipice their flowering groves and massive oaks, and, naturally, he demands its history. Yet this history was not always to be praised. The chronicle credits those who inhabited it in past ages with a series of adventures more curious than moral, and enough to fill a book of legends.

The Ligonieri have followed the progress of civilization. In our day, they respect the laws, and even make themselves respected. They serve the state in the highest ranks of the administration, the army, and diplomacy. Yet it would seem that, after all, the devil has not lost much; for they tell wild stories of the castle's being fatal to conjugal love, of its reigning queens ever suffering in silence the affronts of some rival under its cursed roof. Popular recitals represent them isolated, lifting to heaven their innocent hands, and mingling their prayers with the noise of orgies and the songs of feasts. The favorites of the Chateau Sarrasin belonged mostly to the theatre, and among them was she who reigned a certain evening when the scene took place I am going to relate.

This evening, then, the organist and his two children had arrived on the elevation that commands the residence of the Ligonieri, and were looking about them. There was a fête at the Château Sarrasin.

The grand salon of the ground floor was illuminated, and crowded with a brilliant assembly of guests. Long waves of light came from the windows and doors, and showed the crowd pressing around every opening, and in the shadows revealed groups seated attentively at cards.

All heads were turned toward one point; all looks were in the same direction, and attached themselves to a woman standing in the centre of the light, and surrounded by a chorus and a numerous orchestra.

This woman was clothed in green, and wore a crown of ivy, the ornament of the old bacchantes. A green diamond threw its lustrous rays from her impure forehead. She sang—not the songs that carry tired souls into the regions of the ideal, and make them forget for a moment the sadness of earth; but guilty joys and culpable pleasures were her theme. The metallic voice sang in response to her chorus; and, becoming more and more excited, the quick, passionate notes mounted into a demoniacal laugh. How sad, how true it is, that the human soul, once beyond the bounds of purity, rejoices in and receives new excitement from the delirium of blasphemy.

Attracted by the light, Paganina advanced toward the precipice. The passionate music had turned her brain. Her growing agitation became extreme, and she betrayed it in gestures and ardent words. When Master Swibert called her, she refused to obey.

"Unfortunate child!" he cried, "thy bad angel is approaching thee. Now comes the hour when I regret thy birth. God grant that I may not be punished for having shown thee the spectacle of evil thou comprehendest so quickly."

The child advances, her father follows, and she begins to run. Wildly through the midst of the rocks she risks her life at every step. Her father, breathless, pursues her, frightened, and covered with a cold perspiration. His eyes, grown large already with fear, see his daughter precipitated into an endless abyss; and discover, also, in the future another abyss still more shadowed and more horrible, where, perhaps, will be lost the deeply-loved soul of his child.

The guests of the Château Sarrasin heard two cries mingle with the joyousness of their féte. The organist seized his child just at the moment when, from the edge of the precipice, she would have plunged into eternity.

He had saved her life, but not regained her soul. That evening, the child separated herself from him in a spirit of revolt which almost broke his heart to witness.

Master Swibert slept but little, and badly. When he awoke, he wondered how he had been able to omit to Paganina his usual good-night. His eyes fell instinctively on the door where, every morning, she came, half-clothed, to salute him. The sun's rays gilded the sill, and the good father's heart beat, thinking how happy he would be if at that moment she would appear. He said, "She is coming;" but she came not.

The organist walked up and down his room, interrupting, from time to time, his monotonous promenade, to listen, in hopes of hearing a word, a creaking, a fluttering of a robe. He heard nothing but the uncertain step of André, wandering sad and lonely in the parts of the house least occupied.

The hours passed. The organist still waited, his suffering becoming anguish. Sometimes he felt he must call out, "My child! my child!" Already he opened his arms to receive her; but his sense of duty prevailed, and he waited for her.

The night again returned, and Paganina had shown no signs of life. A bitter sadness, drop by drop, was accumulating in the heart of her unfortunate father. The most mournful thoughts took possession of him. He dreamed of his approaching death, and saw his child alone, abandoned to interior and exterior enemies, and in his weakness he reproached himself for having brought her into this world.

Already more than half the night had gone. Overwhelmed with sorrow, exhausted, he threw himself into an arm-chair, wondering if he could bear to suffer more, when Paganina entered noiselessly, on tiptoe, lest she should awaken her father, whom she believed asleep. She approached him gently, knelt by his side, and, taking one of his hands, covered it with silent tears.

What a change for our poor organist! An immense joy overflowed his heart, and spread over his whole being in delicious emotion. He forgot all past suffering and future inquietude. He lost all consciousness of the present but the knowledge that his daughter was there, pressed to his heart, and palpitating midst her sobs.

He leaned over, and two tears, the first shed by this austere man, fell on the young bowed head—her baptism of peace and pardon. Grief, repentance, the love of the child, obscured for a time, now manifested themselves violently. She hung convulsively on the neck of her father, and begged his pardon. They exchanged kisses, stifled cries, and little words of tenderness, that are the first elements of that pure and passionate, delicate and violent language of the domestic hearth, so little capable of description.

The stars sparkled peacefully in a cloudless sky. The breath of the night, with its penetrating odors, came noiselessly, and mingled the white hair of the father with the black curls of the child. It refreshed their burning foreheads.

Peace has descended into their souls. Now and then a sob from Paganina is the only witness of the past storm.

"My daughter, my tenderness for you knows no bounds. Trust to me. Arrived at the summit of life, I, whose head is whitening toward eternity, will tell you that, in this world, the only happiness given man is in the affections of his family. You cannot tell, before being a mother, what paternal affection is, and still less will you understand mine. I was ignorant of it myself until yesterday."

The child standing, her little feet united, pressed her head against the heart of her father.

The organist continued: "The angel of a woman never leaves the domestic hearth. If she lives in the world, her angel has forsaken her. A woman's crown is formed in shadow and silence; the gaze and admiration of a crowd will wither it. Your soul I love, my daughter; and our mutual love must never end. Do you understand me? Never! provided our souls rise together toward the abode of infinite love."

The child listens attentively; divining, by a sort of intuition, the sense of these teachings, engraving themselves, in letters of fire, on her heart; and which she will understand, each day, more and more.

Little by little, lulled by the whispering of her father; refreshed, as if bathed in such admirable tenderness, she fell asleep. Her father held her in his arms, and, raising his eyes, he prayed.

Day has come. The aurora awakes in its humid splendor, and throws its first rays over the mountain violets. The bells of the town dance into the air their clear and joyous notes.

"My father," said Paganina in a low voice, and without opening her eyes, "what do those bells say? Their ringing sound makes me tremble with joy."

"My daughter, they celebrate, as they may, the day of the Ascension, when Christ ascended into heaven."

"To heaven! my father;" and she added, in so weak a voice that he could scarcely hear her, "It seems that I am there now—that I repose in your arms."

The organist looked at his daughter, whose closed eyes seemed to enjoy interior contemplation; while his pale face expressed his delight. He raised her; held her up, as if to offer her to God; then laid her quietly on her little bed, and let her sleep.

From that day, the organist possessed perfect control over his daughter. If she seemed disposed to escape from his influence, he recalled the night of the Ascension, and that sufficed. Paganina was still a little girl; but soon she would cease to be one. Her future beauty was crystallizing. The features could be seen; but they had not yet blended into their after harmony. There was something surprising about her.

Morally, the incomprehensible little creature was all dissonance and violent contrasts, promising to be equally powerful for good or evil, as she should be led by superior or inferior influences.

The distinctive character of her nature, habitually concentrated and sometimes impetuous to excess, was her passion for every thing beautiful. Music exercised an extraordinary influence over her. It was, properly speaking, her language; and she understood in it what others could not. Already she spoke in it wonderfully.

Her father taught her his instrument; and she gave herself with love to the study. However, it was easy to see that the demon of song would make her his; so Master Swibert hesitated to give her a master, restrained by his personal ideas on the subject. He had his theory, which appeared singular, no doubt, and he revealed it to his daughter, saying, "Too perfect an instrument is a snare for a musician; for when he has at his service an organ of this kind, he forgets too often to raise it to the ideal, and gives it to matter. Where are those who can disengage themselves from matter to arrive at an idea? Where are those who know that the beauty of the body is the shadow of the beauty of the soul? To pursue exclusively the first is to lose both.

"Look at the immortal composers of my country, whose genius will radiate unto the last of posterity. The shrill notes of the piano are the most common expression of their glorious thoughts. The musicians of this nation find voices neither pure nor powerful enough to express their pitiful imaginations. When I see such anxiety for the sign, I esteem poorly the thing signified, and I think that its beauty is, above all, material.

"I love the human voice. What an admirable instrument! But I tremble to see how it is used to express the passions of earth and the enchantments of pleasure. It is dangerous to possess it. I warn you of your danger, my daughter."

I have already said that this theory was singular. The word appears weak, perhaps; but it came from Germany.

However, it had no influence on the destiny of Paganina; for, having finished his reasoning, her father gave her a master. Happily, logic alone does not govern the world.

The little one then learned to sing. Her success in this study was rapid, and passed all foresight. Sometimes Master Swibert was confounded when he heard her, and trembled before this power which had come from himself.

The moment came when André was to be submitted to the proof of a public education. His uncle considered such a course necessary to make him a man. It was decided that he should receive at the conservatory of Naples the classic traditions of Italian art. The organist and his daughter wished to accompany him to his destination.

They travelled by short stages. Master Swibert proposing, according to his habit, an elevated result, communicated to his children the riches of his erudition. They stopped wherever they could hope to gather some fruit, curious to visit every place of which they knew the history, and he desirous to give them a living knowledge which would be for ever impressed upon them.

His studies and affections induced him to neglect the mere vestiges of antiquity to seek with greater love the souvenirs of Christianity and the relics of the saints. We know if they abound on this illustrious earth.

Every day, then, the travellers turned a new leaf of the book which they had lisped from their childhood. The history of the martyrs particularly seized upon the imagination of Paganina. She never tired of listening to it on the very places they had sanctified by such sublime acts as the world rarely knows.

We may scoff at or disdain the wonders of interior sanctity, but indifference is arrested by the heroism of martyrdom.

The martyrs wear the double crown of divine and human glory. After their God, they are the vanquishers of death. Inspired courage burns on their faces; and when are added to their ranks the grace and beauty of woman and child, why refuse to their memory the homage of love and admiration, if even not to be Christian is considered worthy of worldly honor.

Paganina had the intelligence of greatness; she loved courage and true nobility. The recitals of her father drew tears from her eyes; and in traversing the arenas made memorable by some bloody triumph, she felt within her every inspiration to celebrate them. Here she was true to her Italian nature; but she spoke with an elevation of accent and depth of emotion which are the privileges of northern nations.

One evening she was at the Colosseum. She felt an enthusiasm within her, an inspiration unaccountable, and pictured in life-colors the crowd of excited people, watching and crying out to the poor Christian martyrs struggling and dying, in the brightness of a supernatural light. She entirely forgot herself.

Something like a hymn breathed from her oppressed heart; eloquence overflowed from her lips. The passers-by were attracted toward her, and her father listened overcome and astonished. While she appeared transfigured, standing in the light of the setting sun, which seemed to throw around her the bloody purple of which she chanted, a ray of the glory of her ancestors rested on the forehead of this grandchild of the martyrs.

That evening, her father, in taking her home again, said to her, "Go on, my little one; many have passed for eloquent who had not your inspiration; many have sought for poetry, and great they were; but they have not found the fruit your tiny hands have gathered. Mignon sang: you sing and speak; and if you use your power for good, Mignon may not compare with you."

When the time came for the children to part, André was overcome in a manner which seemed incompatible with his nature, so ordinarily tranquil. The father and daughter returned alone, and lived afterward with no other company than themselves. They felt no need to seek their diversion among their neighbors. The simple ties of friendship or convenience to them were unnecessary, and the organist preserved with the outside world only the acquaintance that strict politeness demanded.

Paganina's affection increased daily. A profound sentiment without display, and only recognizable by certain mute signs that might have escaped an indifferent eye. Her father, however, could not be deceived.

So these two beings were never separated. They worked together; the organist conducted his daughter into the highest regions of music, and was astonished, in teaching her, to discover horizons hitherto unknown. Paganina made wonderful progress.

Those who find in art their happiness in this world, and seek the depths of those mysterious tongues of which so many speak and know nothing—those alone can form an idea of the happy moments passed in their solitude.

At times these two souls rose together, mounted even to the pure heights where, to those who attain to them, is given a supernatural felicity.

To these joys Paganina aspired with an immoderate ardor; but in attaining them she experienced a reaction of extreme sadness. This disquieted her father; so, in the language of parable which he liked to use, and which sometimes proved more original than gracious, he said, "My daughter, my daughter, drink with precaution; at the bottom of the purest streams are hidden the most dangerous reptiles. Be prudent, or you will swallow the leech. There is only one fountain to quench your thirst, and where, with your impetuous humor, you may drink with safety: it is that which gushes toward eternal life."

[Transcriber's note: This discussion is impressive, considering that quantum theory and the internal structure of the atom appears many decades in the future.]

Translated From The Etudes Religieuses.

Recent Scientific Discoveries.

By Fr. Carbonelle.

The hypothesis of an ethereal medium everywhere diffused, is still, in spite of some vague objections urged against it, universally received, and the most recent theories and researches have not suggested its abandonment or modification in any important respect. On the contrary, they point to its more exact establishment, and to its application to large classes of phenomena in which, until lately, it was hardly supposed to be involved. There is no longer any branch of natural philosophy which can dispense with it; and in the theory of heat as a mode of motion, which will soon be the basis of a new system of physics more full and clear than the previous one, the motion must probably be explained by the principle of ethereal undulations or vibrations.

These vibrations show themselves by three different effects, namely, heat, chemical action, and color. The first two were for a long time neglected, but the third offered quite a large field, in which many very beautiful discoveries were made. It was known, for instance, that the oscillations were made with prodigious rapidity. Thus, the red of the spectrum is produced by vibrations repeated four hundred and eighty-three trillions of times in a second; while for the violet, more than seven hundred and eight trillions are required. Between these limits all the visible rays are contained, and, taken successively, they produce all the shades of the spectrum, and, by their combination, all possible colors. But as there are vibrations in the air too rapid or too slow to give the sense of sound to the ear, so there are, in the ether, slower than the red, or quicker than the violet, and hence invisible. The first have been detected by their calorific, the second by their chemical effects. The spectrum has thus been considerably extended at both ends, and we cannot be sure that its true limits have even yet been found.

These facts have been known for some time, and are found in all treatises on physics. We only speak of them in order to explain better the theories proposed by modern science to explain the three effects of ethereal radiation.

The hypothesis of three essentially different kinds of rays has now been abandoned. The solar beam, for example, which causes six hundred and thirty trillion vibrations a second, has the three properties of producing in the eye the sensation of blue, of heating Melloni's thermo-electric pile, and of decomposing the chloride of silver used in photography; but it does not appear that three different rays vibrating with this velocity are sent to us, each the cause of a separate effect. Notwithstanding the most careful experiments, no one of these properties has ever been diminished in a ray without diminishing the rest in the same proportion. Of course, these properties are differently proportioned in the different rays of the spectrum; but in two rays from the same part, and hence having the same velocity of vibration, these properties always consist in the same relative intensity. {815} At the red end of the spectrum, the heating power predominates; at the other extremity, the chemical; in the middle, the luminous. The reason of this seems to be merely the difference of vibratory velocities; and we shall see that this will suffice to account for it.

Let us first explain how we conceive the production of the phenomena of chemical action and of heat. For clearness, we must advert to a theory familiar to all, according to which ponderable matter is composed of excessively small volumes, called atoms, which, though perhaps theoretically divisible, are never divided by any physical or chemical action. In the constitution of bodies, these atoms are supposed to be grouped in some manner, each group forming what is called a molecule. These, unlike the atoms, are decomposed in chemical changes, though not in physical ones, by which we understand such as evaporation, melting, crystallization, heating, magnetizing, electrifying, etc., unless these happen to affect the chemical constitution as well as the physical condition of the substance. All these do not alter the arrangement of the atoms in the molecule, but only the position or distance of the molecules with regard to each other. A collection of molecules may be called a particle; physical action then alters the constitution of the particle as chemical does that of the molecule. It may be remarked that our senses give us no direct evidence of the existence of molecules, much less of that of atoms, and they are supposed to be so extremely small that it will probably never be possible to detect them in this way.

In the application of this chemical theory to that of light, a new hypothesis is made, namely, that the ethereal fluid, whether itself continuous or composed of separate elements, penetrates all the interstices between the atoms of a molecule, as well as those between the molecules. The motions of this fluid, and of the matter which it penetrates, are communicated to each other, according to laws not yet ascertained, but of which we already have some glimpses. Thus, in treating of the effects of the ethereal vibrations on ponderable bodies, great importance is probably due to what is called isochronism, or equality of times; that is, the agreement of the rapidity of vibration of the ether with that of which the matter is susceptible; for in all known communications of vibratory movements, this isochronism plays a very notable part. If, for example, we place upon the same stand two clocks, having pendulums of the same length, and consequently swinging in the same time, and start one of them, the slight impulses communicated by this to the other will finally set the latter also in motion. If, on the other hand, the pendulums are not isochronous, no such effect will be produced. In the same way, a stretched cord will vibrate if one of the sounds of which it is capable is produced near by; but it will not be affected by other notes, even though much louder—showing that isochronism is more important than intensity. Another illustration of the same thing struck me forcibly some ten years ago. I had ascended with some photographic apparatus to the top of an old square tower, very high and massive, to take some views. The tower belonged to a church, the bells of which were rung several times while I was there. The great bell, though of a very considerable size, shook the building very slightly; it hardly caused any tremor in the image of the landscape. {816} But a second and much smaller bell could not be rung without giving to the tower, after two or three minutes, a strong swaying movement like that of a tree shaken by the wind. This was owing to the isochronism between the oscillations of the tower and of the small bell, which more than compensated for the difference of mass.

We have here an explanation of the physical and chemical phenomena produced by the ethereal rays. A few vibrations of this medium, probably, would produce no perceptible effect on a mass of matter; but these movements are repeated hundreds of trillions of times in a second, and however feeble their influence at first, isochronism may finally give it great power. Let us consider, first, the molecules, which have some connection between them, as yet unknown, but probably only allowing a certain set of vibratory velocities, (as a cord will only vibrate so as to produce a definite series of musical notes.) If, then, these are isochronous with those of the surrounding ether, the movement of the latter will be communicated to the molecules; or, according to the new theory of heat, the body will be warmed. These movements may even become so violent as to permanently modify the manner of union of the molecules—that is, to change the state of the body from solid to liquid or gaseous; and, by this change of state, the molecules may become insensible to the vibrations which previously affected them; for the set which they can now perform may have been entirely altered. The phenomena of heat are then well accounted for by this theory. To explain similarly the chemical ones, we have only to suppose ethereal vibrations, such that the movement affects the atoms separately, instead of the whole molecule, so that, after they have been sufficiently prolonged, the connection between the atoms will be destroyed. According to this, the chemical action of light should always be one of decomposition; it is so undoubtedly in most cases, and in the rest, where a combination is produced—as, for instance, in the formation of chlorhydric acid by the action of the violet rays on a mixture of chlorine and hydrogen—we shall adduce hereafter some facts which explain them, and show that even here the real action of the rays is a decomposing one. It may be remarked that the introduction of these ethereal vibrations, whose dimensions and velocities are well known, into the region, still so mysterious, of atoms and of molecules, promises to lead to results long unhoped for. If, for example, the theory above stated is correct, it would appear that the union of the atoms is such that their necessary time of oscillation is shorter than that of the molecules; since the red rays, which have the greatest heating power, vibrate more slowly than the violet, which are the most active chemically, as stated some distance back.

The luminous action of the rays is no doubt the most important for us, but also the most difficult to study; we have, however, something to say about it, for real progress has lately been made in this department. In the first place, since we are speaking of sensations, it is necessary to notice that this subject has two very different parts, one of which belongs to natural science, and the other to psychology. We shall here speak only of the first, that is, of three classes of phenomena which are produced at the exterior extremities of the nervous fibres, on the line of the fibres, and in the brain respectively. {817} It has been said, in a previous paper, that each of these requires a certain time, and the experimental results as to these times were there given. But this is all, or almost all, the knowledge, unfortunately, which we yet have as to what takes place in the brain. The conjecture has been made that the different kinds of sensations are due to different modifications of the cerebral extremities of the various nerves; or that at the interior extremity of the optic nerve, a different action occurs from that at the nerve of hearing, which seems probable, since there are good reasons for believing that the action of the main body of the nerve itself is precisely the same for all the sensations. In more than one way, our nervous system would then resemble the telegraph. All the wires are traversed by similar currents, but the registering apparatus is different in each. In one, the dispatch is read off upon a dial; in another, it is printed on a moving band; in a third, a facsimile is given of it, etc. The sending is also accomplished by different means; but in all cases the same agent, the electric current, is employed.

Since we are treating of the sensation of sight only in connection with the external vibrations, we need here only discuss the first of the three classes of phenomena mentioned above, those which correspond to the transmission of the dispatch. In explaining this, we shall follow the celebrated professor of Heidelberg, M. Helmholtz.

The use of the spectroscope, and the analysis of light as now made in physics, chemistry, and astronomy, might induce the idea that color is an intrinsic property of the rays, depending entirely upon the length of the undulation in each, and inseparably connected with it; but this is not the case. Color is an organic phenomenon, only produced in the living animal; and, in one sense, is very independent of the length of the wave, since it can even exist without the presence of any luminous ray. Its laws are admirably exhibited in a figure called Newton's circle. This circle has been modified by recent experiments, and has received three enlargements, which make it a sort of triangle with rounded corners; but it is very well to preserve its name, for, as yet, the claims of Newton in optics have not been contested in any "Commercium epistolicum." Let us briefly describe this figure. The red, green, and blue of the spectrum occupy the three corners respectively. Passing round the circumference, we go from red to green through yellow, from green to blue through greenish blue, and from blue to red through violet and purple. If we draw a straight line from any point of the circumference to the centre, we find the same color on all points of the line, but more and more diluted, so that the centre itself is perfectly white. This figure contains all possible shades of color, and has the following remarkable property, established by experiment. If we wish to know what color will be produced by the mixture of any others, we have only to mark upon this figure the points where the several colors are found, and place weights there proportional to the intensities in which the different colors are to be used in the combination; at the centre of gravity of these weights, that is, at the point on which the circle (supposed itself to be without weight) would balance when thus loaded, we shall find the resulting shade. This point does not need to be found by experiment, being more easily calculated mathematically.

Now it is evident from this that color is a mere matter of sensation; for it is obvious that the same centre of gravity can be obtained by an infinity of arrangements of the original colors, notwithstanding the diversity of their wave-lengths; and it will also be found that these various mixed rays, though having precisely the same color—that of the centre of gravity—will differ entirely in their other properties. They act variously upon the thermometer and on the sensitive photographic plate, and give different tinges to colored objects which they illumine. But upon the retina the action of all is the same. How is this result to be explained? We will answer without stating the proofs, which the limits of this article would forbid.

From what has been said, it will be seen that all colors can be produced by the mixture of the three fundamental or primary ones, red, green, and blue, which were placed at the three rounded corners of Newton's circle. It will also be supposed that, as in the theory of Thomas Young, nervous fibres of three kinds are found at every point of the retina. When these are excited in any way, whether by the vibrations of the ether, by lateral pressure on the ball of the eye, by a feeble electric current, or by any other means, they transmit the excitement to the brain; but the red fibres, (so to speak,) if they should act alone, would only produce, however they were irritated, the uniform sensation of a red such as we hardly ever actually see, more saturated than the ordinary red, and which would be found in our figure at the extreme summit of the rounded corner. The two other kinds of fibres would, of course, act similarly, producing colors more pure than are usually seen; since, in our usual sensations, the three are always mixed, each predominating in its turn; and this is the case even in the spectrum itself. The effect of the pure colors in the latter may, however, be heightened as follows: Let us fix our eyes, for instance, for a few moments on the blue-green. This is the complementary of the red. The fatigue will produce a momentary insensibility in the fibres corresponding to the blue and green, and, turning the eyes to the red part of the spectrum, the slight admixture of these colors there present will fail to excite sensibly the corresponding nerves, so that the red will be seen for a few seconds in great purity. But to return. The stimulus of the first set of fibres, though found more or less in all parts of the spectrum, will predominate at the red end, where the vibrations are slowest; that of the second set in the middle, where the green is found; that of the third, at the blue extremity. Why these inequalities? Why, also, do the dark rays, preceding the red and following the violet, fail to act on the retina? No certain reason can be assigned, but there are two very plausible ones: first, the media which the rays have to traverse in the eye before reaching the nerves have, like all other transparent bodies, the power of absorbing the vibrations, not all uniformly, but some in preference to others. This elective absorption would destroy or diminish the effect of the rays on the nervous fibres. The second reason, as will readily be surmised, is the want of isochronism between the vibrations of the rays and those of the nervous fibres.

In confirmation of this theory, a remarkable anatomical fact, noticed among many birds and reptiles, may be cited. These actually have in the retina three kinds of fibres: the first terminated by a small, oily red drop, the second by a yellow one, while the third have no perceptible appendage. {819} Evidently, the red rays will arrive most purely at the first, the central rays of the spectrum at the second, while the blue and violet ones will act freely only on the third. It must be granted that no such thing has been observed in man and the other mammalia; but something similar may be found in the singular pathological phenomenon to which the chemist Dalton has given his name. Daltonism is most frequently an inability to perceive red. For eyes thus affected, the chromatic triangle or circle just mentioned is considerably simplified; but sad mistakes are the consequence. "All the differences of color," says Helmholtz, "appear to them as mixtures of blue and green, which last they call yellow." This disorder would be, according to the above theory, a paralysis of the first, or red fibres. The simplicity of this explanation is certainly in favor of the theory which gives it. But we had determined not to bring up arguments. Let us, then, pass on; remarking, however, one respect in which the eye, otherwise so superior to the rest of the senses, is inferior to the ear. Sounds, though combined to any extent in harmonies or discords, can readily be separated by an experienced ear. The eye, on the other hand, only sees the result of mixed colors; it needs instruments to rival the ear; and it is only by means of the prism that it can separate and classify the various vibrations which reach it.

But, provided with this prism, or spectroscope, it has lately done wonders. It has discovered and measured a whole world of new phenomena, which, according to the theory just developed, must be attributed to reciprocal exchanges of movement between the ether and the ponderable molecules. The light given by these has disclosed to us many secrets of chemistry, and especially of astronomy.

Before specifying the most recent of these discoveries, we will profit by what has already been said to explain very briefly the fundamental principles of spectral analysis. Transparent bodies, whether solid, liquid, or gaseous, exercise upon the rays an absorption which is called elective, because some undulations are allowed to pass, while others are stopped, according to their velocities; and one of the effects of this absorption is the color of such bodies. This is to be explained by the principle of isochronism. Those vibrations which, for want of it, cannot be imparted to the surrounding matter, pass freely; the others are absorbed. But it is remarkable that gases and vapors only absorb a small number of them, while solids and liquids retain a great many. Thus, supposing that we have obtained, in any way, a continuous spectrum—that is, one with no breaks—containing all the known rays, not only the visible ones between the red and violet, but also the rest outside of these limits, a liquid or solid body intercepting this light will entirely destroy, or considerably weaken, large portions of this spectrum; whereas a gas or vapor generally will only efface a few small ones, whose absence is detected in the luminous part of the spectrum by the dark, transverse lines which have been so long known in that of the sun. This is certainly quite extraordinary, since it would suggest the inference that in gaseous bodies, the molecules, though less condensed, or further from each other, than in solids or liquids, have a much smaller range of possible vibrations. Besides this, the researches of Mr. Frankland on flames have lately shown that, even in gases, this range increases as the density augments. These results must undoubtedly be considered as strange; but what, after all, do we know of the connection of the elements of matter? {820} Without dwelling further on this point, we will mention the most important fact learned by these experiments: that this elective absorption is a complete test of the chemical composition of gases. In given conditions of temperature and pressure, each gas is perfectly distinguished from all others by the special absorption which it exercises upon the luminous rays. The principle by which chemical analysis is performed spectroscopically is thus evident. To find if any particular gas is to be found on the path of the ray, it is only necessary to develop the latter into a spectrum, and to see, by the position of the particular dark lines produced in it, if the absorption due to this gas has been effected.

But this is not all. Bodies sufficiently heated become luminous. According to the theory, this means that the molecules of matter, in their turn, communicate their vibrations to the ether; and here again we should find the influence of isochronism. The ether, it is true, is susceptible of vibrations of any velocity within certain very wide limits; but the molecules can give it none which are not isochronous with their own. Let us see what will result. Evidently, that the light which is emitted will, when developed into a spectrum, be concentrated in brilliant lines at those points where the velocities of undulation are the same as those of which the gas is capable; and, further, these lines should also evidently be in the same places, as the dark lines which this gas produces, as explained above, in a continuous spectrum, by absorption. This actually takes place in most cases, but some exceptions must be expected; because variations of temperature and pressure change the mutual connections of the gaseous molecules, and hence should also change the velocities of their oscillations. Thus, it is often found that the same gases change their systems of brilliant lines as their temperature or pressure changes; and Mr. Frankland has even obtained gases giving continuous spectra, sometimes attaining this result by pressure alone. The influence of heat also explains why solid or liquid bodies, when incandescent, give continuous spectra; while, at a low temperature, their interposition produces an elective absorption. For it is known that transparent solids or liquids become opaque when heated sufficiently to shine; the reason apparently being that, like the ether, they are capable of vibrations of any degree of rapidity within the usual limits, and hence allow no ethereal ones—or, in other words, no light—to pass through them, but absorb them all. Most flames or incandescent vapors, on the contrary, do not entirely lose their transparency. This property is of inestimable value in our investigations of nature.

Gases, by the combination of their elective absorption with their equally elective emission, produce results which at first sight might appear singular, but which can now readily be explained. Suppose that a flame is situated on the path of some rays which, without this interposition, would give a brilliant continuous spectrum. This flame only absorbs the ray having vibrations isochronous with its own; on the other hand, it emits rays similar to those which it absorbs. The resulting spectrum will vary according to the relative intensity of the emitted and absorbed rays. If these two intensities are equal, the spectrum will remain continuous; but if the absorption predominates, there will be dark lines in it; if the emission, brilliant ones. {821} Similar phenomena of reversal have been often met with in the recent examinations of different parts of the sun.

The principles just explained have been known for several years, and were sufficient for astronomy as long as it restricted its investigations to the chemical analysis of the atmospheres of the heavenly bodies. But it was soon perceived that much greater use could be made of the spectroscope. Information is now beginning to be acquired by means of it which had previously appeared to be unattainable, regarding, for instance, the rapidity of the motion of stars the distance of which is still unknown; the great movements which are continually taking place in the great masses of gas in the solar photosphere, and the pressure of these masses at different depths; and it is even hoped that a direct determination of their temperature may be made. Let us speak first of the observations of stellar velocities. Their possibility may easily be shown by means of an acoustic phenomenon which the reader must frequently have noticed. Let us suppose two trains of cars to be moving rapidly in opposite directions, and that one of them whistles as it passes the other. If we are seated in the latter, we shall perceive that the pitch of the whistle suddenly falls as it passes us. The reason is manifest. A certain time is necessary for the sound to reach us; and while the train is approaching, this time is sensibly shorter for each succeeding vibration, so that the interval between the vibrations is apparently diminished, and the note is higher than it would be were the trains at rest. On the other hand, as the whistle recedes after passing, its pitch is lowered for a similar reason. Of course, no such effect is produced by that of our own train, which always remains at the same distance from us. By the amount of flattening of the sound, it is quite possible to calculate the velocity of the train, as compared with that of sound. [Footnote 198]

[Footnote 198: Suppose the sum of the velocities of the trains to be one-ninth of that of sound, and that the whistle is, at a given moment, 1140 feet (which is about the distance travelled by sound in a second) from our ear. The vibrations emitted at this instant will reach us in one second; and all those emitted in the nine seconds required for the train to arrive will be condensed into the remaining eight. Their frequency will then be nine-eighths of what it would be without the motion. It will be diminished in nearly the same ratio after the passage; since the vibration emitted nine seconds afterward will require an additional second to reach us; thus, the frequency will now be nine-tenths of what it would be without the motion, or four-fifths of what it was before meeting; corresponding to a flattening of two whole musical tones. This would require a relative velocity of 127 feet a second, or 87 miles an hour; which gives the rule, that, for every half-tone of flattening, the sum of the velocities, or the velocity of the moving train, if we are at rest, is 22 miles an hour.]

It is very easy to apply what has just been said of the waves of sound to those of light. The motion of the sonorous body displaces its sounds on the acoustic scale; in the same way, the motion of the luminous body will displace its light on the optic, placing any particular line, dark or brilliant, in the spectrum nearer to the violet or rapid end, if the body is approaching; and nearer to the red, if it is receding. And we are not obliged to wait till the change has taken place in the character of the motion, as in the case of the train, since we can always obtain lines similar to those thus displaced, and having the same velocity of vibration, from some terrestrial substance, relatively at rest, and put the two side by side in the same field; and by this means we obtain at once the difference between the apparent number of vibrations in a second of the ray from the moving body, and the real number, and thus the velocity of the moving object. This observation has the advantage of being independent of the distance of the objects observed, being as accurate for the most distant stars as for the nearest. {822} We may notice, in passing, also a singular consequence. If the motion were rapid enough, it would change the colors of objects; and, since outside the visible spectrum there are dark rays, it would even be possible for a luminous body to become invisible, by the mere effect of movement away from or to us. But the prodigious velocity of light places such a result among mere metaphysical possibilities. Indeed, it was thought, for a time, that the effect of motion on the spectral lines would never be perceptible. The first trials only gave negative results, either because the bodies observed were moving too slowly, or because the instruments used were not sensitive enough. This is no longer the case, as we shall soon see.

To conclude this explanation of principles, it only remains to say a few words on the spectroscopic observations of temperature and pressure. But here we shall indeed be obliged to be brief; since Messrs. Frankland and Lockyer, who have undertaken investigations on these important points, have not yet finished their labors; and what they have as yet communicated to the Royal Society of London, and the Academy of Sciences of Paris, is not sufficiently detailed. In 1864, Messrs. Plücker and Hittorf discovered that variations in temperature of some of the chemical elements, such as hydrogen, nitrogen, sulphur, and selenium, caused sudden changes in their spectra. At a certain degree of heat, their former lines instantly disappeared and were succeeded by new ones. This is evidently somewhat analogous to what takes place in a sonorous pipe when it is blown more forcibly. At first, the sound only becomes louder, then its pitch is suddenly raised. But here we know the relation of the new note to the old one; but the connection between the successive spectra has not yet been ascertained. As regards pressure, Messrs. Frankland and Lockyer inform us that one of the lines of hydrogen increases in breadth with increased compression of the gas. We have also already said that under very high pressures the gases have not only shown broader bright lines, but even continuous spectra. (It will be remembered that the usual spectrum given by a luminous gas consists of isolated bright lines.) Father Secchi, whose attention has lately been turned to composite rather than to simple substances, has observed, among other things, that the spectrum of benzine vapor is gradually modified with a gradual increase of density.

Let us pass to the recent applications which astronomers have made of these various principles. The eclipse of the 18th of August, 1868, and the beautiful discovery of M. Janssen, have naturally turned their attention to the sun, and some most interesting discoveries have been made. To study its various portions, an image of it is first produced in the focus of a large telescope, which image is afterward enlarged by a lens similar to those used for the objectives of microscopes; and its different parts are successively placed upon the slit of the spectroscope. (The slit is the small aperture of that shape through which the light enters before falling upon the analyzing prism.) This slit thus receives light from only a part of the sun's disc; for the light diffused in our atmosphere and falling upon it, although coming indeed from all parts of the sun, is too feeble to interfere with the observations. Suppose, then, that our eye is at the spectroscope, and that the slit is receiving rays from the centre of the sun. {823} The movement of the heavens will bring all the points of the solar radius successively upon it, from the centre to the edge; and if the slit is placed perpendicular to this radius, it will come out, of course, tangent to the edge. Under these conditions, and if the atmosphere is steady, the phenomena will be as follows.

As long as we are upon the disc, we shall see nothing but the usual solar spectrum with its colors and its numerous dark lines. The region from which this light comes is called the photosphere; and its spectrum would be continuous were not its light absorbed by the interposed vapors of a great many substances. These vapors produce the dark lines; but where are they? It was for a long time supposed that they formed an immense atmosphere round the sun, only visible during total eclipses under the form of a brilliant aureola. This hypothesis seems now to have been abandoned, for reasons which will soon be given. It is generally thought that these absorbing vapors form the atmosphere in which the luminous clouds float, or, at least, that they are in immediate contact with the photosphere.

Secondly, when we have nearly arrived at the edge, the spectrum is covered with a number of bright lines. According to Messrs. Frankland and Lockyer, these probably indicate a very thin gaseous covering of the photosphere, the elective emission of which has no effect for want of sufficient thickness, except upon the borders of the sun, where it is seen very obliquely. Upon the rest of the surface it only acts by its elective absorption, and perhaps may be the only cause of the dark lines. This conjecture certainly agrees with the principles just developed.

Thirdly, at the moment of passing off the disc, the lines all disappear, and the spectrum becomes continuous. Father Secchi, who informs us of this fact, naturally ascribes it to a particular layer enveloping the photosphere. He adds that this layer is very thin, so that tremulousness in the air suffices to prevent its observation, on account of the mixture of lights. It is not found on the whole circumference of the disc; but we shall give an explanation of this. He supposes that it is the seat of the elective absorption which produces the dark lines; but how can this be reconciled with the continuity of the spectrum which it emits?

This spectrum soon disappears, and some brilliant lines take its place, particularly a red, a yellow, a green, and a violet one. At this moment the slit is illumined by the famous rose-colored layer, now called the chromosphere, upon which rest the protuberances, formerly so mysterious, seen in total eclipses. We cannot see it in the ordinary way, on account of the atmospheric light; but it comes out in the spectroscope, its light being concentrated in a few bright lines, while that of our atmosphere is spread out in a long spectrum, and consequently much weakened. It has been found that the mean thickness of this gaseous envelope of the sun is more than 5000 kilometres, (3107 miles,) or about four tenths of the earth's diameter, and that its contour is very variable; it is often agitated like the waves of a stormy sea, while in some places it sometimes has a very uniform level. It is now regarded as forming the outer limit or coating of the sun. The only reason which formerly supported the belief in a gaseous atmosphere outside of it, the elective absorption of which gave the dark lines of the solar spectrum, was the phenomenon of the aureola, already mentioned. But the thin layer discovered by F. Secchi will probably account for this; and there are, on the other hand, very strong reasons for rejecting the idea of such a vast exterior envelope. {824} One is the appearance, mentioned above, of the numerous bright lines which Messrs. Frankland and Lockyer attribute to a thin, gaseous coating of the photosphere. The light of these ought seemingly to be absorbed by a thick atmosphere, and the lines reversed to dark ones. Besides, these same observers consider that the change of breadth of the lines shows that the pressure is insignificant at the summit of the chromosphere, and that even at the base it is less than that of our own air. Lastly, no traces have been found of the bright-line spectrum which this envelope ought itself to give in the vicinity of the disc.

To return to the chromosphere: of what gases is it formed? It certainly is principally composed of hydrogen, perhaps in many parts entirely so. When a series of electric sparks is passed through a tube containing pure hydrogen at a very low pressure, the tube is illumined with a light of the same color as that of the protuberances. If this light is examined with the spectroscope, it shows a fine spectrum with a number of brilliant and very fine lines, among which four are conspicuous, broader and brighter than the others. The first is red, the second green, the third and fourth are violet; but this fourth is much the faintest, and even the third is not so bright as the other two. The first is called C, the second F, because their positions exactly correspond to those of the two dark lines thus designated by Fraunhofer in the solar spectrum. The third is very near the dark line G of the sun, which is produced by the vapor of iron. Now, the two first are always found among the lines of the chromosphere; the third also is often visible; and M. Rayet has recently seen the fourth. Hydrogen, then, exists in this layer; for though its other lines are not seen, this may easily be ascribed to their faintness. But there is one line of the chromosphere which is still unexplained, the yellow one between C and F. It would at first seem to be the well-known double line of sodium, called D, which is so frequently met with in spectroscopic experiments; but it is certain that it is somewhat more refrangible than this; and it is not yet known to what substance it is due; it may, perhaps, also belong to hydrogen, under a different pressure or temperature from any under which it has been observed here.

It has been said that the outline of the chromosphere is generally very irregular. Immense columns rise from it, the celebrated protuberances, the height of which is sometimes as much as eleven diameters of the earth, (or 85,000 miles.) It must, therefore, be subject to great agitation, to which the spectroscope bears witness. Mr. Lockyer has observed several times that foreign substances were projected into it; for example, magnesium into one protuberance as far as the sixth part of its height; barium and sodium, and probably other bodies also, were seen, but at smaller elevations. We now understand the breaks in the thin layer detected by F. Secchi; it is probably torn by the upward movement of various substances toward the protuberances. It is, in fact, wanting near the bright spots on the sun, called faculae, and it is now known that these faculae are always covered by protuberances.

Near these bright spots are also usually found the dark spots which have been observed for more than two centuries. Some discoveries have just been made regarding these which are perhaps the most interesting of any yet made in the sun. {825} Every one knows that they are composed of two distinct parts—the nucleus, which appears black in a telescope, but which is really quite bright, since it gives a spectrum of its own; and the penumbra, which surrounds this nucleus. The latter consists of portions of the photosphere, drawn out in the form of threads toward the centre of the nucleus; these threads sometimes unite with each other and form bridges, as it were, over the dark space. All the spectral observations confirm the idea previously entertained, that these spots are really cavities in the photosphere; also they indicate that these cavities are filled with absorbing vapors, whose high degree of pressure is manifest by the broadening of their lines. Mr. Lockyer has seen in them sodium, barium, and magnesium; F. Secchi, calcium, iron, and sodium. Above these spots the hydrogen of the chromosphere appears in quantities sufficient for its elective emission to destroy the black lines produced by its absorption upon other parts of the disc, and even sometimes to change them into bright ones. But there are many other peculiarities in the spectra of the spots; and F. Secchi, in examining them, has hit upon an idea which seems to us very suggestive. It was already known by observations of their frequency and size, that the sun is a slightly variable star, with a period of ten and one third years. We now find a new resemblance between it and the other variable stars. It may be remembered that the Roman astronomer has lately divided the stars into four classes, according to the general character of their spectra. He has just compared the different portions of the sun with these four groups, and finds that if its surface was all like the nuclei of the spots, it would have to be put in the class whose type is Betelgeux, all of which are more or less variable; that the penumbras are like Arcturus, and the general surface of the photosphere like Pollux. He has also concluded, from the presence of many of the dark lines in the nuclei, that the vapor of water exists in these regions of the sun; and the appearance of others not yet named has caused him to suspect the presence of many other compound bodies. Up to this time, hardly any thing but the simple substances has been looked for, as the heat of the sun would seem to be so great as to separate all the composite ones; but this temperature probably is not so high in the spots. It became, therefore, of interest to examine the faint red stars which form his fourth group; and in doing so, F. Secchi has obtained the surprising result that the vapor of a compound substance, namely, benzine, gives, when incandescent, a spectrum having bright lines exactly corresponding to the dark ones of one of the stars of this group. This star, then, appears to have an atmosphere of benzine.

Finally, the spectroscope has demonstrated the movement of at least one star. Mr. Huggins has found that the hydrogen lines in the spectrum of Sirius do not exactly coincide with those of this gas when at rest, but are displaced toward the violet; this observation was confirmed at Rome. It would follow from this that Sirius is rapidly approaching us. This is the only observation of this description which seems yet to be well established. But may it not be possible to make others, and even elsewhere than among the stars? The chromosphere is, as we know, the scene of very rapid movements; and may not these be visible by the displacement of the spectral lines? {826} The following remark of Mr. Lockyer, in one of his communications to the Royal Society, would induce us to hope for this: "In the protuberance of which we are speaking, the line F was strangely displaced. It seemed that some disturbing cause altered the refrangibility of this line of hydrogen under certain conditions and pressures." But is it really to pressure that this displacement is due, when we know that rapid movement produces this effect, which has never been known to follow from pressure? But let us hasten to acknowledge that, in a subsequent communication of the same author, we find a sentence much more to the point, and which only needs to be a little more developed to answer our question. Mr. Lockyer is here speaking of movements in the vapors which fill the cavities of the spots. "The changes of refrangibility," says he, "of the rays in question show that the absorbing matter is rising and falling relatively to the luminous matter, and that these movements can be determined with great precision." Let us hope that this will be verified by observation, and that exact measures will show the fertility of such a promising theoretical principle. [Footnote 199]

[Footnote 199: The rapidity of some of these movements has been said to be about one hundred miles a second.]

The length of this bulletin is beginning to alarm us; but since it should include all the last scientific developments concerning the subject of ethereal vibrations, a word must be added on some curious experiments of Mr. Tyndall. The chemical action of these vibrations had hardly been examined hitherto, except in the nutrition of plants, in the formation of chlorhydric acid, and in the transformation of various substances, principally used in photography. The successor of Faraday has recently studied their effects upon vapors, and has applied the curious results of his investigations to some as yet unexplained facts of meteorology and astronomy. Passing a cylindrical beam of light down a long glass tube full of the vapor which he wished to examine, he found that the vapor soon ceased to be completely transparent. An incipient cloud, as he calls it, soon appeared, so thin that it could only be seen by the light of the beam producing it, but became invisible in the full light of day. Some vapors undoubtedly will not produce it; but the experiment succeeds perfectly with many different ones, especially with nitrite of amyle, bisulphide of carbon, benzine, etc. The following explanation of this phenomenon seems quite probable. The vibrations of the ethereal medium, or at least some of them, are communicated to the atoms of which the composite molecules of the vapor are formed. Owing to isochronism, the movement becomes strong enough to break up the molecule, the atoms of which are formed into new combinations, which are better able to resist the action of light. If the new substance cannot remain under the given pressure and temperature in the gaseous state, it will be precipitated in liquid particles, which are at first extremely small, but gradually increase in size, so as to intercept the light and become visible. If the vapor employed satisfies these conditions, the experiment ought to succeed. The chemical analysis of the products has, we believe, in some cases confirmed this explanation; we will now confirm it by some facts of another kind.

In Mr. Tyndall's experiments, the vapor examined was never unmixed; when it was put into the tube, some other gas was also introduced, usually atmospheric air; but other gases were also employed. With hydrogen, a remarkable effect was produced. On account of its small density, it failed to sustain the liquid particles, and they slowly settled in the bottom of the tube. {827} By a suitable diminution of the pressure of these mixtures of gas and vapor, the chemical action of the rays could be retarded at pleasure. The "incipient cloud" could then be seen to form gradually; and whatever was the character of the vapor used, the cloud had always at first a magnificent blue color. Continuing the experiment, the brilliancy of the cloud increased, but its blue tinge diminished, until it became as white as those usually formed. The natural explanation of this change is found in the gradual growth of the liquid particles.

The cloud was not usually formed all along the course of the rays. After having traversed a certain thickness of vapor, the rays, though seeming as bright as ever, lost their chemical power. This result might easily be predicted by the theory. Only a few of these rays had the proper length of wave to act by isochronism upon the atoms of the vapor. These would be absorbed shortly after entering; and the others, though vastly more numerous and escaping absorption, would produce no chemical effect. It was even probable that, by passing the light at the outset through a small thickness of the liquid, the vapor of which was contained in the tube, all its active rays could be taken out; and experiment confirmed this conclusion. It is to be regretted that the light was not examined with the prism before being employed; the wave-length of the active rays would then have been known. It is no doubt very probable that they are toward the violet extremity, either among the visible rays or beyond. But the colored glasses, which the English physicist interposed, only partially resolve the question. The prism would undoubtedly have shown that the wave-length of the active rays varies with the substance exposed to them.

Some vapors taken alone are almost insensible, while their mixture is immediately affected by the passage of the rays. Such is the case of that of nitrite of butyle with chlorhydric acid. This is very easily explained theoretically. The disturbance communicated to the atoms by the ethereal vibrations, though very decided, may be insufficient to break up the molecules. But if another cause, though itself insufficient alone, comes to its assistance, the atoms may be separated. Such another cause is that which chemists have long known as affinity, the manifestations of which are very numerous; but which has not yet been submitted to a precise analysis. In the case just mentioned, the affinity of the elements of the nitrite of butyle for those of the chlorhydric acid conspires with the vibrations to destroy the molecules of the two substances and form a new one, which is precipitated. The phenomenon is like that observed in the growth of plants. Light alone is not sufficient to decompose the carbonic acid of the air; neither are the leaves when in the dark. But when the sun's rays fall upon them, the carbonic acid is decomposed, its oxygen uniting with the atmosphere and its carbon with the plant. It is now easy to justify what was said in the beginning as to the formation of chlorhydric acid by the action of the rays on a mixture of chlorine and hydrogen. It is only necessary that the molecules of these gases, or, at least, of one of them, should be composed of several atoms. Affinity alone could only break the union of these very slowly; but the light would shake them apart, and enable the affinity to act immediately.

So far Mr. Tyndall's experiments agree perfectly with the theory; they confirm it, but they do not extend it. He has, however, made others, which seem to disclose new points in the theory of exchange of movements between the ether and ponderable matter. It might no longer be the atoms or the molecules which would have to be considered in respect to the ethereal vibrations, but even the particles, if sufficiently small. In fact, these particles reflect the rays not absorbed, according to entirely new laws. In the first place, although belonging to colorless liquids, they reflect the blue rays much better than the others. This is true of all the vapors tried, without exception. This elective reflection only holds when their dimensions are small, since it disappears as the size of the particles increases. This is quite a new fact, and, it must be acknowledged, as yet quite unexplained. Secondly, they polarize light according to laws which must also be called new, being entirely different from those given by theory and experiment for polarization by reflection. In one respect these laws are not new; for they have been long observed in atmospheric polarization; but this has always been one of the knotty points of the undulatory theory. Evidently, Mr. Tyndall's experiments do not clear it up entirely; but they have made an important advance in that direction, by showing to what physical circumstance this polarization is probably due. It would appear, that is, that in the higher regions of our atmosphere there are vapors which, instead of condensing in particles large enough to form ordinary clouds, are precipitated like those used by Mr. Tyndall, and fill the air with extremely small particles and with incipient clouds. This hypothesis is certainly very probable. It accounts at once for the blueness of the sky, and for its polarization of light.

Here is, then, a problem for theorists, in a better condition than previously. We hope to return to it shortly, in a subsequent bulletin. In conclusion, let us point out a new application of these experiments to the physical theory of comets. Mr. Tyndall considers the cometary matter to be a vapor on which the sun's rays act physically and chemically. These two actions would be somewhat contrary to each other; for the first would tend to evaporate the liquid particles and expand the vapor, while the second would precipitate this vapor in the form of incipient cloud. As the comet approaches solar action, forming an immense volume, of which the visible part will be only a small fraction, the head being the most condensed portion. If, now, we suppose the head to absorb the heating rays more abundantly than the remaining ones, in the cool shadow behind it the chemical action may prevail, and form an incipient cloud, which will be the tail of the comet. Elsewhere, the calorific action will predominate, and the vapor will remain invisible. Such is substantially the new theory of comets. It certainly satisfies the general conditions of the problem, and especially it explains very naturally the enormously rapid movements observed in the tails of these bodies. But will what is still undetermined in it enable it to be accommodated to the numerous facts already observed, and hereafter to be so? Here, also, it may be regretted that the spectroscope was not employed by the English physicist. The spectra of the incipient clouds might have been compared with those of comets' tails; and would have given an excellent test of the theory. Perhaps, however, he has reserved this part of his researches for a future publication.

St. Oren's Priory.

Or, Extracts From The Note-book Of An American In A French Monastery.

      "Pour chercher mieux."
  —Device of Queen Christina of Sweden.

              PART I.

  "I hear a voice you cannot hear,
     Forbidding me to stay:
   I see a hand you cannot see,
     Which beckons me away."

Such were the words on my lips, my dear friend, when I bade you farewell and promised that I would, from time to time, give you a picture of my convent life, that you might in spirit follow me closely into the sealed garden of the Beloved, though forced by circumstances to remain far from me in body.

Fatigued with my long journey, you can imagine I was very glad when I reached this city. I hastened to find the Rue du Prieuré, a narrow, gloomy street, paved with cobble-stones, cheerless and uninviting. But about half-way down, I saw a statue of Mary Most Pure, in a niche over a large doorway, with her all-embracing arms extended in welcome. That was a sursum corda which reassured me. The place where Mary is honored is always a home for her children. The sight of her image brings peace and repose to the soul, and I turned aside to rest under her shadow. It was the grand portal of St. Oren's Priory, an arched passage through the very building, wide enough to admit a carriage. I stopped before the ponderous door that was to open for me a new life. This was the door I had so often heard compared with another portal which bears the inscription:

But above my head was the Madonna which meant love and peace. Peace; yes, that was what I sought, like the Tuscan poet at the Italian monastery:

  "And as he asks what there the stranger seeks,
   My voice along the cloister whispers, Peace!"

The door opened just wide enough to admit me, and, passing through the arch, I found myself in a small paved court, enclosed by the monastery on all sides, where the sun only comes for a short time at midday—a grateful refuge from its heat. In it is a fine large linden-tree, under whose wide-spreading branches I found a group of nuns—it being the hour of daily reunion. I felt bewildered by the sight of so many strange faces, but my first impression was one of general kindness and cordiality. I could not have asked for a kinder welcome, and surely hope and peace were on every face. One of the mothers, seeing my fatigue, took me to the chapel for a moment, and then, through long corridors, to a small cell; thus giving me a general glance at my foreign home. I found thick stone walls, long passages, paved floors, a dim old chapel, and narrow cells. You will think this fearful; on the contrary, it is charming because monastic. One of the narrow cells is mine; furnished with a table, chair, bed, and prie-dieu. On the latter stands a crucifix, and on the wall hangs a print of Notre Dame de Bon Secours. There is one window in it,

It opens in the middle, longitudinally, like all the windows here; each part swinging back like a folding-door. Looking through it upon the convent garden, the first thing I saw was a lay-sister, bearing on her head an antique-looking jar, which she had just filled from a huge well. There are two of these immense wells in the garden, dug by the monks of old! Yes, monks, for our monastery was once a Benedictine abbey, and dates from the tenth century. There's hoary antiquity for you, which has such a charm for us people of the new world. These first days, while resting from my fatigue, I have been looking over the annals of this old establishment, and must give you an outline of them.

Do you remember reading, in the Chronicles of Sir John Froissart, of the Armagnacs, so long at enmity with the house of Foix? The first Count of Armagnac, was the founder of St. Oren's Priory. He was known by the name of Bernard le Louche. He made this city the capital of his comté; and one of his first acts, after his establishment here, was to build this monastery. The old parchment in the archives of the priory, quite in accordance with the spirit of the times, runs thus:

"Bernardus Luscus, mindful of his sins, unable to fulfil a vow he had made to visit the Holy Places at Jerusalem, and desirous of liquidating his debts to Divine Justice, resolved, by the counsel of his wife, the Domina Emerina, and the advice of the magnates, his lieges, to found a monastery in honorem Sanctorum Joannis Baptistae et Evangelistae et Beati Orentii, that therein prayer might be daily offered for his sins and for those of his posterity."

The site selected for the erection of this monastery was on the banks of a branch of the Garonne, at the foot of an old city known in the time of the Caesars as Climberris, and built en amphithéatre, with superb terraces, upon the side of an elevation. It was fitting that the abbey, which Count Bernard had founded for the spiritual weal of himself and his posterity, and endowed with "lands and livings many a rood," should find shelter beneath his fostering eye at the very foot of his crescent-shaped city, which was itself surmounted by the embattled walls of his own stronghold. Thus enclosed by hills on the north and west, and the peaceful, sluggish Algersius on the east, threading its way toward the Garonne—its current soft-gliding and calm as the life of the cloister—what spot more suitable could Count Bernard have found on which to build a house of prayer? The warm sun of France to which it thus lay exposed was tempered by the keen, invigorating winds that came from the snowy Pyrenees, which glitter away to the south.

In this very place, before the advent of the Messiah, in mythological times, a temple had stood in honor of Diana, the old ideal of a people's reverence for purity, and one of nature's foreshadowings of the Christian exaltation of chastity. The Auscitains being early converted to Christianity, their zealous apostles overthrew the high places of the Gentiles, and thereon set up the victorious ensign of the cross—Vexilla regis prodeunt!

On the ruins of Diana's temple was erected an altar to the true God, and a baptistery, named, as all baptisteries are, after the precursor of Christ, where came the warlike Ausci to be regenerated at the holy hands of the zealous St. Taurin, and the fearless, idol-demolishing St. Oren, who in turn fixed their abode hard by. Other saints too have lived on the same spot, and their bodies were enshrined hereon after their spirits had passed away. {831} St. Taurin, St. Oren, St. Léothade, St. Austinde, names ever venerable to the heart of an Auscitain, living in the shadow of your shrines, sheltered by your votaries who merit for me your protection, I should be ungrateful to you, untrue to my own heart, did I not often murmur your potent names and praise you to those afar off!

St. Taurin was the fourth successor of St. Paterne, whom St. Sernin, the great apostle not only of Toulouse but of all this part of France, consecrated first bishop of Eauze, then the metropolis of Novempopulania, as Gascony was called. Forced by barbarians, who came in search of spoils, to quit Eauze, St. Taurin took refuge in Climberris, bringing with him, among other relics, the bodies of his four sainted predecessors in the episcopacy: St. Paterne, St. Servand, St. Optat, St. Pompidien. At that time, there were two distinct cities here—Climberris, a Gaulish city, on the side and crest of the hill, and Augusta Auscorum, on the eastern bank of the Algersius, which last received its name from the Emperor Augustus, who passed through it on his return from Spain, and gave it the rights of a Roman city. St. Saturnin had first preached the gospel here, and built a church under the invocation of St. Peter in the city of Augusta; and at the foot of Climberris, where our priory now stands, was a church of St. John. St. Taurin chose the latter as his metropolitan church—a rank it retained for a long period—and there enshrined the holy bodies he had brought with him.

The zeal of St. Taurin was not confined to his own flock. Hearing of a great Druidical celebration in the woods of Berdale, he repaired thither. The unholy rites had commenced, and a profound silence reigned, when all at once a loud voice was heard. It was that of St. Taurin, denouncing their idolatry and calling upon the multitude to turn to the true God. The crowd was at first too much astonished at his boldness to move, but after some hesitation, incited by the Druids, overwhelmed the apostle with a shower of stones. Finding he still breathed, they cut off his head. His feast is solemnized with the utmost pomp in this diocese, on the fifth of September, which is believed to be the day of his martyrdom.

St. Oren belonged to a Spanish family of high rank, his father being the Duke of Urgel and Governor of Catalonia. He early renounced his right of heritage, but, after the death of his brother, succeeded to the family estates. He sold all his property, distributed the money among the poor, and retired to a hermitage amidst the mountains of Bigorre, where he led an angelic life, giving himself up to severe austerities and the contemplation of divine things. The renown of his virtues and his reputation for learning caused his nomination to this see, of which he reluctantly took possession in the year 400. He displayed extraordinary energy and zeal in rooting out the vestiges of idolatry still lingering in his diocese, and in reviving true piety among the lukewarm of his flock.

St. Oren was a learned man and a poet. The great Fortunatus, Bishop of Poitiers, who lived in the sixth century, mentions his poems, of which some fragments have come down to us. His Nomenclature, in particular, has always been known and quoted. It is more extensive than any other ancient list of the symbols of the God-Man. Sylvius, in the fifth century, gives forty-five of these symbolical names in seven verses. Clement of Alexandria, in his hymn to our Saviour, gives ten. St. Cyril mentions twelve, in a sermon. {832} The list of St. Phébade of Agen, in the fourth century, comprises twenty-one. The Nomenclature of Constantinople mentions twelve; that of Rome, twenty-two; but that of St. Oren, composed in his solitude of Bigorre, gives, in five distichs, fifty-two of these emblematical names of our Saviour. I quote it entire:

  De Epithetis Salvatoris Nostri.

    Janua,
    Virgo,
    Leo,
    Sapientia,
    Verbum,
    Rex,
    Baculus,
    Princeps,
    Dux,
    Petra,
    Pastor,
    Homo,
    Retia,
    Sol,
    Sponsus,
    Semen,
    Mons,
    Stella,
    Magister,
    Margarita,
    Dies,
    Agnus,
    Ovis,
    Vitulus,
    Thesaurus,
    Fons,
    Vita,
    Manus,
    Caput,
    Ignis,
    Aratrum,
    Flos,
    Lapis angularis,
    Dextra,
    Columba,
    Puer,
    Vitis,
    Adam,
    Digitus,
    Speculum,
    Via,
    Botryo,
    Panis,
    Hostia,
    Lex,
    Ratio,
    Virga,
    Piscis,
    Aquila,
    Justus,
    Progenies regis,
    regisque Sacerdos;
    Nomina Magna Dei,
    major at ipse Deus.

"These are the great names of God, but he himself is still far greater!" says the last line.

St. Oren never lost his love for solitude, and this attraction, added to the burden of his episcopal duties, induced him at last to resume his hermit's staff and set out for the grotto, which had been the witness of his former austerities and was the never-ceasing object of his regret. His flock, in consternation, pursued him and brought him back to his post, where his piety, his talents, and the miracles he wrought, gave him preeminence among all the bishops of Aquitaine. When Theodoric I., King of the Visigoths, was besieged at Toulouse, by Lictorius, lieutenant of the celebrated Aétius, the former sent St. Oren, with several other bishops, to arrange terms of peace with the Roman commander. Lictorius received them with haughty contempt, and, sure of victory, rejected all their propositions. Then Theodoric humbled himself before the Lord of Hosts. He covered himself with sackcloth, prostrated himself in prayer, and then went forth to battle and to victory.

Shortly after this embassy, St. Oren felt his end approaching, and armed himself with the holy sacraments for the last earthly combat. His soul passed away, with a sweet odor, on the first of May, and his body was enshrined in the church of St. John, which subsequently took his name. He has always been greatly venerated in this country, and is invoked in all diseases of the mind. Count John I. of Armagnac gave a magnificent silver bust as a reliquary for the skull of St. Oren. His feast is still religiously celebrated, and is a great holiday among the common people, who assemble after vespers to dance their rondeaux in the open air.

The church of St. John, where reposed a long line of holy apostles and prelates, was, with the two cities, destroyed by the Saracens, in the eighth century. But in the year of grace 956, as I have said, Bernard le Louche, inspired by God, built on the same spot a magnificent church with three naves, to which he joined a Benedictine abbey. They were built of the stones of the city walls, which, two centuries before, had been levelled to the dust by the Moors. A hundred years later, this abbey was reduced to a priory by St. Hugo, and affiliated to his abbey at Cluny. The names of a long succession of abbots and priors are recorded in the chronicles of St. Oren's Priory, most of whom belonged to the noblest families of the country. During the French Revolution of 1793, the abbatial church and a part of the monastery were, alas! destroyed; but there is a quadrangular tower—a part of the original abbey—still standing, and a fine Gothic chapel, which dates from the fourteenth century, besides a more modern, and still large, edifice, with long dim corridors leading away to austere cells, or to spacious sunny salons. These were taken possession of by a venerable community of Ursuline nuns, who had been dispersed during the Reign of Terror, but who, as soon as permitted, hastened like doves to find a new ark.

A steep spiral staircase, of hewn stone, lighted only by long narrow chinks left purposely in the thick walls, leads to the top of the old tower, which commands a delightful view of the valley of the Algersius. At the foot, toward the south, lies the convent garden, with its wells, its almond-trees, acacias, vines, and rose-bushes—loved haunts of the nightingales, which I heard there for the first time in my life. On the east passes the route impériale, beneath the very convent walls, and beyond, parallel with it, flows the river which gives its name to the département. Centuries ago, when the country was more thickly wooded, it is said to have been a navigable river, and merited to be sung by Fortunatus, who was a poet as well as bishop. The eastern bank is shaded by a long grove of noble trees—a public promenade—where, at due hours, may be seen all the fashion, valor, and sanctity of the city. Through the trees may be caught a glimpse of an old Franciscan monastery, now an asylum for the insane, where once stood a temple of Bacchus, whose memory is still perpetuated in this land of vineyards. There, in the fourteenth century, was buried Reine, niece of Pope Clement V., and wife of John I., the thirteenth Comte d'Armagnac. Near by is the airy tower of St. Pierre, first built by St. Saturnin, in the third century, and rebuilt several times since—the last time, after its destruction by the Huguenots in the civil and religious disturbances of the sixteenth century. The music of its carillon floats through the valley at an early hour every morning, summoning the devout to mass.

Cradling the valley toward the west is the quaint old city. Its houses of cream-colored stone with red tiled roofs rise one behind the other on terraces, and, crowning all, are the towers of one of the finest cathedrals of France.

Due east from the tower, in the background, rises a high hill, called in the time of the Romans Mount Nerveva, but which now glories in the more Christian appellation of Mount St. Cric. There our glorious St. Oren battered down a temple of Apollo, but its summit is still lit up by that god at each return of hallowed morn.

Away to the south stretch the Pyrenees, hiding Catholic and chivalric Spain, and gleaming in the sun like the very walls of the celestial city. Even Maldetta, with its name of ill omen, looks pure and holy.

This old tower is for me a loved haunt on a bright sunny day. I often betake myself to its top to enjoy all the reveries inspired by the scene before me. Its venerable, almost crumbling walls, its curious recesses and carvings, speak loudly of the monks of old. There I seem nearer to heaven; I breathe a purer, a more refined atmosphere, which exalts the heart and quickens its vibrations.

There is a large sunny apartment in the tower in which I witnessed a most affecting event—the death of a nun. So impressed was I by this flight of an angelic soul to the everlasting embraces of the Spouse of virgins, that I cannot refrain from giving you a sketch of its closing scenes.

When I first arrived at the priory, poor Sister Saint Sophie wandered around like a ghost, already far gone with pulmonary consumption. She entered the cloister while only seventeen years of age, wishing to offer the flower of her life to him who loves the fragrance of an innocent heart. Now, at the age of twenty-eight, she was called to exchange the holy chants of the choir for the divine Trisagium of the redeemed above. Her health had long been delicate; but the innocence of her soul, the natural calmness of her disposition, her strong religious faith, and her detachment from earth, made her look forward to death without the slightest apprehension. She spoke of the event as she would of going to the chapel where dwells the Beloved.

About a week before her death, she went to the infirmary, by her own request—to die. The infirmary is a commodious apartment in the second story of the tower, a room which most of the nuns shrink from approaching, for there they have seen so many of their sisters die. I went every day to see poor Sister Sophie. The room was adorned with religious engravings, a crucifix, a statue of the Madonna, and a holy-water font. On the mantel were some books of devotion, among which I noticed the New Testament in French. I always found this dying sister calm, excepting one evening, when her cheeks glowed with a burning fever. It was only a few days before her death, and was caused by her last struggle with earth. When that was past, she was ready to die. Her sister, longing to see her once more, had obtained permission of the ecclesiastical superiors to enter the monastery. But Sister Sophie, wishing to avail herself of this last opportunity of self-sacrifice, opposed her entrance; and it was this struggle between natural affection and a sense of duty which produced so violent a fever. This act of self-denial affected me deeply.

One Saturday, at about half-past eight in the morning, I was hastily summoned by the Mère St. J—— to go to the infirmary, for Sister Sophie was dying. I hurried down. Poor Sophie lay, ghastly white, with her crucifix in her hands. Her rosary and girdle lay, on the bed, at the foot of which was placed an engraving of the Sacred Heart of our Lord Jesus Christ, in the opening of which reposed a dove—emblem of the soul that trusts in the Saviour. She was perfectly calm. There was not a sign of apprehension. Her brother-in-law, who was her physician, stood by her bedside, and said she could not survive the day. Her confessor, the Abbé de B——, a venerable priest of more than four score years, asked if she had any thing on her conscience. She shook her head. Her soul was clad in its pure bridal robe, ready for the marriage supper of the Lamb. All went to the chapel, and, with lighted tapers, two and two, followed the holy viaticum to the infirmary. It was borne by the curé in a silver ciborium, and placed on an altar erected in the middle of the room. It was a most solemn scene—the nuns kneeling all around with wax tapers in their hands, their heads bowed down in adoration, and their black robes and veils flowing around them, all responding to the priest, who, in white surplice and stole, brought comfort to the dying. He demanded of the dying nun a profession of her faith; if she died in charity with all mankind; and if she were sorry, and begged pardon of God, for all her sins—to which she faintly but distinctly responded. He then gave her the divine viaticum, and prepared to administer to her the sacrament of extreme unction. {835} As he anointed each organ, he said, before repeating the formula of the church, "O God! forgive me the sins I have committed by such an organ," (of sight, hearing, etc.) After this sacrament he accorded her the plenary indulgence of Bona Mors. I was very much affected by these holy rites, and the more so as I then witnessed them for the first time.

I went to see the departing sister several times in the course of the day. The death-struggle was long, but there was no appearance of suffering.

At eight o'clock in the evening, while we were reading the meditation for the following morning, a nun came in haste. "Quick! quick! pray for Sister Sophie. She is dying!" In a moment the infirmary was crowded with nuns. Sister Sophie was in her agony. The crucifix was still in her hand. A blessed candle of pure white wax was burning beside her, and the sub-prioress was reading solemn prayers for the departing soul, to which the nuns sobbingly responded. At the head of her bed stood a sister, who sprinkled her from time to time with holy water. Near her stood another prompting pious aspirations: "Jesus! Mary! Joseph! may I breathe out my soul with you in peace!"

At half-past eight she had given up her soul as calmly as if going to sleep. The Sub-venite was said, and then we all went to the chapel to pray for the departed.

The next morning, (Sunday,) on my way to the chapel, I stopped at the infirmary. Sister Sophie was lying on a bier, clad in her religious habit, with the sacred veil upon her head, and in her clasped hands a crucifix, and the vows which bound her to the Spouse of virgins. Her countenance was expressive of happiness and repose. A wax candle burned on each side of her head. A holy-water font stood near, and some nuns knelt around, praying for their departed sister. That day, masses were offered for her in every church and chapel in the city, and at a later hour the nuns said the office of the dead in choir. At four o'clock, I went again to the infirmary, to see her placed in her coffin. I have witnessed among those who are vowed to a life of holy poverty many examples of detachment from every thing the world deems essential, but I have never seen any thing which so went to my heart as when I saw Sister Sophie's coffin. It was simply a long deal box, unpainted and without lining. The body was placed therein, still in the religious costume. The black veil covered the face, and on her head was a wreath of white flowers. How bitterly did the nuns weep as they placed their sister in her narrow cell—even more austere than that in which she had lived! I too wept profusely to see one buried thus humbly, but perhaps suitably. The lid being nailed down, the coffin was covered with a pall, on which was a great white cross, and on it the novices spread garlands of fresh white flowers mingled with green leaves.

The nuns are buried in the cemetery of St. Oren's parish, and nothing is more affecting than when, at the portal of the convent, the coffin is entrusted to the hands of strangers; the nuns not being able to go beyond the limits of the cloister. It is then conveyed to the exterior church. Several priests received Sister Sophie at the door, and sprinkled the coffin with holy water, chanting meanwhile the De Profundis and Requiem aeternam. How awfully solemn are these chants of the dead! Every tone went to my very heart. The coffin was then borne to the centre of the church, where it was surrounded by lights, and the priests chanted the office for the dead, at the close of which they went in procession to the cemetery. {836} First were three acolytes, the middle one bearing an immense silver cross, which gleamed aloft in the departing sunlight; and the other two bore the censer and the bénitier; then came the priests, two and two, chanting the Miserere. The coffin followed, borne on a bier by six peasant women dressed in white, with curious white caps and kerchiefs. Their sepulchral appearance made me shudder. Then went four young ladies bearing a pall, on which was the great white cross and the significant death's-head. Many other ladies followed in procession. Arriving at the cemetery, the grave was blessed, while we all knelt about it. Water that had been sanctified with prayer was sprinkled on the fresh earth; clouds of incense rose from the smoking censer, and Ego sum resurrectio et vita burst in solemn intonations from the lips of the priests. Then the coffin was lowered into the grave; the young ladies threw in garlands of flowers which were soon covered. Poor Sophie was at rest, and her soul was enjoying the reward of her sacrifices. I bedewed her grave with my tears. Never was I so peculiarly affected by any death as by this, every circumstance of which is fastened most vividly in my memory. The De Profundis and the Miserere still ring in my ear, and poor Sister Sophie, as she lay in her agony, surrounded by the spouses of Christ, praying amid their sobs, for her admittance into Paradise, will never be forgotten. "Requiescat in pace!"

But of all parts of the priory, I love best the antique chapel of the Immaculate Conception. It is entered through the cloister by a low, dim vestibule, supported by "ponderous columns, short and low." A few steps, and the arches spring lightly up, forming a perfect gem of a Gothic chapel, with its altar faithful to the east—

  "Mindful of Him who, in the Orient born,
     There lived, and on the cross his life resigned,
   And who, from out the regions of the morn,
     Issuing in pomp, shall come to judge mankind."

Three ogival windows in the chancel throw on the pavement the warm gules of an escutcheon emblazoned on the glass. They diffuse not too strong a light—only enough for a glow around the tabernacle, leaving the rest of the chapel in a shade that disposes the heart to contemplation and prayer. In the morning, at mass, the rising sun streams through, mingling with the light of the tapers, like that of nature and grace in the hearts of the worshippers. Over the altar, in a niche, is a statue of Mary Most Pure, with the divine Babe in her arms—as I love to see all her statues, that the remembrance of the Blessed Virgin may never be disconnected from that of the Incarnation. "The Madonna and Child—a subject so consecrated by antiquity," says Mrs. Jameson, "so hallowed by its profound significance, so endeared by its associations with the softest and deepest of our human sympathies, that the mind has never wearied of its repetition, nor the eye become satiated with its beauty. Those who refuse to give it the honor due to a religious representation yet regard it with a tender, half-unwilling homage, and when the glorified type of what is purest, loftiest, holiest, in womanhood stands before us, arrayed in all the majesty that accomplished art, inspired by faith and love, could lend her, and bearing her divine Son, rather enthroned than sustained, on her maternal bosom,'we look, and the heart is in heaven!' and it is difficult, very difficult, to refrain from an 'Ora pro nobis!'"

In this chapel Mary has been honored for ages. The chronicles of the priory tell us that in the days of the monks of St. Benedict crowds of the faithful filled, as now, this chapel on the eighth of December, its patronal féte. The deep-toned voices that then chanted the praises of Mary have died away, but the notes have been caught up and continued in softer, sweeter tones by the lips of the spouses of Christ.

I can never enter this chapel without a thrill. I love to linger beneath its vault of stone, the arches of which spring from corbells quaintly sculptured, and form, at their intersection, medallions of Jesus and Mary, who look benignly down on the suppliant beneath. Prostrate on the pavement which holy knees have worn, and breathing an air perfumed by the prayers of centuries, my mind goes back to former times, and I think of the cowled monks who once bowed in prayer before the same altar, and murmured the same prayers I so love to repeat:

  "Their book they read and their beads they told,
   To human softness dead and cold,
       And all life's vanity."

I must tell you something of St. Mary's Cathedral, which is the glory of this place. You should see it from our garden, crowning this city built upon a hill, with its towers and pinnacles. It is perfectly majestic. There, on the same spot, before the Incarnation, stood a temple of Venus. Christianity, which always loved to sanctify these high places, made the lascivious Venus yield to the Mother of pure love. Toward the end of the third century, St. Taurin brought a venerated statue of our Lady from Eauze, and erected a chapel here in her honor. It was not till about the year 800 that a cathedral was erected in the same place. It has been four times demolished, and as often rebuilt. In 1793, it was preserved with great difficulty. During that time it served as a prison for many of the noblesse, and was stripped of many of its most precious ornaments. The holy image of Mary was superseded by the Goddess of Reason, and horses were stabled in its chapels. But one does not love to linger over such profanation.

This cathedral is particularly remarkable for the carvings of the choir and for the fine stained-glass windows of the Renaissance. Wishing to examine it minutely, I obtained permission to visit it at those hours when it is closed—that is, from noon till three o'clock. Accompanied by a servant, I was there precisely at twelve. The Angelus bell pealed forth just as I entered the church, and

  "Sprinkled with holy sounds the air, as the priest with his hyssop
   Sprinkles the congregation and scatters blessings upon them."

The Suisse, who was an old soldier under Napoleon I., and was in the Russian campaign, locked us in, free to wander at will and unremarked in this vast cathedral, with the excellent Monographie by the learned Abbé Canéto in hand. At the very portal we passed over the tomb of an old archbishop, who wished through humility to be buried under the pavement of the principal entrance to the church, that he might be trodden under foot by all men. Perhaps there was something of natural instinct in this choice. I know not whether I should prefer some quiet and shady nook for my grave, or a great thoroughfare like this, with the almost constant ring of human feet above my head. This prelate has lain there about two centuries, "awaiting," as the inscription says, "the resurrection of the dead."

We entered the church beneath the tribune of the organ, a fine instrument—the master-piece of Joyeuse, a famous organ-maker of the time of Louis XIV. On its front panels are beautifully carved, en relief, St. Cecilia and the Royal Harper.

The whole building is over three hundred feet long. Four rows of pillars divide it into three naves and collateral chapels, which are twenty-one in number, extending quite around it, each with paintings, and statues, and altars of marble, and its oaken confessional,

  "Where the graveyard in the human heart
    Gives up its dead at the voice of the priest."

The baptismal font, in the first chapel to the left, is of a single block of fine black Belgian marble. One lingers reverentially before it, to think of all the souls that have there been regenerated, and of the holy joy of the guardian angels around it.

The windows are glorious in their effect. Thereon are represented all the principal characters of the Bible, beginning with Adam and Eve; interspersed are the sibyls (Teste David cum sibylla) and saints of the middle ages. The bright sun, streaming through these "storied windows richly dight," revealing in brightest hues "many a prophet, many a saint," casts a rich light of purple and crimson and gold over altar and saint and shrine; not the dim religious light of the poets, but bright and glorious as the rainbow that spans the Eternal Throne! I could sit in their light for ever. What a beautiful missal, gorgeously illuminated, they form for the common people, and a book ever open, full of the beauty of holiness! I envy those who have worshipped in such a church from infancy, whose minds and tastes have been formed, in part, by its influences, whose earliest religious associations are connected with so much that is beautiful as well as elevating. There must be a certain tone to their piety, as well as to their minds, wanting to those who have only frequented the humbler chapels of the new world. I can never enter the plainest Catholic church without emotion. The very sight of a humble altar surmounted by the rudest cross, goes to my heart; how much more a magnificent church like this, where every thing appeals to the heart, the soul, the imagination!

  "Flamboyant with a thousand gorgeous colors,
   The perfect flower of Gothic loveliness!"

Beyond the transepts is the choir—a church within a church; for it is enclosed by a high wall with a screen and rood-loft in front. Here the canons chant the divine office seven times a day. The stalls in which they sit are fit for princes—each one a marvellous piece of workmanship, like the handiwork of a fairy rather than of man.

The panels with their large figures in relief, the Gothic niches with their statuettes, the desks all covered with carved animals and plants almost in the perfection of nature, the canopy with its hangings, beautiful as lace, are all perfectly wrought in black oak, and surpass all conception. I have heard it said the wood was kept under water twenty years, and the carver was fifty years in completing his work; and you would believe it could you see the effect. I have seen finer churches, in some respects, but no carvings to surpass these. One is never weary of examining every inch of this exquisite choir, so full of perfection is every part. Sacred and profane history, mythological and legendary lore, the fauna and flora, are all mingled in these stalls. There are one hundred and thirteen of them—sixty-seven superior, and forty-six inferior; and three hundred and six statuettes in wonderful little Gothic niches. Each superior stall has its large panel, on which in demi-relief is the image of some saint or sibyl. {839} One of them represents St. Martha of Bethany, with an aspersoir in her hand and the Tarasque at her feet, alluding to the old legend so popular in Provence, of her subduing a monster which ravaged the banks of the Rhone by sprinkling him with holy water. The city of Tarascon commemorates the tradition. A magnificent church built there, under the invocation of St. Martha, was endowed by Louis XI.

At three o'clock the canons came for vespers, after which we went to the tower to see the view and examine the bells, the largest of which is covered with medallions of the apostles and the Blessed Virgin, and with mottoes. It bears the name of Mary.

  "These bells have been anointed
   And baptized with holy water."

Perhaps you do not know that in the ceremony of consecrating a bell, the bishop prays that, as the voice of Christ appeased the troubled waters, God would endow the sound of the bell with power to avert the malign influence of the great enemy; that it may possess the power of David's harp, which dispelled the dark cloud from the soul of Saul; and that at its sound hosts of angels may surround the assembled multitudes, preserve their souls from temptation and defend their bodies from all danger. The smaller bells are rung daily for the Angelus and ordinary occasions. The tones of the great Bourdon are reserved for the grand festivals of Christmas, Easter, etc. I was curious to see them, for they are like friends from whom we have had many kind tokens, but have never met. They are always ringing above the priory; and their tones say so many things to our hearts—solemn and funereal, or tender, or joyful. "There is something beautiful in the church-bell," says Douglas Jerrold—"beautiful and hopeful. They talk to the high and low, rich and poor, in the same voice. There is a sound in them that should scare away envy and pride and meanness of all sorts from the heart of man; that should make him look on the world with kind, forgiving eyes; that should make the earth itself seem, to him at least, a holy place. Yes, there is a whole sermon in the very sound of the church-bells, if we only have the ears to understand it." As Longfellow says:

"For the bells themselves are the best of preachers; Their brazen lips are learned teachers. From their pulpits of stone in the upper air, Sounding aloft, without crack or flaw, Shriller than trumpets under the law, Now a sermon and now a prayer. The clamorous hammer is the tongue; This way, that way, beaten and swung, That from mouth of brass, as from mouth of gold, May be taught the Testaments, New and Old: And above it the great cross-beam of wood Representeth the holy rood, Upon which, like the bell, our hopes are hung. And the wheel wherewith it is swayed and rung Is the mind of man, that round and round Sways, and maketh the tongue to sound! And the rope, with its twisted cordage three, Denoteth the scriptural Trinity Of morals, and symbols, and history; And the upward and downward motions show That we touch upon matters high and low: And the constant change and transmutation Of action and of contemplation, Downward, the Scripture brought from on high; Upward, exalted again to the sky; Downward, the literal interpretation, Upward, the vision and mystery!"

In the undercroft of the cathedral reposes, among other saints, the body of St. Léothade. He was of royal blood, being a near relative of Eudes, Duke of Aquitaine, who was of the race of Clotaire II. He was also related to Charles Martel, and to the well-known sylvan saint, Hubert, who was contemporary with St. Léothade, and a native of this part of France. St. Léothade embraced the monastic state early in life, and, after being abbot at Moissac, was called to govern this diocese, which he did for twenty-seven years. In the wars between Charles Martel and Eudes he retired into Burgundy, his native place, where he died at the beginning of the eighth century. His body was reclaimed by the Auscitains. {840} His tomb is all sculptured with the symbols of our Saviour—the fish, wine, etc.

Through the kindness of the mère prieure I had the privilege of assisting at the office of Holy Week at St. Mary's Cathedral. I witnessed all those affecting rites from the jubé, or rood-loft, which is reached by a dark, winding stairway in one of the huge pillars. My position was one of seclusion, and yet overlooked both the choir and the nave. To fully appreciate the ceremonies of the church, one must witness them in one of these old churches of the middle ages, to which they seem adapted. The long procession of white-robed clergy, through the forest of columns, with palm branches in their hands; "Hosanna to the son of David!" resounding through the arches; the tapers, rich vestments, the heavenly light streaming through the stained-glass windows, not dimly, but like a very rainbow of hope encircling us all—impress the heart with sentiments of profound devotion.

I was particularly struck by the vivid picture of the Passion given in the gospel of Palm-Sunday, as sung by the choir. One priest chanted the historical parts in a recitative way; a second, the words of our Lord; and a third, the words of the disciples and others. The insolent cries of the multitude, the confident tones of St. Peter, the loud bold tones of Judas, were well reproduced; while the sacred words of Christ were repeated in the clearest, calmest, most subdued and plaintive of accents, that sank into my soul and moved me to tears. That voice seemed to sweep over the sea of surging hearts that filled the church, like the very voice of Jesus calming the tempest on the lake! It rung in my heart for days. It rings there yet, a sermon more powerful than any man could preach. When the priest comes to the words, "and gave up the ghost," the sight of the vast multitude prostrating to the ground is most impressive.

The gospel of the Passion, succeeding the triumphant procession with the palm branches, becomes doubly impressive by the contrast. "Oh! what a contrast," cries St. Bernard, "between 'Tolle, tolle, crucifige eum,' and 'Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini, Hosanna in Excelsis!' What a contrast between 'King of Israel,' and 'We have no king but Caesar!' Between the green branches and the cross! Between the flowers and the thorns! Between taking off their garments to cast before him, and stripping him of his own and casting lots for them!"

The nave was one forest of waving green branches, and the common people seemed to enter into and enjoy the ceremonies very heartily. These grand services give such a vivid idea of the great events of the life of Christ that they must be very beneficial to the people, who come in throngs to witness them; and there are no pews here, with their invidious distinctions, to shut them out. The peasant and the nobleman are brought on a level in that place where alone is to be found true democracy—the Church.

The archbishop presided at these ceremonies, a venerable, austere-looking prelate, who moved about with gravity, always attended by his servant, a pale, cadaverous-looking man in black, with a white cravat, reminding me so forcibly of one of our New England ministers that I never could resist a smile when my eye fell on him, as he obediently followed the dignified prelate.

St. Mary's Cathedral was once one of the richest in France, being endowed by the kings of Arragon, Navarre, and of France, and by the Counts of Fezensac and of Armagnac. In those days the archbishop was a magnate in the land. The Counts of Armagnac paid homage to him, and when he came to take possession of his see, the Baron de Montaut, with bared head and one limb bare, awaited him on foot at the gates of the city, took his mule by the bridle, and so conducted him to the cathedral. He was then, as he styles himself now, primate of Novempopulania and of the two Navarres.

One of the old archbishops, of the race of the Counts d'Aure, accompanied Richard the Lion-hearted to Palestine in 1190, and died there the next year.

On Holy Thursday all business was suspended. The streets were crowded with people going to visit the different churches where the Blessed Sacrament was exposed. I visited fourteen churches and chapels. At every turn in the streets were boys erecting little altars and chapels by the way-side, and importuning the passer-by for a sou to aid in fitting them up. Of course, I saw the greater part of the city, which is picturesque, as seen from the valley, but rather ugly when one has mounted the weary flights of steps, and gained its heart. The streets are mostly narrow and treeless, but there are two promenades with fine old trees, and the public buildings are a credit to the place. There is a grand and petit séminiaire here, a lyceum, normal school, two boarding-schools, besides several day and free schools; so there is no lack for means of instruction.

The famous Nostradamus, renowned for his Centuries prophétiques, was once a professor in this place. And St. Francis Regis was regent of the Jesuits' college which was here before the suppression of that order in the last century.

On Good-Friday I went to the chapel of the Carmelites, for the Three Hours' Agony. Daylight was wholly excluded. The altar was fitted up like a Calvary, with a large crucifix on the summit. Tall wax candles burned around it as round a bier. The rest of the chapel was in darkness. The black grating that separates the chancel from the choir of the nuns was so closely curtained that they were wholly invisible. The agony was a paraphrase of the last words of our Saviour upon the cross, making it like seven discourses, or rather meditations. At the end of each part all knelt, while the preacher made an extempore prayer, and then rose a sweet solemn wail of music. One by one the lights around the Calvary were extinguished—a deeper gloom shrouding the chapel and settling on our hearts. At last, only one light was left, emblematic of Him who came to give light to the world. That, too, went out at three o'clock, leaving us in utter darkness. Then the preacher cried: Jesus is dying!—Jesus is dead! All fell on their knees. The most profound silence reigned. When sufficiently recovered from the awe and solemnity which pervaded every heart, all prostrated themselves, and softly left the church. The effect was indescribable. Nothing could so powerfully incite the heart to repentance for sin, and unite it to the sufferings and death of Christ, as this three hours' meditation on his agony upon the cross.

  "Holy Mother, pierce me through;
   In my heart each wound renew
   Of my Saviour crucified!"

After the weight of sorrow that had been accumulating on the heart during the great week of the Passion, you cannot imagine the effect when, on Holy Saturday, the joyful Alleluias rang out with all the bells of the city, which had been hushed for days, announcing the Resurrection. A great rock seemed rolled away from the heart, and hope and joy rose triumphant over sorrow, and anguish, and fear.

On Easter-Sunday I saw something at St. Mary's quite new to me. After mass, a basket of bread was blessed, broken in pieces, and passed around the church. All took a piece, made the sign of the cross, and said a short prayer before eating it. This pain bénti is in commemoration of the Agapae of the primitive Christians, I suppose. It is a common custom here. While still at our devotions, a man came around with a dish, saying in a queer, sing-song tone, Pour les ámes du Purgatoire, (For the souls in purgatory,) and offered the dish as if doing you a favor to receive your mite, which, perhaps, was right enough.

Last Sunday evening I went to St. Oren's parish church, to assist at the month of Mary. On each side of the pulpit is a large statue. One is of Moses, the Hebrew lawgiver, with two horns. He is often represented so by the old masters, because the same word which expresses the brightness of his face when he descended from the mount, may also be rendered horns. They give him a comical look, any thing but saint-like. Such a statue would seem more suitable, to my unaccustomed eyes, for some rural spot. Then it would look like some link between man and the lower animals, and so have some claims to our sympathy.

I went into the sacristy to see the ivory horn said to have been used by St. Oren, in the fifth century, to call the people to the holy mysteries. It was still used, last century, during Holy Week. It is curiously carved in the Byzantine style, with leaves, birds, beasts, etc., upon it. It is popularly believed to have the power of restoring hearing to the deaf. In the sacristy was an old statue of St. Jago in a pilgrim's garb. In former times there was a hospice in this city for the reception of pilgrims to his shrine at Compostella.

In making some excavations in our grounds, where once were the cloisters of the monks, the workmen have found many old graves, and also some curiosities. The other day a marble slab was found, on which is a Latin inscription in quaint old characters, stating that it was erected by Amaneus II., an archbishop of this diocese in the thirteenth century. Beneath the inscription was carved a cross, on one side of which was a crosier, and on the other a leopard lion, the cognizance of the house of Armagnac. It bore the date of 1288. The said Amaneus was of the celebrated house of Armagnac, the head of which founded this priory. I should not be a true daughter of the house did I not, with pious memory, love to recall our benefactors, for, replacing the old monks, we take upon ourselves their sweet debt of gratitude. I will give you, then, an outline of this once proud family, that you may share all our glorious memories.

The counts of Armagnac descended from the Merovingian race of kings. They were connected by marriage with the proudest families of Europe, and at one time they gave their name to a faction of France against the Burgundians. Their proud name and royal blood were fit to merge again into a race of kings. {843} The first Count d'Armagnac was Bernard le Louche, who, through Charibert, sovereign of Toulouse and Aquitaine, descended from Clotaire II. Count Bernard was distinguished for his piety and his benefactions to the church. The third count of Armagnac divested himself of his worldly goods, and became a monk of the order of St. Benedict.

The famous contest of the Armagnacs with the house of Foix began in the time of Bernard VI., the twelfth count. The pope in vain endeavored to reconcile them. Philippe of Navarre finally decided their differences, and peace was declared in 1329. The war was renewed some years after, in the time of Count John, who was taken prisoner, and had to pay a ransom of one thousand livres.

Count Bernard VII. is the most famous of the Armagnacs. He was the fifteenth count. His daughter Bonne married Charles, Duke of Orleans, then only nineteen years of age, and the son of the Duc d'Orléans who was killed by Jean-sans-peur, Duke of Burgundy. Count Bernard became, by the youth of his son-in-law, the head of the Orleans faction against the Burgundians. He was made constable of France in 1415. To the dignity of supreme commander of the army was added in a short time that of prime minister. Descended from the old French monarchs, he had great sway in the south of France, and was one of the greatest warriors of his age. He displayed remarkable talents in remedying the frightful evils which broke out throughout the kingdom. His efforts would doubtless have been successful, had he not had to struggle against the Burgundian party. By his experience and firmness he established discipline among his troops, and kept them constantly ready for action. Active, intrepid, gifted with a bold and elevated character, he became a fearful rival for Jean-sans-peur.

The numerous partisans of the latter, having succeeded in deceiving the vigilance of the constable, introduced the Burgundian troops into Paris in the middle of the night. The massacre of the principal royalists was the consequence, and the Count of Armagnac himself was slaughtered in the most frightful manner, on the 12th of June, 1418, in the fiftieth year of his age. He was concealed in the house of a mason. The Burgundians threatening the partisans of the Armagnacs with death and confiscation, the mason treacherously denounced his guest, who was immediately imprisoned in the conciergerie, amid the imprecations of a multitude of his enemies. Forcing themselves into the prison, they slew the count. In their fury they cut off a piece of his skin, two inches wide, from the right shoulder to the left side, in ridicule of the scarf which was the distinguishing badge of the Armagnacs. He was buried at St. Martin des Champs.

His successor, Count John IV., greatly aided Charles VII. against the English, but finally offended him by desiring to marry the daughter of the King of England, and by styling himself, "by the grace of God, Count of Armagnac," though his ancestors had used the expression for six centuries.

The haughty pretensions of the counts of Armagnac were the cause of their final ruin. King Louis XI., ever jealous of the claims of the nobility, decreed the downfall of their house. Count John V. was besieged at Lectoure, and obliged to capitulate. The soldiers entered the palace, ascended to the count's chamber, and slew him on the first Saturday in Lent, 1473. At the third blow he died, invoking the Virgin. All the people of Lectoure were massacred, and for two months wolves were the only inhabitants of the place. {844} The lands of Count John were united to the crown of France. His brother Charles, who had been kept prisoner for fifteen years, was finally restored to liberty, and to the possession of the Comté d'Armagnac in 1483. He married Jane of Foix, who had no children; but he left a natural son, the Baron de Caussade, whose only son, George d'Armagnac, embraced the ecclesiastical state, and became a cardinal. He was the last of the male line of the Armagnacs.

The Comté d'Armagnac was afterward given by Louis XII. as the dowry of his niece, Margaret of Valois, when she married Charles d'Alençon, the grandson of Marie d'Armagnac, daughter of Count John IV. Charles dying without children, Margaret married Henri d'Albret, King of Navarre, who descended from a daughter of Count Bernard VII. of Armagnac. Henri Quatre, King of France, was their grandson, and from his time the Comté d'Armagnac has been permanently united to the crown.

Louis XIV., after consummating his marriage at St. Jean de Luz, returned to Paris through this city, where he assisted at the divine office in St. Mary's Cathedral, and, in quality of Count of Armagnac, took his place in his exquisitely carved stall as chanoine honoraire.

The stronghold of the Armagnacs was long since laid low. Their very name and blood are lost in those of another race, and their lands given to another; but still in the green valley of the Algersius rise the gray walls of a remnant of St. Oren's abbey to propitiate the mercy of God in behalf of Count Bernard and his lady Emerina, and still for them and their posterity goes up from the nuns in choir the daily "Oremus pro benefactoribus nostris!"

Last evening I went to the cathedral to hear Hermann improvise upon the organ, or, I should say, Frère Augustin, for he is a barefooted Carmelite monk. He was the favorite pupil of Liszt, under whose instructions he became a celebrated musical artist and composer. He was miraculously converted at Paris some years since, by some particular emanation from the blessed sacrament, the full particulars of which he has never given. "Secretun meum mihi," he says, when speaking of it. He had gone to church, at the request of a Christian friend, to play on the organ. His conversion was succeeded by the desire of becoming a monk, that he might daily receive our Lord in the blessed sacrament, to which, from the first, he felt the most tender devotion. He now belongs to a monastery in Agen. You should have heard him last night, as I did, amid a crowd of all ranks. I do not enjoy music scientifically, but it gives expression to a thousand emotions and desires which are floating in the soul, and which the tongue knows not how to express. That of Hermann partakes of the enthusiasm and tenderness of his nature.

I stationed myself at the baptismal font, that I might see the frère as he came down from the tribune. He was dressed in the costume of his order, which is of the natural color of the wool. His cowl was thrown back. His head was shaven closely with the exception of a circlet of hair, as we see in pictures. He is an Israelite and his features are of the Jewish type, but not too strongly marked. His face was pale. In fact, he is out of health and on his way to a place of rest. His manner was refined but unpretending, and he seemed quite unconscious of the curiosity and interest displayed by the crowd. {845} He is a poet as well as musician, and some of his cantiques in honor of the blessed sacrament are very beautiful, particularly the one entitled Quam dilecta Tabernacula Tua! I quote two verses from it:

  "Ils ne sont plus les jours de larmes:
     J'ai retrouvé la paix du coeur
   Depuis que j'ai goûté les charmes
     Des tabernacles du Seigneur!

  "Trop long-temps, brebis fugitive,
     Je m'eloignai du Bon Pasteur.
   Aujourd'hui, colombe plaintive,
     Il l'appelle—il m'ouvre Son Coeur!"

A friend sent me this morning a pamphlet containing the dedication of a collection of his hymns, which is a flame of love. I give you an extract, which is only the echo of my own heart:

"O adorable Jesus! as for me, whom thou hast led into solitude to speak to my heart—for me whose days and nights glide deliciously away in heavenly communications with thy adorable presence; between the remembrance of the communion of to-day and the hope of the communion of to-morrow, I embrace with transport the walls of my cherished cell, where nothing distracts my only thought from thee; where I breathe only love for thy divine sacrament. … If the church did not teach me that to contemplate thee in heaven is a still greater joy, I should never believe there could be more happiness than I experience in loving thee in the holy eucharist, and in receiving thee in my heart, so poor by nature but so rich through thy grace!"

The New Englander On
The Moral Aspects Of Romanism.

In The Catholic World of April last, we vindicated the fair fame of the Catholic Church from some foul aspersions of a Protestant minister, the Rev. M. Hobart Seymour, contained in a book of his entitled, Nights among the Romanists.

The matter was a very simple one. This reverend gentleman, in the opening chapter of his book, gave us the "moral results of the Romish System," as he elegantly, in accordance with the exigencies of modern controversy, styles the Catholic Church. This "moral result" was, that Catholics are, everywhere, beyond comparison, more unchaste than Protestants—say from three or four to twelve times as much so. We do not exaggerate in the least. Every reader who reads this book will draw this conclusion. As The New Englander says, "The effect of this exhibit on the mind of the reader is overwhelming. To the Protestant reader it serves to close the case, at the outset, against the pretensions of the Roman Catholic Church to be the institution ordained of Christ to destroy the works of the devil."

This conclusion was reached by a comparison of the statistics of many Roman Catholic countries of Europe with Protestant England, in regard to homicide.

Then by comparing the amount of illegitimacy in certain Catholic cities with that in certain other Protestant cities in Europe. Passing by the first branch of the subject for reasons which we assigned, and which prevent us from taking up the matter now, we considered the second very fully and completely. We examined, with the utmost care and fidelity, the statistics of illegitimacy of all the leading countries of Europe, including the whole population of both city and country, and found Mr. Seymour's conclusions, in this respect, were utterly and completely false. {846} The complete exhibit showed that, taking the number of illegitimate births as a standard of comparison, Catholic countries are not in any degree more unchaste than Protestant, but, on the contrary, the difference is in their favor quite decidedly, though not with that overwhelming preponderance claimed by Mr. Seymour in favor of Protestantism.

He states that he has taken his figures from official documents, (and we have not disputed this,) but these same documents give the account for the countries as well as for the cities, and Mr. Seymour cannot be allowed to plead ignorance in reference to them. He cannot, therefore, be excused from wilful and deliberate deception, when he suppresses these statistics so necessary to form a judgment in the case, and only gives such portions of them as shall seem to sustain a false conclusion. This is the true suppressio veri and suggestio falsi, which is certainly one of the meanest and most cowardly forms of lying known.

We felt a natural indignation at being made the victims of such treatment, and denounced the Rev. Mr. Seymour as a calumniator, and called on the Rev. L. W. Bacon, who had warmly recommended him and his book, to withdraw his recommendation, and cease to abet the circulation of a vile calumny, even though the Catholic Church were the object of it.

Mr. Bacon, in reply to our article, comes out in The New Englander, endorsing not only the statements, but the unjust and wicked conclusions of Mr. Seymour, and claims to have refuted the statements of The Catholic World. We will now proceed to show in what fashion he has done this.

The conclusions of Mr. Seymour in regard to the "moral results of the Romish system," rest mainly in a comparison of the city of London with the capitals of four Catholic countries, showing that while the rate of illegitimacy is only 4 per cent in the former, it varies from 33 to 51 per cent in the latter. This is reinforced by tables of ten Prussian cities (of which, by the by, the best two are Catholic cities) with ten Austrian; another of five English cities with the same number of Italian, with similar, though by no means such striking results. Then, lest countries should seem to get the go-by, various Protestant countries are compared with provinces of the Austrian empire, which, it is needless to say, make a bad show in the comparison.

As we have said before, we did not impugn in The Catholic World the accuracy of these figures, but we pointed out that we could not trust them as indicating the morality of London, Liverpool, and the English cities, because the rate of illegitimacy in them was lower than in the whole of England; and it is a most violent and incredible supposition, that cities acknowledged to be the hotbeds of vice should be purer than the countries in which they are situated. We suggested that other forms of impurity had probably replaced illegitimacy, and that, after all, London, Liverpool, etc., were not much, if any, better than the continental cities. We quoted some figures in reference to the amount of what is called the "social evil" in London, etc., from The Church and the World, a ritualistic journal. This, and this alone, Mr. Bacon attacks, of all that is contained in our article. Our other reasons in regard to the morality of London, etc., are left entirely unnoticed. We gave also some, as we conceived, very grave and strong reasons why the figures of illegitimacy should not be regarded as conclusive in regard to the continental cities. {847} We pointed out the existence of very large establishments in them for the reception of foundlings, receiving all infants deposited in them; and suggested that, for this reason alone, the illegitimacy of whole districts of country would all show itself in the city. This is obvious enough; for example, if a large hospital of this kind existed in New York City, no one doubts it would receive infants from New Jersey, Connecticut, and all the adjacent country, and the rate of illegitimacy would represent all this part of the country, rather than the city alone. Mr. Bacon has not vouchsafed to give one word of reply to all this, or to discuss the matter at all. Now, as it concerns the good name of a large class of his fellow-men, and is evidence in rebuttal of a very grave accusation against them, this really seems more like the conduct of a partisan determined on victory at any rate, rather than of a Christian gentleman seeking to vindicate a fellow-Christian from an imputation against his character.

But whatever might be said about the comparative morality of certain cities, we vindicated the Catholic Church from the charge of having produced a moral result incomparably worse than Protestantism, and completely destroyed the overwhelming effect calculated to be produced on the Protestant mind by Mr. Seymour's conclusions, by giving one complete table of the percentage of illegitimacy in all the chief countries of Europe, both Protestant and Catholic, as follows:

	Catholic Countries.
1825-37	Kingdom of Sardinia	2.1
1859	Spain	5.6
1853	Tuscany	6.
1858	Catholic Prussia	6.1
1859	Belgium	7.4
1856	Sicily	7.4
1858	France	7.8
1851	Austria	9.

	Protestant Countries.
1859	England and Wales	6.5
1855	Norway	9.3
1858	Protestant Prussia	9.3
1855	Sweden	9.5
1855	Hanover	9.9
1866	Scotland	10.1
1855	Denmark	11.5
1838-47	Iceland	14
1858	Saxony	16.
1857	Wurtemberg	16.1

Every item of which was taken by ourselves, after a patient and minute examination, from the Journals of the Statistical Society of London, in the Astor Library, taking the latest accounts of each country in every case.

Here the whole question lies in a nut-shell. As Mr. Bacon says, "the criterion is in the number of illegitimate births." This table gives a complete view of this criterion, and therefore it requires to be refuted before it can be said that any refutation has been made of The Catholic World. How does Mr. Bacon meet it?

He does not meet it at all. He says that the figures of The Catholic World are "outrageously false," and "that he shall presently prove it." We have looked in vain for the proof that any figure of this table is either "outrageously false" or false at all. We do not see that he has said one word to bring any of them under even the least shadow of suspicion. We will give the substance of his arguments against the truth of our statements:

1. Mr. Seymour's book appeared, and no answer was made to it for many years, and therefore it must be presumed to be truth, as to its facts and conclusions.

To this we reply, that it makes no difference what presumptions may exist when they are upset by positive proof. Whether Mr. Seymour has been answered or not, does not change the rate of illegitimacy in any country of Europe in the least. Catholics may not deem it more worth while to reply to Seymour than to the McGavins and the Brownlees. The obviously sinuous and unfair selection of Mr. Seymour's statistics is a sufficient reason for allowing them to slide along with a thousand other calumnies so obviously false as not to be worth the trouble of refuting. However that may be, we have given the refutation, and that ends all the presumptions.

2. Mr. Bacon tries to produce an impression on the minds of his readers that we shall add up and arrange the figures to suit our convenience, and are not to be trusted because we profess confidence, in the outset, of the result of the investigation, on account of our belief that the Catholic Church is the church of Christ.

"But The Catholic World for April last crushes these formidable allegations with one single stroke of a priori argument: 'We know that she (the Roman Church) is Christ's church, and that just in proportion as she exerts her influence, virtue and morality must prevail; and that it is impossible to prove, unless through fraud and misrepresentation, that the practical working of her system produces a morality inferior to that of any other.' This, of course, is 'the end of controversy.' To go into details of argument would be superfluous, not to say ridiculous, after a demonstration so sweeping. But scorning criticism and ridicule, straightway down into details and figures marches The Catholic World. Having at the start announced it as de fide that the figures must be so found and so added up as to show a satisfactory balance in favor of his side, or else the foundations of the faith were destroyed and the hope of salvation cut off, he proceeds to the statistical business with that eminently fair, candid, and philosophical spirit which might be expected to result from such convictions."

The Christian, then, according to the reasoning of the Rev. Mr. Bacon, who, firmly believing in the divinity of the religion of Christ, expresses confidence in the result of any investigation as to the moral result of Christianity, is to be deemed a rascal who will not hesitate to employ any unworthy arts in selecting and adding up his figures so as to make the result come out in accordance with a foregone conclusion. We dismiss insinuations like this with the contempt they deserve. If we have done any thing of this kind let it be proved; if not, do not insinuate it to our prejudice.

3. Mr. Bacon says: "The gist of the article in The Catholic World is taken from one in The Church and the World, an ultra-ritualist journal, London, 1867."

This is entirely untrue. The "criterion" of the "moral results of the Romish system" was illegitimacy, and the "gist of the article" is in the comparison embraced in the tabular statement of the Roman Catholic and Protestant countries of all Europe, of which nothing whatever has been taken from The Church and the World. We cited the statistics of Ireland from this journal, warning our readers of the fact that we could not verify it out of the statistical journals, and therefore we did not include it in our table, as can be seen by referring to the article itself.

Besides this, nothing is taken on the authority of The Church and the World, except some statistics in relation to a side issue, the amount of prostitution in London, and other English cities. Mr. J. D. Chambers, M.A., Recorder of Salisbury, the author of the article in The Church and the World, states that there are 28,100 bad women in London, known to the Metropolitan Police, while it should be, that number, in all England, known to the Metropolitan Police. {849} He also gives a table of the number of houses in other English cities where abandoned women resort, and this number does not correspond at all with the number of brothels reported by the police. It seems to us that Mr. Chambers may have been misled by the term "Metropolitan Police," in setting down the number of abandoned women to London rather than to England, without attributing to him any wilful falsification. And if these women are so well known to the Metropolitan Police, it may be inferred that, wherever they belong, they must carry on their nefarious occupation in London a good part of the time, and thus Mr. Chambers be substantially correct in his statement, after all. Mr. Bacon roundly asserts that Mr. Chambers has given the number of brothels in the leading English cities. This is incorrect, and, when the object is to fasten a brand of infamy on another's character, an inexcusable proceeding. Mr. Chambers has not given the number of brothels, but the number of houses to which bad women resort. There are many such resorts in New York City, which would not be reported as brothels in the police returns.

We wish the public to understand this fully. Mr. Bacon accuses Mr. Chambers of a gross exaggeration in the number of brothels in the English cities. He gives the table as follows:

Brothels in	According to CATHO. WORLD	in Fact
Birmingham	966	183
Manchester	1111	410
Liverpool	1573	906
Leeds	313	63
Sheffield	433	84

Now, Mr. Chambers never stated the above number of brothels in those cities, but that number of houses where prostitutes resort, a very different thing.

We find in Thom's Almanac of 1869 the following table, for England and Wales, of houses of bad character:

Receivers of stolen goods	2230
Resorts of thieves and prostitutes	5689
Brothels and houses of ill-fame	6614
Tramps' lodging-houses	5614

The last three figures may well be added up to give us the number of houses where prostitutes resort; the tramps' lodging-houses, according to Mr. Kaye's description of them, (in his Social State of England,) being little better than brothels. The public may now form an intelligent judgment which is the most guilty of misrepresentation, Mr. Bacon or Mr. Chambers, and which most deserves to be branded as a calumniator of his neighbor.

"The witness is impeached and kicked out of court with a very ugly letter burned too deep in his forehead to be rubbed out. We are glad to acknowledge that The Catholic World is not the guilty author of these impostures, and to express our unfeigned and most willing belief that that every way respectable magazine would be incapable of contriving such tricks."

Alas Mr. Bacon! we fear that in your inconsiderate haste to brand another, the ugly letter will be burned so deep in your own forehead that you will find it very hard to efface it.

4. Having finished up Mr. Chambers in this style, he considers that his refutation of The Catholic World is complete. He says:

"The figures with which The Catholic World attempts to vindicate the superior morality of Romish over Protestant countries, are taken from a discredited and refuted writer in The Church and the World… We have given facts enough now to discredit without any particular refutation whatever else of assertion may be contained in the article on the 'comparative morality of Catholic and Protestant countries' in The Catholic World for April, 1869. We do not need to rebut the testimony of this article point by point."

These facts given relate exclusively to Mr. Chambers and the statistics of prostitution, as we have shown above, and do not affect those relating to the "criterion" of illegitimacy.

The substance—as Mr. Bacon calls it, the gist—of the article of The Catholic World remains as yet intact; it has not even been examined by the critic. Who gave Mr. Bacon the right to say, as he does, that the substance of our article was taken from The Church and the World? There is an unblushing effrontery about this statement which is astonishing. There is nothing in the article to warrant it. Whenever we quoted The Church and the World, the reference is made at the foot of the page, and we distinctly state, there, that our figures on illegitimacy are taken from the Journals of the Statistical Society of London. Our readers can judge of this proceeding for themselves.

But Mr. Bacon criticises us in severe terms for using these Journals, and says:

"If we had been in search of truth, how much easier and better to go to the census returns, and get facts that can be trusted. But when the object is, as with The Catholic World, to find figures which shall tally with a conclusion already determined by theological considerations, doubtless it is well to keep clear of authoritative documents, and take only such figures as have been manipulated in a succession of magazine articles, constructed to serve a purpose."

What better authority can we have in this country, on statistics, than the Statistical Journals of London? It is all an idle pretence to speak of getting the governmental returns in any great public library. We hunted for them in the Astor Library, and could not find one of them. The Society of London is composed of Protestants. Mr. Lumley, the author of the principal article on statistics, is probably one too. He has taken his information, he tells us, in regard to Great Britain, from the Registrar's Reports; the others, from reports made to parliament, and from the Annuaire de l'Economie et de la Statistique, of Paris. We have not a shadow of reason to doubt either the accuracy or fairness of the returns, or that they have been taken from the best governmental census returns. It would have been more creditable if Mr. Bacon had favored us with a table taken from these same returns, which he says are so easy to be obtained, to show the "outrageous falsity" of our statements, rather than to attempt to refute us by the method of pure insinuation.

We challenge Mr. Bacon or any one else to produce a table of illegitimacy embracing all or nearly all the Protestant and Catholic countries of Europe, from the latest governmental returns, which shall differ essentially from ours, or from which any one may not draw precisely the conclusions we have drawn in respect to the moral results of Protestantism and Catholicity.

We will now explain what was stated about the rate of illegitimacy in Ireland. Had we been inclined to proceed in the unscrupulous manner which Mr. Bacon insinuates in regard to us, we could have given this rate of three per cent from The Church and the World without remark, as it is simply given there among the other figures; but as we could not verify it in the Statistical Journals, we said so, in order to warn the public, and we stated that probably Mr. Chambers had access to the Registrar's Report, which we had not. {851} For this, Mr. Bacon pitches into us in this style:

"What will be the amazement of the reader to be informed that there are no 'Registrar's Reports' for Ireland; that the Romish priests and the Romish party have constantly succeeded in preventing, for reasons satisfactory to themselves, any act of parliament for securing such returns from Ireland; and that the supposed 'Registrar's Report' of three per cent of illegitimate births is a mere fiction!"

Hold on, Mr. Bacon! do not go ahead quite so fast. There are Registrar's Reports for Ireland, plenty of them, to be seen in the Statistical Journals in the Astor Library. In Thom's Official Almanac and Directory, Dublin, 1869, we read, "The act for the registration of births and deaths in Ireland came into operation on the 1st of January, 1864." Then follows registrar's returns of these for 1864, 1865, 1866, and 1867.

The first return of illegitimate births has just been published. Our supposition was, that these returns were in existence, though not perhaps complete enough to warrant publication, and that they were known in England to Mr. Chambers and others, and this seems to be the truth. The rate for Ireland is 3.8 per cent, not so different from the figure of The Church and the World. We take the following from the Catholic Opinion, London, June 19:

"The Scotsman, one of the leading organs of Presbyterian Scotland, gives the following:

"'We come next to a very painful and important point, and shall get away from it as soon as possible. The proportion of illegitimate births to the total number of births, is, in Ireland, 3.8 per cent. In England, the proportion is 6.4; in Scotland, 9.9. In other words, England is nearly twice, and Scotland nearly thrice worse than Ireland. Something worse has to be added, from which no consolation can be derived. The proportion of illegitimacy is very unequally distributed over Ireland, and the inequalities are such as are rather humbling to us as Protestants, and still more as Presbyterians and as Scotchmen. Takings Ireland according to registration divisions, the proportion of illegitimate births varies from 6.2 to 1.9. The division showing this lowest figure is the western, being substantially the province of Connaught, where about nineteen-twentieths of the population are Celtic and Roman Catholic. The division showing the highest proportion of illegitimacy is the north-eastern, which comprises or almost consists of the province of Ulster, where the population is almost equally divided between Protestant and Roman Catholic, and where the great majority of the Protestants are of Scotch blood and of the Presbyterian Church. The sum of the whole matter is, that semi-Presbyterian and semi-Scotch Ulster is fully three times more immoral than wholly Popish and wholly Irish Connaught—which corresponds with wonderful accuracy to the more general fact that Scotland, as a whole, is three times more immoral than Ireland as a whole. There is a fact, whatever may be the proper deduction. There is a text, whatever may be the sermon; we only suggest that the sermon should have a good deal about charity, self-examination, and humility."'

So that, after all, now that the truth is at last out, the "Romish priests and the Romish party" have no reason to be ashamed of it. Probably their reason is best known to themselves; for it would puzzle any one else to devise any earthly reasons why they should oppose the publication of the Registrar's Report, so honorable to the Catholic people of Ireland.

Mr. Bacon is "happy to announce" that, as a result of the attack of The Catholic World, a new edition of Seymour's book, with its opening chapter, is soon to appear. So, all the old calumnies and falsehoods are to be circulated with redoubled activity, and the commandment, "Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor," conveniently be thrust aside. The statistics of London are to be reproduced, while those of England are kept in the dark. {852} Paris is to be compared with London, to produce, as Mr. Bacon says, "an overwhelming effect on the mind of the Protestant reader," while not a word is to be breathed of England and France. Five Italian cities are still to be compared with five English, to show that the Italian Catholics are four times as depraved as the English Protestants, while the rate of illegitimacy in all Italy is considerably less than that of England.

And the tell-tale official reports of the census of Scotland, of Catholic and Protestant Prussia, are to be passed over in complete silence. The countries of Norway, Sweden, Denmark, are to be offset by provinces of the Austrian empire in which, as we showed in The Catholic World, a grinding law of the government hinders us from getting any real knowledge of the statistics of illegitimacy, and while the whole empire shows a rate smaller than any of those different countries. But we are tired of this disgusting enumeration of the fraud and trickery of the Rev. M. Hobart Seymour. The republication of his book cannot hurt us, and only tends to increase the growing distrust on the part of the public of the thousand and one calumnies so unscrupulously circulated concerning Catholics.

We have only to add that The New Englander very appropriately finishes its article against us by bringing out a very infamous falsehood of Mr. Seymour's about the morality of the city of Rome, which we shall not fail to pay our respects to in the next number of The Catholic World.

Sick.

  My brother, o my brother! how my heart,
  Uncertain, sad, doth yearn for thee to-day!
  And my deep soul her earnest prayer doth say,
  That God not yet will loose the fearful dart;
  Not yet, sweet mercy, call on thee to part,
  Prepared so scantily for the long, long way;
  Nor till his lamp lights with her blessed ray
  The narrow line along the shadowy chart.
  Dear Lord, a stranger, far away he lies,
  Where fevered pestilence about him leers;
  His breath the yellow death! And yet my cries
  Are not for that loved body whose weak sighs
  First warmed her breast—'tis nine and twenty years—
  The soul, poor soul 'tis needs these prayers and tears.

Translated From The Spanish.

How Matanzas came to be called Matanzas.
Or, Uncle Curro And His Club.

Fernan Caballero. Here I am, Aunt Sebastiana, with a fixed intention to make you tell me a story.

Aunt Sebastiana. Say that to my Juan, señor; he can tell no end of stories, and when he don't remember them, he makes them to suit himself.

Fernan. Here comes Uncle Romance, who, if he wants a cigar and desires to give me pleasure, will tell me the story you have promised me in his name.

Uncle Romance. You must know then, señor, that there was once a man who lived gayly, without thinking of to-morrow; and, since to spend, to owe, and not to pay, is the way to the poorhouse, our man soon found himself without hacienda, and with but thirty days to the month for possessions, and nothing to eat but his finger-nails. He grew so spiritless that his wife used to beat him, and his children insult him, and say impertinent things to him when he came home bringing no provisions for the house.

He got so desperate at last that he borrowed a rope of his gossip, and went away to a field to hang himself. He had fastened the rope to an olive-tree; but just as he was going to put it around his neck, a little fairy-man appeared to him, dressed like a friar. "What are you doing, man?" said the friar. "Hanging myself, as your worship sees." "So, then, Christian, you are going to do like Judas. Go away from there. It wouldn't be well for you. Take this purse, which is never empty, and mend your fortune."

Our man took the purse, and drew out a dollar, then another, then another, and saw that it was like a woman's mouth, that pours out to all eternity words, and words, and still words, and its words are never exhausted. Seeing this, he untied the rope, wound it up, and started for home. There was an inn on the road; he entered it and began to ask for whatever they had to eat and drink, paying when it was brought; for the innkeeper, seeing him so greedy, would not trust him for all he wanted. He ate so much and drank so much that he fell under the table, and lay there more sound asleep than the dead in Holyfield.

The innkeeper, who had perceived that the purse was none the lighter, told his wife to make one just like it, and while Uncle Curro slept, went and stole the enchanted purse out of his pocket and put the other in its place.

When Uncle Curro woke up, he took the road again, and reached his house more jolly than a sunshiny day.

"Hurrah!" he shouted to his wife and children, "here's money and to spare; our troubles are over."

He put his hand into the purse and drew it out empty; put it in again; but what was there to take out? When his wife saw that, she flew at him and beat him into a new shape.

More desperate than ever, he snatched the rope and went back to hang himself. He went to the same place, and tied the rope to a branch of the olive. "What are you going to do, Christian?" said the little fairy-man, appearing in the form of a cavalier, in the crotch of the tree. "Hang myself like a string of garlics from a kitchen ceiling," answered Uncle Curro quite composedly. "So you have lost patience, again?" "And if I have nothing to eat, señor?" "' It is your own fault, your fault; but—go away. Take this table-cloth, and while you keep it you will never find yourself without something to eat." Then the little fairy-man gave him a table-cloth, and disappeared among the branches.

Uncle Curro unfolded the cloth upon the ground. The minute it was spread out, it covered itself with dishes, some of them good and the rest better than the king's cook could have made them, if he had tried his best.

After Uncle Curro had stuffed himself till he could hold no more, he gathered up the cloth and set out for his house. When he got as far as the inn, he felt sleepy and lay down to take a nap. The innkeeper knew him, and guessed that he had something valuable; so, as cool as you please, he pulled the cloth away from him, and put another in its place.

Uncle Curro reached home, and shouted to his wife and children, "Come, come to dinner; I'll take it upon me to see that you get your fill this time." Thereupon he undid the cloth, but only to behold it covered with stains of all sorts and sizes.

At him she went. Mother and children all fell upon the poor man at once, and an object of charity they left him.

Uncle Curro seized the rope once more and went off to hang himself. He was determined to do it this time, and the fairy-man was determined he shouldn't. He gave Uncle Curro a little club, and told him that with it he would be able to possess his soul in comfort; for that he had nothing to do but say, "Bestir yourself, little club!" to make all the world run away and leave him in peace, with a wide berth.

Uncle Curro set out for home with the club, as happy as an alcalde with his stick. As soon as he saw the young ones coming toward him demanding bread with insults and impertinences, he said to the club, "Bestir yourself, little club!" and before the words were fairly out of his mouth, it began to deal about it in a way that speedily routed the children. Their mother ran out to help them, but, "At her!" cries Curro, "at her with all your might!" and with one rap the club killed her.

They gave notice to the magistrate, and presently the alcalde made his appearance with his officers. "Bestir yourself, little club!" ordered Curro, and the club came down on them as if it had been paid at the rate of a dollar a thump. It killed the alcalde, and the others ran away with such might that not one of them had a sole left to his foot. Then they sent a messenger to let the king know what was going on, and the king sent a regiment of grenadiers to take Uncle Curro of the little club.

But, "Bestir yourself, club!" bawled Uncle Curro, as soon as they came in sight, and threw the club in the midst of the files. The club begun its dance upon the ribs of the grenadiers, with a sound like a fulling-mill. It crippled this one's leg, and that one's arm; knocked out one of the captain's eyes, and, in short, the grenadiers threw away their muskets and knapsacks, and took to their heels, in the full belief that the devil was running loose.

Free from care, Uncle Curro lay down to sleep, with his club hidden in his bosom, for fear that somebody might steal it.

When he awoke, he found himself tied hand and foot, and on the way to prison. They sentenced him to ignominious death. The next morning they took him out of the dungeon, and, when they had caused him to ascend the scaffold, untied his hands. Out he drew his little club, and as he said, "Bestir yourself!" threw it at the executioner, who speedily yielded up the ghost under its blows. "Free that man," commanded the king, "or he'll finish with every one of our subjects. Tell him that he shall have an estate in America if he will leave the country."

Uncle Curro consented, and the king made him lord of lands in the island of Cuba, where he built himself a city, and killed so many people in it with his club that its name was called, and has remained, Matanzas.

Correction Of A Mistake.

The writer of the article on "Spiritualism and Materialism," in the Magazine for August, page 627, says, "The Holy See says the immateriality, not spirituality, of the soul is to be proved by reason." This is a mistake. The language of the Holy See is, "Ratiocionatio Dei existentiam, animae spiritualitatem, hominis libertatem cum certitudine probare potest—Reasoning can prove with certainty the existence of God, the spirituality of the soul, and the liberty of man." The writer wishes us to say that he is wholly unable to account for his blunder; for in writing, he had the words of the Holy See before his eyes, and certainly thought he read immaterialitatem; but in re-reading the words since a friend called his attention to the mistake, he finds that the word is plainly printed spiritualitatem. Of course the misstatement was wholly unintentional, and whatever in the article rests on it must be withdrawn, and the writer fully and explicitly retracts it.

Yet the writer requests us to say that he thinks the doctrine maintained in the article is not affected by this mistake, blunder, or misstatement. The writer does not question the spirituality of the soul, but maintains that the soul's spirituality, save in the sense of its immateriality, is not provable by reason without revelation. He thinks immateriality, in the sense he explains it, covers all that is really meant by spiritualiy in the decision of the Holy See. We certainly do not, by reason alone, know what either spirit or matter is in its essence. We can prove by reason the substantiality, activity, unity, simplicity, indissolubility, and immateriality of the soul, or that it is not matter. Does the Holy See decide that we can do more, or go further? Does the spirituality of the soul, as provable by reason, mean any thing more? If not—and the writer, till better informed, must think it does not—he has erred only in using one word when he should have used another, and mistaking the word actually used by the Holy See. So much the writer of the article wishes us to say for him, which we do cheerfully; for we are well assured of his devotion to the Holy See and his loyalty to the Holy Father.

New Publications.

Cantarium Romanum, Pars Prima, Ordinarium Missae.
Studio et sumptibus Monachorum Ord. S. Benedicti.
Conv. St. Meinradi, Ind. 1869.
Cincinnati and New York: Benziger Bros.

This publication purposes to give, in modern notation, the melodies of Gregorian Masses; that is, those portions which are common to all masses—the Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, Agnus Dei, with the Responses. We hail this as a step in the right direction, but are forced to find some fault with this volume.

In the first place, we do not find the notation at all in conformity with the Roman Gradual or Missal, and suppose that it is according to one of those numerous "propers" which, in course of time, have been patched up for the use of various particular dioceses and religious orders. The spirit of the church to-day is one which inspires a return to unity in even minor points of discipline, of which the unity of the chant is, in our judgment, not the least. Again, the division of the words, their adaptation to the notes, and the length of notes given, makes horrible work in some places with the accent of the Latin, and destroys the majestic march of the melody. The effeminate sharp reigns supreme, and fancy responses take the place of those given in the Missal.

Meditations On The Sufferings, Life, And Death Of Our Lord Jesus Christ.
Translated from the French by a Sister of Mercy.
Part First.
Cincinnati: Robert Clarke & Co. 1869.

This is a very excellent book of meditations, well translated, and published in the best style; to be completed in thirteen numbers. The proceeds are to be devoted to the building of a church annexed to the Convent of the Sisters of Mercy, in Cincinnati, to be called "The Church of the Atonement," and to be devoted especially to the adoration of the Sacred Heart of our Lord, in reparation of the injuries and outrages which it suffers from the neglect of tepid Christians and the more open sins of the wicked. The book is one which will be very useful to those who desire to practise meditation, and the object to which the good sisters intend to devote the profits, which we hope they may receive from it abundantly, is one that must commend itself to the heart of every good Catholic. We give them our best wishes for their complete success, and recommend their book most heartily to general circulation.

A journal of two years and a half sojourn in Germany, Switzerland, France, and Italy, in only 338 duodecimo pages, is, as things go and as people write, really very moderate. It is a simple, straightforward story of what the authoress saw and heard, with a variety of practical information that many Americans on a first European tour might find useful.

There is no affectation of style or sentiment in the book, and the authoress may be said to belong to the realistic school of travellers, who keep a bright lookout for railroad fares, hotel bills, and the prices of things in general.

With disquisitions on art, Mrs. Urbino does not trouble us much, although she admires the works of that queen of Jarleys, Madame Tussaud, whose name she ungratefully prints Trousseau. At p. 228, the authoress indulges in this reflection: "How out of place crosses look in the Coliseum! {857} I cannot see why they were put there, since there are a sufficient number of churches in the city." The good lady does not appear to be aware of the fact that if the cross had not been placed in the Coliseum, we people of the nineteenth century would never have seen the noble ruin of that grand monument.

Service Manual;
for the instruction of newly-appointed Officers, and the Rank and File of the Army, as compiled from Army Regulations, the Articles of War, and the Customs of the Service.
By Henry D. Wallen, Brevet Brigadier-General United States Army, and Commander of the General Service Department, Fort Columbus, New York Harbor.
1 vol. 8vo, pp. 166.
New York: D. Van Nostrand. 1869.

General Wallen has compiled this excellent manual from the authorized sources, and added to it the fruit of his mature experience and intimate practical knowledge of the subject. The work possesses value, not only as an authentic guide to the young officer in all the details of company, camp, and garrison duty, his relations of subordination and responsibility, and his duties and obligations to those above and below him in the military order, but also is mellowed and animated by a spirit of kindness and good-will, and that genuine characteristic of the good soldier and thorough gentleman to whom duty is honorable, and both command and obedience acceptable for their own sakes and the inherent virtue they imply. This spirit animates this work throughout, and gives to it a character far superior to ordinary dry regulations. General Wallen is well qualified for the task he has undertaken. He is an old and faithful officer, and intimately acquainted with the service in all its branches and ramifications. He served with credit in the war with Mexico, and was one of the pioneers of the settlement of Oregon. Owing to the fact of having been born in Georgia, General Wallen was distrusted during the late war by Mr. Stanton, and ordered to New Mexico. General Grant, who is his life-long friend, as soon as he came into power, ordered him to the East, and did what he could to repair the injury he had experienced from the suspicious disposition of the late secretary of war.

This work is of equal value to soldiers and officers, and will have a tendency to promote that mutual goodwill and cordial sympathy between the two classes growing out of the faithful performance of their respective duties, which we alone need to make our military system perfect, and absolutely invincible in war, as well as an example of honor and fidelity in peace.

A Report On The Excisions Of The Head Of The Femur For Gun Shot Wounds.
By George A. Otis, M.D.,
Assistant Surgeon and Brevet Lieutenant-Colonel U.S.A.
Being Circular No. 2 War Department, Surgeon-General's Office.
Jan. 1869. 4to, pp. 141.
Washington: Government Printing Office.

It is not our purpose, in calling the attention of the readers of The Catholic World to this work, to enter upon any discussion or details of a purely surgical character, which would be obviously out of place. The Catholic World is essentially Catholic, and while strictly and purely so, aims to embrace within the scope of its critical observation every subject of interest and importance to society; and especially to award its cordial praise to those efforts which have for their object genuine science, true humanity, and national and individual honor and intellectual and moral advancement.

The work before us is of the character indicated. In reverting to the public calamities and private miseries of the late war, it is a matter of satisfaction to know that out of the eater has come forth some meat; out of the strong, some sweetness. {858} With the exception of the doubtful advantage of the knowledge which we have gained of our brute strength, some improvement in gunnery, and the familiarization of the public mind with battle, murder, and sudden death, we have reaped no substantial benefit excepting in the department of military surgery. The medical profession gave during the war an extraordinary example of courage, devotion to duty, labor, and self-sacrifice, which we fear is not fully appreciated either by the country or the government. They rose as a body above the political issues involved, and the personal passions evoked, and, acting on the great principle of charity underlying their vocation, saw, in many a sick and wounded man, a friend and brother.

This principle was acted upon on both sides, it was the most humanizing element which entered into the conflict, and aided and seconded the chivalric spirit which animated the graduates of West Point. These two qualities redeemed the late war from utter barbarism.

There was, on the part of the medical officers, an earnest, conscientious, and zealous determination to ascertain the best methods of treatment in all cases, and an ardent desire to relieve suffering, save life, and preserve limbs in the best possible condition for future usefulness. The publications of the Medical Department and the admirable museum collected at Washington bear testimony to the accuracy of this statement, and, while they are a terrible and sickening commentary on man's inhumanity to man, they are also a sublime and beautiful illustration of that power which turns temporary calamities into permanent benefits, and of that humanity and science which are both motives and objects of the profession of medicine.

The reports issued from time to time by the surgeon-general are the concentrated and distilled expression of multitudes of crude and detached observations, carefully elaborated, compared, analyzed, and corrected, till they come to express the precise knowledge and experience of the present day on a given subject.

The portion of this great work before us is prepared by Doctor George A. Otis, Assistant Surgeon and Lieutenant-Colonel U.S.A., and is a model of patient labor, exact knowledge, just discrimination, and acutely intelligent appreciation. It presents all that is known in regard to a class of terrible and exceedingly fatal injuries. The facts, evidence, and opinions are carefully and impartially weighed and estimated, and the conclusions are such as will be accepted by every discriminating surgeon throughout the world.

The voice of the medical profession will, we believe, endorse the opinion which we somewhat apodictically express.

Society and the country owe Doctor Otis a debt of gratitude for his great work, and also the medical bureau which aids and directs his labors. Such works belong to the class of benefits whose value cannot be expressed by human standards. They reflect honor upon the age and country which produce them, and are an invaluable legacy to the future.

We cannot conclude this imperfect notice without expressing the hope that Congress, influenced by the universal sentiment of the country, will give all the material aid required to the Surgeon-General's Department in prosecuting its great and most fruitful labors.

Silver Jubilee Of The University Of Notre Dame, June 23d, 1869.
Compiled and published by Joseph A. Lyons, A.M.
Chicago: E. B. Myers & Co.

This is a tastefully gotten-up volume, designed as a "memorial" tribute to the students, past and present, of the University of Notre Dame, in Northern Indiana, on the occasion of the celebration of the twenty-fifth or silver anniversary of the corporate existence of that now large, flourishing, and important Catholic institution of learning. It gives a brief but interesting history of the university, from its humble beginnings, a quarter of a century since, under the zealous and effective labors of the Very Rev. Father Sorin and his well-chosen and able co-workers, to its present wide and ample proportions. {859} This is followed by an account of its internal economy or arrangements; its study, discipline, and amusements; its societies—religious, literary, and others; its library, museum, etc., etc. Sketches are also given of the lives of its presidents, vice-presidents, professors, and teachers, as well as of its alumni, with a full account of the exercises of its recent Jubilee commencement. Altogether, the volume must prove a very interesting and acceptable one to the numerous graduates, pupils, and friends of Notre Dame.

Nora Brady's Vow, And
Mona The Vestal.
By Mrs. Anna H. Dorsey.
Boston: Patrick Donahoe. 1869.

The first of these stories is of modern times, and the other is of the time of St. Patrick. Mrs. Dorsey, like all writers not to the Irish manner born, makes fearful work with what some persons are pleased to call the Irish brogue. This is, however, a small fault, with which we do not wish to quarrel. The stories are presented to the public in a beautifully printed and elegantly bound volume, and will, we doubt not, be welcomed in many an Irish-American household.

The Way Of Salvation,
in Meditations for all times in the year. By St. Alphonsus Liguori.
Translated from the Italian by the Rev. James Jones.
New York: Catholic Publication Society, 126 Nassau St.

One of the best signs of the present time, and a sign most encouraging to Catholics of all classes and professions, is that books of genuine piety are more and more in demand every day. It was this fact that induced the Catholic Publication Society to bring out in a neat and very convenient form the celebrated Way of Salvation, by St. Liguori. It is one of the most popular works of that sainted author; and the mere announcement of its publication is sufficient recommendation.

The Two Schools. A Moral Tale.
By Mrs. Hughs.
New York: The Catholic Publication Society. 1869.

This book presents in a striking manner the results of two systems of home education. In it we have a vivid picture of the consequences of wealth, recklessly lavished on an only daughter, contrasted with the encouraging way in which the virtue of a much-injured girl triumphs over the designs of base and cunning enemies. The authoress possesses a happy talent of describing persons in an easy and remarkably concise style, and she succeeds in causing her characters to act and speak in a natural manner. The book will be read, by girls especially, with the keenest enjoyment. The conduct of Mary will seldom fail to draw forth their approval, and all readers will agree that this is a good story.

A German Reader.
In Prose and Verse.
With Notes and Vocabulary.
By William D. Whitney.
New York: Leypoldt & Holt.

The text of this Reader has at length reached us; and in regard to accuracy, arrangement, and clearness of type it is all that can be desired. The selections are very good, although many of them have already done service in German educational works. Originality is only claimed for the vocabulary and notes, which have not yet been published, so that we may only remark that the volume will enjoy a very high reputation, if the forthcoming part be prepared with the same attention that has been devoted to the text.

The Poetical Works Of Samuel Lover.
London and New York: George Routledge & Sons.

A most beautiful edition of the beautiful songs of Lover, written mostly, as all know, about love and lovers. Yet not all. We are indebted to him for many charming ballads, of sweetest melody and deepest pathos, to which indeed Lover owes his fame as a poet.

The Irish Widow's Son;
Or, The Pikemen Of Ninety-eight.
A story of the Irish Rebellion, embracing an historical account of the Battles of Antrim and Ballinahinch.
By. Con O'Leary.
Boston: P. Donahoe. 1869.

This book is interesting, and free from the coarseness which is found in so many stories of Ireland. The author has succeeded in producing a readable tale of that epoch in Ireland's history when secret associations became the controlling power of that misgoverned country.

Essay On Divorce And Divorce Legislation,
with special reference to the United States.
By Theodore D. Woolsey, D.D., LL.D., President of Yale College.
New York: Charles Scribner & Co. 1869.

This book, by one of the first scholars of our country, is a very learned and laudable effort to effect a reform in our divorce legislation. It would require a long and elaborate article to do justice to the work and the subject. At present we can only say that the community ought to thank Dr. Woolsey for the labor he has performed in their service, and which he has done as well as it can be done by one who stands on the Protestant platform.

THE CATHOLIC PUBLICATION SOCIETY has in preparation, and will publish early in October, The Illustrated Catholic Family Almanac for 1870. It will contain the astronomical tables, calendars, a great amount of valuable statistics, as well as several well-written sketches of places and things in various countries. It will be illustrated with over twenty splendid wood-cuts, and will be sold for 25 cents per copy. Orders from the trade should be sent in at once.

Lacordaire's Sketch of the Order of St. Dominic;

Memoir, Journal, and Correspondence of Mrs. Seton, by Mgr. Seton, in 2 vols. 8vo;

Love of our Lord Jesus Christ, by St. Jure, vol. 2;

Library of Good Examples, 12 vols.

John Murphy & Co., Baltimore, announce A Memoir of the Life and Character of the Rev. Demetrius Augustin de Gallitzin, Founder of Loretto and Catholicity in Cambria County, Pa., Apostle of the Alleghanies. By Very Rev. Thomas Heyden, of Bedford, Pa.

Mary and Mi-Ka, a story of "The Holy Childhood;"

Five Years in a Protestant Sisterhood, and Ten Years in a Catholic Convent;

and a Life of Christopher Columbus.

Kelly, Piet & Co., Baltimore, announce the republication of the Roman periodical,

Acta ex Iis decerpta quae apud Sanctam Sedem geruntur.
The Double Sacrifice: a tale of Castelfidardo. The Life of Madame Louise de France, Daughter of Louis XV., in religion Mother Terese de St. Augustin. The Day Sanctified; being meditations and spiritual readings for daily use.

Popular Tales. By Maria Edgeworth.

Moral Tales. By Maria Edgeworth.

1847	129,062
1848	189,176
1849	220,791
1850	212,603
1851	289,601
1852	300,992
1853	284,945
1854	319,223
1855	136,233
1856	142,342
1857	183,773
1858	78,589
1859	79,322
1860	105,162
1861	65,539
1862	76,306
1863	167,844
1864	182,396
1865	196,352
1866	233,418
1867	242,730
Total	3,832,404

The Catholic World. Monthly Magazine Of General Literature And Science.

Vol. IX. April, 1869, To September, 1869.

Contents.

Poetry

New Publications.

The Catholic World.

Vol. IX., No. 49. April, 1869.

The Fable Of Pope Joan.

Translated From The French. The Approaching General Council.

By Mgr. Dupanloup, Bishop Of Orleans.

Lent, 1869.

The Modern Street-ballads Of Ireland.

Daybreak.

Chapter I.

Chapter II. A Louis D'or.

Comparative Morality Of Catholic And Protestant Countries.

Heremore-Brandon; Or, The Fortunes Of A Newsboy.

Chapter VIII.

When?

Translated From The French Of Le Correspondant. Influence Of Locality On The Duration Of Human Life.

The Bishops of Rome.

March Omens.

Translated From The German By Richard Storrs Willis. Emily Linder. A Life-portrait.

Xavier De Ravignan.

The Educational Question.

The Omnibus Two Hundred Years Ago.

New Publications.

The Catholic World.

Vol. IX., No. 50.—May, 1869.

The Woman Question.

Daybreak.

Chapter III. Chez Lui.

Chapter IV. Just Before Light.

Chapter V. The Sword Of The Lord And Of Gideon.

Problems Of The Age, And Its Critics.

Heremore-Brandon; Or, The Fortunes Of A Newsboy.

Chapter IX.

Our Lady's Easter.

Two Months In Spain During The Late Revolution.

Pope Or People.

Translated From The German By Richard Storrs Willis.

Emily Linder.

II.—Her Conversion.

The Irish Church Act Of 1869.

My Mother's Only Son.

Catholicity and Pantheism.

Number Six. The Finite.

Aubrey de Vere in America.

About Several Things.

A Chinese Husband's Lament For His Wife.

Translated From The French Of M. Stanislas Julien, Professor Of The Chinese Language, Paris.

A May Flower.

New Publications.

The Catholic World.

Vol. IX., No. 51.-June, 1869.

Spiritism And Spiritists.

Daybreak.

Chapter VI. Presentiments.

Good Old Saxon.

By An English Catholic.

Waiting.

From The Rivista Universale, Of Genoa.

The Supernatural.

By Cesar Cantu.

Two Months In Spain During The Late Revolution.

The Approaching Council Of The Vatican.

St. Mary's.

A May Carol.

St. Peter, First Bishop of Rome.

A Ruined Life.

The Philosophy Of Immigration.

Vigil.

The Geography of Roses.

Spanish Life and Character.

From The German Of Baron Stolberg.

Filial Affection As Taught And Practised By The Chinese.

New Publications.

The Catholic World.

Vol. IX., No. 52.—July, 1869.

Columbus At Salamanca.

The Catholic World.

Monthly Magazine

Of General Literature And Science.

Vol. IX.

April, 1869, To September, 1869.

Translated From The French.

The Approaching General Council.

Chapter II.

A Louis D'or.

Comparative Morality Of Catholic
And Protestant Countries.

Heremore-Brandon; Or,
The Fortunes Of A Newsboy.

Translated From The French Of Le Correspondant.

Influence Of Locality On The Duration Of Human Life.

Translated From The German
By Richard Storrs Willis.

Emily Linder.

A Life-portrait.

Chapter III.

Chez Lui.

Chapter IV.

Just Before Light.

Chapter V.

The Sword Of The Lord And Of Gideon.

Heremore-Brandon;
Or, The Fortunes Of A Newsboy.

Translated From The German
By Richard Storrs Willis.

Number Six.

The Finite.

Translated From The French Of M. Stanislas Julien,
Professor Of The Chinese Language, Paris.

Chapter VI.

Presentiments.

Two Months In Spain During
The Late Revolution.

Chapter VIII.

The Lord Answered Job Out Of A Whirlwind.

Chapter IX.

Noblesse Oblige

Chapter X.

A Broken Circle.

Chapter XI.

The Mountains Whence Help Cometh.

Two Months In Spain
During The Late Revolution.

Translated From The French.

Sister Aloyse's Bequest.

Number Seven.

The Finite.—Continued.

Chapter XII.

So As By Fire.

Two Months In Spain
During The Late Revolution.

Conference Preached In The Cathedral Of Notre Dame,
In Paris, By R. Pere Hyacinthe, January 3, 1869.

Chapter XV.

"The Coming Of The Messenger."

Translated From The German
Of Conrad Von Bolanden.

Hon. Thomas Dongan,
Governor of New York.