Catholic World, Vol. 23, by Paulist Fathers

[Pg 1]

THE

CATHOLIC WORLD.

VOL. XXIII., No. 133.—APRIL, 1876.

HOW WE ARE MISREPRESENTED ABROAD.

Following the example of older nations, the United States has been accustomed to keep at foreign courts and capitals certain diplomatic agents whose presence there seems to be considered necessary for the protection of our national interests, as well as a pledge of mutual friendship and comity. Under the more modest title of envoys or ministers these gentlemen exercise the powers and enjoy the immunities of ambassadors, and to their supposed wisdom, tact, and judgment are entrusted all difficult negotiations and the settlement of doubtful questions of international law.

In view of the increased facilities for communication between independent governments afforded by railroads and telegraphs, the general diffusion of accurate geographical and commercial knowledge, and the almost total disuse of the secret diplomacy of former times, it has been seriously considered whether this class of rather expensive officials might not be dispensed with altogether. Many persons, also, are inclined to believe that the public welfare would suffer little, if at all, by such a measure, on the principle that bad or incompetent representatives are worse than none. But if the custom, as appears probable, is still to be adhered to, it is becoming more and more apparent that the personnel of our diplomatic corps must speedily undergo a radical change for the better, if we would not bring our country into lasting disrepute and contempt in the eyes of all just and discerning men.

In Europe diplomacy is practically as much a profession as law or medicine. Its students begin their allotted course at an early age in the capacity of attachés or secretaries of legation. As they gain in experience they are moved from one court to another, in regular order of promotion, until finally, after years of practical observation and laborious study, they develop into accomplished diplomatists and ripe statesmen, whose services are invaluable to their country, at home and abroad. Not so in America; with us the post of minister resident or envoy extraordinary, is usually the reward of some obscure partisan, the solace of a disappointed Congressional [Pg 2] aspirant, or the asylum in which superannuated cabinet officers can find dignified obscurity. Occasionally accomplished international lawyers like the late Mr. Wheaton or Reverdy Johnson are selected, but these rare cases are in sad contrast with the generality of persons chosen, every few years, to represent in foreign countries the power, dignity, and intelligence of the republic. They are almost invariably men of mediocre ability, contracted views, and defective education; unaccustomed to any high degree of social refinement, and sometimes ignorant of the very language of the country to which they are accredited, while not necessarily masters of their own. From a perusal of some volumes of state documents [1] we are led to conclude that the principal duty of our diplomats is to write long, prosy letters to the Secretary of State, and to encumber the archives of his office with copious extracts from foreign newspapers of no value or public interest whatever. In this mass of correspondence we look in vain for the keen, accurate criticism of men and manners, or the profound views of statesmanship which characterized the despatches of the Venetian ambassadors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the French and English emissaries of a later period.

On the contrary, we find these letters exhibiting a remarkable feebleness and crudity of mind, and, where matters relating to religion or morals are discussed, a purblind prejudice unworthy of any rational American, but especially reprehensible in an exalted official of our government. This latter blemish is so prominent, and withal so repeatedly displayed, as to be painfully suggestive of a desire on the part of the writers to win, by unworthy means, the favor of the appointing power at the federal capital. We also observe with regret that they are accustomed to use, with the greatest deliberation and upon the slightest occasion, the terms reactionist, Romanist, ultramontane, and other nicknames—all of which are inaccurate and most of them offensive—when describing the supporters of the Catholic Church, who, in various parts of the Christian world, are battling for the rights of conscience and the freedom of their religion; while eulogistic adjectives are lavished on all parties and measures, no matter how tyrannical or arbitrary, provided they are directed against the church and her priesthood. Just here we may as well ask at the start, Is there not occupation enough for our diplomatic service in attending to the great commercial and other secular interests of the republic, but that they must turn aside to devote their chief attention to the cultivation and spread of anti-Catholic bigotry?

One of the most glaring examples of this indecent partisanship is to be found in the records of our diplomatic relations with Mexico—our nearest neighbor and the most populous of the Spanish-American republics. Formerly the greatest care was exercised in filling this important mission, only gentlemen of sound discretion and liberal views being selected; but since the advent of Mr. Fish as Secretary of State, this wise precaution has been neglected, and, as a consequence, we have had at the Mexican capital, for several years, a deputy named John W. Foster, whose total misapprehension of the duties of his office is painfully apparent, even from his own reports. It will be remembered that in 1859 the partisans of Juarez, [Pg 3] assembled at Vera Cruz, proclaimed war on the Catholic Church, abolished all religious communities, confiscated their property, and expelled their members of both sexes. They also declared marriage a civil contract, to be entered into only before a magistrate, abolished religious oaths, and attempted other “reforms” equally impertinent and detrimental to the public good. During the short reign of Maximilian these attempts on the liberty of the church were of course discontinued; but when Juarez assumed absolute control of the government they were renewed, and on the 25th of September, 1873, were declared by his successor, Lerdo de Tejada, a part of the constitution. This effort to make religious proscription the fundamental law of the republic seemed so judicious and praiseworthy to Mr. Foster that he immediately transmitted to Washington a full copy of Lerdo’s proclamation, with the remark: “Their incorporation into the federal constitution may be regarded as the crowning act of triumph of the liberal government in its long contest with the conservative or church party.”

Knowing something of the antecedents of Mr. Foster, we are not surprised at his sympathy with what may be called the illiberal or anti-church party; but the reply of our Secretary of State is simply inexplicable. On October 22 he writes:

“The Mexican government deserves congratulation upon the adoption of the amendments of its constitution to which the despatch relates. It may be regarded as a great step in advance, especially for a republic in name. We have had ample experience of the advantage of similar measures—an experience, too, which has fully shown that, while they have materially contributed to enlarge and secure general freedom and prosperity, they have by no means tended to weaken the just interests of religion or the due influence of clergymen in the body politic.”

How a gentleman of Mr. Fish’s acknowledged intelligence could permit himself to write such a document is incomprehensible. He knows well that “we”—meaning the United States—have not had “ample experience,” or any experience whatever, “of the advantage of similar measures.” “We” have had our moments of fanaticism, our church-burnings and convent-sackings, it is true; but neither the municipal law nor the Constitution has presumed to control the spiritual affairs of the church in this republic. Our seminaries, colleges, convents, and schools are yet untouched by the civil magistrate; our priests can administer the sacraments without the risk of police interference; and our Sisters of Mercy and Charity can pursue their holy avocations and not incur the risk of perpetual banishment. What has contributed to enlarge and to secure to us general freedom and prosperity is not such anti-Catholic legislation as that upon which Mr. Fish congratulates the “republic in name,” but the very contrary.

It would seem, however, that some of those entrusted with the highest offices of state regret this happy condition of things. Evidence crops out everywhere to strengthen the suspicion that our government, not finding interests at home of sufficient magnitude to occupy its attention, is drifting more and more into sympathy with the conspiracy now prevalent in Europe against the rights of the Catholic Church and that birthright of every American citizen—freedom of conscience.

But, however unsustained by fact, the moral sympathy thus tendered by the mouth-piece of our [Pg 4] government to the Mexican president was highly valuable to his party at that juncture. The laws against the clergy and nuns were exceedingly unpopular with the great mass of the Mexicans, and it was necessary that the endorsement of the powerful and prosperous republic of the north should be secured in their favor. If such measures had “materially contributed to enlarge and secure general freedom and prosperity” in one country, as Mr. Fish solemnly asserted, why should they not have the same salutary effect in another? There is no reason for surprise, therefore, to find that when the elated Mr. Foster transmitted Mr. Fish’s letter, with his own felicitations, to Mr. Lafragua, the Mexican Minister of Foreign Affairs, he was answered in the following complimentary phrase:

“The president of the republic has received with special gratification the expression of the kind sentiments which animate the people and government of the United States respecting the people and government of Mexico, which sentiments could not have been interpreted by a more estimable person than your excellency. The president is sincerely thankful, as well for the cordial congratulation which his excellency the Secretary of State has had the kindness to address to you on account of the proclamation of the amendments to the federal constitution, as for the ardent wishes which your excellency manifests for the consolidation of the republican institutions and of peace, and for the prosperity and material development of the United Mexican States.”

It will thus be seen that by the wilfulness—or indiscretion, let us call it—of Mr. Fish “the people and government of the United States” are credited with a sympathy for, and approval of, what their conscience, their spirit, and their whole history up to this time repudiate—a legislation of tyranny and religious proscription. Mr. Fish—and no man better—knows that such sympathy has no foundation in the hearts of the American people or in the real policy of its government. He knows that the people abhor the sentiment expressed in the “amendments to the federal constitution” of Mexico. What are we to think, then, of a statesman who, actuated by whatever motive, shows himself so ready to play fast and loose with the solemn trusts confided to him? Is the vast power that he must exercise safe in the hands of one who is ready to veer with every wind that blows, especially when it blows against Rome? Is this the true expression of the policy of which we have lately heard so much—“Let the church and the state be for ever separate”? Our American feelings rise with indignation against so grave a misrepresentation of the principles and policy of our government, especially by one so familiar with them as Mr. Fish. There is no excuse for this.

Mr. Fish’s faux pas was too precious to the anti-Catholic faction not to receive the widest publicity. “This correspondence,” writes Mr. Foster to his principal, “was yesterday read in the national Congress by the Minister of Foreign Affairs, by direction of the president of the republic, and after its reading the president of Congress, in the name of that body, expressed the gratification with which the assembly had received the intelligence, and by a vote of Congress the correspondence was entered upon its journal. The Minister of Foreign Affairs has also caused its publication in the official newspaper, and it has appeared in all the periodicals of this capital.”

A year had scarcely passed away, during which every effort had been [Pg 5] made thus to mislead and pervert public opinion, when De Tejada’s government found itself strong enough to pass additional “laws of reform” infringing still farther on the rights of conscience. On the 15th of December, 1874, the Sisters of Charity, the last remnant of the Catholic orders in Mexico, were also rudely expelled from their institutions and ordered to quit for ever the scenes of their pious and untiring labors. And in this connection, a curious comment on Mr. Fish’s congratulatory despatch was offered by the people of the city of San Francisco. The Sisters expelled by virtue of the constitution which met with such marked approval from Mr. Fish, were received with open arms and welcomed by our fellow-citizens in California. Surely, this was giving the lie direct to Mr. Fish by his own countrymen, whose conscience naturally revolted from a system of government which, as its chief claim to the sympathy and fellowship of foreign peoples, set up its power and willingness to banish from its jurisdiction all that was purest and holiest. Yet Mexico is as far from “general freedom and prosperity” as ever, and Messrs. Fish and Foster, the instigators of this last outrage on humanity, continue to be high and trusted officials of our freedom-loving republic.

Still, the faction that controls Mexican politics was not content with constitutional and statutory “reforms.” As long as the heart of the country remained Catholic its hold on power was feeble and uncertain. It therefore aimed at nothing less than a general conversion of the people, at a new Reformation, and selected what it considered the most fitting instruments for that purpose. These were itinerant Protestant missionaries of all sects, kindly furnished to order by the Boston American Board of Missions and the Pacific Theological Seminary of California, who soon overspread the promised land and began their labors of conversion. The states of Mexico, Vera Cruz, Guerrero, Puebla, Jalisco, Hidalgo, Zacatecas, and San Luis Potosi were especially favored by their presence, where, from their method of proceeding, their foul abuse of the religion of the populace, and the rank blasphemy that characterized their preaching, it was plain that they considered they had fallen among barbarians and idolaters. Going from place to place, and surrounded by armed guards, they not only fulminated the heresy of Protestantism, but scattered broadcast printed travesties of the Commandments and of the prayers and ritual of the church, some copies of which they had the hardihood to nail to the cathedrals and other places of Catholic worship. To make matters still more offensive, they frequently interspersed their harangues with laudations of the “liberal” party who patronized them, and direct attacks on all who opposed its iniquitous policy.

One of those zealots, a Rev. Mr. Stephens, after a nine months’ journey through several towns, found his way to Ahualulco, where, relying on the countenance of the government officials, he commenced a series of bitter assaults on Catholicity. A popular tumult was the result, during which the unfortunate man was killed, March 2, 1874. When news of this cruel, though not unprovoked, murder reached Mr. Foster, he waited on the Mexican minister, who informed him that “the principal assassins and two priests had been arrested, and that [Pg 6] a judge had been despatched to the district with an extra corps of clerks to ensure a speedy investigation and trial.” This promise was faithfully and promptly kept, as we find by a despatch dated April 15, in which the minister says:

“Up to the present date seven of the guilty parties have been tried and condemned to death, from which sentence they have appealed to the supreme court. Twelve or fifteen more persons charged with complicity in the crime are under arrest awaiting trial, including the cura of the parish of Ahualulco.”

Yet this summary vengeance, nor even the indignity offered to the venerable cura, who had had no participation whatever in the disturbance, did not satisfy the insatiable soul of Mr. Foster. From his subsequent letter to Lafragua, and several despatches to our government, we infer that the condign punishment of the priest, innocent or guilty, was to him the most desirable of objects. To inaugurate the new Reformation by the execution of a Catholic clergyman appears to have been considered by him as a master-stroke of policy. But even the Lerdistas were not prepared for so desperate a step, and Foster was doomed to find his hopes blighted. Alluding to a conversation with Minister Lafragua in September, he writes to Mr. Fish, bemoaning his hard fate:

“I thanked him for communicating the intelligence in relation to the trials of the assassins of Rev. Mr. Stephens, the receipt of which I had anxiously awaited, but expressed my disappointment in finding no mention of the proceedings had in the trial of the cura of Ahualulco, to whom the published accounts attributed the responsibility of the assassination.…”

This information, and the fact that the appeal of the seven condemned persons had not been determined, drew forth one of Mr. Fish’s unaccountable diplomatic missives. “You may farther inform him orally,” says our Secretary, alluding to Lafragua, “but confidentially, if need be, that this must necessarily become an international affair, unless it shall be satisfactorily disposed of and without unreasonable delay.” Now, why should the information be given orally and confidentially if there was not some desire, some trick, to avoid responsibility for a doubtful act tending to intimidate a friendly power? and wherefore should the killing of the man Stephens be made an international affair—i.e., a just cause of war—when so many American citizens had been already murdered in Mexico with impunity? Foster had repeatedly complained that during the short time he had been in charge of the legation thirteen “murders of the most horrid character and revolting to our common civilization” had been committed on his countrymen, for which there had not been a single punishment; yet we hear of no intimation of making them international affairs. Were the lives of these persons, presumably following legitimate callings, collectively of less value than that of a mendacious preacher of a gospel of violence?

Emboldened by the words of Mr. Fish, Foster again returned to the attack in a note to Lafragua, in which he directly, and on his own responsibility, charges the cura with having been the instigator of the crime. The first intimation that the cura had had any participation in exciting the mob against Stephens was contained in a letter from a brother preacher named Watkins, who was stationed at Guadalajara, more than sixty miles from the scene of the disturbance. On this [Pg 7] suspicious and slender foundation Foster had been in the habit of building up a mass of insinuations and charges against the priest, referring to “general” and “printed” reports as his authority. When after a searching investigation the cura was honorably discharged, and the minister again complained to Lafragua, that official replied rather tartly in the following unequivocal terms:

“In relation to the acquittal of those who were charged with being instigators of the crime, it is the result of a judicial act, which has taken place after the due process had been completed for the investigation of the truth, which is not always in accord with the prejudices of the public.”

If the minister had added: “and of Mr. Foster and the Board of Missions,” the sentence would have been more complete. Having failed to accomplish his grand design—the chastisement of the cura—the ultimate fate of the convicted laymen became a matter of little importance to our assiduous representative.

Another opportunity soon presented itself for Mr. Foster’s official interference. On the night of January 26, 1875, a riot occurred in Acapulco, in which five persons were killed and eleven wounded on both sides. Of the former, one was claimed to be an American. It appears that a Rev. M. N. Hutchinson, supported by the United States consul, J. A. Sutter, and a few native officials, had commenced his evangelical labors in that city by personally insulting the parish priest, Father J. P. Nava, and by openly abusing everything considered holy and venerable by Catholics. This method of preaching Christ’s Gospel so exasperated the populace that an attack was made on the building used as a Protestant church, and a street fight, with fatal results, followed. Hutchinson, the cause of the fray, escaped and found refuge on board a ship; while Sutter, who seems to have been as cowardly as he was vicious, threatened to abandon the consulate and follow his example. As in the case at Ahualulco, the “liberal” authorities at once arrested the cura, but so indignant were the citizens, and even some of the federal employees, at the act that he was at once set at liberty.

Here was a rare chance for Mr. Foster to display his reformatory energy, and on this occasion he had a most efficient associate in the gallant consul. That truthful gentleman writes to his chief, January 27, three days after the riot:

“All the Indians are under arms, and threaten to attack the town if the parish priest—who, in my opinion, is the prime mover of these heinous crimes—should be arrested. So he is still at large, and laughing, probably, at the impotence of the authorities.… Everybody in town is afraid of the Indians, who, incited by a fanatical priest, would perpetrate the most atrocious crimes.”

All this Mr. Foster believed, or appeared to believe; for we find him embodying it in his official communications to Lafragua, with some additional remarks of his own to give the calumny greater point and force. Supported by the American minister, Sutter now looms up as the defender of Protestant rights in general. Addressing personages of no less distinction than the governor of the state and the district judge, he requests them to “promptly take the necessary measures within your power to procure the speedy punishment, according to the law, of the instigators and perpetrators of the atrocious massacre of Protestants,” etc. There is no limitation [Pg 8] here, it will be observed, to American citizens; the peremptory consul, “in obedience to instructions received yesterday from the Hon. John W. Foster, envoy extraordinary, etc.,” had assumed a protectorate over the entire evangelical body of Acapulco, and felt himself at liberty to insult the executive and judiciary of the state of Guerrero.

The people of Acapulco, however, differed materially in opinion from the consul. Not only did they not fear the Indians or regard their priest as an abettor of riot and murder, but, on the contrary, five or six hundred of them waited on Governor Alvarez, and, in the name of the rest, assured him that the disturbance was wholly caused by Hutchinson and his handful of Protestants, requesting him at the same time to remove the disturbers from their city, as he had the power to do under the laws of the state. Even the Minister of Foreign Affairs—though, like so many of his party, deadly opposed to the church—could not help but ascribe the riot to something like its proper cause. Annoyed, doubtless, by the impertinence of Sutter and the importunities of Foster, he writes to the latter in a vein of delicate irony:

“The consul in Acapulco cannot be ignorant of the fact that Protestant worship was a new propaganda among a people who, unfortunately, have not been able to attain to that degree of civilization to enable them to accept without aversion religious tenets which they disown, and it is well known that the religious sentiment is one of the most sensitive, and that, when attacked, it is all the more irritable.”

The logical position of the Mexican minister is unassailable. But what a humiliating predicament for our government to be placed in by her diplomatists abroad! Such is the natural result of selecting the kind of men for important posts, or indeed for any posts at all, complained of at the beginning of the article. It is clear that this Mr. Foster has missed his vocation. He would be more at home in a Protestant board of missions, or as a “worker” in “revivals,” than standing before a people as the representative of the truth, worth, and genius of a great nation.

Mr. Foster was not satisfied with the explanation. He had lost one priest, and he was not going to let another slip through his fingers without a struggle. He reminds Lafragua of Mr. Fish’s “congratulations,” and appeals to his gratitude. “While it is very natural that I,” he writes, “as the representative of a government which has officially congratulated that of Mexico on the constitutional triumph and recognition of the principles of religious liberty, should watch with deep interest the practical enforcement of these principles, I have made the outbreaks of fanatical mobs the subject of diplomatic intervention only when American citizens have been assassinated.” But the plea was in vain; even the government of Lerdo de Tejada dared not molest the cura of Acapulco, who, strong in his innocence and in the affection of his flock, continued to exercise the duties of his sacred office, regardless alike of native “reformers” and officious diplomats. Up to the latest dates Mr. Foster had not yet caught a cura, and the people of Mexico seem as far as ever from the enjoyment of the blessings of a new Reformation, so happily and characteristically begun.

The Central American States include Guatemala, San Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica, each of which holds an undivided fifth interest in the official attention [Pg 9] of Mr. George Williamson, our worthy minister peripatetic. When not involved in domestic brawls—which seldom happens—these miniature commonwealths have a habit of varying the monotony of peaceful life by a descent on one of their neighbors, and even a civil and a foreign war have been known to rage at the same time and place. Having such a vivacious people to look after, the attention of our representative might reasonably be considered fully occupied; yet we learn that he has ample leisure to devote himself to theological and educational speculations, and particularly to the subject of marriage. On this important social relation he not only becomes eloquent, though occasionally obscure, in his despatches, but is evidently looked upon as an authority by the “liberal” party on the Isthmus. Having been asked his opinion by President Barrios of Guatemala, who contemplated extending civil marriage to his people, “I replied,” he says, “it would in all probability soon come; … that in our country we considered the civil law supreme, and would neither furnish a hierarchy of Romanists nor Protestants, to assert its sanction was necessary to give validity to a contract which the law pronounced good.” It may be objected that this passage is not well constructed; so, in justice not only to the liberal views, but to the erudition of Mr. Williamson, we quote the following descriptive extract from a despatch on the condition of the Central American population:

“Intelligence is more generally diffused; people are slowly learning republican habits and adopting republican ideas; a monarchical hierarchy that fostered superstitions, that only allowed education in a certain direction, and which ‘gathered gear’ unto itself ‘by every wile,’ has been dethroned; agriculture now has the aid of the numerous laborers who were employed in the erection of large edifices for monks and nuns and religious exercises.”

A subsequent communication on the state of public education furnishes a rather strange commentary on the above:

“The present attempt at organizing a public-school system is, in my judgment, one of the most laudable acts of the present government, for which it should be entitled to credit, whether there be success or failure. My opinion is that there are too many obstacles to be overcome for the plan to be successful, and that the government is undertaking a grave experiment which is likely to create great dissatisfaction, and may result in revolution. But having driven out most of the priests and nuns, who were heretofore the instructors of the people, it seemed necessary the government should try to supply their place.”

The same latitude of opinion and ill-concealed hostility to the Catholic Church, the same desire to take advantage of every trifling circumstance to misrepresent and malign the motives of her supporters, pervade the correspondence of our other representatives in South America, almost without exception. Thus Mr. Thomas Russell has no scruple in lauding the usurping government of Venezuela, which, in 1870, first imprisoned and then banished perpetually the Archbishop of Caracas and Venezuela, suppressed the seminaries, confiscated the property of the monasteries, and expelled the nuns. Still less has Mr. Rumsey Wing in assuring the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ecuador, in writing about an alleged desecration of a grave in Quito, that the news “of those outrages on the bodies of Protestants” “would create an intense feeling not only in my own country [Pg 10] but throughout Europe”; while, having nothing else to send, we suppose, the same officious gentleman forwards to Washington copies of two decrees of Congress, one granting a tithe of the church revenues to his Holiness the Pope, and the other placing Ecuador under the protection of the Sacred Heart, “to show the intense Catholicism prevailing in this country.”

Then Mr. C. A. Logan, some time of Chili, appears to have interested himself very much in local politics, and it is not difficult to discover upon which side his sympathy rests. In a despatch to Secretary Fish, November 2, 1874, he has the hardihood to charge the Archbishop of Santiago with bribing congressmen, pending the passage of a bill for the partial repeal of a penal law against the clergy. He writes:

“The day arrived for the vote, and a large crowd gathered about the building, awaiting the result with the most breathless anxiety; among these was the archbishop himself, in full clerical robes. Much to the chagrin of the liberals, a two-third vote was gained by the church party under the spur and lash of the clericals, and, as it is freely asserted, by the liberal use of money. The senate is composed of only twenty members, which is not a large body to handle, if they take kindly to handling.”

Mr. Francis Thomas, of Lima, goes even farther than his confrère, and deliberately asserts the complicity of the Catholics, as a body, in the recent attempt to assassinate President Pardo.

“The conspirators,” he says, “had calculated upon the co-operation of all that class of the population of this country who have become hostile to the president of Peru on account of his proceedings, in which high dignitaries of the Catholic Church were concerned. The congress of Peru at its last session passed a law forbidding members of the order of Jesuits to reside within the jurisdiction of Peru. In violation of this law, members of that order who had been expelled from other Spanish republics took possession of a convent in the interior of Peru, and took measures to organize their society. President Pardo, in conformity to the law, issued a proclamation requiring them to leave the country, which has caused some degree of excitement.”

This fact, and the attempts of the government to introduce irreligious books and periodicals into the schools, were sufficient, in the opinion of our impartial minister, to provoke the Catholics of Peru to the foulest crimes.

The Emperor of Brazil, in his open war on the church, also finds an advocate and eulogist in Mr. Richard Cutts Shannon, the American chargé at his court, who employs his vicarious pen in justifying the arrest, trial, and condemnation of the Bishop of Olinda to four years’ imprisonment with hard labor. But he is surpassed by minister James R. Partridge, who, in alluding to the determined intention of the government to prosecute to the bitter end the various vicars who were named to take the place of those successively cast into prison, emphatically declares: “From present appearances, the ministerial party are going on and are determined to carry it through. It is to be hoped that their courage may not fail, neither by reason of the long list of those who are thus declared ready to become martyrs, nor by any political move of the ecclesiastical party.”

Such, in brief, are the views of the men sent to represent this country on American soil. If we turn to Europe—though we may acknowledge a higher order of ability in our diplomatic agents there—we [Pg 11] discover prejudice as strong and partisanship equally conspicuous. Referring to the German Empire, we are pained to find so profound a student of the past as Mr. Bancroft our late minister at Berlin, so easily deceived in contemporary history. Nothing, certainly, can be more untrue than the following statement of the position of affairs in Prussia in 1873:

“The effect of the correspondence [between the Pope and Emperor William] has been only to increase the popularity and European reputation of the emperor, and to depress the influence of the clerical party, thus confirming the accounts, which I have always given you, that the ultramontane political influence can never become vitally dangerous to this empire. The Catholic clergy are obviously beginning to regret having commenced with the state a contest in which it is not possible for them to gain the advantage. The intelligent Catholics themselves for the most part support the government, and so have received from the ultramontanes the nickname of state Catholics.”

There is not a single sentence in the above which is not a misapprehension of facts. How far Mr. Bancroft’s easy assertions and confident predictions, made scarcely two years ago, have been justified by the event is a matter that happily needs no inquiry, while comment on our part would be almost cruel. Mr. Bancroft, however, was not content with supplying information to the State Department on matters exclusively pertaining to his mission. His wide range of vision took in all Europe, past and present. Of the old Helvetian republic he writes:

“Switzerland shows no sign of receding from its comprehensive measures against the ultramontane usurpations; and the spirit and courage of these republicans have something of the same effect on the population of Germany that was exercised by their forefathers in the time of the Reformation.”

And again:

“How widely the movement is extending in Europe is seen by what is passing in England, where choice has been made of a ministry disinclined to further concessions to the demands of the Catholic hierarchy, and where the archbishops of the Anglican Church are proposing measures to drive all Romanizing tendencies out of the forms of public worship in the Establishment. Here in Germany, where the question takes the form of a conflict between the authority of the state at home within its own precincts, and the influence of an alien ecclesiastical power, it is certain that the party of the state is consolidating its strength; and I see nothing, either in the history of the country, or in the present state of public opinion, or the development of public legislation, that can raise a doubt as to the persistency of the German government in the course upon which it has entered.”

What the “comprehensive measures” in Switzerland “against the ultramontane usurpations” mean readers of The Catholic World already know. They are simply a rather aggravated form of the Falck laws—a form so aggravated that it is only within the past year M. Loyson himself warned the world that the “comprehensive measures against ultramontane usurpations,” which Mr. Bancroft finds such reasons to commend, were aimed, through Catholicity, at all Christianity. And yet a high official of our free government, a man of universal reputation and great authority in the world of letters, finds in this elaborate system of proscription and intolerance food for congratulation. One would suppose from the spirit so plainly animating Mr. Bancroft that he is a member of the O. A. U., and that he was chosen rather to represent that delectable society in Berlin than the American Government. It is to be presumed, from his own [Pg 12] despatches, that he would have our government follow the tyrannical attempt of Prussia and Switzerland to “stamp out” freedom of conscience. Mr. Bancroft’s diplomatic experience, under the influence of the court of Prussia, seems destined to reverse his principles and maxims as an American historian. He has, we fear, remained too long abroad for the good of his native truth, character, and sense of right. It is to be hoped that this baneful influence of foreign courts does not pursue him on his return to his own country and people.

Mr. John Jay, who formerly acted as our envoy at Vienna, though not so pronounced or diffusive in his despatches, is not far behind Mr. Bancroft in expressing his entire concurrence with the restrictive policy recently adopted by the government of Austria towards the church; while Mr. George P. Marsh, our representative in Italy, is so great an admirer of Garibaldi that he is never tired of chanting his praises in grandiloquent prose. Those familiar with the life of that notorious bandit will be surprised to learn from so high an authority as the American minister that “he has never through life encouraged any appeal to popular passion or any resistance to governments, except by legal measures or in the way of organized and orderly attempts at revolution; and, from the moment of his arrival at Rome, he exerted himself to the utmost to restrain every manifestation of excitement.”

In marked contrast to the unfair and ungenerous spirit displayed in the despatches of those ministers are the letters from France, Spain, and England. The stirring political events which occupy the entire attention of the two former countries leave no room, perhaps, for the discussion of penal laws and judicial decrees against Catholicity; while the latter, having carried out Protestantism to its logical conclusion, and found it a sham, is more inclined to profit by the blunders and crimes of its neighbors, so as to push its commercial interests, than to imitate them and begin anew the rôle of persecutor for conscience’ sake.

In explanation of the erroneous views so frequently put forth by so many of our diplomatic officials, we are assured that most of those sent to Mexico and Central and South America have been members of secret societies, and, having been accustomed to affiliate with the lodges of those Freemason-ridden countries, have had whatever little sense of equity they originally possessed perverted by the sophisms of their new associates. Possibly; but let us consider how much harm may be done by following such a short-sighted course. All the independent countries south of us on this continent are largely Catholic, and, with the exception of Brazil, claim to be republican. They are bound to us by strong ties, political as well as commercial, and are naturally inclined to look upon the United States as their exemplar and guide, and, if need be, their protector. When they shall have shaken off the incubus of military dictation that now weighs upon them, and, restoring to the church its rights—as will eventually be done—have entered on a new career of freedom and material prosperity, how will they be disposed to feel towards a power which they have known only through its agents, and those the advocates and supporters of everything that is illiberal in politics and degrading in polemics?

In Europe the influence of incapable and unworthy representatives is likely to be even more deleterious [Pg 13] to our national character. The affections of the people of the Old World are strongly inclined toward the free institutions of the New. But if we continue to permit our delegated authority to be used only in favor and encouragement of such enemies of human liberty as the usurper at the Eternal City, the tyrant at Berlin, and the communists of Geneva, the popular sympathy born of our protestations of liberality will soon fade away, to give place to feelings of mistrust, if not of positive aversion.

In calling public attention to the incapacity and perversity of the majority of our diplomatists—men who do not hesitate to put into their correspondence with foreign governments, and their private home despatches, sentiments they dare not utter publicly in the forum or through the press—we by no means desire to restrict proper expressions of opinion or limit the just criticisms of the agents of the Department of State. We only insist that these shall not be indulged in at the expense of a very large and respectable portion of this community. Neither do we require that they shall take sides with Catholics, as such, anywhere, no matter how harsh or unjust may be their grievances. This country is not Catholic, it is true, neither is it Protestant; and, indeed, it is questionable if, in any strict sense, it can be called Christian. But it is a country civilly and religiously free, by custom, statute, and Constitution, and we have a right to demand that whoever undertakes to act for it, as part and parcel of the machinery of our government, among foreigners, shall represent it as it is, in spirit as well as in fact—the opponent of all proscription for conscience’ sake, the enemy of tyranny whether exercised by the mob or the state. Is it not the true policy of our government to send abroad as representatives of our interests men who, while they are not hostile to the prevailing religious beliefs of the country to which they are accredited, are, at the same time, true and stanch Americans? If such men cannot be found, let us, in the name of common sense, have none at all. Some minor interests may perhaps suffer by the omission, but the honor and reputation of the republic will remain unsullied and unimpaired.

[1] Papers relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, etc., for 1874-5.

LINES ON LEONARDO DA VINCI’S
“VIRGIN OF THE ROCKS.”

Maternal lady with the virgin grace,

Heaven-born thy Jesus seemeth sure,

And thou a virgin pure.

Lady most perfect, when thy sinless face

Men look upon, they wish to be

A Catholic, Madonna fair, to worship thee.

Charles Lamb.

[Pg 14]

A POET AMONG THE POETS.

It is of the last importance that English criticism should clearly discern what rule for its course, in order to avail itself of the field now opening to it, and to produce fruit for the future, it ought to take. The rule may be summed up in one word—disinterestedness.

Mr. James Russell Lowell [2] has applied Mr. Matthew Arnold’s rule with rare fidelity in his essays, just published, on Dante, Spenser, Wordsworth, Milton, and Keats. His estimate of the two greatest of modern poets, especially the paper on Dante, is calculated to attract general attention, and to arouse, we apprehend, some acrid sentiment in a certain class of literary butterflies who are accustomed to sip or decline according to the theological character of the garden. It requires considerable courage to place Dante above all his rivals and salute him as

“The loftiest of poets!”

in an hour when poetry has lost the qualities that made Dante lofty and Milton grand, and when the epithet “Catholic,” which Dante loved and Milton hated, has become again a reproach. Lowell’s consideration of both is characterized by disinterestedness as to time, religion, politics, and literature; and the sincere student who casts aside his prejudices, like his hat, when he approaches the temples that enshrine so much of divinity as God deposited in the souls of the Florentine and the Puritan, will find it difficult to dissent from the judgment of Lowell upon their individuality, their inspiration, or their art. Lowell is peculiarly adapted to the form of literature, semi-critical, semi-creative, in which he has recently distinguished himself. We believe his essay on Dante to be the most successfully-accomplished task which he has yet undertaken; and the cultivated American public should thank one who has amused and diverted it as well as he has done for the solid instruction which this volume conveys in a style at once scholarly, fresh, and refined. Lowell’s mental temperament is admirably adapted for the mirroring of poets’ minds. Himself a genuine poet, without ambition above his capacity, his agile fancy discerns the quicker and appreciates more intensely the imagination of epic souls; while his critical faculty, naturally acute, has the additional advantage of a keen sense of humor, which enables him to discover more readily the incongruous, and is, therefore, an invaluable assistant in literary discrimination.

It is the trade of criticism to expose blemishes; it is genius in criticism to appreciate the subject. The journeyman critic of the last two centuries has been so busy making authors miserable without felicitating mankind that when we read through an essay like Lowell’s on Dante, on Wordsworth, or on Spenser, we cheerfully recognize a man where experience has taught us to look only for an ingenious carper or spiteful ferret. However, critics are no worse than they used to be. Swift, who had excellent opportunity of forming an opinion, both in his own practice and in the observation of that of others, has left this dramatic picture, the truthfulness of which there is no reason yet to question: [Pg 15] “The malignant deity Criticism dwelt on the top of a snowy mountain in Nova Zembla; Momus found her extended in her den upon the spoils of numberless volumes half devoured. At her right hand sat Ignorance, her father and husband, blind with age; at her left, Pride, her mother, dressing her up in the scraps of paper herself had torn. There was Opinion, her sister, light of foot, hoodwinked, and headstrong, yet giddy and perpetually turning. About her played her children, Noise and Impudence, Dulness and Vanity, Positiveness, Pedantry, and Ill-Manners.” Such is reckless and conscienceless criticism even to this day; and we turn from it, in grateful delight, to the reverential commentary which Lowell has produced upon one of the saddest of all human creatures—the great Catholic poet of the middle ages.

Dante, little understood by those who have the largest title to his legacies, is, after all, the universal poet—the poet of the soul. Homer chants the blood-red glories of war, and is the poet of a period; Virgil charms by the grace of his lines, and is the poet of an episode; Milton awes with the mighty sweeps of his rhetoric, and is the poet of the grandiose; Shakspeare astounds with his knowledge of human nature and enchains with his wit, and is the poet of the passions; Dante, when read aright, is found to be the poet of the Soul. The line that divides him from Shakspeare lies between the subjective and the objective—Shakspeare’s themes are men and women; Dante’s sole subject is Man—man within himself, as he is related to God, to religion, to eternity. As Lowell felicitously writes it, “Arma virumque cano; that is the motto of classic song. Dante says, Subjectum est homo, not vir—my theme is man, not a man.”

Why, then, do we not read him more and value him as he deserves? For two reasons: first, the difficulty of adequate translation; next, the mysterious richness of his thought, whose pearls are not strung across the door of the lines to warn us, as later poetry so candidly does, that within there is nothing but barrenness. The proper understanding of Dante has been a growth, beginning in Italy as soon as he was dead, extending gradually over Europe, into England, and now westward, gaining in clearness and glory as time recedes and space enlarges.

Within a century after the poet’s death lectures on his works were delivered in the churches, and, as soon as the invention of printing enabled, numerous editions were edited and circulated. The first translation was into Spanish; then into French; next into German; and a copy of a Latin translation of the Divine Comedy by a bishop was made at the request of two English bishops in the early part of the fifteenth century, and was sent to England. Spenser and Milton were familiar with the poet’s works, but the first complete English translation did not appear until 1802. Of the English translations since then, the most familiar are Cary’s and Longfellow’s; and to this catalogue Mr. Lowell adds: “A translation of the Inferno into quatrains by T. W. Parsons ranks with the best for spirit, truthfulness, and elegance”—praise which will be cordially endorsed by those who have profited by Mr. Parsons’ labor.

We propose to discuss Dante the man and Mr. Lowell’s estimate of him, as exhibited in his writings, and shall touch upon the latter only [Pg 16] as they may be necessary to the clearer revelation of their author’s character. For Dante, like Milton, was not of common mould; in whatever aspect we view him he proves extraordinary to a degree which frequently becomes incomprehensible. It is natural to wish to throw the two under the same light, although the result of the experiment is only to magnify their points of difference and diminish those of comparison. The sum of the results appears to be that only in the accidents of life are they comparable; in the essentials of character, with a single exception—that of intense faith—they were radically unlike. Widely apart as their names appear—Dante dying in 1321 and Milton entering life in 1608—men were engaged during the lives of both in civil revolution, and each had his own theory of government and exercised the functions of political power. Both were men of sorrow, both were unappreciated in their day and generation, and the light and joy which each experienced emanated from within and supplied the fire of their genius. The noblest work of each was written in the gloomiest period of his life. Here the possibility of parallel ends.

There is a close relation—a much closer one than may at first be suspected—between Dante and the instant condition of American society and politics. Nearly six hundred years have passed away, and we have to go back to Dante to learn personal virtue in political life, as well as religion in social affairs. Lowell has escaped the poison of the time. He perceives the essence as well as the necessity of virtue, and fully realizes its absence in our own state.

“Very hateful to his fervid heart and sincere mind would have been the modern theory which deals with sin as involuntary error, and by shifting off the fault to the shoulders of Atavism or those of Society—personified for purposes of excuse, but escaping into impersonality again from the grasp of retribution—weakens that sense of personal responsibility which is the root of self-respect and the safeguard of character. Dante, indeed, saw clearly enough that the divine justice did at length overtake society in the ruin of states caused by the corruption of private, and thence of civic, morals; but a personality so intense as his could not be satisfied with such a tardy and generalized penalty as this. ‘It is Thou,’ he says sternly, ‘who hast done this thing, and Thou, not Society, shalt be damned for it; nay, damned all the worse for this paltry subterfuge. This is not my judgment, but that of the universal Nature, from before the beginning of the world.’… He believed in the righteous use of anger, and that baseness was its legitimate quarry. He did not think the Tweeds and Fisks, the political wire-pullers and convention-packers, of his day merely amusing, and he certainly did think it the duty of an upright and thoroughly-trained citizen to speak out severely and unmistakably. He believed firmly, almost fiercely, in a divine order of the universe, a conception whereof had been vouchsafed him, and that whatever or whoever hindered or jostled it, whether wilfully or blindly it mattered not, was to be got out of the way at all hazards; because obedience to God’s law, and not making things generally comfortable, was the highest duty of man, as it was also his only way to true felicity.… It would be of little consequence to show in which of two equally selfish and short-sighted parties a man enrolled himself six hundred years ago; but it is worth something to know that a man of ambitious temper and violent passions, aspiring to office in a city of factions, could rise to a level of principle so far above them all. Dante’s opinions have life in them still, because they were drawn from living sources of reflection and experience, because they were reasoned out from the astronomic laws of history and ethics, and were not weather-guesses snatched in a glance at the doubtful political sky of the hour.”

In this Dante strikingly differed [Pg 17] from Milton, who was a revengeful and intensely-bigoted fanatic of his own faction, and he admitted to his companionship no man, high or low, who presumed to differ from him. Dante was a politician by principle, placing his country first, and setting a high value on himself as her servant. Milton was a politician by bigotry, placing himself first, and setting a high value on his country because he was her servant. But the manliness of Dante in demanding that the severe precepts of religion should be inflexibly applied to political administration in an age whose corruption was only less shocking than that of our own, is the particular lesson which this vigorous extract from Lowell conveys. If society in this era should esteem political wire-pullers, convention-packers, and politicians who deem patriotism the science of personal exigencies, as Dante esteemed and treated them, should we be any the worse off? Dante looked upon a thief as a thief, and the knave who conspired to defraud the government as fit only to “begone among the other dogs.” Would there not be a healthier tone in our political affairs if these classes of criminals were not met, as is usually the case, by justice daintily gloved and the bandage removed from her eyes, lest she should make a mistake as to persons?

The inspiration of Dante was strictly religious. So was Milton’s; but with this distinction: that Dante’s religiousness was real and beneficent, while Milton’s was unreal and malignant—as Lowell says, Milton’s “God was a Calvinistic Zeus.”

A brief and succinct analysis of the Divine Comedy will be found serviceable by those who have not analyzed it for themselves, and at the same time will make manifest the dependence of Dante’s inspiration upon Catholic doctrine:

“The poem consists of three parts—Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. Each part is divided into thirty-three cantos, in allusion to the years of the Saviour’s life; for although the Hell contains thirty-four, the first canto is merely introductory. In the form of the verse (triple rhyme) we may find an emblem of the Trinity, and in the three divisions of the threefold state of man, sin, grace, and beatitude.… Lapse through sin, mediation, and redemption—these are the subjects of the three parts of the poem; or, otherwise stated, intellectual conviction of the result of sin, typified in Virgil; … moral conversion after repentance, by divine grace, typified in Beatrice; reconciliation with God, and actual, blinding vision of him—‘The pure in heart shall see God.’… The poem is also, in a very intimate sense, an apotheosis of woman.… Nothing is more wonderful than the power of absorption and assimilation in this man, who could take up into himself the world that then was, and reproduce it with such cosmopolitan truth, to human nature and to his own individuality as to reduce all contemporary history to a mere comment on his vision. We protest, therefore, against the parochial criticism which would degrade Dante to a mere partisan; which sees in him a Luther before his time, and would clap the bonnet rouge upon his heavenly muse.”

Dante proved himself a reformer of the most aggressive kind. The difference between him and Luther was that Dante endeavored to reform men by means of the church; Luther endeavored to destroy the church rather than reform himself. Evils existed within the church, as a part of society, during the periods of both. Dante helped to correct them as a conservative; Luther chose, as a radical, to tear the edifice down. Unlike the temple of Philistia, the church stood, and the Samson of the sixteenth century fell beneath the ruins of a single column.

No fact in the history of poetry is [Pg 18] more striking than the necessity of religion as a source of inspiration. The Iliad and Odyssey acquire their epic quality from the religion of Greece; gods stalk about, and Minerva’s shield resounds in the clangor with that of Achilles. The Æneid would be beautiful without the association of mythology; but it is mythology which enhances its grace into grandeur. The Vedas are an expression of the religious aspirations of the Hindoos. The verse of Boccaccio is pleasing only in proportion as religion cleansed his pen. Petrarch’s sonnets would never have been written had not Laura taught him the distinction between pure love, as the church knows it, and the passions which carried Byron into hysterics. The Italian epic of the sixteenth century, Jerusalem Delivered, which is held by Hallam to be equal in grace to the Æneid, had the First Crusade for its theme. Would it have been possible for Milton to have written any poem equal to Paradise Lost out of other than Scriptural materials? Aside from the literary characteristics and dramatic strength of the plays of Shakspeare, does not their chief value lie in their correct morality—the morality which is found nowhere outside Catholic teaching? This is not the place to discuss the modern decline of poetry. Matthew Arnold’s theory—it is a general favorite—is that history and boldly-outlined epochs make poetry; and Lowell says, in his essay on Milton, “It is a high inspiration to be the neighbor of great events.” But the last two centuries have been crowded with history; boldly-outlined epochs have lifted their awful summits in England, in France, in Italy, in the United States, in Spain. Where are the great poets among the verse-makers who have been neighbors of these great events, and might have caught high inspiration from them? Since the Reformation the moral world has been growing iconoclastic, and there is no poetry in iconoclasm.

Next to religion, woman has been the great inspiration of poets; but the modern idea of marriage has shattered the sanctuary walls which Christianity erected around it; the sacredness of home is invaded, the oneness of love destroyed—there is no poetry in divorce.

Is not the decline of poetry a very curious, if not a fatal, reply to the hypothesis of evolution, carried logically into the moral and intellectual world?

Mr. Lowell completes his essay by a minute examination of Dante’s thought and style, as exhibited in the Divine Comedy; and we can find space only for the closing period:

“At the Round Table of King Arthur there was left always one seat empty for him who should accomplish the adventure of the Holy Grail. It was called the perilous seat, because of the dangers he would encounter who would win it. In the company of the epic poets there was a place left for whoever should embody the Christian idea of a triumphant life, outwardly all defeat, inwardly victorious; who should make us partakers in that cup of sorrow in which all are communicants with Christ. He who should do this would achieve indeed the perilous seat; for he must combine poesy with doctrine in such cunning wise that the one lose not its beauty nor the other its severity—and Dante has done it. As he takes possession of it we seem to hear the cry he himself heard when Virgil rejoined the company of great singers:

‘All honor to the loftiest of poets!’”

Mr. Lowell’s Dante is a man divinely inspired and overshadowed by divinity to the grave itself—a character austere, devoid of humor, unflinchingly faithful to his [Pg 19] conceptions of right whether moral or political, self-respecting, and believing in his own commission from God; a mind logical, systematic, and illuminated by Heaven, consciously developing its marvellous genius in the midst of contumely; a heart consumed first by human love for Beatrice, and by it purged and refined out of personality into the love of God and the proper relative appreciation of all creatures; a sublime human soul, in brief, transformed from the individual into the universal, and teaching all men, as it was taught in sorrow and in love, to seek eternity as the sole object worthy of human effort; and teaching in a lofty splendor of phrase and successions of exquisite imagery which continue to astonish posterity and will for ever adorn general literature.

The essay on Milton is devoted rather to Mr. David Masson than to the poet. There is nothing to indicate that the critic is in love with either the poems or the personality of the sublime Puritan who officiated in the capacity of Latin secretary to Oliver Cromwell, and who devoted himself to epic verse after his services ceased to be available for the oppression of his fellow-men. Still less is he enamored of Mr. David Masson as a biographer of Milton, and the jovial though thoroughly effective manner in which he demonstrates the Scotch professor’s unfitness for this office adds to his volume a flavor of pungency which brings back happy recollections of the “Table for Critics.” Masson is very voluminous and exasperatingly given to remote and often irrelevant detail; and Macaulay, in extinguishing some of the literary pretenders of his time, was never more dextrous than Lowell in this grotesque joust at the Edinburgh professor’s faults, nor half so witty. Referring to the length of the biography—there are eight volumes octavo of the Life and Works—Lowell says with perfect gravity: “We envy the secular leisures of Methuselah, and are thankful that his biography, at least (if written in the same longeval proportion), is irrecoverably lost to us. What a subject that would have been for a person of Mr. Masson’s spacious predilections!” And he goes on to say: “It is plain, from the preface to the second volume, that Mr. Masson himself has an uneasy consciousness that something is wrong, and that Milton ought to be more than a mere incident of his own biography.” Masson, on the other hand, is of opinion “that, whatever may be thought by a hasty person looking in on the subject from the outside,” no one can study Milton without being obliged to study also the history of England, Scotland, and Ireland; whereupon Lowell retorts that, even for a hasty person, eleven years is “rather long to have his button held by a biographer ere he begins his next sentence.”

Masson’s rambling history of the seventeenth century “is interrupted now and then,” says Lowell, “by an unexpected apparition of Milton, who, like Paul Pry, just pops in and hopes he does not intrude, to tell us what he has been doing in the meanwhile.” Blinded by the dust of old papers which Masson ransacks, to discover that they have no relation to his hero, the critic compares the ponderous biography to Allston’s picture of Elijah in the wilderness, “where a good deal of research at last enables us to guess at the prophet absconded like a conundrum in the landscape, where the very ravens could scarce have found him out.”

[Pg 20] This characterization of Edinburgh by Harvard will certainly inspire suggestion, if it does not awaken hope; but Lowell’s right to criticise the sedate and prolix gentleman who occupies in the Scottish metropolis the chair which he himself fills at Cambridge does not rest, as we have already seen in the essay on Dante, on Susarion’s faculty of turning the serious and dull into actual comedy.

Like all who have recently written of Milton—with the exception of Masson—Lowell looks upon him as a being “set apart.” To idealize the author of Paradise Lost is quite as natural as to idealize Dante, notwithstanding their relative distances from us; but in the former case, with Lowell, it is the idealization of admiring awe; in the latter, of tender and exquisitely appreciative love. He does not appear to hold Milton in any degree of the personal affection which he feels for the inspired Florentine, but is constrained to insist that Masson is disrespectful toward his subject, and that “Milton is the last man in the world to be slapped on the back with impunity.”

When Lowell writes of Milton’s literary style, although he does it sparingly, every stroke is a master’s. His estimate of Milton as a man is calm, judicial, and courageous. “He stands out,” he says, “in marked and solitary individuality, apart from the great movement of the civil war, apart from the supine acquiescence of the Restoration, a self-opinionated, unforgiving, and unforgetting man.” It is the habit of hurried teachers of our day, who have to teach so many more things than they know, to exalt Milton

“High on a throne of royal state,”

and swing before him the incense of a senseless and absurd homage. In our school-days most of us were led to look upon the sightless poet as a being more than man, if a little less than God. Virtues, as he understood them, he certainly possessed; but many more virtuous than he suffered ignominy and death for presuming to exercise the very liberty which he grandly claimed for himself, but which, we find on examining his prose, he was dilatory in awarding to others, even in the abstract. These prose writings are at once curious and monstrous, and exhibit the real Milton in a true and natural light, even as Samson Agonistes, Lycidas, and Paradise Lost manifest his superb and supreme characteristics as a poet. In prose he wrote as he thought; in verse he wrote as he could. He was always the rhetorician, making an art of what men of less genius can display only as the artificial; but while his poetry is the complete manifestation of his art, his prose, always written with an obvious and acknowledged personal purpose, manifests himself. His prose works are already scarce; the day is not distant when nothing will remain of them but their ashes, for the types will plead release from perpetuating the hard, angular, stony reality of a man whom taste, if not instinct, yearns to withdraw from our painful knowledge of what he was, and veil him in a radiant mistiness of what we wish he might have been. Nothing better illustrates the idealism with which the pencil of youth paints Milton than Macaulay’s essay, written while he was still a boy, but included with the mature expressions of his manhood. Nothing could more completely pulverize this roseate estimate than Milton’s own works in the days when he wrote for time and not for immortality. No matter what the theme, his prose is always ponderous and polysyllabic, [Pg 21] abounding in magnificent metaphor, violent epithets, arrogant dogmatism, and personal abuse of those who differed from him, of which no trace, happily, remains in our day. The higher the man, the coarser the missile which he hurled at him with a giant’s force. In his reply to Salmasius he addresses that eminent scholar as “a vain, flashy man,” and, in the progress of his argument, reminds him that he is also a knave, a pragmatical coxcomb, a bribed beggar, a whipped dog, an impotent slave, a renegade, a sacrilegious wretch, a mongrel cur, an obscure scoundrel, a fearful liar, and a mass of corruption.

He seems to have lacked both consistency and clearness of conviction. He was apparently incapable of loving woman; he scarcely respected her; and, in his social theory, awarded the sex a place somewhat below that which it occupied under the patriarchs, and considerably lower than that described by Homer as peculiar to the heroic age of Greece. He obtained coy and pretty Mary Powell from her father in consideration of so many pounds of the coin of the realm, at a time when a mortgage had become embarrassing and a daughter was the only available means of extinguishing it. When that volatile young woman, shivering in the shadows of a Puritan despot, found courage enough to leave his roof, Milton was undoubtedly more impressed by her audacity than grieved by her absence. It was his pride that was hurt; and notwithstanding that he had previously advocated social views of the straitest and most conservative kind, he then published his essay on divorce, which, in amazing egotism, in wealth of classical and Scriptural allusion, in looseness of morals, and in equality of social privileges as between man and woman, is as veritable a curiosity as antiquarians have yet rescued from the monumental mysteries of old Assyria. In politics and religion he was as unsound and wavering as in his laws for society. An aristocrat of the most despotic type, he enthroned learning, and yet permitted his daughters to acquire only the alphabets, that he might use their senses as his slaves. He despised them as human beings, and they, in turn, hated and deceived him, and almost his last words on earth were terrible denunciations of those whom God intended to illumine his home, soothe his life, and deliver his whitened head, already aureoled, to

“Dear, beauteous Death.”

For many years—the very best of his life—he lent himself to the political schemes of Oliver Cromwell, and the violence and coarseness of his pamphlets made him one of the most conspicuous figures of a long series of civil storms; yet Lowell is constrained to admit that “neither in politics, theology, nor social ethics did Milton leave any distinguishable trace on the thought of his time or in the history of opinion.” He considered his ideas and inclinations correct and above appeal, simply because they were John Milton’s. The harshest word which Lowell says of his prose style is his comparison of a man of Milton’s personal character, which was without taint, to Martin Luther, whose writings were a true reflection of their author. Lowell is very gentle in saying of so noted a plagiarist as Milton: “A true Attic bee, he made boot on every lip where there was a trace of truly classic honey.” He did indeed, not in prose only, but in his verse. But we easily forgive him. There are thieves whom stolen garments more become than their owners.

[2] Among my Books. Second Series.

[Pg 22]

ARE YOU MY WIFE?

BY THE AUTHOR OF “PARIS BEFORE THE WAR,” “NUMBER THIRTEEN,” “PIUS VI.,” ETC.

CHAPTER XIV.

THE EPISODE EXPLAINED.

The night closed in—night, that is so cruel, yet so merciful; intensifying every pain in the long dark watch, or lulling it in blessed sleep.

There was very little sleep for Raymond that night, and none at all for his two nurses. They sat by his bed while the slow hours dragged on, watching his feverish restlessness, that was occasionally soothed by broken snatches of rest, thanks to a potion that was administered at intervals. Franceline’s anxiety gradually returned as she sat there observing every sound and symptom. She could not but see that there was something far more serious in this sudden attack than an ordinary fainting fit. Raymond was so troubled and excited in his sleep that she almost wished him to awake; and then again she longed for unconsciousness to soothe his feverish terrors. He clutched her hand; he could not bear her to move from him. At last the dawn came, and like a bright-winged angel scattered the darkness and scared away the ghostly phantoms of the night, and Raymond fell into a slumber long and deep enough to be refreshing.

Some days passed without bringing any change; but he was no worse, which, the doctor said, meant that he was better. His condition, however, continued extremely critical.

It was wonderful both to Angélique and to herself how Franceline bore up under the strain; for both her mental and physical powers were severely taxed. She had hardly closed her eyes since her father had fallen ill; and she took scarcely any food. But anxiety, so long as it does not utterly break us down, buoys us up.

The few neighbors who were intimate were kind and sympathizing. Lady Anwyll had driven over and made anxious inquiries, and would gladly be of use in any way, if she could. Miss Bulpit also came to offer her services in any way they could be available. Miss Merrywig called every day. So far Franceline had seen none of them; she was always with her father when they called, and Angélique would not disturb her for visitors.

Father Henwick came constantly to inquire, but did not always ask to see the young girl. Franceline wondered why her father had not before this expressed a wish to see him; it seemed so natural that such a wish should have manifested itself the moment Raymond was able to receive any one. She dared not take the initiative and suggest it, but she could not help feeling that it would be an immense relief to the sufferer if he could disburden his mind of the weight that was upon it, and speak to Father Henwick as to a tried and affectionate friend, if even he did not as yet seek spiritual help and guidance from him. It had [Pg 23] long since been borne in on Franceline that the horrible suspicion which had so mysteriously fallen on Raymond was in some way or other connected with his sudden illness; she brooded over the thought until it became a fixed idea and haunted her day and night. How was it that he did not instinctively turn for comfort to the Source where he was sure to find it? Father Henwick himself must feel pained and surprised at not having been summoned to the sick-room before this. Franceline was thinking over it all one morning, sitting near Raymond’s bedside, when Angélique put in her head and announced in a loud whisper that M. le Curé, as she dubbed Father Henwick, was down-stairs, and would be glad if she could speak to him a moment. Franceline rose softly, and was leaving the room, when her father, who was not dozing, as she fancied, said:

“Why does he not come up and see me? I should be glad to see him; it would do me good.”

Father Henwick came up without delay, and Franceline soon made a pretext for leaving him alone with the invalid. It was with a beating heart that she closed the door on them and went down-stairs to wait till she was recalled. She could hear only the full, clear tones of Father Henwick’s voice at first; after a while these grew lower, and then she heard the murmur of Raymond’s voice; then there seemed to follow a silence. She was too agitated to pray in words, but her heart prayed silently with intense fervor. The conference lasted a full half-hour, and then Father Henwick’s cheerful voice sounded on the stairs.

“How do you think he looks, father?” she said, meeting him at the study door with another question in her eyes that Father Henwick thought he understood.

“Much better than I expected!” he answered promptly and with a heartiness of conviction that was music to her ears; “and you will find that from this out he will improve steadily, and rapidly, I hope, too.”

A stifled “Thank God!” was Franceline’s answer.

“And now how about you?” said the priest, with something of the old blunt grumble that was so much more reassuring than the tenderness called forth by pity. “I heard a very bad account of you this morning—no sleep, and no food, and no air; you mean to fret yourself into an illness before your father is up and able to attend on you, do you? That would be one way of showing your dutiful affection for him. Humph! Are those the eyes for a young lady to have in her head on a fine sunny morning like this? Did you go to bed at all last night?”

“Yes, but I could not sleep; I was too anxious, too unhappy.”

“Too unbelieving, too mistrustful. Go up-stairs this minute, you child of little faith, and lie down and lay your head upon the pillow of divine Providence, and be asleep in five minutes!”

He left her with this peremptory injunction, and Franceline, with a lightened heart, went up-stairs determined to obey it. It was as yet, of course, a matter of pure conjecture what had passed between the priest and her father; but when, an hour later, after obediently taking that refreshing sleep on the pillow of divine Providence which had been commanded her, she came into Raymond’s room, there was a marked change in his whole [Pg 24] demeanor. He had not passed the interval in the listless apathy that had now become habitual to him. He had made Angélique bring over a little celestial globe and set it on the bed for him, and had amused himself with it awhile; and then he had taken up the book Franceline had left on the chair beside him when she stole out of the room. It was The Imitation of Christ. He was reading it when she entered, and there was an expression on his features that made her happier than she had been for a long time. He looked more peaceful, more life-like than she had seen him for weeks even before he had fallen ill.

“You are feeling better, petit père?” she said, kissing him, and taking the dear face between her hands to look into it more closely.

“Yes, my clair de lune, much better,” he replied, with a smile that had all its wonted sweetness and something of the old brightness. “I think I shall be able to get down-stairs in a day or two.”

“I see you have been at your old tricks again,” she said, shaking her finger at him and pointing to the globe; “you know you are forbidden to do anything that gives you the least fatigue.”

“It was not a fatigue, my little one—it amused me; but I will not do it again, if you don’t wish it.”

Franceline hugged his head to her cheek, and said she would let him do anything so long as it amused him.

“I was thinking of you last night, petit père,” she said, making the globe revolve slowly on its axis; “the sky was so beautiful at twelve o’clock when I happened to look out of my window that I longed for you to see it.”

“Ha! Then probably it will be the same to-night,” said Raymond. “I will keep my curtain drawn, so that I may see it, if it is.”

“Yes; and let the moon keep you awake whether you will or not! I should like to hear what Angélique would say to that proposal! No; but I will tell you what we’ll do: I will be on the watch to-night, and if the stars are like last night I will steal in and see if you are awake, and if you are I will draw the curtain so that you may see them from your bed. We shall be like two savants making our ‘observations’ in the night-time, shall we not? And—who knows?—we may discover a new star!”

Raymond pinched her cheek and laughed gently. His hopes in this respect were limited by facts—or rather negatives—that Franceline did not stop to inquire into; she had not gone deeply into the science of astronomy.

“There is no saying what I might not discover with those bright eyes of thine for a telescope,” said M. de la Bourbonais.

Angélique rejoiced in her own fashion at the decided turn for the better that her master had suddenly taken. She saw that he spoke a good deal during the evening, and ate with a nearer approach to appetite than he had yet shown; so she settled him for the night, and went to bed with a lighter heart than for many past nights, and soon slept soundly.

Franceline did not follow her example. It was not anxiety that kept her awake, but happiness; she could not bring herself to part with it so quickly, and lose it for a time in unconsciousness. There was a presence, too, in the ecstatic silence of the night, that answered to this sense of joy and appealed [Pg 25] to her for responsive watch. Joys are more intense when we dwell on them in the night-time, because they are more separate, farther lifted from the jarring discord of our daily lives, where pain cries around us in so many multiform tongues. It is as if the world grew wider in spiritual space, and that senses and fibres, too delicate to vibrate in the glare of daylight, woke up in the solemn hush when the world of man is out of sight and God comes nearer to us.

Franceline stood at the window and gazed at the beautiful scene that spread itself before her. The moon was at her full; the landscape, diluted in the moonlight, floated in mystic, illimitable space, still and hushed as if the world were holding its breath to hear the stars tingling in the sapphire dome; every tree and blade of grass were listening to the silence; the river sped stealthily along like a silver snake between its banks where the gray poplars stood looking down, frighted by the vibration of their own shadows, dyeing themselves black in the water.

“If he were awake, how he would enjoy this!” murmured Franceline to herself; and then, unable to resist the temptation, she stole softly through Angélique’s room and across the landing into Raymond’s. The doors were all open, partly to admit more air, partly that they might hear the least tinkle of his little hand-bell, if he sounded it.

“Is that my Franceline?” asked a voice from the bed. The night light threw her shadow on the floor, and Raymond, who was not asleep, saw it.

“Yes, petit père,” she answered in a whisper; “the sky is so lovely I thought I must come and see if you were awake. Shall I draw the curtain?”

“Yes.”

She did so, and then crept back and knelt down beside him. Raymond laid his cheek against her head, and clasped her hand in his, and they remained for some moments gazing at the beauty of the heavens in silence. Then he said, making long pauses, as if he were thinking aloud rather than speaking to her:

“How wonderful is the splendor of God as he reveals it to us in his works!… Who can measure his power, his glory?… Think what it means, the creation of one of those stars! And there are myriads and myriads of them spangling millions of miles of blue sky! There are no steppes, no barren spots, there where the stars cannot grow. They are not like flowers, those stars of our world; they never perish or fade—they only draw behind the light for a while; always harmonious, moving in their appointed places like the notes of a divine symphony; they make no discord. The great stars are not scornful of the little ones; the little stars are not jealous of the great; each is content to be as it is and where it is, and to stay where the great Star-Maker has fixed it.… My clair de lune, let us try and be content like the stars.”

Franceline raised his hand to her lips, and murmured the strophe of her favorite hymn of S. Francis: “Praised be my Lord for our sister the moon, and for the stars, which he has set clear and lovely in the heavens.…”

The next morning Father Henwick came and was once more closeted with Raymond. Nothing had been said about it, but, when the door-bell sounded, M. de la [Pg 26] Bourbonais glanced quickly at the clock, and exclaimed in a tone of surprise: “Already half-past twelve! I did not think it was so late. Thou wilt show him up at once, my child, and then leave us alone for a little.”

No further explanation was necessary. Franceline kissed him in silence, placed a chair close by his pillow, and then, in a happy flutter, went down to meet Father Henwick.

Two days after this there was great joy at The Lilies. The little cottage was decked out as for a bridal. Franceline had stayed up late to have it all finished for the early morning; she would do everything with her own hands. The stairs were wreathed with garlands of green leaves and ferns; every vase and cup she could find was filled with the sweet spring flowers—cowslips, primroses, anemones, and wild violets—and placed in the tiny entrance and on the landing opposite Raymond’s room. The room itself was transformed into a chapel. At the foot of the bed stood a small table covered with Franceline’s snowiest muslin, joyously sacrificed for the occasion. Lights were burning on either side of a large crucifix; there were lights and flowers on the mantelpiece, where she had placed her statue of the Madonna and other precious ornaments; the thin curtains were drawn and filled the little room with a soft golden twilight. Franceline was kneeling beside the bed, reciting some litany aloud, which Raymond answered from a book in timid, reverential under-tones.

But now a sudden hush falls upon the faintly-broken silence. There is a sound of footsteps without; a dear and awful Presence is approaching. No need to ring; the door stands open to its widest, and Angélique, kneeling on the threshold, adores and welcomes the divine Guest; a little bell goes tinkling up amidst the flowers, and ceases as it enters the illuminated room.…

* * * * *

The sudden improvement in Raymond’s state was not followed by a proportionately rapid progress. He still continued extremely weak, and was not able to come down-stairs until several days later. Dr. Blink was puzzled; he had been very sanguine when the rally took place, and now he hardly knew what to think. He was convinced from the first that the attack had been in a great measure caused by some mental shock; but that seemed at one moment to have righted itself, and he thought his patient was safe. This was apparently a mistake. The pressure may have been unexpectedly lightened, but it was clearly not removed; and until this was done medicine could do very little.

“There is something on his mind,” said the doctor to Mr. Langrove one morning, on coming out from his daily visit; “there is some trouble weighing on him, and he will not recover until something is done toward removing it.”

The vicar understood perfectly the drift of this remark. It was an appeal from the medical man to the friend of the patient for help or light. Mr. Langrove could give neither. He observed that the count had been seriously anxious about Franceline’s health; but Dr. Blink shook his head. He knew how to discriminate between the effect of heartache and a pressure on the mind. In this case the mind was oppressed by some secret burden, or he was very much mistaken; [Pg 27] it might be some painful apprehension in the future, or something distressing in the past; but whatever the cause was, past or future, the present effect was unmistakable, and, unless some friend who had the full confidence of the patient could afford some relief, the worst might still be apprehended. Mr. Langrove answered by some irrelevant expression of sympathy and regret, but volunteered no opinion of his own. He went home and sat down and wrote to Sir Simon Harness. This was all he could think of. If Sir Simon could not help, he believed no one else could.

It so happened that the baronet was just now absent in the South of Italy, in dutiful attendance on Lady Rebecca; and as he had been called off suddenly, and left no orders about his letters being sent after him, those directed to his bankers lay there unopened. There was another besides Mr. Langrove’s lying there, which, if it had reached him, would have rejoiced the baronet’s heart and provoked a quick response.

The fears which Raymond’s tardy progress raised in the mind of his medical man were not shared by Franceline. Hope still triumphed over alarm, and she felt confident that, since the great weight on her father’s mind had been removed, his complete recovery must ultimately follow. This certainty made the delay easy to bear. It was wonderful how her own strength bore up. She had quite lost her cough—a fact which confirmed the doctor’s previous opinion that the nerves had more to do with this symptom than the lungs—she kept well, and was altogether in better health than for some months previously. Her spirits raised to elation after that happy morning’s episode, continued excellent—at times as joyous as a child’s.

The moment M. de la Bourbonais was able to get down-stairs Angélique insisted on Franceline going every day for a walk while the sun was shining. One morning, when he had come down and was comfortably established on the sofa in his study, propped up so that he could see out of the window, Franceline said she was going to gather him a bouquet. She smoothed and changed the cushions, put another shawl over his feet, moved the sofa a little bit nearer the window, and then back again a little bit nearer the fire, until, finding there was absolutely nothing more to fuss over, except to kiss him for the tenth time with “Au revoir, petit père!” as if they were separating for a journey, she sallied forth for her constitutional.

The weather was mild and beautiful; spring was intoning the first bars of its idyl, striking bright emerald notes from the tips of the trees, and drawing low, pink whispers from the blackthorn in the hedges; the birds were beginning to tune their lutes and make ready for the great concert that was at hand. Franceline’s heart bounded in unison with the pulse of joy and universal awakening; she began to warble a duet with the skylark as she went along, stopping every now and then to make a nosegay of the pink and white anemones and violets and torch-like king-cups that grew in wild luxuriance in the woods and fields. Dullerton was famous for its wild flowers. Half an hour passed quickly while thus engaged, and then she turned homewards. The doves were on the watch for her, “sunning their milk-white bosoms on the thatch,” as she came [Pg 28] in sight, and swelling the sweet harmony of earth and sky with a tender, well-contented coo. But hark! Could that be the cuckoo that was already calling from the woods? She paused with her hand on the latch to listen. No: it was only the voice of the sunshine echoing through her own happy heart. She pushed open the gate and walked quickly on; but again her step was arrested. Some one was coming round by the park entrance. It was no doubt Mr. Langrove; no one else came that way—no one but Sir Simon Harness, and there he stood. Franceline had nearly uttered a cry, when a quick sign from the baronet checked it and made her walk leisurely on without doing anything to attract attention. She cast a furtive glance towards the casement, to see if by chance her father had changed his place and come to sit by the window; but he was still on the sofa where she had left him.

Sir Simon opened his arms and clasped her with a warmth of emotion that did not surprise Franceline.

“You heard that he was ill! You are come to see him!” she exclaimed.

“I have only heard it this minute from my people at the house. Why did you not write to me, child? Ah! he would not let you, I suppose? My poor Raymond! And now how is he? Can I see him? Will he see me?”

“Why should he not see you, dear Sir Simon?” said Franceline, raising her large, soft glance to him, full of wondering reproach.

“Of course, of course,” said the baronet; “but is he strong enough to see me? They tell me he has been terribly shaken by this illness. It might cause him a shock if he saw me too suddenly.”

“Shall I tell him that you are expected down to-day? That would break it to him,” suggested Franceline. “Or you might write a line and send it in first to say you were here; would that do?”

Before Sir Simon could decide for either alternative, fate, in the shape of Angélique, decided for him. She had seen Franceline enter the garden, and wondered why she loitered outside instead of coming in; so she came out to see, and, on beholding Sir Simon, threw up her arms with a shout of astonishment.

Franceline cried out “Hush!” and shook her hand at the old woman, but it was too late; Raymond had seen and heard her from his sofa.

“Go in at once,” said Sir Simon, much excited—“go and tell him I am come to kiss his feet; to ask his forgiveness on my knees. Tell him I know everything.” And he pushed her gently from him. Franceline did not stop to ask what the strange message could mean, but ran in, thinking only how best she could deliver it so as to avoid too sudden a shock to her father.

Raymond was sitting up on the sofa, his face slightly flushed.

“What is the matter? Who is there?” he cried.

“Dear father, nothing is the matter; only something you will be glad to hear,…” she began.

“Ha! it is Simon! What has he come for? What does he want?”

“He wants to embrace you; and, father, he bade me say that he knows everything, and has come to ask you to forgive him and let him kiss your feet. He is waiting; may he come in?”

But Raymond did not answer; he was murmuring some words to himself, with hands lifted reverently as in prayer, while a smile of unearthly joy diffused itself on his [Pg 29] whole countenance. The emotion was too much for him; he fell back exhausted on his pillow.

Franceline thought he had fainted and screamed out for help. Sir Simon was beside her in an instant.

“Raymond! my friend, my brother, can you ever forgive me?” he cried, kneeling beside M. de la Bourbonais and taking his hand in both his.

“You know the truth, then? You got his letter?”

“Whose letter? I got no letter; but I found the ring. Look at it!”

He drew an enamelled snuff-box from his pocket, opened it, and held up the diamond, that flashed in the sun like a little star.

“Thank Heaven! I shall now be justified before all men!” exclaimed M. de la Bourbonais with trembling emotion. “This is more than I dared to hope. My God! I give thee thanks for this great mercy.”

No one spoke for a moment. Franceline had signed to Angélique to leave the room, but remained herself, a silent spectator of the strange scene.

“Who had it? How was it found?” said M. de la Bourbonais, taking the ring and examining it with an expression of mistrust, as if it were some uncanny thing that he half expected to see melt in his fingers.

“It has been in my possession, locked up at the Court, all this time!” replied Sir Simon. “You may remember I used this snuff-box that night, and sent it round the table. Someone dropped the ring into it unawares; it was not opened afterwards, and it never entered into my stupid brain to think of looking into it. I went away in a great hurry next morning, and threw the snuff-box into a safe in my room where I keep papers and the loose jewelry I have in use. I came down this afternoon to get a deed out of the safe, saw the snuff-box, and by the merest chance opened it and found the ring.”

“Mon Dieu!” murmured Raymond, after hearing this simple explanation of the mistake that had very nearly cost him his life.

“Bourbonais, can you ever forgive me?” said Sir Simon.

Raymond opened his arms without speaking. Sir Simon flung himself with a sob upon his breast, and the two clung together and wept.

Franceline felt as if even she had no right to be present; that she was intruding in a sacred place where some mystery, not intended for her eyes, was being unfolded. She was moving softly toward the door when her father called her back.

“Come hither, my child; come and embrace me. I can have no happiness that thou dost not share.”

“Franceline,” said Sir Simon, rising from his knees and taking her hand with an expression of humility that was very touching in the grand, white-haired gentleman, “I have been guilty of a great act of disloyalty towards your father. I cannot tell you what it was; perhaps he will. Meantime, he has forgiven me for the sake of our long friendship, and because his soul is too noble, too generous, to bear malice, even against an unfaithful friend. Will you do as he has done, and say you forgive me too?”

His voice was full of trembling, his eyes were still moist. Franceline did as he had done to her father: she flung her arms round his neck and wept.

TO BE CONTINUED.

[Pg 30]

A SEQUEL OF THE GLADSTONE CONTROVERSY.

III.

The keen relish which we all have for other people’s sins is proverbial. As those who think with us are right, so are they virtuous who have only our own vices. Prodigality, which, to the miser’s thinking, is the worst of sins, is, in the eyes of the spendthrift, merely an evidence of a generous nature. Men who wish to be thought gentlemen have a weakness for what are called gentlemanly vices; but from the coarser though less depraved wickedness of the vulgar they turn with loathing. This bias of our common nature is not confined in its action to individuals; it affects classes, nations, races. The rich are shocked by the vices of the poor, and the poor, in turn, no less by those of the rich; masters hate the sins of servants, and are repaid in their own coin.

When the free-born Briton sings, “England, with all thy faults, I love thee still,” he means that faults, if only they be English, are after all not so bad. Wrapt up in the precious bundle of our self-love are all our pet sins and weaknesses. The universal hatred which existed between the nations of antiquity must be attributed in great part to the fact that their vices were unlike, and therefore repellant. The national contempt for foreigners is, in Christian times, strong in proportion to the barbarism of the people by whom it is felt; but in Greece and Rome such civilization as was then possible seemed to have no power over this prejudice. Not to be a Greek was to have been created for vile uses, and not to be a Roman was to be nobody. The French, as seen by the English, are giddy and lack dignity; the English appear to French eyes, sulky and wanting in good nature; the Turk thinks both struck with madness, because they walk about and stretch their legs when they might sit still; and though he is at their mercy, yet he cannot persuade himself that they are anything but Christian dogs. The negro is quite sure the first man must have been black, and in this he is in accord with Mr. Darwin. The North American Indian will vanish from the earth through the golden portals of the western world still believing that he is the superior of the “pale face.” The power of national prejudice is almost incredible. “Our country, right or wrong” is, we believe, an American phrase; but it expresses a sentiment which is almost universally held to be right and proper. In international disputes men nearly always take sides with their own country, without stopping to inquire into the merits of the quarrel, which, indeed, the strong feeling that at once masters them would prevent them from being able to do. They act instinctively like children who always think that in difficulties with neighbors their own parents are in the right. We Americans are certainly not paragons of virtue, and in this centennial year it is probably wise to discuss almost anything rather than our morals; yet we cannot but think that M. Louis Veuillot was somewhat under the influence of national prejudice when he wrote that, if we [Pg 31] were sunk in the bottom of the ocean, civilization would have lost nothing. Our form of government, it is true, does not lead us to look for salvation, either in church or state, from a king by divine right; still, he might just as well have let us alone, especially as he is at no loss for quarrels at home. Nor can we think that the Germans who have raised such a storm of indignation over the crime in Bremerhaven, committed, as it is supposed, by an American, would have held the whole German people and their civilization responsible for the offence had they known its author to be native there and to the manner born.

As no passion takes hold of the human heart with such sovereign power as that of religion, it follows that no bias of judgment is more fatal to truth than religious prejudice; and now let us gently descend again to M. Emile de Laveleye and his pamphlet:

“It is agreed on all sides,” he says (p. 25), “that the power of nations depends on their morality. Everywhere is found the maxim, which is almost become an axiom of political science, that where morals are corrupted the state is lost. Now, it appears to be an established fact that the moral level is higher among Protestant than among Catholic populations. Religious writers confess this themselves, and explain it by the fact that the former remain more faithful to their religion than the latter, which explanation I believe to be the true one.”

Here is fairness surely. The soft impeachment could not have been made in a more moderate or subdued tone. Catholics are notoriously more immoral than Protestants; but the subject is a painful one, and M. de Laveleye does not wish to emphasize the unpleasant truth by giving proof—which, indeed, would be superfluous, since Catholics themselves, we are assured, admit the fact and are concerned only about its explanation; and, strange to say, they have found the key to the mystery in the greater fidelity of Protestants to their religion: so M. de Laveleye and the Catholics shake hands and the dispute is at an end.

The position of Protestants with regard to this question is peculiar. The very life of their religion is intimately associated with a fixed belief in the preternatural wickedness of popes, priests, nuns, and Catholics generally. The sole justification of Protestantism was found in the abominable corruptions of Rome, and its only defence is that it is a purer worship, capable of creating a higher morality. The history of the Reformation, as written by Protestants, traces its origin to an awful and heaven-inspired indignation at the sight of papal iniquity, which resulted in a divine Protest against sin. It is this feeling, indeed, which is the living human magnetism in the words of Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, and Knox. They all felt that in so far as they protested against open and patent evil they were right, and therefore strong. Leo X., with God’s eternal truth, but encircled by all the Graces and Muses, was at a disadvantage with those strong and plain-spoken men. In fact, the eternal ally of human error is human truth. It is because men who are right do wrong that men who are wrong seem right; and if men in general were fit to be priests of God, there would be on earth no power to oppose the Catholic Church. St. Paul had protested, St. John Chrysostom had protested, St. Peter Damian had protested, St. Bernard had protested, St. Catherine of Sienna had protested, and yet there was no Protestantism. [Pg 32] To protest was well and is well, but to seek to found a religion upon a protest is madness; and this is Protestantism. With Protestants purity of dogma is out of the question; and nothing, therefore, remains to them but purity of morals. To this they must cling like drowning men to straws. Protestantism, if considered from a doctrinal point of view, is nihilism. Gather up the hundred sects which, taken collectively, are called Protestantism, and we will find every positive religious dogma excluded; not even the personal existence of God remains. Mr. Matthew Arnold is a true Bible-Protestant, who has a little sect of his own, and all that he holds is that there is “a Power in us, not ourselves, which makes for righteousness”; and this he has discovered to be the sum and substance of all Scripture teaching. Doctrinal Protestantism is like the wrong side of a piece of tapestry with its fag-ends hanging in patches, twisted and jumbled; and yet they are the very substance out of which has been wrought a work of divine beauty. The dogmatic weakness of Protestantism throws its whole energy upon the moral side of religion. Its utter falseness, when we accept the fact that Christ has established a divine system of faith, is so manifest that no impartial thinker would hesitate to give his full assent to the sentiment of Rousseau: “Show me that in religious matters I must accept authority, and I shall become a Catholic at once.” Supposing the Christian religion to be what it is commonly held to be by both Catholics and Protestants, it necessarily follows that the Catholic Church is the only logical as it is the only historical Christianity. This, we believe, is the almost universally-received opinion of non-Christian writers in our own day, in which, for the first time since the Reformation, a considerable number of learned men who are neither Catholic nor Protestant have been able to view this subject dispassionately. We do not mean to say that these writers prefer the church to the sects; on the contrary, they are partial to these because in their workings they perceive, as they think, the breaking-up and dissolution of the whole Christian system. Protestantism is valuable in their eyes as a stage in what Herbert Spencer calls “the universal religious thaw” which is going on around us. If there has been no divine revelation, then whatever tends to weaken the claim of the church to be the depository of such revelation is good, especially as her claim is the only one which rests upon a valid historical basis. And it is because a very large number of men more than half suspect there never has been a revelation that Protestantism meets with so much favor from the unbelieving and pagan world, as serving the purpose of an easy stepping-stone from the strong and pronounced supernaturalism of the church to the nature-worship of Darwin and Spencer or the German Culturists.

Macaulay was struck and puzzled by what his keen eye could not fail to perceive to be so universal a phenomenon as to have the force of a law of history.

“It is surely remarkable,” says this brilliant writer, “that neither the moral revolution of the eighteenth century nor the moral counter-revolution of the nineteenth should have in any perceptible degree added to the domain of Protestantism. During the former period whatever was lost to Catholicism was lost also to Christianity; during the latter whatever was regained by Christianity in Catholic countries was regained also by [Pg 33] Catholicism. We should naturally have expected that many minds, on the way from superstition to infidelity, or on the way back from infidelity to superstition, would have stopped at an intermediate point. Between the doctrines taught in the schools of the Jesuits, and those which were maintained at the little supper-parties of the Baron Holbach, there is a vast interval in which the human mind, it should seem, might find for itself some resting-place more satisfactory than either of the two extremes; and at the time of the Reformation millions found such a resting-place. Whole nations then renounced popery without ceasing to believe in a First Cause, in a future life, or in the divine authority of Christianity. In the last century, on the contrary, when a Catholic renounced his belief in the Real Presence, it was a thousand to one that he renounced his belief in the Gospel too; and when the reaction took place, with belief in the Gospel came back belief in the Real Presence. We by no means venture to deduce from these phenomena any general law; but we think it a most remarkable fact that no Christian nation which did not adopt the principles of the Reformation before the end of the sixteenth century should ever have adopted them. Catholic communities have since that time become infidel and become Catholic again, but none has become Protestant.”

There could not be a more satisfactory proof of the transitional and accidental nature of Protestantism. Like all human revolutions, it grew out of antecedent circumstances; and these were primarily political and social and only incidentally religious. The faith in the divine authority of the Christian religion was at that time absolute, and not at all affected by the tendency to scepticism observable among a few of the Humanists. The political power of the pope, however, together with his peculiar temporal relations to the German Empire, had gradually created throughout Germany a very strong national prejudice against his authority, which, upon the slightest provocation, was ready to break out into downright hatred of the Papacy. The worldly lives and ways of some of the popes had been as fuel for the conflagration which was to burst forth. Men, unconsciously it may be, grew accustomed to look upon the Christian religion and the Papacy as distinct and separable; and the temper of the public mind, while remaining reverential toward Christ and his religion, was embittered against his vicar. When, from amidst the social abuses and political antagonisms of Germany, Luther, in the name of Christ, denounced the pope, his voice struck precisely the note for which the public ear was listening, and, as Macaulay says, whole nations renounced allegiance to the pope without giving up faith in God and his Christ. This was done in the excitement of revolutionary enthusiasm, when passion and madness made deliberation impossible, and when a thoughtful and analytical study of the constitution of the church was out of the question. The Reformers imagined that they could abolish the pope and yet save Christianity, just as in France, two centuries and a half later, it was thought possible to abolish God and yet save the principle of authority, without which society cannot exist. And, indeed, it is as reasonable to suppose that this world, with its universal evidence of design and adaption of means to ends, could have come into existence without the action of a supreme and intelligent Being, as to think that the system of religious truths taught by Christ can have either unity or authority amongst men without a living centre and visible representative of both. Protestants, by rejecting the primacy of the pope, were forced to accept as fundamental to their faith a principle [Pg 34] of so purgative and drastic a nature that, in the general process of sloughing of religious thought which it brings on, it is itself finally carried away into the vacuum of nihilism.

This became evident as soon as the attempt was made to agree upon articles of belief. New heresies sprang up day after day, and complete chaos would have ensued from the beginning had not the different states taken hold of one or other of the sects and “established” it, thus, by the aid of the temporal power, giving to it a kind of consistency, but at the same time depriving it of vitality. Thus what Macaulay regarded as so remarkable—that no Christian nation which did not adopt the principles of the Reformation before the end of the sixteenth century should ever have adopted them—and he might as well have made the proposition universal, since there was no reason why he should limit it to Christian nations, since it is well known that in nothing has Protestantism given more striking proof of its impotence than in its utter failure to convert the heathen,—this, we say, far from surprising us, seems so natural that we cannot understand how an observant mind should think it strange.

Protestantism was, in the main, the product of the peculiar political and social condition of Europe during the last period of the middle ages, and to expect Catholic nations, or indeed individual Catholics of any intellectual or moral character, to become Protestant in our day argues a total want of power to grasp this subject. As well might one hope to see the pterodactyls and ichthyosauri of a past geologic era swimming in our rivers. Catholics there are, indeed, now, as in the eighteenth century, who become sceptics, who abandon all belief in Christianity, but none who become Protestants; for we cannot consider such persons as Achilli or Edith O’Gorman as instances of conversion of any kind. A very limited acquaintance with Catholics and Catholic thought will suffice to convince any reflecting mind that for us there is no alternative but to accept the doctrine of the church or to renounce faith in Christ. Was there ever fairer field for heresy to flourish in than that which opened up before Old Catholicism at its birth? But it was still-born. To this day its sponsors have not dared define its relation to the pope; and until this is done it remains without character. At any rate, it does not claim to be Protestant.

Turning to view the present condition of Protestantism, we are struck by the contrast. The very word “Protestant” is without meaning when applied to two-thirds of the non-Catholics of Germany, England, and the United States. Their mental state is one of disbelief in, or indifference to, all forms of positive religion; and if occasionally they are roused to some feeling against the church, it is through an association of ideas, traditional with them, which places her in antagonism with their political theories and national prejudices. Among earnest and reflecting Protestants who are united with one or other of the sects, there are two opposite currents of religious thought of a strongly-marked and well-defined character. Those who are borne on the one are being carried farther and farther away from the historic teachings of Christ, and are busied in trying to dress out in Biblical phraseology some of the various cosmic or pantheistic philosophies of the day. They very generally assume that religion has nothing to do with [Pg 35] theology, nor, consequently, with doctrines and dogmas. As its home is the heart, its realm is the world of sentiment; and so it matters not what we believe, provided only we feel good. Opposed to this current, which is bearing with it all the distinctive landmarks of the Christian religion, is another which is carrying men back to the church. In fact, all great minds among Protestants who have been strongly impressed by the objective character of Christian truth have been drawn towards the Catholic Church. Who can have failed to perceive, for instance—to mention only the three greatest who have occupied themselves with religious questions—how Leibnitz, Bacon, and Bishop Butler, in their intellectual apprehension of the Christian system, were, in spite of themselves, attracted to the church? Or who that is acquainted with the English Catholic literature of our own day is ignorant of the divine illumination which many of the most intellectual and reverent natures from the sects of Protestantism have found in the teachings of the one Catholic Church? In this way, by a process of supernatural or natural selection, the fragments of Protestantism are being assimilated to the church or are disappearing in the sea of unbelief in which even now they are seen only as barren islands in the wild waste of waters.

These considerations must be borne in mind by whoever would take a comprehensive view of the question which we propose now to discuss. In the first place, by reflecting upon them we shall find no difficulty in accounting for the marked difference in tone and character between Catholic and Protestant controversy, by which no attentive observer can have failed to be struck. Taking for granted the existence of God and the divinity of Christ, as admitted by the earlier Protestant sects, the logical position of the church is unassailable, which, as we have already stated, is generally conceded by impartial non-Christian thinkers.

As a consequence, Catholic controversialists, assured of the absolute coherence of their whole system with the fundamental dogma of the divine mission of Christ, have been chiefly concerned with showing the logical viciousness of the essential principles of Protestantism. They have, indeed, not omitted to remark upon the moral unfitness of such men as Henry VIII., Luther, Knox, and Zwingli to be the divinely-chosen agents of a reformation in the religion of Christ; but such observations have been incidental to the main course of the argument, and this is alike true of our more learned discussions and of our popular controversies.

Catholic writers—allowing for individual exceptions—have not felt that, to show the falsity of Protestantism, it was necessary to denounce Protestants or to stamp upon them any mark of infamy. They have treated them as men who were wrong, not as men who were wicked. Protestant controversy, on the other hand, presents for our consideration characteristics of a very different nature. In the consciousness of their inability to settle upon a fixed creed, which has been shown by history, and from the necessarily feeble manner in which articles of faith could be held by them, on account of the disagreement and conflict of opinion among themselves, Protestant writers were forced to treat their religion, not as a doctrine, but as a tendency; and for this reason, [Pg 36] together with the natural hatred which men entertain for a church or government against which they have rebelled, they were led to draw contrasts between the results of Protestantism and Catholicity; so that it became customary to attribute all the enlightenment, morality, progress, and liberty of the world to Protestantism, and to represent Catholics as cruel, ignorant, corrupt, and in every way depraved. Luther, as we should naturally expect, led the way in this style of controversy.

“The Papists,” he said, “are for the most part mere gross blockheads.… The pope and his crew are mere worshippers of idols and servants of the devil.… Pope, cardinals, bishops, not a soul of them has read the Bible; ‘tis a book unknown to them. They are a pack of guzzling, stuffing wretches, rich, wallowing in wealth and laziness.… Seeing the pope is Antichrist, I believe him to be a devil incarnate.… The pope is the last blaze in the lamp which will go out and ere long be extinguished—the last instrument of the devil, that thunders and lightens with sword and bull;… but the Spirit of God’s mouth has seized upon that shameless strumpet.… Antichrist is the Pope and the Turk together.… The pope is not God’s image, but his ape.… Popedom is founded on mere lies and fables.… A friar is evil every way; the preaching friars are proud buzzards; all who serve the pope are damned; the Papists are devoid of shame and Christianity.”[3]

This is the style of Protestant controversy which, except in form, still lingers in this nineteenth century. Protestant devotion, it may be said without sarcasm or exaggeration, consists essentially in a holy horror of popery. Were it possible to eliminate the Catholic Church from human society, Protestantism would at once fatally assume an attitude towards the world wholly different from that in which it now stands. At present, when attacked by evolutionistic pantheism—which means all the sophistries of the day—it takes refuge behind the historic fortress of Christianity, the Catholic Church, and, when encountered by the church, it makes an alliance with cosmism or anything else. Were the Catholic Church not in existence, it would be forced at once to build a fortress of its own; for the Bible is only a breastwork, which must be in charge of a commander-in-chief if we hope to hold it for the sovereign Lord. From the beginning, then, Protestants branded Catholics with a mark of infamy; they were idolaters, worse than pagans, for the most part gross blockheads, who fall an easy prey to the designing arts of priests and monks, who are only knaves and rogues, whose chief aim is to carry out the fiendish purposes of the pope, the arch-enemy, Antichrist, the devil in the flesh; and thus the church becomes the Woman of Babylon, flaming in scarlet, and alluring the nations to debauch.

No evidence, therefore, is needed to show that Catholics are immoral, depraved, thoroughly corrupt. To doubt it would be to question the truth of Protestantism and to believe that something good might come out of Nazareth. In good sooth, do not the Catholics, as M. de Laveleye says, admit the fact themselves?

We often hear persons express surprise that intelligent and honest Protestants should still, after such sad experience, be so eager to believe [Pg 37] the “awful disclosures” of “escaped nuns,” and to patronize that kind of lecture—of which, thank God! Protestants have the monopoly—delivered to men or women only, in which the abominations of the confessional are revealed and the general preternatural wickedness of priests, monks, and nuns is made fully manifest. This, to us, we must say, has never seemed strange. The doctrine of total depravity is an article of Protestant faith, and, when applied to Catholics, to none other have Protestants ever clung with such unwavering firmness and perfect unanimity. When disagreeing about everything else, they have never failed to find a point of union in this. Even after having lived and dealt with Catholics who are kind-hearted, pure, and fair-minded, in the true Protestant there still lurks a vague kind of suspicion that there must be some mysterious and secret diabolism in them which eludes his observation; that after all they may be only “as mild-mannered men as ever scuttled ship or cut a throat”; and after his reason has been fully convinced that the Catholic Church is the only historical Christianity, he is still able to remain a strong Protestant by falling back upon the undoubted total depravity of Papists. Dr. Newman, in his Apologia, the most careful and instructive self-analysis which has been written in this century, or probably in any other, declares that after he had become thoroughly persuaded of the truth of the Catholic Church his former belief that the pope was Antichrist still remained like a stain upon his imagination; and yet he had never been an ultra-Protestant. Many a Protestant has ceased to believe in Christ, without giving up his faith in the pope as Antichrist.

It is not surprising, in view of all this, that Protestants should have habitually held the church responsible for the evil deeds of Catholics.

When quite recently the excited Germans charged the dynamite plot of Thomassen upon our American civilization, we replied, with perfect justice, that such crimes are anomalies, the guilt of which ought not to be laid upon any nation, and all reasonable men admitted the evident good sense of our answer; but Protestants the world over have been unanimous in seeking to hold up the church to the execration of mankind as responsible for the St. Bartholomew massacre. Is Protestantism answerable for Cromwell’s massacres at Drogheda and Wexford? Religious fanaticism, no doubt, had much to do in urging him to butcher idolaters and slaves of Satan; but we should blush for shame were we capable of thinking for a moment that such inhumanities are either produced or approved by the real spirit of the Protestant religion.

We know of nothing in the Catholic Church which in any way corresponds with Protestant anti-popery literature; indeed, we doubt whether in the whole history of literature anything so disgraceful and disreputable as this can be found, unless, possibly, it be that which is professedly obscene, but which has nowhere ever had a recognized existence; and we question whether even this is as discreditable to human nature as the “awful disclosures” and “lectures to men or women only” of Protestants.

In discussing the comparative morality of Catholic and Protestant nations it would be more satisfactory, even though it should not be more conclusive, to consider their [Pg 38] respective virtues rather than their vices. There would seem to be neither good sense nor logic in taking the individuals and classes that are least brought under religious influences of any kind, in order to use their depravity as an argument for or against the church or Protestantism. In the apostolic body one out of twelve was a thief and traitor, yet neither Catholics nor Protestants are in the habit of concluding from this that they must all have been rogues and hypocrites. The amount of crime, one would think, is but a poor test of the amount of virtue. As the greatest sinners have made the greatest saints, so in the church depravity may co-exist with the most heroic virtue, though, of course, not in the same individual. Our divine Saviour plainly declares that in his church the good shall be mingled with the bad; that the cockle shall grow with the wheat till the harvest time; that some shall call him Lord and Master, and yet do not the will of his Father; that even, with regard to those who sit in the chair of Moses—and, let us add, of Peter—though their authority must ever be acknowledged, yet are not their lives always to be imitated, nor approved of even. It is manifestly contrary to the teaching of Christ to make the note of sanctity in his church consist in the individual holiness of each and every member. He is no Puritan, though he is the all-holy God. A puristic religion is essentially narrow, self-conscious, and unsympathetic; it draws a line here on earth between the elect and the reprobate; its disciples eat not with sinners, nor enter into their abodes, nor hold out to them the pleading hands of large-hearted charity. Such a faith does not grow upon men; it does not win and convert them to God.

If, instead of comparing the crimes, we should consider the respective virtues of Catholic and Protestant nations, we should at once be struck by the difference in their standards of morality. The most practical way of determining the real standard of morality of any religion is to study the character of its saints. There we find religious ideals made tangible and fully discernible. Here at once we perceive that there is an essential difference between the Catholic and the Protestant standard of morality. The lives of our saints, even when understood by Protestants, generally repel them. They are, in their eyes, useless lives, idle lives, superstitious lives, unnatural and inhuman. We take the words of Christ, “If thou wouldst be perfect, go sell what thou hast, give it to the poor, and come and follow me,” in their full and complete literal meaning. The highest life is to leave father and mother, to have nor wife nor children, nor temporal goods except what barely suffices, and to cleave to Christ only with all one’s soul in poverty, chastity, and obedience. Now, this life of prayer in poverty, chastity, and obedience is an offence to Protestants. They do not believe in perfect chastity, they hold religious obedience to be a slavery, and poverty, in their eyes, is ridiculous. Inasmuch as the monks tilled the earth, transcribed books, and taught school, they receive a partial recognition from the Protestant world; but inasmuch as they were bound by religious vows they excite disgust. We should say, then, that the distinctive trait of Catholic morality is ascetic, while the Protestant is utilitarian. The one primarily regards the world that is to be, the [Pg 39] other that which already is. The one inclines us to look upon this as a worthless world to lose or win; the other is shrewd and calculating—this is the best we have any practical experience of; it is the part of wisdom to make the most of it. The one seems to be more certain of the future life, the other of the present. It is needless to prolong the contrast, and we shall simply confess that we have always been inclined to the opinion of those who hold that Protestantism, in its aims and direct tendencies, is more favorable to what is called material progress than Catholicism. In fact, one cannot realize the personal survival of the soul through eternity, and at the same time be supremely interested in stocks or the price of cotton.

Not that the church discourages efforts which have as their object the material interests of mankind; but, in her view, our duties to God are of the first importance, and to these all others are subordinate. What doth it profit? she is always asking, whereas Protestantism is busy trying to show us how very profitable and pleasant the Reformation has made this world—and virtuous, too, since honesty is the best policy and enlightened self-interest the standard of morals. It is the old story—God and the world, the supernatural and the natural, progress from above and progress from below.

But we feel that it is time we should give our readers proof that we have no desire to avoid direct issue with M. de Laveleye. We flatly deny, then, his assertion that the Catholic nations are more immoral than the Protestant; and when he further affirms that Catholic writers themselves—for his words can have no other meaning—admit this, he lies under a mistake for which there can be no possible excuse. In the statement of facts, however, which we propose now to give, we make no use whatever of the testimony of Catholics, but rely exclusively upon the authority of Protestants and of statistics; and that our readers may have the benefit of observations extending over considerable time as well as space, we will not confine ourselves to the most recent writers or statistics on the subject under discussion. Laing, a Scotch Presbyterian and a most conscientious and observant traveller, who wrote some thirty-five years ago, says of the French: “They are, I believe, a more honest people than the British.… It is a fine distinction of the French national character and social economy that practical morality is more generally taught through manners among and by the people themselves than in any country in Europe.”[4] Alison, the historian, writing about the same time, but referring to the early part of this century, says that the proportion of crime to the inhabitants was twelve times greater in Prussia than in France.[5] To this may be added the testimony of John Stuart Mill, in his Autobiography, published since his death, who passed a considerable portion of his life in France. Referring to his sojourn there when quite a young man, he says:

“Having so little experience of English life, and the few people I knew being mostly such as had public objects of a large and personally disinterested kind at heart, I was ignorant of the low moral tone of what in England is called society: the habit of, not indeed professing, but taking for granted in every mode of implication that conduct is of course always directed towards low and petty objects; the absence of high feelings, [Pg 40] which manifests itself by sneering depreciation of all demonstrations of them, and by general abstinence (except among a few of the stricter religionists) from professing any high principles of action at all, except in those preordained cases in which such profession is put on as part of the costume and formalities of the occasion. I could not then know or estimate the difference between this manner of existence and that of a people like the French, whose faults, if equally real, are at all events different; among whom sentiments which, by comparison at least, may be called elevated are the current coin of human intercourse, both in books and in private life, and, though often evaporating in profession, are yet kept alive in the nation at large by constant exercise and stimulated by sympathy, so as to form a living and active part of the existence of a great number of persons, and to be recognized and understood by all. Neither could I then appreciate the general culture of the understanding, which results from the habitual exercise of the feelings, and is thus carried down into the most uneducated classes of several countries on the Continent, in a degree not equalled in England among the so-called educated, except where an unusual tenderness of conscience leads to a habitual exercise of the intellect on questions of right and wrong.”[6]

This is strong testimony when we consider that it comes from an Englishman. In speaking of the elder Austin the same writer says: “He had a strong distaste for the general meanness of English life, the absence of enlarged thoughts and unselfish desires, the low objects on which the faculties of all classes of the English are intent.”[7] Mill’s opinion of the French is confirmed by Lecky, who writes: “No other nation has so habitual and vivid a sympathy for great struggles for freedom beyond its border. No other literature exhibits so expansive and œcumenical a genius, or expounds so skilfully or appreciates so generously foreign ideas. In no other land would a disinterested war for the support of a suffering nationality find so large an amount of support.”[8]

Much has been said and written of the licentiousness of the French, which may, in part at least, be due to the fact that they, more than any other people, have known how to make vice attractive by taking from it something of the repulsive coarseness which naturally belongs to it, but must also be ascribed to the feeling that they are Catholic, and therefore sensual. But let us examine the facts on this subject. We again bring Laing forward as a witness.

“Of all the virtues,” he says, “that which the domestic family education of both the sexes most obviously influences—that which marks more clearly than any other the moral condition of a society, the home state of moral and religious principles, the efficiency of those principles in it, and the amount of that moral restraint upon passions and impulses which it is the object of education and knowledge to attain—is undoubtedly female chastity. Will any traveller, will any Prussian, say that this index-virtue of the moral condition of a people is not lower in Prussia than in almost any part of Europe?”[9]

Acts which in other countries would affect the respectability and happiness of a whole family for generations are in Prussia looked upon as mere youthful indiscretions. But let us take the statistics of illegitimacy, which is a method of discussing the question made popular among Protestants by the Rev. Hobart Seymour in his Evenings with the Romanists.

The number of illegitimate births in France for every hundred was, in 1858, 7.8; in the same year in Protestant [Pg 41] Saxony it was 16; in Protestant Prussia, 9.3; in Würtemberg (Prot.), 16.1; in Iceland (Prot.) (1838-47), 14; in Denmark (1855), 11.5; Scotland (1871), 10.1; Hanover (1855), 9.9; Sweden (1855), 9.5; Norway (1855), 9.3.

Catholic France, then, judged by this test, stands higher than any Protestant country of which we have statistical reports, except England and Wales, where the percentage was, in 1859, 6.5; but England and Wales are below other Catholic countries, and notably far below Ireland. The rate of illegitimacy in the kingdom of Sardinia (1828-37) was 2.1; in Ireland (1865-66), 3.8; in Spain (1859), 5.6; in Tuscany, 6; in Catholic Prussia, 6.1.

In Scotland there are, in proportion to population, more than three times as many illegitimate births as in Ireland; and in England and Wales there are more than twice as many, and in Protestant Prussia the percentage is a third greater than in Catholic Prussia.[10]

If chastity, to use Laing’s expression, is the index-virtue, the question as to the comparative morality of Protestant and Catholic nations may be considered at an end. Lecky’s words on the Irish people have often been quoted, to his own regret we believe.

“Had the Irish peasants been less chaste,” he says, “they would have been more prosperous. Had that fearful famine which in the present century desolated the land fallen upon a people who thought more of accumulating subsistence than of avoiding sin, multitudes might now be living who perished by literal starvation on the dreary hills of Limerick or Skibbereen.”[11]

There is not in all Europe a more thoroughly Protestant country than Sweden. For three hundred years its people have been wholly withdrawn from Catholic influences. During all this time Protestantism, upheld by the state, undisturbed by dissent, with the education of the people in the hands of the clergy, and a population almost entirely rural, has had the fairest possible opportunity to show what it is capable of doing to elevate the moral character of a nation. What is the result? In 1838 Laing visited Sweden and made a careful study of the moral and social condition of the people; and he declares that they are at the very bottom of the scale of European morality. In 1836 one person out of every 112—women, infants, sick, all included—had been accused of crime, and one out of every 134 convicted and punished. In 1838 there were born in Stockholm 2,714 children, of whom 1,577 were legitimate and 1,137 illegitimate, leaving a balance of only 440 chaste mothers out of 2,714.

Drunkenness, too, was more common there than in any other country of Europe or of the world. Nearly 40,000,000 gallons of liquor were consumed in 1850 by a population of only 3,000,000, which gives thirteen gallons of intoxicating drink to every man, woman, and child in the kingdom.

If these things could be said of any Catholic nation, the whole Protestant world would stand aghast, nor need other proof of the absolutely diabolical nature of popery. Compare this agricultural and pastoral population with the Catholic Swiss mountaineers—who to this day claim to have descended from a Swedish stock, and whose climate is not greatly different from that of Sweden—and we find that the Catholic Swiss are as moral and sober [Pg 42] as the Protestant Swedes are corrupt and besotted. Or compare them with the Tyrolese, than whom there is no more Catholic and liberty-loving people on earth.

“Honesty may be regarded as a leading feature in the character of the Tyrolese,” says Alison.… “In no part of the world are the domestic or conjugal duties more strictly or faithfully observed, and in none do the parish priests exercise a stricter or more conscientious control over their flocks.… Perhaps the most remarkable feature in the character of the Tyrolese is their uniform piety—a feeling which is nowhere so universally diffused as among their sequestered valleys.… On Sunday the whole people flock to church in their neatest and gayest attire; and so great is the number who thus frequent these places of worship that it is not unfrequent to see the peasants kneeling on the turf in the church-yard where Mass is performed, from being unable to find a place within its walls. Regularly in the evening prayers are read in every family; and the traveller who passes through the villages at the hour of twilight often sees through their latticed windows the young and the old kneeling together round their humble fire, or is warned of his approach to human habitation by hearing their evening hymns stealing through the silence and solitude of the forest.… In one great virtue the peasants in this country (in common, it must be owned, with most Catholic states) are particularly worthy of imitation. The virtue of charity, which is too much overlooked in many Protestant kingdoms, is there practised to the greatest degree and by all classes of people.”[12]

With true Protestant condescension Alison adds: “Debased as their religion is by the absurdities and errors of the Catholic form of worship, and mixed up as it is with innumerable legends and visionary tales, it yet preserves enough of the pure spirit of its divine origin to influence in a great measure the conduct of their private lives.”

Among rural populations more than elsewhere the divine power of the Christian religion is made manifest. To the poor, the frugal, and the single-hearted those heavenly truths which have changed the world, but which were first listened to and received by fishermen and shepherds, appeal with a force and directness which the mere worldling and comfort-lover cannot even realize. In the presence of nature so silent and awful, yet so vocal, everything inclines the heart of man to hearken to the voice of God. Mountains and rivers; the long, withdrawing vales and deep-sounding cataracts; winter’s snows, and spring, over whose heaving bosom the unseen hand weaves the tapestry that mortal fingers never made; summer’s warm breath, and autumn, when the strong year first feels the chill of death, and “tears from the depth of some divine despair rise in the heart and gather to the eyes”—all speak of the higher world which they foreshadow and symbolize. But in the hurry and noise of the city, with its extremes of wealth and poverty, of indulgence and want, of pride and degradation, the pleading voice of religion is not heard at all, or is heard only as a call from the shore is heard by men who are madly hurrying down some rapid stream. It is evident, therefore, that the easiest and surest way of getting at the relative moral influence of the Catholic and Protestant religions is to study their action upon rural populations. We have already established on the best authority the incalculable moral elevation of the Catholic rural populations of Switzerland and the Tyrol over the Protestants of the same class in Sweden. Let us now turn to Great Britain.

Kay, after having given a table [Pg 43] of criminal statistics for England and Wales for the years 1841 and 1847, makes the following remarks upon the facts there presented:

“This table well deserves study. It shows that the proportional amount of crime to population calculated in two years, 1841 and 1847, was greater in both years in almost all the agricultural counties of England than it was in the manufacturing and mining districts.… With what terrible significance do these statistics plead the cause of the poor of our rural districts! Notwithstanding that a town life necessarily presents so many more opportunities for, and temptations to, vice than a rural life; notwithstanding that the associations of the latter are naturally so much purer and so much more moral than those of the former; notwithstanding the wonderfully crowded state of the great manufacturing cities of Lancashire; notwithstanding the constant influx of Irish, sailors, vagrants, beggars, and starving natives of agricultural districts of England and Wales; and notwithstanding the miserable state of most of the primary schools of those districts and the great ignorance of the majority of the inhabitants, still, in the face of all these and other equally significant facts, the criminality of the manufacturing districts of Lancashire is LESS in proportion to the population than that of most of the rural districts of England and Wales!”[13]

In Scotland illegitimacy is more common in the country than in the towns and cities. In 1870 the rate of illegitimacy for the whole country was 9.4 per cent., or 1 in every 10.6; whereas in the rural districts alone it was 10.5, or 1 in every 9.5. In 1871 it was for the whole country 10.1, or 1 in every 9.8, and in the rural districts 11.2, or 1 in every 8.9.[14] In England also the rate of illegitimacy is much larger in the rural districts than in the cities, whereas in Catholic France it is just the reverse. In the country districts of England we have the following rate:

Nottingham,	8.9
York, North Riding,	8.9
Salop,	9.8
Westmoreland,	9.7
Norfolk,	10.7
Cumberland,	11.4
In France:
Rural districts,	4.2
La Vendée,	2.2
Brittany—Côte d’Or,	1.2

Thus in the most Catholic rural districts of France there are only one or two illegitimate births in every hundred.

This is also true of Prussia, whose most strongly Catholic provinces are Westphalia and the Rhineland. In Westphalia there are only three and a half illegitimate births in every hundred, and in the Rhineland only three and a third; but in thoroughly Protestant Pomerania and Brandenburg there are ten and twelve illegitimate births in the hundred.[15] In Ireland, again, we find the same state of things. The rate of illegitimate births for all Ireland is 3.8 per cent.; but the lowest proportion is in Connaught, nineteen-twentieths of whose people are Catholics, and the greatest is in Ulster, half of whose population is Protestant. “The sum of the whole matter,” says the Scotsman (June, 1869), a leading organ of Presbyterian Scotland, “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 no reason why further proof should be given of what is a [Pg 44] manifest truth: that rural populations—let us say, rather, the people—in proportion as they are Catholic, are also chaste; and consequently that the Catholic Church, as every man who is competent to judge must know, is the mother of purity, which is the soul of Christian life, and without which we cannot draw near to the heart of the Saviour and supreme Lover of men. Protestants, however, will be at no loss for arguments. Should the worst come to the worst, illegitimacy, like the gallows, may be declared an evidence of civilization, and then it needs must follow, as the night the day, that it is more common in Protestant than in Catholic countries.

Let us now turn to the vice of intemperance. “I am sure,” says Hill, “that I am within the truth when I state, as the result of minute and extensive inquiry, that, in four cases out of five, when an offence is committed intoxicating drink has been one of the causes.”[16]

In an attempt, then, to form an estimate of the relative morality of nations, we should not omit to consider the vice of drunkenness, which is the cause of half the crime and misery in the world. Were it in our power to obtain accurate statistics on this subject, as on that of illegitimacy, the superior sobriety of the Catholic nations would be shown even more strikingly than their superior chastity. The Spaniards, it is universally acknowledged, are the soberest people in Europe, as the Swedes are the most intemperate. Their respective geographical positions suggest at once what is often assigned as a sufficient explanation of this fact—the great difference of climate. It was long supposed that the southern nations were more sensual than the northern, because it was thought a warm climate must necessarily develop a greater violence of passion. We know now, however, that this is not the case. Though climate has an undoubted influence on morality, its action is yet so modified or controlled among Christian and civilized nations that generalizations founded upon its supposed effects are unreliable. The Swedes and the Scotch are intemperate, the Spaniards and the Italians are sober. The former are Protestant, the latter Catholic; it is therefore at once evident that religion has nothing to do with this matter, which can only be accounted for by the difference of climate. These are the tactics of our opponents: those virtues in which the Catholic nations excel must be attributed to natural causes; but when some of them are found to lack the enterprise and industrial spirit of the English or the Americans, it would be altogether unreasonable to ascribe this to anything else than their religion.

Scotch statistics show a greater amount of intemperance in summer than in winter, which would seem to indicate that a high temperature does not tend to destroy the passion for intoxicating drink. But we do not propose to enter into a discussion of causes, which, however, we are perfectly willing to take up at the proper time. Our controversy with M. de Laveleye turns upon facts.

We have already cited the testimony of Laing to show that the Swedes, after they had been under the exclusive influence of Protestantism for three hundred years, were the most drunken people in Europe. Laing was in Venice on [Pg 45] the occasion of a festival, when the whole population had turned out for pleasure, and he did not see a single case of intoxication; not a single instance, even among the boys, of rudeness; and yet all were singing, talking, and enjoying themselves. He gives the following account of a popular merry-making which he saw at Florence:

“It happened that the 9th of May was kept here as a great holiday by the lower class, as May-day with us, and they assembled in a kind of park about a mile from the city, where booths, tents, and carts, with wine and eatables for sale, were in crowds and clusters, as at our village wakes and race-courses. The multitude from town and country round could not be less than twenty thousand people, grouped in small parties, dancing, singing, talking, dining on the grass, and enjoying themselves. I did not see a single instance of inebriety, ill-temper, or unruly, boisterous conduct; yet the people were gay and joyous.”[17]

Robert Dale Owen, writing from Naples, said: “I have not seen a man even partially intoxicated since I have been in the city, of 420,000 inhabitants, and they say one may live here for four years without seeing one.”

Let us now turn to Protestant lands. St. Cuthbert’s parish, Edinburgh, had in 1861 a population somewhat exceeding 90,000 souls. Of these, 1,953 were “drunk and incapable,” 3,935 were “drunk and discharged”; making in all 5,888, or nearly 1 in 15.

In Salford jail (England), in 1870, the proportion of commitments for drunkenness was, as compared with commitments for all offences, 37 per cent.[18]

We have it upon the authority of the English government that in 1874 no fewer than 285,730 Britons were proceeded against for being drunk and disorderly, or drunk and not disorderly; and, of course, to this must be added the probably greater number who escaped arrest. Mr. Granville, one of the secretaries of the Church of England Society in the Diocese of Durham, estimates that there is an aggregate of 700,000 habitual drunkards in England. “It is a melancholy but undeniable fact,” says the Alliance News,” that, notwithstanding vast agencies of improvement, intemperance, crime, pauperism, insanity, and brutality are more rampant than ever; and, if we except pauperism, these evils have more than doubled in the last forty years.” We have not been able to get the statistics of drunkenness for Ireland, and can therefore institute no comparison between England and that country with regard to intemperance;[19] but we have before us the criminal statistics of both countries for 1854, the population of England and Wales in that year being about three times as great as that of Ireland. The following table of convictions will enable us to form an estimate of the comparative honesty of the two nations:

Robbery by persons armed, England and Wales,	210
Robbery by persons armed, Ireland,	2
Larceny from the person, England and Wales,	1,570
Larceny from the person, Ireland,	389
Larceny by servants,[20] England and Wales,	2,140
Larceny by servants, Ireland,	44[Pg 46]
Larceny, simple, England and Wales,	12,562
Larceny, simple, Ireland,	3,329
Frauds and attempts to defraud, England and Wales,	676
Frauds and attempts to defraud, Ireland,	62
Forgery, England and Wales,	149
Forgery, Ireland,	4
Uttering and having in possession counterfeit coin, England and Wales,	674
Uttering and having in possession counterfeit coin, Ireland,	4

On the other hand, the following crimes are proportionately more numerous in Ireland:

Convictions for manslaughter in 1854:

England and Wales,	96
Ireland,	50
Burglary, England and Wales,	384
“ Ireland,	240

We cannot think, however, that these returns are reliable, for the Statistical Journal of 1867 gives the following criminal tables for England in 1865:

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

And in Ireland from 1865 to 1871, a period of six years, only 21 persons were sentenced to death, of whom 13 were executed.

It is greatly to be regretted that criminal statistics give us no information upon the religious character of the persons accused or convicted of offences against the law. Many persons have been baptized in infancy, and are called Catholics, though they have never been brought under the influence of the church. In the absence of official statistics, Dr. Descuret, who, in his capacity of legal physician in Paris, had abundant opportunity to obtain data relative to this subject, made, about thirty years ago, a careful study of the religious views and sentiments of French criminals. The conclusion which he reached was that, in every hundred persons accused of crime, fifty are indifferentists in religion, forty are infidels, and the remaining ten sincere believers. In a hundred suicides he found only four persons of known piety, three of whom were women subject to melancholia, and the other had been for some time mentally deranged.[21]

[3] The Table-Talk of Martin Luther, pp. 200, 206, 213, et passim.

[4] Notes of a Traveller, pp. 79, 80.

[5] History of Europe, vol. iii. chap. xxvii. 10, 11.

[6] Autobiography, pp. 58, 59.

[7] Ibid. p. 177.

[8] History of European Morals, p. 160.

[9] Notes of a Traveller, p. 172.

[10] For the full discussion of the statistics of this subject see The Catholic World, vol. ix. pp. 52 and 845.

[11] European Morals, p. 153.

[12] Alison’s Miscellaneous Essays, p. 119.

[13] Kay’s Social Condition of the People, vol. ii. p. 392.

[14] See London Statistical Journal, 1870, 1871.

[15] Historische Politische Blätter, 1867.

[16] Crime: its Amount, Causes, and Remedies. By Frederick Hill, Barrister-at-law, late Inspector of Prisons. London, p. 65.

[17] Notes of a Traveller pp. 418-19.

[18] See London Statistical Journal, 1871.

[19] In 1871, 14,501,983 gallons of spirits were distilled in Scotland. What proportion of this was consumed at home we do not know. For the same year the number of gallons entered for home consumption in Ireland was 5,212,746. The population of Scotland is nearly three millions and a half, and that of Ireland about five millions and a half.

[20] England and Wales, with not quite three times the population of Ireland, had fifty times as many cases of dishonesty among servants, which clearly accounts for those newspaper advertisements in which English housekeepers are careful to state that “no Irish need apply.”

[21] La Médecine des Passions, p. 116.

[Pg 47]

PRIMEVAL GERMANS.

Urdeutsch (which we have translated Primeval Germans) is a historical novel, the scene of which is laid in the Black Forest towards the second half of the fourth century. The author, Conrad von Bolanden,[22] says in his preface that he intends it to be the first of a series of three illustrating the action of Christianity on the German people: the state in which it found them, that to which it brought them, and that to which he says they are likely to be reduced by modern infidelity. The story—which is mainly put together from facts of the biography of St. Martin, Bishop of Tours, and from descriptions of ancient German life drawn from Roman and German historians—is interesting as the record of a time utterly gone by, and of a state of barbarism incident to the childhood of nations. Very nearly the same characteristics appear in the earliest chapters of the history of all uncivilized tribes, and a special likeness can be traced between the Teutons of the ninth century and the American Indians of the sixteenth and seventeenth. Sprung from widely different races, and experiencing the effects of Christianity in a very different manner, there is yet a striking likeness in some of the manners and customs, the industries, the opinions, and the few moral axioms of both peoples with which Christian missionaries have made us familiar.

The plot of the story is slight, and has the advantage of not being confused and complicated, as is the case in many modern novels. St. Martin, yet a deacon, is travelling to Strassburg with his servant Eustace (one of the best characters in the book), and stumbles upon a sleeping barbarian, whom he awakens from a bad nightmare by the strains of his harp or lyre. He then asks of the gigantic German what is his errand, and the Buffalo (such names were common among the Teutons) tells him that he is on his return from the famous grove of Helygenforst, where he had been sent by Bissula, the only daughter of the last king of the Suevi, to consult an oracle on the issue of a blood-feud between the two noble families of the Walen and the Billing. She and her youngest brother Hermanric are the only representatives left of the former family, her father and her eleven brothers having all fallen victims to the enmity of the Billing. St. Martin remonstrates with the German (a freedman of the Suevi), and tells him that the true God abhors blood-feuds, and, availing himself of the German belief in one Supreme God, the All-Father, whose reign is to be made manifest after the end of the world and the destruction of the gods Odin, Thor, Freya, Loki, etc., tells Buffalo that he is the messenger of the All-Father, and will save the last of the Walen from their danger and dilemma. The German, by his word and his hand (as was also the custom later in the vowing of feudal homage), constitutes himself the Muntwaldo, or protector, of [Pg 48] the deacon, and they set off to the land of the Suevi. Eustace, formerly a soldier under Martin when the latter was a centurion, strongly objects to this arrangement, and grimly reiterates his certainty that nothing will ever transform the hopelessly barbaric Germans. On their way the party are attacked by four Chatti, a tribe opposed to the Suevi, and Martin forbids Buffalo to fight in his behalf, saying that he will willingly go with the strangers, but in six days will not fail to visit the Suevi. Buffalo goes on his way, and the two Romans are taken to the village of Duke Fraomar, the leader of the Chatti.

Here follows an interesting description of the dress and domestic arrangements of the early German tribes. The duke is not an hereditary chieftain, but a leader chosen by the tribe for his valor and strength, who has collected round himself a personal following or guard, a sort of freebooter’s company—the original, perhaps, of the roving bands of “Free Companions” who played such a conspicuous part in the wars of the middle ages. The dress of the freemen of the tribe consisted mostly of skins and furs, with the head of the animal, whether buffalo, stag, wolf, or bear, drawn like a hood over the head, and the front paws tied under the chin or crossed on the breast. The women wore long, rather tight-fitting garments of coarse linen, with short sleeves and bands of gaudy colors sewed round the hem; the feet were bare. Both men and women wore long hair; it was a sign of free or noble birth, and was plentifully greased with butter, as were also, on some occasions, the bodies of the warriors. The children and the slaves were for the most part naked or only provided with leathern aprons. The house had but one apartment, which served all purposes: the fire was in the middle, while to one side were bundles of straw and skins, the primitive beds, and to the other a slightly-raised platform, the primitive table and chairs. The men sat or lay on this and ate off their shields, or sometimes off wooden platters. The women served them at meals and filled the drinking-horns with beer and mead. Besides these horns, human skulls—those of enemies slain in battle—were used as goblets, and these, together with the skulls of sacred horses and the horns of stags, adorned the walls of the dwelling. There was also generally a wooden chest, clumsily fashioned, containing the clothes of the family. The women, children, and slaves ate round the hearth after their lords, and while these were gambling with dice. The passion of gambling seems to have been an inveterate one, and a man would often stake his all, including wife, children, and slaves—sometimes even himself. If he lost, he was reduced to the condition of a slave. The walls of the house were black and glistening with the smoke of the mighty and continuous fires, and there is no mention of even a hole in the roof as an outlet. St. Martin and his servant are introduced into this wild interior just after the Duke Fraomar has been winning house, lands, slaves, cattle, and even his wife, from a freeman of the “hundred.” The strangers are made welcome and become the guests of the duke, which implies that henceforth their persons are sacred, as nothing was more shameful in the eyes of the Germans than to break their word or infringe the rights of hospitality. Eustace, however, looks ruefully on the evidences [Pg 49] of good-will tendered him in the shape of a kind of oat-broth, seasoned with the primitive German preparation of salt, which (Pliny is responsible for the statement) consisted of charcoal made of oak or hazel, impregnated when hot with the water of salt springs; the black morsels giving the same odor to the broth with which they were mixed.

Duke Fraomar, who has a promise from Odin’s oracle to help him in a foray against the neighboring Suevi, provided he does not attack them before the “ninth full moon,” is rather uneasy at having these strangers, who are under the protection of his enemies, brought to him, in case anything untoward should happen to them, and the Suevi fall upon him to avenge them, before the charmed time. The next day one of the freemen takes the saint and his servant round the settlement; and the author here introduces an account of the old German division of property in a “hundred,” or community of one hundred freemen, each possessing the same quantity of ground, and each obliged to render military service to the head of the tribe. The agricultural economy was by no means contemptible. Ploughed land and land overgrown with bushes alternated in lots, and each was cultivated during six years, then allowed to lie fallow six more. Manuring was unknown, chiefly because the animal manure was used as a safe and warm covering to the earth caves where the grain was stored in winter, and where not seldom the owner and his family also took refuge from the cold. Each freeman had his stables, his slave-huts, and his brewery, the latter being generally a cave in a rock furnished with one or two mighty caldrons. At the end of this inspection of the “hundred” (such a division exists still in England, though far enough in spirit from the ideal of the free Teutons) the strangers come upon a terrible scene of cruelty and superstition.

The “journey to Walhalla” was the poetical title given to the immolation of aged and wealthy persons of both sexes, who, instead of being allowed to die a natural death, were, according to the ancient custom, first killed and then burned with their possessions, with an accompaniment of religious ceremonies. A pile of wood was raised, and the victims, stupefied with beer, laid thereon, with one or two slaves who were to wait upon them in the halls of Odin; for the Germans believed that no one who died a natural death went to Walhalla, but endured torments and shame in hell. Men and women, therefore, willingly allowed themselves to be killed, and often committed suicide as another means of reaching Walhalla. On this occasion two old men and a woman were to be immolated. A ludicrous dispute occurs here between one of the men and his son, who grudges him two slaves as his servants in Odin’s hall, whereupon the father announces his determination to live rather than go to the other world with so paltry a following. This settles the question, and the son gives up the second slave. A great deal of drinking and a sacred chant by the priest of Odin precede the butchery, and the victims are each killed by one blow of “Thor’s hammer,” wielded by a freeman deputed to this office by the heathen priest. The worst part follows. Just as the pile has been set on fire an infant is thrown on, the child of the woman whom the duke won the [Pg 50] night before at dice. The indifference of the mother at the order for this barbarous execution seems to us rather overdrawn. Human nature is human nature the world over; and if there is one feeling more obstinately ineradicable than any other, it is the feeling of a mother for her child—or, say, in the very lowest possible scale of civilization, of a female for her young. Even though infanticide is common among most heathen nations, and was certainly not unknown among the early Germans, it is rather an exaggeration on the part of the author to represent the mother herself in this case as utterly and absolutely indifferent to the child’s fate. While their guide is busy drinking among the spectators of this scene, Martin and Eustace penetrate the sacred grove, round which is drawn a cord, which no German would have passed with unbound hands. Unknowing of this custom, the strangers enter the wood and gaze on the human skulls and skeletons, the bloody skins and the sacred horse-skulls, hung on the branches of the trees. The priest soon discovers their presence in the holy grove, and threatens to kill them on the spot, but is restrained by the duke’s messenger, their guide. He afterwards goes to the duke and demands that the law shall be carried out, which, for such a sacrilege, decrees that the profaner of the holy grove should lose his right hand and his left foot. Fraomar, thinking of his plan for attacking the Suevi at the ninth moon, and not before, hesitates to consent to the priest’s demand and seeks to protect his guests.

Meanwhile, the story goes on to follow Buffalo to the house of the Walen princess Bissula, who, though a heathen, has been in Gaul and had some intercourse with the Romans and a German Christian sovereign family called the Tribboki. Her dress and dwelling are described as much embellished by Roman arts and many degrees removed from the ancient German simplicity. But, though outwardly less a German, she is at heart an uncompromising adherent of the old customs of her fathers, particularly of the blood-feud. She lives for the sole purpose of avenging the death of her father and brothers; and, indeed, her stern determination is the only circumstance of the book which can be called a “plot.” Withimer, the son of the king of the Tribboki, is her lover and her suitor, and comes to her house to offer himself as her husband. He is a Christian and hopes to convert her also, but the terrible blood-feud stands between them. She loves him as passionately as he loves her, but refuses to marry him unless he will swear to take upon himself the duty of revenge against her enemies, the Billing. This, as a Christian, he cannot do, and hence ensues a hard struggle between his love and his conscience, in which the “baptized heathen,” as the author calls him, very nearly breaks down and forswears the faith. Bissula, on her side, is still more determined, and once even attempts suicide by throwing herself in the way of a wild beast while out hunting, saying, as she does so, that she can more easily give up her life than her love, but that her honor is yet dearer to her than her love. Various devices are resorted to by Katuwald, the young chief of the Billing, the hostile family, to end the blood-feud by marrying Bissula, with whom he is in love; and the author now introduces the “Thing,” or assembly of the people, the primeval parliament. This took place [Pg 51] in a circle surrounded by trees, on which the freemen hung their shields and helmets. A rock, sacred as a kind of tribunal, stood in the centre, and round this stone benches were ranged, on which sat the representatives of the several hundreds. The oracle which Buffalo had been sent to consult had returned the answer, “Let the Thing judge the cause,” the priest who represented the deity having been bribed by the Billing prince to send this answer. Bissula, with her lover, appears at the assembly; but before their coming a lesser court of justice is held for the adjustment of local claims, which gives us an opportunity of reviewing some curious customs of the ancient Germans.

For instance, the value of human life in the case of a slave is shown in two “cases” which come up for arbitration. A slave—but the son of a free father, and a freeman himself by birth—secretly marries a freewoman, and, on her father’s discovering the connection, the choice is given her of killing her husband with her own hand or of being herself degraded to slavery. A sword and a distaff were offered her; if she chose the former, she was free, but was forced to plunge it in the man’s breast; if the latter, she became a slave. There were two other possible means of settling the question: the father had the right to kill her, and the owner of the slave might give him his freedom. In the case in point this last was the happy solution of the problem. Another difficulty arose in the case of damages claimed by a freeman whose neighbor’s tame stag, trained for hunting purposes, had broken into his fields, killed a dozen head of cattle and two slaves, in return for which he himself had shot the stag. The latter was declared by law to be of a greater value than the two slaves, and a fixed rate of compensation was adjudged, which completely satisfied both parties. From a heathen point of view, considering that both men and stags were “chattels,” it cannot be wondered at that the latter were thought most valuable; for the market was over-stocked with slaves, who might be had any day during a foray, while “domestic” stags were very hard to train, and required to be taught some years before they could be of any use to their owners.

When Bissula makes her appearance, the gathering of the people resolves itself into a “Thing,” and she and her enemies, the five sons of the noble Billing Brenno, take their place by the rock. Hermanric’s absence causes some wonder and annoyance, but Marcomir, the umpire, nevertheless begins the session. Katuwald boldly proposes to end the feud by marrying Bissula, who openly and contemptuously refuses his suit, whereupon a great tumult arises and Hermanric rides into the circle, a bloody head dangling at his saddle-bow. He recounts his exploit—how he, though not yet invested with a man’s weapons (as the rule was to entrust neither sword nor spear to a youth under nineteen), forced the aged Brenno, who had stayed at home, to fight him in single combat, the Billing armed with sword and shield, and himself only with a club. The trembling slave who follows him corroborates his story, and Katuwald, already sore from Bissula’s proud refusal of his love, looks upon the youth with a significant and angry eye, and at last leaves the council, having publicly asked to be told the law of compensation for [Pg 52] carrying off another man’s wife or betrothed. Affairs stand thus with the Suevi, while the story returns to Martin in the hands of the Chatti.

An assembly of the freemen of this tribe is held to discuss the question raised by the priest, as to Martin’s punishment for invading the sacred grove. This takes place the same day that Buffalo goes in quest of his friend, and he arrives in time to be present at the gathering. Duke Fraomar is anxious to save the strangers—not for their own sakes, but for fear of precipitating the attack on the Suevi before the propitious time appointed by the oracle. At last Martin proposes an ordeal such as, since the days of Elijah, has often been resorted to to decide rival claims to truth. A few chosen representatives are to accompany him and the priest to the shrine of the heathen gods in the forest, and the Christian and the priest are both to call upon their gods to show themselves. Here follows a description of the shrine—a building of wood beneath a gigantic oak-tree. Within are kept “Thor’s hammer” and “Tyr’s sword,” and the car of the goddess Hertha, the Cybele of Teutonic mythology, or simply the Earth-mother. Into this car she was at times supposed to descend, when a yoke of cows was harnessed to it, and it was covered with a white cloth, and thus drawn solemnly through the “hundred.” After these processions, the car and cloth were washed by slaves in a pond, into which the latter were afterwards thrown and drowned. The statue or figure of the goddess was erected in a huge crack of the sacred tree, and her grim, enormous head, with staring eyes and yawning mouth, black with clotted blood, crowned a clumsily-carved block, without either arms or legs.[23] Horse-skulls and white horse-skins (the priest was also clad in such skins), human skulls and skeletons, dogs’ heads and skins of wild beasts, hung from the branches of the sacred tree, which might have sheltered a regiment. Near the sacred car stood a stone altar encrusted with blood. The priest carefully placed the Christian stranger within easy reach of his arm, and distributed the others, the duke, the Sueve Buffalo, and the wise men of the hundred, where they could not see his movements. After his prayer, he was preparing to swing the hammer so as to reach the saint’s head, when Buffalo, suspecting foul play, stole quietly forward and called to Martin to shift his position. Martin simply bade his companions, who, like himself, had their hands securely bound, rise up and lift their hands free from the cords. The fastenings fell off and the heathens stood in awe, waiting for his words. This, says the author, is word for word from St. Martin’s biographer, Sulpicius Severus. Then came a crashing noise, and the lightning fell on the priest, killing him instantly, while the mighty tree was rent in pieces and fell to the earth, carrying in its fall the idol, temple, altar, and car, which disappeared under its burning branches. With awe and terror Fraomar and the Chatti besought the stranger, as a terrible magician, to leave them and not work them any more mischief. The saint sorrowfully complies, grieving that the true God had not yet conquered their hearts, though his might had been shown in such a way, and goes his way with Buffalo to the Suevian settlement. Here [Pg 53] he takes up his abode in a cave, in front of which is a spring called Odin’s Spring, and in which the Germans bathe their new-born children and give them names. Meanwhile, Withimer, the Christian, struggles with his love, and Bissula, the proud, beautiful heathen princess, still refuses to marry him unless he will undertake the duty of avenging her murdered father and brothers. St. Martin reasons with both, and at last prevails with the former to give up his love for the sake of his conscience; but having painted the evils of ingratitude to God and of eternal damnation in vain, he at last conquers the youth by reminding him that, as a German, it would be an indelible disgrace to him to forswear himself by breaking his baptismal vows. Bissula mourns his sudden departure, which she attributes to a messenger having recalled him during her absence, and turns her attention to preserving her last remaining brother from the hatred of the Billing. This she does by resorting to the charms of the Abruna woman Velleda, a priestess said to be hundreds of years old, and to possess marvellous powers, as Circe of old, to change men into stones, trees, and animals. She is, however, not a witch, but the enemy of witches; and here follows a terrible account of the cruelties and absurdities to which the belief in witches led in those times, and, indeed, in all times. Châteaubriand’s [24] beautiful Gallic Velleda is a very different character from this hideous old hag of the Black Forest. Though not a witch, she has, in Bolanden’s book, all the conventional “properties” of one in the shape of a talking raven and two snakes entwined round her neck and arms. She promises Katuwald to give Bissula a love-drink, to turn her heart from Withimer to himself; and by a charm, consisting of a piece of skin inscribed with mystic characters, she promises to Hermanric invulnerability against “sword and spear.”

St. Martin, in the meanwhile, has managed to gather an audience of children, whom he instructs in the truths of Christianity and teaches to behave according to Christian morality, not forgetting also to induce them to clothe and wash themselves regularly every day. Some of the parents also join his catechumens, but the greater part still look upon him as an impious contemner of the gods and a powerful magician The priest of this “hundred” once tries to entrap him at the head of a crowd of infuriated Germans, but the saint mildly and logically drives him into contradictions which are evident even to his unlearned hearers. On this occasion the two accounts of the creation, the Biblical and the Teutonic, are set side by side. The defeated priest retires, but only to plot further mischief; and the scene changes to a German wedding, which forms a very interesting chapter. Girls of an age and willing to be married usually wore several little bells in their girdle, and it was allowed to any freeman to carry them off, provided he afterwards loyally paid the stipulated price—two fat oxen, a caparisoned horse, two slaves, a sword, a spear, and a shield—to the bride’s father. The bridegroom’s dress was that usually worn by freemen on state occasions, and of course the full complement of weapons was indispensable. Falk, the bridegroom, is represented as wearing a magnificent bear-skin, with the head drawn over his own as a hood. The bride, besides [Pg 54] her linen tunic or undergarment; wore also a cloak of Roman manufacture and of gaudy colors. The whole kindred of the bridegroom accompanied him with horns, pipes, and a kind of cymbals to his father-in-law’s house, and the oxen, etc., were led by the slaves. The father performed the ceremony, and Falk swore by “sword and spear” to hold his wife in all honor and truth. The father put a ring on the bride’s finger and bade her remember that, although her husband would be allowed by ancient custom to take other wives if he pleased, she herself would nevertheless be bound to the most unswerving fidelity; and, giving her two yoked oxen as a wedding present, told her that as these two drew one car, so husband and wife were bound to share and carry together the burdens of life.[25] The shrill music of the horns and clashing together of weapons accompanied the approving hurrahs of the two families, and Falk now led his wife home. From the door of his house hung a naked sword—the “marriage sword”—a warning of the doom that follows the least infidelity; and on going in the bridegroom led the bride three times round the hearth, saying: “Here shalt thou stay and watch as housemistress in chastity, prudence, and industry.” A free-woman of the husband’s kindred then brought a bowl of water and washed the bride’s feet, after which the bride’s father dipped a linden-branch in the same water and sprinkled the bed, the domestic utensils, and the relations of the bridegroom. A wooden platter full of honey was then handed to him, and, as he anointed the bride’s mouth with honey, he said these words: “Let thy mouth always speak sweet words to thy husband, but no bitter ones.” After this ceremony the bride’s head was wrapped in a cloth, and she was led to the closed door of the dwelling, and in succession to those of the stables, the grain-store, and the slave-huts, each of which she struck with her right foot, while the women showered handfuls of wheat, oats, barley, and beans on her head, during which rite the father said to her: “As long as thou governest thy house with industry, so long shalt thou not lack the fruits of the earth.” Falk now took the cloth off his wife’s head and kissed her, and all the family followed with their congratulations.

The expected presence of Bissula at the banquet had led to a departure from the ordinary German usage, and a table had been prepared for such as would sit at it during the bridal feast. The king’s daughter, when she came, brought a much-valued present, one which German housewives of the present day rate as highly as their gigantic ancestresses of the days of old—a store of home-spun linen. After the banquet, a wild dance was performed in honor of the young couple. Tacitus gives an account of it: The young men assembled in a crooked double line, half of them holding naked swords and the other half spears, held forward, crossing each other. Four or five youths, entirely naked, now began a skilful dance, threading their way with incredible quickness between the shining weapons. The Scotch sword-dance is thought sufficiently clever nowadays, but what is it compared to the real danger, and the opportunity of showing dexterity as well as courage, which this ancient German custom offered? This game was accompanied by the shrill blast of horns [Pg 55] and pipes and the hoarse shouting of the excited spectators. Another drinking bout followed this exploit, when, as the day began to fade, the priestess Velleda made her appearance. And now a natural phenomenon was added to the strange scene—a partial eclipse of the moon, which the Germans explained as the struggle between the moon and the giant wolf Managarm, a half-divine creature, who feeds on the bodies of the dead and now and then hunts and pursues the heavenly bodies. As the shadow grew less and the moon’s light broke forth again, the guests clamored and clashed their arms together, crying out, “The moon wins! the moon wins!” as if encouraging human combatants. During this confusion Katuwald, the Billing chief, emboldened by the love-potion which Velleda has given Bissula to drink, attempts to carry her off; but the maiden, strong as the women of giant growth of old Germany ever were, wrestles with him and overcomes him, bearing him in her arms into the midst of the assembled guests. Most of the authorities quoted by Bolanden go to confirm the facts of the extraordinary strength of the women of that time, their stature of six and often seven feet, and of the custom prevalent among the Germans of teaching young girls to wrestle and throw the spear like the men.

The next scene of primitive life in the Black Forest is the doom of the adulteress, a wretched, guilty woman being driven naked through the “hundred,” pursued by all the free-women, each armed with long whips and small knives. This was the common punishment decreed for such offences. A human sacrifice to the gods of Walhalla is also portrayed in vivid colors: the Chatti immolate a slave and two oxen as a propitiatory offering before their foray against the Suevi; and one more example of German manners and customs is afforded by the funeral of Hermanric, Bissula’s brother, whom the Billing Katuwald has slain with an arrow. This is gorgeously described: the car, drawn by six horses, contained the corpse and was adorned with endless plate, jewels, rare stuffs, and articles of Roman workmanship of great value; the horses’ heads were wreathed in oak and ash garlands; three fully caparisoned horses and eight gorgeously-arrayed slaves, the special servants and companions of the deceased, followed the car and were destined to be struck dead and burned with their master. Marcomir, the umpire, pronounced a funeral oration, and the priest’s deputy had lifted the sacred hammer to kill the first slave, when a strange whirlwind began to shake the forest around the funeral pile. Trees were uprooted, the wind tore and howled through the branches, thunder and lightning added their terrors, and the Suevi stood rooted to the ground in awe and amazement. St. Martin is seen in the distance advancing towards them at a miraculously quick pace, and as he comes nearer the storm-cloud is just seen passing away, while the sun breaks forth again. The cry of “The sorcerer!” is raised, but Buffalo cries out, “He is no sorcerer, but a holy man,” and, breathless, they all watch the saint.

Here the author again draws on Sulpicius Severus for a signal miracle—nothing short of a raising from the dead. St. Martin commands the dead Hermanric to arise and live; the youth starts up and clings to the saint’s mantle, while the bystanders are dumb with fear and awe. [Pg 56] He comes forth, and, mounting one of his horses, seats his deliverer on another and rides away with him, bidding his sister believe in the almighty and only God of the Christians, and telling his slaves that as they were to have followed him into Walhalla, so he expects them the next day at the saint’s abode, to follow him in the new way of life he has at last discovered. The end is easy to see: Bissula becomes a Christian, renounces her hatred against the Billing, and receives baptism with hundreds of her relations and slaves, to all the latter of whom she and her brother give their freedom and certain necessary possessions—in fact, almost portioning out their estate between them. Bissula then marries Withimer, and they spend their lives in trying to spread the light of the Gospel among their fellow-countrymen, while Hermanric follows St. Martin and becomes a monk in one of the first Frankish monasteries.

Among the most natural characters in the book are Eustace and Buffalo, who delight the reader with their various shrewd sayings and their dog-like fidelity to St. Martin. One or two curious facts have an incidental place in the story; for instance, the derivation of the modern German word for grandson—Enkel—vouched for by Simrock, and which is a survival of the old custom of reckoning the two nearest degrees of relationship by the two joints of the leg; the knee signifying the son, and the ankle the grandson.

A very good point is also made in Withimer’s spiritual probation, his penance in the cave with St. Martin, and his meekly submitting, after a terrible struggle with his own pride and passions, to receive a scourging from the saint, and to cut off his golden, flowing hair, the outward badge of his sovereignty. His victory over himself and his true humility are very beautiful. In the baptism scene it is interesting to be reminded of the old formula of the questions addressed to the catechumens, of which the following are specimens:

“Forsachis [renouncest] tu diabolæ? … End ec [and I] for sacho allum diaboles workum [works] en wordum [words] Thunaer ende woten ende [and] allein them unholdum [unclean] the ira genotes [companions] sint.… Gelobis tu [believest thou] in got alamehtigan [Almighty] Fadaer [Father]?”

We meant to have spoken more at length of the mythology of the Teutonic races, but have no space for the subject. The authorities Bolanden has followed are Tacitus, Grimm, and Arnkiel. Concerning history, manners, and customs he quotes Julius Cæsar, Tacitus, Procopius, Strabo, Pliny, Schmidt, Simrock, Wirth, Heber, Cantù, Ozanam, and Arnkiel. For the traditions of St. Martin’s life Sulpicius Severus, his deacon, friend, and biographer, is the authority. We should like to give an example of the poetry of the ancient Germans; but as the Nibelungenlied is accessible to every scholar and widely known even to the ordinary reading public, no specimen of inferior war-hymns would be worth drawing attention to. We will conclude by a beautiful description of the simplicity and humble appearance of a holy bishop of the fourth century, Justinus of Strassburg, and who, as well as St. Martin, had a high opinion of the grand “raw material,” ready to the hand of Christian workers, in the brave, truthful, loyal, hospitable, even if cruel and uncivilized, Germans of the “forest primeval.”

[Pg 57] Bolanden says: “The simplicity of the bishop reminded one of the apostolic age. He bore no outward sign of his high rank, and his only garments were two tunics of white wool, one long with long sleeves, and another, sleeveless and short, over it, while over all hung a cloak of Roman make. His feet were shod with sandals. His black beard hung low over his breast, while a ring of whitening hair encircled his bald head. His features were thin, as if with fasting and mortification, his glance calm, and his demeanor humble; while his hands, used to toil, were extraordinarily strong, for he followed the example of St. Paul, who refused to be a burden upon any one.… For precisely the most pious and holy of the bishops of the Frankish country gave themselves to manual labor, to give a good example to the Franks, who shrank from work as from a shameful occupation,… and this, too, by no means to the prejudice of the vineyard of the Lord. On the contrary, those self-denying men, indifferent to life, seeking no earthly honors or distinctions, thinking only of the service of God, were the pillars of the church and the most fruitful signs of her progress. Neither did they acknowledge the golden fetters of kings, which hinder the working of Christ’s messengers. They were free in their sacred ministry, and God’s protection accompanied them in their hallowed work.”

Bolanden’s book has, of course, an arrière-pensée, which is so evident through the story that it rather spoils the mere literary value of the book, as “a purpose” more or less cramps any literary production. But, as a clever contemporary says, “In the hot theological controversies of the present day it is hard to treat any subject, even remotely connected with ecclesiastical history, without betraying a ‘tendency.’” Bolanden is outspoken enough as to his, which has for object the present Prussian laws against religious freedom. But we think we may safely say that the first book of the series will be the most original and interesting, illustrating as it does a period so little known and not yet become, like the middle ages, the hackneyed theme of every novelist, from first to fifth rate, of every civilized and literary European nationality.

[22] Conrad von Bolanden, a brief sketch of whose life has already appeared in these pages, requires no introduction to the readers of The Catholic World, who will know him best as the author of The Progressionists, Angela, The Trowel or the Cross, etc.

[23] This reminds one of the Aztec war-god Quatzacoatl.

[24] Les Martyrs, Châteaubriand.

[25] Tacitus, Germania.

[Pg 58]

SACERDOS ALTER CHRISTUS.[26]

The priest, “another Christ” is he,

And plights the church his marriage-vows;

Thenceforth in every soul to see

A daughter, sister, spouse.

Then let him wear the triple cord

Of father’s, brother’s, husband’s care;

In this partaking with his Lord

What angels cannot share.

O sweet new love! O strong new wine!

O taste of Pentecostal fire!

Inebriate me, draught divine,

With Calvary’s desire!

“I thirst!” He cried. The dregs were drained:

But still “I thirst!” his dying cry.

While one ungarnered soul remained,

The cup too soon was dry.

And shall not I be crucified?

What though the fiends, when all is done,

Make darkness round me, and deride

That not a soul is won?

God reaps from very loss a gain,

And darkness here is light above.

Nor ever did and died in vain

Who did and died for love.

1871

[26] St. Bernard.

[Pg 59]

LABOR IN EUROPE AND AMERICA.[27]

There was a time, not far distant, when men thought they had found in the United States of America the sovereignty of labor. It was the boast of its people that there were no American paupers. The working classes looked with something like contempt upon the condition of their fellow-laborers in Europe. Here was the land where every man’s independence rested in his own hands and his willingness to labor. No day should come when an honest day’s work would not earn, not bread alone, but a home—an American home. This was the time when the followers of Boone were disclosing to wondering eyes the virgin richness of the Ohio and Mississippi valleys; when, later, adventurous spirits led the way over the Rocky Mountains to a new western empire; when, close succeeding, California opened its Aladdin’s caves, not to the lash of kings or tyrants over toiling slaves, but to the picks and pans of free labor. Yes, here at last was found what the poets and philosophers of Greece and Rome had only dreamed of—the ideal commonwealth, a golden age. Thus had a free republic, established in the richest and grandest territory the sun shone on, conquered at last the problem of ages, and labor stood the peer of capital—nay, aspired to be its master. It was claimed not only that a particular form of government had achieved those economic results, but that it was capable of maintaining them indefinitely. Politics bade defiance to political economy.

Is this state of things true of to-day? In part, yes, it may be answered. Looking at the comparative independence and comfort of the great masses of the working classes of this country, noting that intelligent zeal for personal liberty which pervades them, much reason for congratulation still remains. But the pressure of those social conditions affecting labor in other countries is beginning to be seriously felt. The reserve forces of capital are coming up. The “salad days” of the nation are over. It has grown to manhood, and, growing thus, has met the harsh experiences inseparable from national as from individual life. It begins to feel the burdens of maturity, and to be harassed by its anxieties. Labor has met war, its wild fever, its deadly collapse; labor has met debt, the second and costlier price of war, sucking out the life-blood after the wounds of battle have been stanched; and, lastly, labor has met capital, which, like one of those genii described in the Arabian tales, rises portentous to its full strength and stature out of the smoke of war and the shadow of debt. These two forces, labor and capital—which, to borrow an image from the ancient myths, Ἀνάγκη or Necessitas seems to have linked together in iron bonds—mutually hostile [Pg 60] yet inseparable co-laborers in the work of human progress, are preparing to try their strength in the New World as they have done in the Old. The first murmurs of that contest which it was deemed republican institutions could for ever avert are plainly heard. Daily observation shows that the laws governing the accumulation of wealth elsewhere—increase stimulating increase in a geometrical ratio—are not suspended here. “The rich are growing richer, the poor poorer.” Any of the great daily newspapers need only to be looked at from week to week and month to month to find the growing record of strikes, the agitation of labor, the increase of pauperism. The glory of the country, its greatest source of prosperity, has had in it an element of weakness. That rich and wide domain, which invited immigration, postponed, but has not been able eventually to stay, the aggregation of surplus labor—especially on the two seaboards—which everywhere becomes the bond-slave of capital, and fights its battles against free labor. In a word, politics, the barriers of merely political pronunciamientos, have yielded in the United States, as elsewhere, to those primal laws of supply and demand which govern the wages of labor. We are assimilating to the economic conditions of Europe. A revolution has taken place during the course of the last quarter of a century in the industrial features of this country. The flux and reflux both of labor and capital between America and Europe are instant and inevitable. Henceforward the contest between them will be fought out on the old conditions, little or not at all affected by political or—what is the same thing—sentimental considerations.

Here, then, is a problem for the statesmen of this age widely differing from that which engaged the attention of the fathers of the Constitution, yet like it in this: that the successful solution of each aims at the amelioration of the condition of mankind. One was political; the other is, and will be, social, and may be regarded as a sequel to, and complement of, the first.

Must we sink into the old ruts along which labor has slowly and painfully dragged its burdens for ages in Europe? Is there no help for this Sisyphus? Must the stone roll down the hill again, after having mounted so near the top? Or is it possible that the light which the founders of this republic set up as a beacon for the political regeneration of mankind one hundred years ago may be rekindled in the same land in a succeeding age to lead the way to the regeneration of labor? It is a task for the highest, the most Christian, the most Catholic statesmanship. The church, faithful to its great rôle of emancipator or manumitter, which it took up, in advance of the age, in the darkest eclipse of the declension of the Roman Empire, and has never since abandoned, will be found again in the van of this movement. Labor and capital, which, left to themselves, would rend each other, may find in its arbitrament a truce—peace—harmonious working.

Is the hope that this republic shall be the first to utter to Europe and the world some grand maxims in social economy, as one hundred years ago it did in politics, chimerical? By its realization we shall be able to avert from this country the atheistic commune which is threatening to ravage Europe, or to meet it and defeat it should it come.

Wise action must be the result [Pg 61] of good information. Such a work, therefore, as this of Dr. Young’s on Labor in Europe and America is a valuable auxiliary to those who like to know what they have to deal with before moving in any matter. It is a bulky volume of over eight hundred pages octavo of closely-printed matter; but it is not so appalling as it looks, the number of countries surveyed and the diversity of the conditions of labor presented making it interesting even to the general reader. Dr. Young’s position as chief of the United States Bureau of Statistics has given him exceptional advantages and facilities for obtaining information in the preparation of such a work, and it is fair to say that he appears to have availed himself of them with great industry and ability. It is, in fact, the work of a specialist who is devoted to his subject, and is therefore primâ facie worthy of attentive consideration. Nor does it fail in great part to make good its pretensions. Yet it has all the faults of the current works of the infant science of statistics. It jams everything into columns of tabular statements, and seeks to draw infallible averages and wide-sweeping deductions from them which cannot be always sustained on closer scrutiny. Observation is everywhere too limited, the conditions of society and of individual existence and labor too minutely diversified and shifting, to be toted up like a sum in addition by a calculating machine. Were we to listen to the statisticians, however, we would displace the Pope and put them in his chair. They would feel quite at ease there, and the infallibility they shake their heads at in Pio Nono would fit them to a charm. Like the jailer in Monte Christo, they would blot out all individuality and number every one and everything 1, 2, 3. But man is too stubbornly self-willed ever to be made the term of an equation.

How different, how inferior, such a work as this, for instance, of Dr. Young’s—comprehensive and well digested as it truly is—to any one of his great namesake’s in the last century, Arthur Young, who, more justly than M. Adolphe Quetelet, deserves the title of the “father of modern statistics.” One is like the Turkey carpet that Macaulay speaks of in his criticism on Montgomery, which contains indeed all the colors that are to be found in a masterpiece of painting, but is fit only for its own uses; the other is a picture instinct with life. The old method of personal, detailed, and necessarily limited observation, while it excelled in picturesqueness, gave at the same time solid, accurate, special information which the hasty generalizations of the present day too often miss. The latter confuse the mind by their immense array of figures.

Again, Dr. Young has given, we think, a disproportionate share of attention to Europe, Asia, and even Africa—occupying in all over seven hundred pages with his account of labor in those countries, while he handles the subject in the United States and Canada in just one hundred pages. His explanation is that his work is intended chiefly for circulation in the United States, but this explanation is unsatisfactory. His long introductory history of labor from the remotest times, compiled, as it plainly is, from the works of European scholars within everybody’s reach, and his view, chiefly at second hand, from the reports of American consuls, of the state of labor in Europe, are manifestly inferior, both in interest and authority, to the copious original works of the [Pg 62] statisticians of particular foreign countries; while his history of American labor and presentation of its existing conditions, which ought to have given its real value to his work, are extremely meagre and superficial. His own tour through the manufacturing centres of England and the Continent appears from his statements to have been of too flying a nature to yield any very authoritative results. But we wish it to be distinctly understood that while the plan of Dr. Young’s work, and, in some respects, its execution, appear to us defective, we are by no means disposed to undervalue the great utility of what he has accomplished in thus presenting to the American reader in compact form a survey of the history of labor down to our own times. It is only from a study of the subject in its widest aspects that an intelligent comprehension of the factors of the problems before us in America can be arrived at.

Dr. Young begins by a review of the origin of slavery and gradual development of wage labor, following its thread through the rise and decline of the ancient empires of Egypt, Greece, and Rome. The conquest and carrying off of alien races for the uses of manual labor, while their conquerors followed the profession of arms, was the most fruitful source of slavery in ancient times. This species of slavery is still found in Africa. It was long ago extinguished in Europe. It was crippled in America by the suppression of the slave trade, and has finally disappeared in the United States by the emancipation of the negro race. On the other hand, we have never had in this country the predial slavery which is bound to the soil and digs the ground it originally sprang from, of which the last great example is vanishing from Russia under the benignant edicts of Alexander II. But there is no doubt that that form would have developed itself in the United States from negro slavery if the distinction of color could have been annihilated. It was already tending in that direction when the war intervened.

We must pass over Dr. Young’s account of labor under the feudal system, but we cannot help noting the prejudice he seems to share with the vulgar against the monks. To read his pages, one would necessarily be led to infer that the clergy were among the worst oppressors of the poor; that they ground their unhappy serfs, and were the allies of the nobles and military commanders in keeping down the working classes. That all this farrago of calumny is directly the reverse of the truth is now so universally admitted by students of those ages that it is needless to enter into the question, nor would our space permit us to do so. It will suffice to quote Hallam, who, while opposed to the principles upon which monasteries are founded, calls those of the middle ages “green spots in the wilderness where the feeble and the persecuted could find refuge.”[28] And again, speaking of the devastation of immense tracts by war, he says: “We owe the agricultural restoration of the great part of Europe to the monks.”[29] It is singular that such testimony is omitted by Dr. Young. It would be still more singular if it had escaped his observation. His admissions are as ridiculous as his omissions. In a foot-note of a single line, which is lost in the midst of two chapters on the subject, he says: “It is admitted that the abbots [Pg 63] were most indulgent landlords.” This is as if a writer on the woollen manufacture of the present day should devote a hundred pages to the knitting-needles of the old women in our country towns, and inform his readers in a one-line footnote: “Steam machinery was also used in this age in the manufacture of woollens.” The monastery was as distinctively the economic feature of the civilization of the middle ages as the steam-engine is of our times. Each played the same part in its development. It is just as easy to be blind to one as to the other.

Passing over the period included between Elizabeth and George III., and the early days of what Dr. Young aptly terms the “era of machinery,” we come down to the consideration of the organization and prices of labor, the rates of wages and cost of subsistence, and the habits of the working classes in England at the present day. These are fruitful themes, and are treated of in detail. We will endeavor to present a few items of comparison, from the statistics given in connection with them, with those afforded later in the case of the United States.

What we have said about the change that has taken place in the conditions of labor in the United States is shown by Dr. Young’s account of the trades-unions of the United Kingdom. Instead of, as formerly, maintaining their position on a totally different and higher plane than European workmen, American mechanics now take the law, in many cases, from English organizations. For instance, the “Amalgamated Society of Engineers,” a union including machinists, millwrights, smiths, and pattern-makers, and numbering at the close of 1874 about 45,000 members, had 30 branches in the United States at the end of 1873, with an aggregate membership of 1,405. These branches were spread over every manufacturing city of the first or second class in the Union. Five branches were established in Canada. Some idea of the power of such a society, apart from its mere roll of membership, may be gathered from its annual statements of the account of its accumulated fund. Its balance on hand at the close of 1873 amounted to £200,923 1s. 6¾d. Its expenditure during the same year amounted to £67,199 17s., 5½d., including such items as telegrams, banking expenses, delegations, grants to other trades, parliamentary committees, gas-stokers defence fund—disclosing, in fact, all the incidents of a powerful and active organization.

The “Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners” has 265 branches, 14 of which are in the United States. The membership, however, appears to be small in this country, numbering only 445 men. The governmental organization of societies of this class is very elaborate and centralizing in character. Monthly reports are received from all the branches, including those in the United States. For instance, the monthly reports of the Amalgamated Carpenters’ Society for January, 1875, from the United States, represent the state of trade as “bad,” “dull,” or “slack,” with the exception of San Francisco, where it is reported “good,” and Newark as “improving.” Although no data are here given, it is not to be doubted that this system of reports will be, or has already been, extended to such organizations as the “Miners’ National Association,” numbering 140,000, and the National [Pg 64] Agricultural Laborers’ Union, numbering 60,000, thus seriously affecting the immigration not only of skilled but of agricultural labor. In fact, we are already aware that personal reports have been made by Joseph Arch and others, some of them not favorable. The formidable character of the trades-unions of Great Britain is seen by the mere statement of their aggregate membership, which Dr. Young estimates, with all deductions, at 800,000 in January, 1875.

The question of strikes in England is too large a one to be entered into here. Dr. Young gives a brief history of the great Preston strike of 1836, of the Nottingham, the Staffordshire Colliery, the Pottery, and the Yorkshire strikes, all of which proved unsuccessful after terrible suffering on the part of the workmen and great loss on both sides had been endured. A short account is also given of the unsuccessful “Amalgamated Engineers’” strike of 1851-52, and the protracted engineers’ strike on the Tyne, 1871-72, for the nine hours’ system, which resulted in a compromise. Experience has demonstrated of strikes, 1st, that they are usually unsuccessful; 2d, that they lessen the employer’s ability to maintain even the wages paid before the strike, by giving an advantage to his competitor in other countries which he cannot always recover; 3d, that where they are fought out to the end they cause suffering and develop disease in the weak, and in women and children, which no wages can pay for or cure; 4th, that they deteriorate the character of the men engaged in them by promoting a feeling of lawlessness and desire for stimulation even among the best disposed; 5th, that, even if successful, there is a greater dead loss in money spent than is recouped by the advance gained in wages. These conclusions are now beginning to be so well understood in England—where, from more perfect organization, strikes are larger and cost more to both parties than in the United States—that the chairman of the Trades-Union Congress of the United Kingdom, held at Liverpool in January, 1875, in his opening address referred to strikes as a mode of settling differences with employers which ought to be avoided by all practicable means, and resorted to only in the most extreme cases—an opinion afterwards embodied in a resolution which was adopted by the Congress. The principle of arbitration has already been tried successfully in several important instances.

Dr. Young illustrates the rates of wages in the United Kingdom by tables. He accompanies the tables with the explanation that “in a very large number of occupations the hands are paid by the piece or by weight, and the actual rate of wages would not indicate the sum an operative would take home with him at the end of the week as the price of his labor. The sums stated in all these tables are therefore the average sums earned per week, whether the labor be paid by the day or the piece.” The same explanation holds good for the United States. Of these tabular statements our space will only permit us to give two or three, to which we shall subjoin the rates of wages in the United States in the same occupations by way of comparison. The British pound sterling is computed at $4 84, and the shilling at 24 cents.

WAGES IN COTTON-MILLS.

The reduction in the hours of labor and the increase in the rates of wages in English cotton-mills are shown in the following table:

[Pg 65] Statement showing the average weekly earnings of operatives in cotton-mills during the years 1839, 1849, 1859, and 1873.

OCCUPATION.	SEX.	WORK OF 69 HOURS.		WORK OF 60 HOURS.
OCCUPATION.	SEX.	1839.	1849.	1859.	1873.
Steam-engine tenders,		$5 76	$5 72	$7 20	$7 68
Warehousemen,		4 32	4 80	5 28	6 24
Carding:
Stretchers,	Women and girls,	1 68	1 80	1 92	2 88
Strippers,	Young men,	2 64	2 88	3 36	4 56
Overlookers,		6 00	6 72	6 72	7 68
Spinning:
Winders on self-acting mules,		3 84	4 32	4 80	6 00
Piecers,	Women and young men,	1 94	2 16	2 40	3 84
Overlookers,		4 80	5 28	6 24	7 20
Reeling:
Throttle-rulers,	Women,	2 16	2 28	2 28	3 00
Warpers,		5 28	5 28	5 52	6 24
Sizers,		5 52	5 52	6 00	7 20
Doubling:
Doublers,	Women,	1 68	1 80	2 16	3 00
Overlookers,		5 76	6 00	6 72	7 68

“Other branches show the same ratio of advance.”

The following statement was furnished to Dr. Young by the proprietors of the cotton-mills of Messrs. Shaw, Jardin & Co., of Manchester, operating 250,000 spindles, and producing yarns from No. 60 to 220, sewing cottons, lace yarn, crape yarn, and two-fold warp yarns:

Average wages (per week of 59 hours) of persons employed in 1872.

OCCUPATION.	WAGES.
Carding:
Overseer,	$10 89
Second hand,	7 26
Drawing-frame tenders,	2 66
Speeder-tenders,	3 14
Grinders,	5 32
Strippers,	5 32
Spinning:
Overseer,	14 52
Mule-spinners,	$13 31 to 15 73
Mule-backside piecers,	2 42 to 3 87
Repair-shop, engine-room, etc.:
Foreman or overseer,	14 52
Wood and iron workers,	7 74
Engineer,	9 68
Laborers,	5 32

These tables will be found on pp. 330-31. Now let us compare the wages there given with those paid to the same class of operatives in the United States. On pages 750-51, Dr. Young gives a table showing the average weekly wages paid in American cotton-mills in various States in 1869 and 1874. We select Rhode Island, for the reason that the rate of wages there appears to be a good average, being lower than is paid in Massachusetts and higher than in New York.

Wages in cotton-mills (weekly average).

OCCUPATION.	RHODE ISLAND.
OCCUPATION.	1869.	1874.
Carding:
Overseer,	$17 00	$17 00
Picker-tenders,	7 80	7 72
Railway-tenders,	3 50	[B]4 47
Drawing-frame tenders,	5 00	[C]5 40
Speeder-tenders,	6 12	[C]7 48
Picker-boy,	6 25	[A]4 03
Grinders,	9 08	9 10
Strippers,	7 26	7 50
Spinning:
Overseer,	15 60	17 69
Mule-spinners,	9 50	10 16
Mule-backside piecers,	2 85	[A]2 52
Frame-spinners,	5 00	[B]3 70
Dressing:
Overseer,	13 75	14 80
Second hand,	9 00	11 83
Spoolers,	5 00	[C]4 32
Warpers,	5 75	[C]6 98
Drawers and twisters,	5 00
Dressers,	11 25	13 11
Weaving:
Overseer,	18 33	18 00
Weavers,	8 00	[C]7 91
Drawing-in hands,	7 50	[C]7 25
Repair-shop, engine-room, etc.:
Foreman,	18 00	15 79
Wood-workers,	15 00	13 58
Iron-workers,	13 16	13 68
Engineer,	18 00	13 71
Laborers,	9 33	8 59
Overseer in cloth-room,	15 00	12 42

[A] Boys.

[B] Females.

[C] Part females.

[Pg 66] It will appear, therefore, from an examination of the tables that the average weekly wages in Rhode Island cotton-mills (which fairly represent those of the rest of the country) are in most cases from a third to nearly double those paid in Manchester. But it will also be observed that, whereas English wages appear to have increased steadily in every grade, the American rates show a decided tendency downwards. The highest skilled American labor holds its own with difficulty, but in the lower grades cheaper labor has been extensively employed since 1869. Dr. Young’s explanation must also be borne in mind in reading these tables—viz., that the labor is frequently piece-work. In some instances the English operatives also employ their own helpers.

But do these figures really represent the present rate of wages? Doubtless the average given is a fair one. But any one whose attention was directed to the strike at the Lonsdale Mills, R. I., January, 1875, must have noticed that wages are in reality much lower than here given. Into the merits of that controversy we do not enter—we wish merely to arrive at the figures. The company would appear to have done everything they could for the comfort and improvement of the condition of their hands, and the reduction complained of probably could not be avoided in the then depressed state of the market. The special correspondent of the New York Herald of that date gives the statement of the superintendent, who said that the weavers before the reduction were receiving fifty cents per cut (wide goods), and with the reduction of 10 per cent. the price paid would be forty-five cents per cut; or, in other words, they would earn about $1 a day. Taking the statements of the operatives, it was claimed that many of the men were making only ninety-six cents a day before the strike, and the women sixty-five cents. Those figures, therefore, in the case of one of the largest companies, represent labor as already reduced below English rates. This strike also afforded an illustration of the statement, made in the beginning of this article, of the instant ebb and flow of labor, as well as capital, which now characterizes industry in the United States. The operatives were about half English and half Irish (the overseers alone being American), and the first movement of those who had enough money to do so was to return to England or Ireland.

Notwithstanding the readiness of operatives to strike the moment the opportunity offers—a readiness perfectly well known and appreciated by their employers—and notwithstanding also, it may be said, the determination of employers to regulate wages by the laws of trade, it is nevertheless one of the most noble and encouraging features of the industrial pursuits of this age that the employers in many instances—and those generally the chief—show that they intend that their minds shall not be diverted from the purpose of improving the condition of their workmen, both mentally and materially. It is well that the mild voice of Christian charity should still be able to make itself heard in the midst of this whir of iron machinery.

In the condition of no kind of labor does the United States compare more favorably with England and the Continent of Europe than in agriculture. Here the respective wages paid hardly admit of comparison. But it is not to be lost [Pg 67] sight of that, wretched as the condition of the English agricultural laborer may appear to us, his way of viewing things is not ours. The rough, arduous, irregular, exposed labor of the Western backwoodsman, or even farmer, appears to him more terrible than the dull, stated servitude, with its beer in the present and its work-house in the future, that shock our free thought. The report of the delegates of the Agricultural Union was decidedly unfavorable in the case of Canada, where the conditions of labor do not essentially vary from those of the Northwestern States. This question of agricultural labor is, however, too vast a one to be treated of here. Dr. Young’s reports are very valuable, but take, perhaps, the American view of the question too much for granted.[30]

WAGES OF MECHANICS AND SKILLED ARTISANS IN GREAT BRITAIN.

This branch of his subject is copiously treated by Dr. Young in connection with his tour through the chief manufacturing cities of the United Kingdom in 1872. From the numerous tables presented we select one under the head of “Skilled trades in London, weekly wages in 1871” (page 242) as being the most comprehensive.

The average daily wages of persons employed in the same trades in the United States in 1874 was from $2 25 for shoemakers to $3 33 for bricklayers or masons (pp. 745-747); or, in other words, from 50 per cent. to 100 per cent. more than in England.

Statement showing the established rates of wages obtained by members of the various trades societies of the metropolis, in summer and winter, compiled under the supervision of Alsager Hay Hill, LL.B.

TRADES.	NUMBER OF MEMBERS.	RATE OF WAGES.
TRADES.	NUMBER OF MEMBERS.	Sum’r	Winter
Bakers,		$3 87	$5 08
Basket-makers,		3 63	4 84
Boat-builders,		8 47	7 26
Bookbinders,	702	7 26	7 26
Brass-cock finishers,		8 47	8 47
Brass-finishers,		8 47	8 47
Bricklayers,	2,386	16[D]	16[D]
Brush-makers,	400	[E]	[E]
Cabinet-makers,	500	7 26	7 26
Cabinet-makers, deal,	450	7 99	7 99
Carpenters,	4,740	9 14	9 14
Carvers and gilders,	50	4 84	4 84
Coach-builders,	25	9 68	9 68
Coach-makers,	320	9 68	9 68
Coach-smiths,	200	4 84	12 58
Coach-trimmers and makers,		6 05	6 05
Compositors,	3,550	4 84	8 47
Cork-cutters,	100	7 26	7 26
Cordwainers,	3,678	[F]	[F]
Curriers,	1,900	8 47	8 47
Engineers,	33,539	16[D]	16[D]
Engineers,	33,539	18[D]	16[D]
Farriers,	220	9 68	12 10
French polishers,	30	7 26	7 26
Hammermen,	80	5 81	5 81
Iron-founders and moulders,	7,372	9 20	9 20
Letterpress printers,		7 26	7 26
Painters, house,		14[D]	14[D]
Pianoforte makers,	400	16[D]	16[D]
Plasterers,		14[D]	14[D]
Plumbers,		18[D]	18[D]
Pressmen, printers,	60	7 26	7 26
Skinners,	225	7 26	7 26
Steam-engine makers,	100	16[D]	16[D]
Steam-engine makers,	100	18[D]	18[D]
Stone-masons,	17,193	9 14	7 82

[D] Per hour.

[E] Piece-work.

[F] Uncertain.

PURCHASING POWER OF WAGES.

But we cannot stop at the mere figures in dollars and cents. In this connection we must consider what those wages will buy in each country—what is their purchasing power:

“If a workman in Birmingham” says Dr. Young, “receive for fifty-four hours’ labor 30s., or about $8 33 in United States currency, and another, of the same occupation, in Philadelphia earn $12 50, it would be inaccurate to say that the earnings of the latter were 50 per cent. more than those of the former. The question is not what is the United States equivalent of the thirty British shillings, but what is the purchasing power of the wages of the [Pg 68] one workman in England and of the other in the United States? In other words, how much food, clothing, and shelter will the earnings of the one purchase as compared with the other?”

For the solution of this question Dr. Young enters into an elaborate analysis of the price of provisions, clothing, house-rent, etc., in each country. In this we are unable to follow him. But taking the amount paid for board by single men and women employed in mechanical labor in the great cities of both countries, the average price paid by men in Great Britain ranges from $2 50 to $3 50 per week; in the United States, from $4 50 to $5 50. For women, in manufacturing cities in England, from $1 50 to $2 50 per week; in the United States, from $2 50 to $3 50. In the great American manufacturing centre, Philadelphia, the average price of mechanics’ board is, for men, $5 per week; for women, $3. But this does not mean a single room for each; in most cases two, in some three, four, and even five, sleep in the same chamber. British workmen probably eat as much meat as American workmen, but they have not the same variety of dishes. House-rent is cheaper in most English cities even than in Philadelphia, where great and commendable efforts have always been made to provide good and cheap houses for working-men. Clothing Dr. Young estimates at less than half the price in England for the laboring classes compared with the United States; partly from cheaper rates, and partly from the inferior kind British workmen consent to wear—fustian or corduroy being the most common material.

We would wish to follow Dr. Young, if it were possible, into a comparison of the rates of wages and cost of living in the great iron and steel works on the Tyne, at Essen, Prussia, and in Philadelphia, but our space is already exceeded. The highest wages earned at the works of Fried. Krupp, Essen, which Dr. Young personally visited in 1872, were $1 80 for 11 hours’ piece-work. At the same establishment dinner (meat and vegetables and coffee) and lodging are supplied to unmarried men at $1 18 per week. Bread is an extra charge. Large bakeries are attached to the works.

In the comparison of the general rates of wages and cost of living in Great Britain and the United States, so many and so great diversities exist in both countries that it is a hazardous matter to draw general conclusions. Stated broadly, it would appear that the rate of wages in Great Britain since 1865 has shown a steady tendency to advance, with some fluctuations, while the cost of living is nearly stationary; in the United States, within the same period of ten years, wages have remained stationary or shown a tendency to decline, allowing for the fluctuations caused by a depreciated currency, while the cost of living has increased. The commercial depression existing since 1873 has affected labor in both countries, but more sensibly in the United States. The great falling off in immigration since 1873 is a remarkable and sensitive test of the depreciation of the labor market in the United States and the simultaneous rise of wages in Europe. From the recent report of the New York Emigration Commissioners it appears that there were landed at Castle Garden during 1875 84,560 immigrants, against 140,041 for 1874 and 294,581 for 1873. The falling off has been equally divided among [Pg 69] all nationalities. Nor does this tell the whole story; for the steamship companies show a very large return of laborers to Europe during the past year. It is not intended to convey the impression by these figures that European emigration has finally stayed its course towards these shores, but it is evident that it has received a serious temporary check. It is not the purpose of this paper to investigate what the remedy for this state of things may be. But it may be stated as the conviction of the writer that a mere return to specie payments, though beneficial, will not do all for the country that its advocates claim. Something more will be required—that is, economy, curtailment of expenses, national and individual—before we can reach bottom. Like youth sometimes, we have temporarily outgrown our strength. We have no vast deposits of wealth, the hoardings of centuries, to fall back upon like some European countries. We have always lived right up to our income, and have not yet adjusted ourselves to our sudden plunge into national debt. Hope has all along buoyed us up to over-production and consequent over-expenditure. The supply of labor must equalize itself to the necessary, not speculative, work to be done before it can be established on a sound basis. Fresh enterprises, promoting renewed inflation and over-production, will lead to another collapse. In the effort to recuperate, and before a new start can be made on a safe road of prosperity (which it is not doubted will be opened again), those who are already poor will suffer the most, as always has been and will be the case. The American working classes will have eventually to abandon most of those habits of personal expense which now seem to them a matter of course, but which European working-men would regard as extravagant, and to approach nearer to the old-country standard of living.

We are not able to follow Dr. Young in his researches into the rate of wages and cost of subsistence in the various countries of continental Europe which he visited. None of them approach so near the American standard as Great Britain. In most of them labor is poorly paid and the working classes live meanly according to our notions, yet contrive, withal, to enjoy a degree of comfort, and even happiness, which to us seems hard to understand under the circumstances.

[27] Labor in Europe and America: A Special Report on the Rates of Wages, the Cost of Subsistence, and the Condition of the Working Classes in Great Britain, France, Belgium, Germany, the other Countries of Europe, and in the United States and British America. By Edward Young, Ph.D., Chief of the United States Bureau of Statistics. 1875.

[28] Hallam’s Middle Ages, ch. ix. part i.

[29] Id. ch. ix. part ii.

[30] $1 a day for laborers was offered by public advertisement in February of this year, by the superintendent of the Centennial grounds, and men were glad to take it. How strange the spectacle in free America—how fruitless and disheartening the struggle it portends—when legislation is invoked at Albany, in the great State of New York, to keep up a fictitious price of labor!

[Pg 70]

SIR THOMAS MORE.

A HISTORICAL ROMANCE.

FROM THE FRENCH OF THE PRINCESSE DE CRAON.

VI.

There was a castle in Yorkshire whose tall, majestic towers commanded a view of the country for miles around, rising far above the sombre depths of the ancient forest-trees that covered the hills on which the castle was seated.

A silence like the grave reigned within and around this princely habitation. Merry young pages no longer bounded over balustrades and the walks winding from the drawbridge. The Gothic arches no more re-echoed with the noisy clamor of the hounds nor the loud cheering of the young hunters. Rank weeds covered the lofty ramparts and clusters of wild flowers swung between their solitary battlements, as though nature had struggled to conceal the eternal mourning which they seemed for ever condemned to wear.

A traveller approached the castle and examined with great attention the arches bearing the arms of the earls of Northumberland. He held by the bridle a beautiful horse, covered with sweat and dust, whose drooping head and trembling limbs attested his extreme fatigue.

“This is certainly the place!” he exclaimed, still looking around him. “I recognize the crouching lion of Northumberland!” He knocked loudly and waited a long time.

At length the door opened and an old man appeared before him. “What do you want?” he demanded brusquely of the traveller. “If you ask hospitality, you will not be refused; but if you ask to see my master, the Earl of Northumberland, you cannot see him.”

“It is he whom I wish to see,” replied the stranger.

The old domestic contracted his white eyebrows. “That cannot be. Since the death of his father he sees nobody.”

“The old Count of Northumberland dead!” replied Sir Walsh (for it was he).

“Alas! yes, for an entire year. We buried him at Alnwick,” answered the old servant, wiping away a tear.

“Go to your master,” replied Sir Walsh,” and tell him that some one asks to see him on the part of the king. I will wait for you here.”

“On the part of the king!” replied the old servant. “On the part of the king! That will make a difference, I think, and I do not want you to stay here. Follow me.”

After fastening the horse to one of the iron rings which were fixed in the wall of the inner court, he led Sir Walsh into the castle. They crossed long courts, then entered magnificent galleries, where they saw arranged, between the Gothic arches which separated the vast and deeply-embrasured windows, the richest armorial trophies of all ages. [Pg 71] Lances, longbows, and javelins filled up the interstices. Shields and bucklers, borne in battle by the ancestors of the noble earl, were eating away with rust, and the festoons of spider-webs which hung from the huge antlers of stag and deer bore witness to the neglect and indifference of the master of the castle.

Sir Walsh, as he passed along, regarded all these things with an admiration mingled with astonishment. He could not understand the state of abandonment in which he found a habitation that he had always heard described as being one of the most magnificent in all England. The delicately-sculptured wainscoting, the costly paintings, the rich gilding of the rafters and ceilings, were renowned among artists and considered as models which they labored to imitate.

“How singular all this is!” he said to himself. “How can Lord Percy, whom I have known at court, so brilliant and accomplished, content himself in a place like this, magnificent without doubt, but abandoned, desolate, especially since the death of his father? And why has he not returned to court, where his tastes and habits naturally call him?”

While absorbed in these reflections Sir Walsh, preceded by his aged conductor, entered a large octagonal saloon, gilded all over and pierced with crosslets on every side, through which poured floods of brilliantly-colored light, reflected from the stained glass with which they were ornamented.

The view extended very far, and a large river, like a broad belt of silver, wound through the beautiful fields, interspersed with clumps of trees that increased still more the beauty of the landscape.

Walsh paused, enraptured with the prospect that met his gaze, and his conductor made a sign to him to remain there until he had informed his master of his arrival.

The old domestic noiselessly entered Lord Percy’s chamber, and paused near the door in order to observe him; then an expression of profound sadness stole over his features and he advanced still more slowly.

Seated in the embrasure of a large window, and always dressed in the deepest mourning, Lord Percy scarcely ever left his room. Surrounded by a great number of books and papers, he appeared to be absorbed in reading, and the messenger was quite near before he was aware of his presence.

“My lord!” he said in a very low and gentle voice, “there is a stranger here who wishes to speak to you.”

“You know very well that I receive nobody, Henry,” said the Earl of Northumberland without turning his head. “Have you asked him his business?”

“Most assuredly,” replied Henry with a lofty and important air. “I know it, too. He comes here on the part of the king—of the king himself,” he repeated.

“On the part of the king!” cried Northumberland, turning pale. “Of the king! What does he want with me? Have I not done enough for him? Is he not satisfied with having destroyed all my hopes, all my happiness, all my future? Of what consequence to him now is my existence?”

And, overwhelmed with the weight of his afflictions, he folded his arms on his breast and forgot to give his servant an answer.

“My dear son,” murmured the old man softly, after a moment of silent attention, “are you going now [Pg 72] to torment yourself again, and may be, after all, without any cause?” For he dreaded beyond expression anything that might arouse or excite what he termed his master’s “manias.”

“No, my old foster-father, do not be alarmed!” replied Northumberland, who knew very well what was passing in his mind. “Go, and bring in this stranger.”

He then arose, in a state of agitation he was unable to control.

Henry soon returned, bringing Sir Walsh.

On entering, the latter was prepared to give Northumberland a joyful surprise and fold him in his arms; but on being suddenly ushered into his presence he recoiled in astonishment. Could this be the gay and brilliant young man he had known, always cheerful, always affable, whose handsome face and charming manner attracted all around him? Dressed in the deepest mourning, which by contrast increased the pallor of his face, his expression anxious and haggard, a painful constraint was observable in all his movements.

“You do not recognize me, Lord Percy,” said Sir Walsh at last. “There was a time when you called me your friend, and I was proud to bear the title!”

“Oh! no, my dear Walsh,” replied Northumberland, “I could not have forgotten you. Rather say you no longer recognize me; for time has passed like a dream. Since you saw me last I have been transformed into another person. But tell me, why does the name of him who sends you come to invade my solitude? What have I done to him to bring him here again to disturb my ashes? For am I not already dead? Does this castle not strike you as being strangely like a tomb, to which no one any more finds entrance?”

“But I think,” said Sir Walsh, astonished at this outburst and forcing a smile, “that some young girl, descended from her palace of clouds to the midst of your abode, draws around her crowds of your astonished vassals. They admire her snowy robes and crown of stars.”

“No,” replied Northumberland gloomily; “no, never! No female inhabits this place. She who ought to have ruled here will never come, and she who did rule would not remain!”

“What do you mean by that riddle?” inquired Walsh. “What! is the Countess of Northumberland no longer here?”

“No, she is no longer here,” replied Lord Percy. And he passed his hand over his eyes, unable to conceal the emotion all these questions excited; for, in spite of himself, the sight of an old friend had agitated him to the depths of his soul. Man was not made for solitude; he is a social being; he has need of his fellow-men to love them, or even to complain of and to them; and for many long, weary months no human being had knocked at his door or come to offer a word of consolation.

Walsh regarded him with increasing solicitude; at length, unable to restrain his feelings, he threw his arms around his neck.

“My dear Percy,” he exclaimed, “what has happened to you? You seem overwhelmed with sorrow. I felt so happy in anticipation of surprising you by this visit, and again seeing you at the head of all the young nobles of the north, loved as you were among us, the life of the chase and of all those sports in which you excelled! Alas! my [Pg 73] friend, what misfortune has befallen you? Tell me; for I swear I will never more leave you.”

“What misfortune has befallen me, do you ask, my dear old friend?” replied Northumberland, deeply moved. “Yes, you are ignorant of all. And what does it matter? It was irreparable. But tell me the cause that brought you to me. Why has the king sent you hither?”

“For nothing that need give you the least uneasiness,” replied Walsh—“a commission readily executed, and in which you must assist me. We will return to this later. Tell me first of yourself—of yourself alone, my friend—and of your father.”

“My father? He died in my arms more than a year ago without suffering. I have done what he wished,” continued Northumberland, his eyes filling with tears. “I have nothing with which to reproach myself on that account. I have obeyed him. Yes,” he added, fixing his eyes on the floor, “that is the only thought that ever comes to console me.”

“I do not understand you!” replied Walsh. “Speak more explicitly; explain what you mean.”

“Well, know, then,” replied Northumberland in an altered voice, and making a violent effort to control himself—“know that for a long time I loved Anne Boleyn—yes, Anne Boleyn! We were betrothed. The day, the hour, for our marriage were fixed, when the king tore her from me for ever! In his jealous hatred he commanded Cardinal Wolsey, to whose household I belonged, to summon me before him, and forbid me in his name dreaming, for an instant, of marrying her; but on my refusing to obey he appealed to my father, who ordered me to marry immediately a daughter of the Earl of Shrewsbury, under penalty of visiting upon me all the weight of his indignation if I hesitated for one moment. In vain I tried to resist; my father was furious and threatened me with his curse. I at length submitted, and you have all assisted at the festivities of my marriage, and, seeing my new bride, have pierced my heart with your congratulations and assurances of my future happiness. I then left the court. I brought her here; and that young wife, justly wounded by my melancholy, absurd and ridiculous in her eyes, wearied of the retired life I compelled her to lead, left me very soon after my father’s death and returned to her family. And—shall I acknowledge it?—sensible of the wrong I have done her, I am quite reconciled to being forgotten and finding myself abandoned and alone. I have dismissed successively all my pages and valets, retaining only the oldest servants belonging to my house. Henry, my old foster-father, takes entire charge and control of everything. Misfortune and sorrow have made me prematurely old; I need the companionship of the aged, and not of youth. I love to hear around me the slow and faltering step of a man ready to sink into the grave; he seems to hasten the hour for me. His soul, cold and subdued, soothes and refreshes mine. He never laughs; never comes to tell me of a thousand chimerical projects, a thousand vain hopes, recalling those in which I have indulged in days past. His presence alone would be sufficient to expel them! And yet, notwithstanding all this, the sorrow that slumbers in my soul is often suddenly aroused, more wild and insupportable than ever. Wearied by long vigils and sleepless nights, I [Pg 74] sometimes imagine I see Queen Catherine enter my chamber; the reflection of her gold-embroidered robes sheds a dazzling light around her. Her ladies follow. I hear the rustling of their heavy trains; I hear them laugh and converse together about the tournament of the day before. Then all becomes dark! Anne Boleyn turns her eyes away from me; she is envious of the queen; pride, ambition, stifle in her heart every sentiment of affection. Then my agony is renewed. I weep, I sigh, and the shadows vanish into nothingness.

“What happiness can any one expect to find in the honors of a usurped rank? Ah! my friend, I have seen, and felt, and suffered everything. Our faults are the sole cause of all our afflictions. Therefore, far from feeling incensed at the injustice of men, I no more recognize an enemy among them. My heart goes out with deepest pity toward the suffering ones of earth, and I would gladly be able to console them all.”

Saying this, Northumberland paused, overcome by emotion.

“Ah!” at length replied Walsh, who had listened with rapt attention, “how limited are our judgments! Had I been asked the name of the happiest mortal living, I should have given yours without a moment’s hesitation.”

“I know it, and have been told it a hundred times,” replied Northumberland earnestly. “Many men have had their marriage relations dissolved, their fortunes changed, and have still borne up courageously under their misfortunes; but with me it cannot be thus. If Anne Boleyn had married another lord of the court—well, I might have been reconciled. I should at least have been spared the outrage of her dishonor; for her dishonor is mine! I had so taken her heart into my own, united my life so entirely with hers, in order not to suffer the slightest stain to touch it, that there is no torture equal to that which I now endure. Every moment I feel, I suffer; I hear the whisperings of this infamous and widespread report which her foolish vanity alone prevents her from discovering around her.”

“Dear Percy,” replied Walsh, “you cannot imagine how much you exaggerate all this! The solitude in which you live has excited you to such a degree that you almost imagine she bears the name of Countess of Northumberland.”

“Yes!” he exclaimed excitedly, “she bears it in my heart; and there, at least, no one can dispute her right!”

“And poor Lady Shrewsbury?” replied Walsh.

“Lady Shrewsbury,” cried Northumberland, “is the victim, like myself, of compulsion! Never have I regarded her as my wife. If the king had demanded my head, I should not have been bound to obey; but a father’s curse is a weight that cannot be supported! My obstinacy would have brought upon his tottering old age the bitterness of poverty and want. No, no; that is my only excuse, and Lady Shrewsbury herself would have forgiven me had she known my sorrow.”

“My dear Percy,” interrupted Walsh anxiously, “I am deeply grieved to find you in this condition; your heart misleads you, and I perceive the commission with which I am charged will be anything but agreeable. However, what can I do? Here,” he added, unfolding a letter and a roll of written parchment, from which hung the king’s seals, “take and read.”

[Pg 75] He preferred giving him the order to read rather than have the unpleasant task of verbally announcing what he now foresaw would cause him such extreme grief. Northumberland had no sooner glanced over it than the parchment fell from his hands.

“Who? I?” he cried. “I go to arrest the archbishop at the very moment when all the nobility of these parts are assembled to assist at the ceremony of his installation! I, formerly of his household, who have spent all the happiest years of my youth with him—charge me with such a commission? The king wishes, then, to have me regarded with horror and detestation by all the inhabitants of this country! Know, my friend,” continued Percy, fixing his flashing eyes upon Walsh, “that since Wolsey came here he has made himself universally loved and cherished. He is no longer the vain, imperious man whom you knew; adversity has entirely changed him. He occupies himself only in doing good, reconciling family differences, and relieving the distressed. And this gorgeous entry, which causes the king so much uneasiness, he was to have made on foot with the utmost possible simplicity.

“For a long time Wolsey hesitated, entirely for fear of seeing his enemies array themselves against him; but his clergy seemed so wounded at conduct contrary to the usage of all his predecessors that he at length consented. But see how they deceive the king, and endeavor to excite him against those who least of all merit his displeasure!”

“What shall I say to you, my dear Northumberland?” replied Walsh. “When the king issues an order, how can its execution be avoided? All that you say is true beyond doubt, but neither you nor I can do anything; it only remains for us to try and accomplish this disagreeable commission with as little noise as possible.”

“Ah!” replied Northumberland, “why has he imposed such a commission on me? See if even the slightest pleasure of my life is not instantly extinguished. I was rejoicing at seeing you, and immediately I am made to pay for it.”

He continued for a long time talking in this manner, when, Walsh having expressed a desire to go through the castle, Northumberland consented. They found everything in a state of extreme disorder. In many places no care was taken even to open the house to admit the light of day. As old Henry successively opened to them each new hall of the immense castle, the dust, collected in heaps like piles of down, arose and flew away to collect again further on in the apartment upon some more valuable piece of furniture.

Walsh could not avoid expressing to the earl his surprise at seeing him so neglect the magnificent abode of his ancestors. “It is wrong,” replied Percy, “but I prize nothing any more. Of what consequence is it to me whether the roof that shelters me is handsome or plain? When our hearts are crushed by sorrow, we become oblivious to all outward surroundings.”

* * * * *

When night came on, his host retired and left him to that repose of which, after the fatigue of his journey, he stood so much in need. Northumberland ordered old Henry to retire and leave him alone as usual; but Henry had decided otherwise, and continued for a [Pg 76] long time to come and go and pass the chamber slowly under various pretexts, as his solicitude on account of his master was more and more increased on remarking that his habitual sadness had been redoubled since the advent of his visitor.

“Accursed stranger!” he said to himself, “bird of ill-omen, what has brought him here? That famished maw of his would have been very well able to carry him far from the moats of our castle! It is the king who sends him here; but is not our son king of these parts?” And thus muttering to himself, old Henry walked on. Not being able to determine on leaving his master, he stopped and peered through the door in order to observe Lord Percy. The latter sat leaning on the table before him, his eyes closed, his head resting on his hands, and seemingly oblivious to everything around him.

“There he sits still, to take a cold with this trouble!” continued Henry. “However, I must go and leave him.” And the old domestic, still turning his palsied head to look back, passed slowly under the heavy tapestry screen, that fell rustling behind him.

“He is gone,” said Northumberland to himself—“gone, perhaps, for ever; for who knows how long Henry has yet to live? What happiness to think we must die! When weary with suffering, the soul reposes with a bitter joy upon the brink of that tomb which alone can deliver her from her woes! How the certainty of seeing them end sweetens the sorrows we endure! Here where I stand” (he arose to his feet), “beside this hearth, each one of my sires has taken his place, and each has successively passed away. Their armor hangs here empty; their names alone remain inscribed upon them. Why have not I the courage, then, to endure this time of trial they call ‘life,’ which I have wished to consider the end, but which is only a road leading to the end—a road perilous, rough, and wearing? The shortest is the one I consider the best; and he who travels over it most rapidly, has he not found true happiness?

“Have you not sometimes seen, in the midst of a violent storm, a poor bird wildly struggling with winds and waves? You behold it for a moment in the whirlpool, and suddenly it disappears. Just so I have passed through the midst of the world; I had hoped to shine there, because I was dazzled with it. To-day it becomes necessary to forget it. O my soul! I wish thee, I command thee, to forget.”

At this moment a slight noise was heard. Northumberland started.

“What do you want, Henry?” he asked, seeing the old man standing like a shadow at the end of the apartment.

“Nothing!” he replied impatiently.

“But truly,” said Lord Percy, “why have you returned?”

“To see if you were asleep,” brusquely answered the old servant, approaching him. “It was scarcely worth the trouble,” he continued, elevating his voice, “of harboring so carefully this new-comer, if he must pay his reckoning in this way.”

“Ah!” replied Northumberland, regarding his old foster-father with a suppliant expression.” Tell me, Henry, have you never known what it was to grieve for one whom you loved?”

“Ay, in sooth,” replied Henry, “unfortunately I have known it; [Pg 77] but we are not able to live, like you, in idleness, and have hardly time to be unhappy. When I lost my poor Alice, your foster-mother, what anguish did I not feel in the depths of my soul! Well, if I had stopped to think of her, I should have heard immediately my name resounding through all the turrets of the castle: ‘Henry! my lord—my lord goes hunting; hurry! make haste! my lord gives a ball this evening to all the ladies of the country.’ And away I had to go, to come, to run; otherwise my lord your father would fly into a passion. How would you find time to weep if somebody was always calling after you? Besides, I—poor Henry—if they had seen me sitting, like you, all the day in silence, with tears in my eyes and my arms folded, they would have laughed at me, and the pages would have called me a fool.”

“That is true; you are right,” replied Northumberland in an abstracted manner. “You say, then they gave balls here?”

“And superb ones, too!” replied Henry, who liked, above all things, to talk about the old times. “In those days you were not here; they educated you with Monseigneur the Cardinal, our good archbishop at present.”

On hearing these words Northumberland became violently agitated, and his old servant, perceiving his countenance change and his features contract, stopped suddenly in great alarm.

“You are ill, my lord?” he exclaimed.

“No, no,” replied Northumberland; “be calm. Leave me, Henry; I want to be alone. Go to your bed—I command you.”

Henry, forced to leave his master, as he went reproached himself for having spoken of the fêtes the Countess of Northumberland had given in the castle; he imagined it was the recollection of his mother that had so affected Lord Percy.

“The archbishop! the archbishop!” repeated Northumberland. “Oh! let me banish the name, in mercy—for a few hours, at least! He said, I believe, that they gave balls here! What did he say? Yes, that must be it: my mother loved them. Yes,” he continued, looking round at the large and magnificent panels of his chamber, “here they hung garlands and baskets of flowers; a thousand lamps reflected their brilliant colors; delicious music floated on the perfumed air; crowds of people of every age, sex, and rank eagerly gathered here. Time has very soon reduced them to an equality; the sound of their footsteps is heard no more; their voices are mute; they have all passed away. I alone still exist.”

The entire night was spent in these reflections, and when day began to dawn the heavy tramp of horses was heard in the courtyard, and soon, in the cold fog of morning, there issued from the castle gate a troop of armed men wearing long cloth cloaks and caps. It was the earl’s retainers, whom he had assembled during the night from all the surrounding country. He rode in the midst of them in profound silence; even Sir Walsh, reading in his countenance the melancholy dejection under which he labored, had simply pressed his hand without daring to address him a word.

As to the followers of Northumberland, they were astonished at this sudden departure; they were completely ignorant of whither their master was carrying them, having learned nothing from old Henry himself, to whom Lord Percy had [Pg 78] deemed it inexpedient to reveal the destination, and still less the object, of this expedition. The old man felt singularly anxious on the subject, as he was every day becoming more and more accustomed to regard himself as the guardian and adviser of him whom he called his son. Therefore, after having closed the gate of the castle upon the travellers, he went sadly and took his station on the highest tower, to see in what direction his master was going.

A few moments only he followed them with his eyes; for, the valley once crossed, their route conducted them into the depths of the forest, and the cavalcade was soon lost to view.

TO BE CONTINUED.

VAGO ANGELLETTO CHE CANTANAS VAI.

FROM PETRARCH.

Sweet bird, that, singing under altered skies,

Art mourning for thy season of delight—

For lo! the cheerful months forsake thee quite,

And all thy sunshine into shadow dies—

O thou who art acquainted with unrest!

Could thy poor wit my kindred mood divine,

How wouldst thou fold thy wings upon my breast,

And blend thy melancholy plaint with mine!

I know not if with thine my songs would rhyme,

For haply she thou mournest is not dead:

Less kind are death and heaven unto me;

But the chill twilight, and the sullen time,

And thinking of the sweet years and the sad,

Move me, wild warbler, to discourse with thee.

[Pg 79]

ITALIAN COMMERCE IN THE MIDDLE AGES.

“Your mind is tossing on the ocean;

There, where your argosies with portly sail,

Like signiors and rich burghers of the flood,

Or, as it were, the pageants of the sea,

Do overpeer the petty traffickers,

That curt’sy to them, do them reverence,

As they fly by them with their woven wings.”

Merchant of Venice, act i. sc. i.

Thucydides, in the introduction to his history, remarks that one of the principal causes that raised some of the Greek cities to such a high degree of prosperity and power was their engagement in mercantile pursuits. All the great peoples of antiquity by whom the shores of the Mediterranean were occupied—Phœnicians, Carthaginians, Etruscans, Ionians of Asia Minor—rose to wealth and importance by the same means. The Romans alone despised it.

After the subversion of the Western Empire and the last inroads of the barbarians, the natives of Italy were the first to emerge from the ruins of the ancient world. Except religion, they found no worthier or more potent element of civilization than commerce, which procures, to use the words of a celebrated writer, what is of far greater value than mere money—“the reciprocation of the peculiar advantages of different countries”; and throughout the middle ages, until the passage to India by the Cape of Good Hope and the discovery of America, Italy was the most forward nation in Christendom for wealth, refinement of manners, and intellectual culture.

Italian commerce reached its greatest development between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries—that is, between the ages when Marco Polo travelled to Tartary, China, and the Indies and Christopher Columbus discovered America. In these two men, representatives of Venice and Genoa, are embodied the geniuses of trade and navigation; and as though Florence, seated between the rival cities and engaged rather in reaping the fruits than in sowing the seeds of enterprise, were destined to unite in herself the glory of both Italian shores, one of her citizens—Americus Vespucius—gives his name to the New World. This commerce began slowly but progressed rapidly, and attained its noblest proportions during the fourteenth century, when for a hundred years it spread over every sea and land then known in the eager search after riches, bringing back to its votaries whatever luxury Europe, Asia, and Africa produced or man’s invention had evolved out of the necessities of his nature. Next, it gradually fell away and almost disappeared in the sixteenth century, leaving behind it only the cold consolation that there was no reason why it alone should be excepted from the common doom of human affairs, which, when they have enjoyed a certain measure of success, must surely decline and fall.

When the Goths, Longobards, and Carlovingians had conquered Italy, although most of the arts and sciences were lost or hidden in cloisters, neither trade nor commerce was quite neglected; but, despite the [Pg 80] dangers from pirates, the ignorance of the sea, and the exactions of the lawless on land, the Adriatic and Mediterranean were timidly attempted by the inhabitants of the coast, while in the interior of the country an interchange of commodities was carried on between neighboring districts at places set apart for the purpose. These places were generally the large square or principal street of a town, or under the walls of a monastery, and the interchange took place on certain days appointed by public authority.

The assemblies of the people were usually held on the Saturday, and were at first called markets; but afterwards the rarer and more important ones, which were held annually and for several consecutive days, were termed fairs, from the Latin word feria, because they always took place on the feast of some saint. Many rights and privileges were granted at an early period to the merchants who exhibited wares at these yearly gatherings; for without such inducements few cared to undertake a journey with a part, or perhaps the whole, of their earthly substance about them, along roads and across ferries beset by robber-nobles, who levied toll from passers-by and sometimes seized goods and persons for their own use.

The Venetians began earlier to sail on distant seas, and maintained themselves longer on the water, than did the natives of any other parts of Italy. Cassiodorus represents them in the sixth century as occupied solely in salt-works, from which they derived their only profit; but in course of time they issued from their lagoons to become the most industrious and venturesome traffickers in the world. At the beginning of the ninth century they had already introduced into Italy some of the delicacies of the East, but drew odium on themselves for conniving with pirates and men-stealers to capture people and sell them into slavery in distant quarters of Europe and Asia. On the opposite shore of Italy the inhabitants of Amalfi showed themselves the most successful navigators during the early middle ages, trading with Sicily and Tarentum, and even with Egypt, Syria, and Constantinople. Their city is described by the poet-historian William of Apulia, in the eleventh century, as the great mart for Eastern goods, and the enterprise of its sailors as extending to all the ports of the Mediterranean. Flavio Gioja, a citizen of Amalfi, if he did not invent the mariner’s compass, as is somewhere asserted, certainly improved it about the year 1302, either by its mode of suspension or by the attachment of the card to the needle itself. This discovery gave such an impulse to navigation that what had been for ages hardly more than a skilful art became at once a science, and vessels no longer crept along the shore or slipped from island to island, but attempted “the vasty deep” and crossed over the ocean to the New World.

Another rich emporium at an early period, on the same side of Italy, was Pisa. The city was four or five miles from the sea, but had a port formed by a natural bay to the southward of the old mouth of the Arno at a place called Calambrone. The Pisans at first traded principally with Sicily and Africa. They fitted out expeditions against the Saracens,[31] seized several islands [Pg 81] in the Mediterranean, and with both land-troops and seamen took an important part in the first Crusade, being careful, before returning from the East, to establish factories at Antioch and Constantinople. They also sent fleets to humble the Mohammedan cities of Northern Africa. Through commercial jealousy and political reasons they became involved in bitter wars with the Genoese for the possession of Corsica, and with the Amalfitans, who had sided against the emperor. The Pisans, as auxiliaries of the Emperor Lothaire, sent a strong squadron to Amalfi, which was held by the Normans, and, after a rigorous blockade, took it by storm in 1137. It was on this occasion that a copy of the long-lost Pandects of Justinian was found, which is said to be the original from which all subsequent copies in Italy were made, thus reviving the study of Roman law. It was taken from its captors by the Florentines in 1411, and is now preserved in the Laurentian Library at Florence. The monk Donizo, in his metrical life of the Countess Matilda, being annoyed that the mother of the countess should have been buried in Pisa, describes the city somewhat contemptuously as a flourishing emporium whose port was filled with large ships and frequented by many different races of people, even by swarthy Moors.

To the north of Pisa rose her haughty rival, Genoa, surnamed the Superb from her pride and magnificent natural position. After four sanguinary wars with the Pisans, the Genoese swept their fleets from the sea, destroyed their port, and ruined their foreign commerce. The city never recovered from that blow, and the population, which once exceeded 100,000, has fallen to a fifth of that number.

The Genoese had at first been the allies of the Pisans, and united with them to drive the Saracens out of several important islands. They also ravaged the coast of Northern Africa in the eleventh century, and, taking part in the first Crusade, obtained settlements on the shore of Palestine, particularly at Acre. Owing to their secure position at home and their foothold in the East and the islands of the West, their city became one of the two great maritime powers of Italy and the only noteworthy rival of Venice. The power of the Genoese and Venetians was immensely increased by the Crusades, and at one time so feared were they in the Levant that they were able to draw pensions and exact tribute from the pusillanimous emperor at Constantinople. The Venetians were especially favored by Alexius Comnenus, through whom they acquired convenient establishments along the Bosphorus and at Durazzo in Albania. Their doge was honored with the pompous title of Protosebaste. In the meanwhile intestine disturbances and wars with neighboring republics had reduced several of those cities which had lately been most flourishing, and none could compete successfully in the fourteenth century with Venice and Genoa, to which the foreign trade of Italy was left, and to whose marts the produce of the Levant and the countries bordering on the lower Mediterranean was brought, and either there or at the great cities of the interior exchanged for domestic manufactures and the industries of Central and Northern Europe. The carrying trade was almost exclusively their own, but the home or inland business was shared by many other cities—principally by Bologna, Ferrara, Florence, Lucca, and Milan. [Pg 82] At that period the Atlantic ocean and northern coasts of Europe were but rarely navigated by Italian merchants. The Venetians alone despatched annually a large fleet, which—taking its name, the Flanders fleet, from its destination—carried on an enterprising and lucrative traffic with the Low Countries, and, in connection with the Hanseatic League or directly, spread over England, Scotland, and the nations lying on the North Sea and the Baltic, the spices, gums, silks, pearls, diamonds, and numerous other articles of oriental origin which they had procured from the Levant and further Indies. The Genoese furnished the same things to the French, Spaniards, and Moors of Andalusia; but Portugal was served by their rivals.

A maritime power had risen before this time which disputed with the Genoese and Venetians the ascendency on the Mediterranean. This was Barcelona, whose sailors were among the best on the sea, and whose merchants were largely engaged in commerce. Many bold encounters took place between the Catalans and Italians, through jealousies of trade, but the former finally succumbed.

The products of the more distant East reached Italy in Genoese and Venetian ships, through Armenian merchants at Trebizond, and through Arabs by way of Alexandria and Damascus. Those of the north, so necessary for a seafaring people, were brought from the mouth of the Don, the merchandise being floated down that great river in boats from the interior. The Mongols were the masters of all the region thereabouts; but the insinuating Italians, aware of the interest of this branch of commerce, played upon their barbarous pride with so much dexterity that they succeeded in making treaties with them by which they were allowed to occupy certain trading posts where the goods ordered might accumulate and their own wares be exchanged for the productions of Russia, Tartary, and Persia. The wily Genoese had bought from a Tartar prince, at the beginning of the fourteenth century, a small piece of land on the south-eastern shore of the Crimea on which to build a factory. Only a few rude cabins were raised at first, for stores and the dwellings of their agents; but the traffic soon brought together a large population, sumptuous palaces were erected, a strong and lofty wall was built around, and Kaffa [32] became one of the most opulent colonies of the republic, with a population at one time of 80,000.

The rival Venetians had their great deposit at the city of Azov, on the banks of the Don, twenty miles from its mouth. They were not the proprietors, and, although they received numerous favors from the Tartar governor, they were obliged to share them with the Genoese, Florentines, and others, who also did a flourishing business. The amount of goods collected there was so immense and the value so considerable, that when, as sometimes happened, a destructive fire broke out or the place was plundered, the loss was felt as a shock to commerce throughout the whole of Europe.

All along the coast of the Black Sea the Italians plied a profitable trade, and many merchants were settled at Trebizond, from which [Pg 83] vantage-ground they had an important communication open with Armenia, whose people, being united by religion to the Latins, granted them very valuable commercial privileges. The Venetians were favored above the rest. They had churches, magazines, and inns, coined money, and in all matters in dispute were tried by judges chosen among their countrymen, or rather their own fellow-citizens. They could introduce their goods without paying duty, freely traverse the kingdom, and monopolize the exportation of camel’s hair, which was an important article of traffic. The Genoese were no less enterprising than their rivals, and restored in the port of Trebizond a mole that had been built by the Roman Emperor Hadrian. Large quantities of India goods, and especially spiceries, were stored by Italian merchants in the warehouses of Trebizond, Damascus, and Alexandria. There were several overland routes by which this merchandise was transported, but none of them was safe, on account of the frequent revolutions in the countries through which they ran. Some of the caravans that brought the commodities of India and China passed through Balkh, the Baetria of the ancients and at one time the commercial centre of eastern Asia, then up to Bokhara, whence they descended the Oxus for a distance, touched at Khiva, and, traversing the Caspian Sea, ascended the river Kour (the Cyrus of Strabo, xi. p. 509) for seventy miles to its junction with the Aras (the Araxes of Herodotus, iv. 40), from which they crossed by a journey of four or five days into the historical Phasis at Sharapan and down to the Euxine. Another beaten track entered Syria by the Tigris and the Euphrates, and diverged towards the several ports of Palestine and Asia Minor. It passed through Bagdad, which was a great commercial emporium during the middle ages and an entrepôt for the commodities of eastern and western Asia. A memorial of those days when Frank merchants, mingling with Persians, Arabs, Turks, Hindoos, Koords, and Armenians, ransacked her splendid bazaars, remains in our language in the word Baldachin, because canopies made of costly stuff interwoven with gold thread were manufactured in this city, which was known to the Italians as Baldacca, and in the adjective form Baldacchino. Much trade was also done by way of the Red Sea, Cairo, and Alexandria.

In all the ports of the Euxine and Mediterranean the Italians had shops and warehouses, and every rich company kept a number of factors, who despatched goods as they got orders and maintained the interests of their principals. An officer called a consul, who was appointed by the government at home, resided in each of these foreign sea-ports, to defend the rights of his countrymen, and decide differences among themselves, or between them and strangers. Consuls were recognized as official personages by the sovereign in whose territory they resided, and were honored as public magistrates by their own people, from whom they received certain fees for their support, according to the quality and amount of business they were called upon to perform.

The maritime republics of Italy were very fortunate in having transported the Crusaders to the Holy Land in their ships, for by this they acquired many rich establishments in the Levant, and it was not long before the dissolute and degraded [Pg 84] Greeks, who would neither take counsel in peace nor could defend themselves in war, became subject to the imperious will of the Italians.

The Venetians obtained in 1204 the fertile island of Candia, which became the centre of their extensive Egyptian and Asiatic trade. They also had a quarter in Constantinople, which they surrounded by a wall, the gates of which were guarded by their own soldiers, and a distinct anchorage for their own vessels in the Golden Horn. A senate and bailiff representing the doge held authority in this settlement, and exercised jurisdiction over the minor establishments of the republic in Roumelia.

The Genoese were still more powerful at the capital, and the Emperor Michael Palæologus, who was indebted to them for his return to the throne, had given them the beautiful suburbs of Pera and Galata, on an elevated plateau, which they made still more secure, under the elder Andronicus, by a moat and triple row of walls. To these places they transferred their stores and stock; nor was it long before the churches, palaces, warehouses, and public buildings of Pera vied in magnificence with those of the metropolis itself. The island of Chios, where gum-mastic was collected and the finest wine produced, was another of their colonies. These were all ruled by a podestà annually sent from Genoa. The Genoese and Venetians had also factories in Barbary, through which they drove a brisk trade with the interior of Africa. To them more than to any others was it due that for three hundred years the commerce of Italy was famous from the Straits of Gibraltar to the remotest gulf in the Euxine.

The maritime strength of the Italian republics, especially of Genoa and Venice, corresponded to their vast commercial interests and the number of colonies they were expected to enlarge and defend. Thus, the Pisans in 1114 sent an armament, consisting of 300 vessels of various sizes, carrying 35,000 men and 900 horses, to the conquest of the Balearic Islands, which had become a nest of Moorish pirates. A great part of these troops were mercenaries procured from all parts of the world, and contingents drawn from their possessions in Sardinia. In 1293 the Genoese fitted out in a single month, against the Venetians, 200 galleys, each of which bore from 220 to 300 combatants recruited within the continental limits of the republic; and in the vast arsenal of Venice during the fourteenth century 800 men were continually at work, and 200 galleys, not to count the smaller craft, were kept ready in port for any emergency that might arise. Such formidable fleets were manned either by voluntary enlistments or impressment; the hope of heavy plunder, according to the barbarous war-system of those days, which the church strove against but could not wholly change, appealing to young men to serve as sailors or soldiers. The furious rivalry between Genoa and Venice began to show itself soon after the taking of Constantinople by the Franks in 1244, each desiring to reap alone the profits of the Levant trade. After many bloody encounters a peace was patched up in 1298, by which the latter was excluded for thirteen years from the Black Sea, along whose shores the former had colonies, forts, and factories, and was forbidden to send armed vessels to Syria. Terms so propitious raised the pride and influence of Genoa to [Pg 85] the utmost; and feared by all, and claiming to be mistress of the seas, she upheld the honor of her flag with extravagant solicitude. In 1332 she wasted the coast of Catalonia with a force of 200 galleys, and inflicted great injury on the commerce of Barcelona; and two years later, having captured twelve ships of the enemy, heavily freighted with merchandise, in the waters of Sicily, Cyprus, and Sardinia, with an example of ferocious cruelty which only the “accursed greed of gold” and a determination to exclude the Catalans from any share in Eastern commerce could prompt, six hundred prisoners were hanged at a single execution. She was resolved to command the seas, and consequently the trade of the world; but her rival, although crippled, was not prostrate, and the fourth war broke out between them in 1372 for possession of the classical island of Tenedos, so valuable as a naval station and renowned for its wheat and excellent red wine. The Genoese actually got into the lagoons of Venice, vowing to reduce her to the stagnant level of the waters, and approached so near to the city that their admiral could shout to the affrighted people on the quays, Delenda est Carthago! but by a singular freak of fortune they were themselves totally defeated, and glad to accept the mediation of Amadeus VI., Duke of Savoy. It was agreed that neither party should have the island in dispute, but that the duke should hold it at their common expense for two years and then dismantle the fortress.

During this war, called the War of Chioggia, which lasted until 1381, an unusually large number of corsairs roved the seas; but the Italians had long practised piracy, and whole communities were corsairs by profession, just as on land condottieri could be hired to sack cities and castles and desolate whole provinces. The little town of Monaco was notorious during the middle ages for its pirates, as it still is for its ravenous land-sharks. There were two sorts of corsairs. Some were private individuals who went to sea through lust of gain, or because driven from their homes during the fights of faction, and seized whatever they could. These robberies and depredations marked piracy in its original form. Nevertheless during the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries many otherwise honorable characters, who were often unjustly despoiled of their patrimony and driven as outcasts from their native cities, took to this occupation not entirely from inclination, but impelled by the brutality of their countrymen. We may recall as an extenuating circumstance what that grave judge, Lord Stowell, observed (2 Dods. 374) of the buccaneers, whose spirit at one time approached to that of chivalry in point of adventure, and whose manner of life was thought to reflect no disgrace upon distinguished Englishmen who engaged in it.

Other corsairs were patriotic citizens who armed their ships to injure the enemy during lawful hostilities; and although there was abuse in the system, they were not pirates, but privateersmen. Foreign nations used to buy ships from the Italians to increase their own armaments, or engage them to harass their opponents. It is curious, considering how completely maritime supremacy has deserted the Mediterranean for northern seas, to know that the poet Chaucer was sent by King Edward III. in November, 1372, as envoy to the republic of [Pg 86] Genoa to hire vessels for his navy; and Tytler says (Hist. of Scotland, vol. ii. p. 261) that in the same century many of the privateers employed by the Scots against England appear to have been vessels of larger dimensions and more formidable equipment than those of England, probably from their being foreign built, and furnished by the Genoese or the Venetians, for the purposes both of trade and piracy.

It was now that the word Jane came into the language—Chaucer and Spenser use it—for a small coin so-called from Janua (Genoa). It is termed in the old English statutes a galley half-pence.

The Florentines had originally no seaboard, and were obliged to charter ships wherever they could. In 1362, having taken into the service of the republic Pierin Grimaldi of Genoa, with two galleys, and hired two more vessels, their little fleet took the island of Giglio from the Pisans, and the following year, having broken into the port of Pisa itself, they took away the chains that protected it and hung them as trophies on the porphyry columns of their Baptistery.

The foreign commerce for which the maritime cities of Italy, and particularly Genoa and Venice, so savagely disputed, to the scandal of the Christian name among the infidels, as the old English traveller Sir John de Mandeville shows, was certainly very considerable, and a source of almost fabulous profit to those engaged in it who were fortunate in their ventures. Commerce was the foundation of Italy’s prosperity, which was greater than that of any other European country from the twelfth to the fourteenth century. The Italian merchants got cottons, silken goods, brocades, Cashmere shawls, spices, rhubarb and other medicines, amber, indigo, pearls, and diamonds from India and Central Asia. From Persia there came silks, carpets, skins, and manufactured articles used by the great for clothing or for the comfort of their homes. Tartary and Russia furnished hemp, canvas, ship-timber, tar, wax, caviare, raw-hides, and peltries. From the ports of Syria and Asia Minor, and particularly from Smyrna, were shipped to Italy hare-skins, leather, camel’s hair, valonia, cotton stuffs, damasks, dried fruits, beeswax, drugs and electuaries, arms, armor, and cutlery; and many articles of Asiatic luxury and magnificence found their way thence through Italian merchants to the courts and castles of England, Scotland, France, Germany, and other northern nations. Greece sent fine wines, raisins, currants, filbert-nuts, silk, and alum. A large quantity of grain was brought into Italy from Egypt and the Barbary States; but the supply to the colonies in the Levant came mostly from the Black Sea. Wool, wax, sheep-skins, and morocco came from the Moorish provinces of Africa. These were the principal imports, and were exchanged for the products and manufactures of Italy and the countries to the north, for which the Italians acted as agents. The Genoese exported immense quantities of woven fabrics from the looms of Lombardy and Florence, fine linens from Bologna, and cloths of a coarser make from France, for which a ready market was found in the East and among the Italians settled in the Archipelago and Levant. The oils of Provence and the Riviera of Genoa, soaps, saffron, and coral, were also largely exported. Quicksilver was a valuable article in the hands of the Venetians, who got it from Istria and sold it in Spain and the Levant; they also extracted a great amount of salt from Istria and Dalmatia, which was sold at a good profit in Lombardy and other parts of Italy. Sardinia, Sicily, and Naples also did a large foreign business; the last city importing cargoes of delicate Greek and Oriental wines, such as the famous Cyprian, Malmsey, and Muscatel, much of which was sent to different parts of Italy, and into England and the Netherlands. Spain, Portugal, and Flanders were supplied with the products of the Indies and Levant principally by Genoese and Venetian merchants. The latter especially had many privileges and fiscal exemptions in Flanders, and in returning from the North loaded their ships in Portugal with tin, silver bars, wines, and raisins; while the former had the greater part of the trade with the Moors of Africa and southern Spain, from whom, in return for spiceries and other Eastern products, they got gold, cordovans, and merino wool, which were sold to advantage in France and Italy.

The Italians were the best cloth-weavers in Europe in the fourteenth century, although the Flemings were not contemptible rivals. The manufacture of cloth was industriously carried on in many of their cities; in those of Tuscany particularly, the finest kind of work being done in Lucca. When this city was taken by Uguccione della Faggiuola, in 1314, the factories and goods were destroyed, and many citizens emigrated to other parts of Italy, and even into France, Germany, and England. Yet long before this Italian operatives had introduced, or at least improved, the art in the northern countries. Crapes, taffetas, velvets, silks, camelots, and [Pg 87] serges were extensively made in Italy, the richest quality being sold at Florence, where the home industries seemed to centre, and only the most skilled artisans were employed. The art of weaving wool was practised by thousands of citizens, and, nominally at least, by some of the noblest families of the city and contado (commune), since there was a law that no one could aspire to public office unless he were a member of one of the trades-corporations of the republic. The citizens of Florence were classed from 1266 into twelve companies of trades or professions, seven of which were called arti maggiori, viz., 1. lawyers and attorneys; 2. dealers in foreign stuffs; 3. bankers and money-changers; 4. woollen manufacturers and drapers; 5. physicians and apothecaries; 6. silk manufacturers and mercers; 7. furriers. The lower trades were called arti minori. The records of these corporations are now preserved in a part of the Uffizi palace devoted to the public archives of Florence. They range from A.D. 1300 to the end of the eighteenth century. Around the hall, which was fitted up a few years ago to receive them, are the portraits of some of the distinguished men who belonged to these guilds: Dante, Cosimo de’ Medici, Francesco Guicciardini, and others. Balmes gives an interesting account, after Capmany, in his European Civilization, p. 476, of “the trades-unions and other associations which, established under the influence of the Catholic religion, commonly placed themselves under the patronage of some saint, and had pious foundations for the celebration of their feasts, and for assisting each other in their necessities.” Although his long note refers principally to the industrial organization [Pg 88] of the city of Barcelona, it is acknowledged that Catalonia borrowed many of its customs and usages in this matter from the towns of Italy.

Before the middle of the fourteenth century there were over two hundred drapers’ shops in Florence, in which from seventy to eighty thousand pieces of cloth were made every year, to the value of 1,200,000 gold florins, and employing more than thirty thousand people. The historian John Villani says that the trade had been still more flourishing, when there were three hundred shops open and one hundred thousand pieces were made yearly, but that they were of a coarser quality and consequently did not bring as much money into the city, although more people got work. The art of dyeing cloths and other stuffs was cultivated by the Italians during the middle ages with considerable success. Alum, which is much used for this purpose, was eagerly sought after, and the Genoese obtained from Michael Palæologus, on payment of an annual sum, the exclusive right of extracting it from a certain mine in the Morea that had previously been worked by Arabs, Catalans, and others. The lessees began operations with a force of fifty men, and soon built a castle to protect themselves, and finally a town, which was destroyed by the Turks in 1455. The Florentines were so expert in dyeing wool that the material was sent to them for the purpose from other parts of Italy, and even from Germany and the Netherlands. It was only in 1858 that an immense wooden building for stretching and drying cloth in the sun, called Il tiratoio della lana, which had been used for over five hundred years, was torn down as too liable to catch fire.

The cloths of France and other northern countries found a sale in Florence, not so much for home use as for exportation through the Genoese and Venetians. An exception, however, must be made for a rich article called say, manufactured in Ireland, and esteemed so beautiful as to be worn by the ladies of that refined city.[33] John Villani, already mentioned, says that there was a quarter of Florence called Calimala, containing twenty stores of the coarser cloths of the North, of which thirty thousand pieces, of the value of three hundred thousand gold florins, were yearly imported.

Florence in the middle ages had a territory extending only a few miles round its walls; but the industry and speculative spirit of its citizens wonderfully enriched them, and, since “all things obey money” (Ecclesiastes x. 19), they soon became the predominant power, and finally the masters in Tuscany. They were money-changers, moneylenders, jewellers, and goldsmiths for the whole of Europe and no little part of the East. The elements of a business education were given to its youth in numerous schools, attended by some twelve hundred boys, who were taught arithmetic and book-keeping. A great deal of money circulated within the city itself, and a large amount was necessary, particularly before the introduction of bills of exchange, to accommodate merchants in their visits to other countries. The public mint coined annually during the fourteenth century from three hundred and fifty thousand to four hundred thousand gold florins, and about twenty thousand pounds weight of coppers, called danari da quattro, or half-farthings; and eighty private [Pg 89] banks assisted the circulation. The beautiful golden florins were first coined in the year 1252, bearing on one side the impression of St. John Baptist, the patron, and on the other that of a lily, the device of the city. This was considered the finest coin in the world, and so much admired that many princes and governments began to imitate it while preserving its original name, and consequently perpetuating the monetary renown of Florence. It was current in Europe, Asia, and Africa. The workmanship of the Florentines was so superior that they were often called upon to conduct or superintend the coinage in foreign countries. During the reign of King David II., in the first half of the thirteenth century, he appointed a Florentine one of the two keepers of the exchange for all Scotland, and masters of the mint; and under King Robert III. (1390-1424) gold was minted for that kingdom by Bonaccio of Florence.[34] In 1278 the Exchange at London was under the direction of some Lucca merchants; and it seems to be directly from the Italian that we get our English word cash, derived from cassa, the chest in which Italian merchants kept their money. We may have some idea of what a money-centre Florence was in that age from the fact that the notorious French adventurer, the Duke of Athens, who was elected Lord of Florence in 1342, contrived in the course of only ten months to draw four hundred thousand golden florins out of the city. The Florentines, who had the reputation of being the smartest people in Italy, were extremely fond of banking in all its branches. While the middle and lower orders of society were mostly engaged in mechanical occupations, the higher classes handled the money, and would appear to have taken lessons of the Jews. The great feudal nobles of the north, with more land than gold, would often ask their chaplains to reprove them with some holy text of Scripture—Ecclesiasticus x. 10 being a favorite one—when interest was demanded or mortgages were forfeited. They were not by any means the only Italians who publicly courted the queen Regina Pecunia; the ancient name in England for a banker, which was Lombard, and the street in London called Lombard Street, preserving the memory of the Milanese and others out of Lombardy who took up their first residence there before the year 1274, and were great moneychangers and usurers. The stupendous fortunes of the Chigi, who gave Pope Alexander VII. to the church and are now Roman princes, and before them of the Medici family, which became royal, were amassed chiefly in the banking business; but it is a popular error that the well-known sign of the pawnbrokers’ three gilt balls is derived from the armorial bearings of the latter, which their agents in England and other countries placed over the doors of their loan-shops. The arms of the Medici were or, six torteaux gules except the one in chief, which was azure charged with three fleurs-de-lis or. Whether these roundlets had any allusion, as has been suggested, to doctors’ pills and the professional origin whence the family name is supposed to be derived, we cannot determine; but the gold pieces called bezants because coined at Constantinople—Byzantium—and so common at an early period in Italy that the saying Aver buoni Bisanzi was a proverbial expression of one [Pg 90] who had plenty of money, seem to have been early the distinguishing sign of money-lenders and changers, and are the true origin of the pawnbrokers’ balls.

The shrewdness of the Italians in money matters did not always save them from disastrous failures and bankruptcies caused by wars, breach of faith in persons too high to be reached, loss of goods and bullion by fire, piracy, shipwreck, and other accidents. The first great failure of this kind was that of a mercantile company in 1296, which had existed for one hundred and twenty years, and became insolvent for 400,000 gold florins, due to citizens and strangers. It was felt throughout the republic of Florence like the loss of a battle. Even worse was the failure of the Bardi and Peruzzi in 1347. They were both merchants and bankers, and stood at the head of their class in Italy. Loans to the kings of England and Sicily brought them down. The first owed them 900,000 and the second 450,000 gold florins. These were unavailable assets when the 550,000 florins they owed their fellow-citizens and others began to be called for, and therefore they broke. This downfall carried with it a large number of smaller houses, and among them that of Corsini, of the since princely family of that name, which gave St. Andrew and Pope Clement XII. to the church. The celebrated historian John Villani was a great loser by this failure, and was even imprisoned in the Stinche in consequence of it as an insolvent. The law punished fraudulent failures very severely; but if it could be proved that the failures resulted from unavoidable accidents, the debtors were allowed to go free, after surrendering all they possessed to their creditors. For the convenience of customers, the bank-offices used to be on the ground-floor of the houses—sometimes palaces—the masters living above. The rate of discount on exchange was from one and one-half to two per cent., and four per cent. on sums advanced. Jacques Savary, in his Parfait Négociant, says that the invention of bills of exchange is due to French Jews who were driven out of France by Philip the Fair in 1316, and took refuge in Lombardy. By means of such bills they were able to get the value of the property they had left in the hands of friends. They were imitated by certain Ghibellines who, being exiled, went to Amsterdam and saved some of their goods left in Italy. In negotiating these bills and effecting the sale of goods, persons called sensali (brokers) were employed.

No duties were levied on exports, but imported goods had to be stored in government buildings called dogane—i.e., custom-houses, or, perhaps more accurately, bonded warehouses—from which, although they might be hypothecated, they could be withdrawn only after payment of a certain sum. There was a chamber of commerce called Mercanzia at Florence, and all the other commercial cities had their merchants’ exchange for the transaction of business, the sordid use to which they were put being often disguised by the beauties of architecture, painting, and sculpture. Thus, the Sala del Cambio at Perugia was decorated with frescoes by the celebrated Pietro Perugino, assisted by his immortal pupil Raphael of Urbino.

In all seaports there were certain judges, elected by and from among the merchants, who composed a tribunal called Consolato di Mare. They settled disputes between traders [Pg 91] and ship-owners, gave assistance in distress, and watched over the interests of commerce. The origin of such boards of trade was very ancient among the Italians, for as early as the year 1129 one was established at Messina. It is said that the Pisans were the first to make laws regulating navigation, and that their code was approved in 1075 by Pope Gregory VII.[35] There was no appeal from the decisions of these admiralty courts, and in cases of fraud or other misdemeanor the guilty party was punished by public authority.

Sericulture began in Italy in the fourteenth century, and was practised with success, especially in Lombardy. The statutes of Modena obliged the peasants to plant a large number of mulberry-trees, in order to promote it.

The wide extent of Italian commerce and the industrial prosperity of Italy, which was a consequence of it, greatly enriched her higher classes and led to the most extravagant luxury during the latter part of the middle ages. Nations now reckoned highly civilized, and where the comforts of life are within the reach of all, were then badly clothed and poorly fed. The effeminacy of the wealthier Italians during the fourteenth century, when commerce was most extended, caused them to despise, amidst the delicacies of the East and the fruits of their own intelligence, the rude simplicity of their more northern neighbors. Even the lower classes among them felt a desire for greater convenience and refinement. Dante, Boccaccio, the chroniclers, and other writers of this period portray or lament the ever-increasing luxury of the age, and we can gather from them an accurate idea of the style of living and magnificence of the patricians in their provisions, furniture, and dress during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Nuptial entertainments and civic festivals were the occasions of most display; and Chaucer, who had partaken of such, writes probably as much from recollection as after Petrarch, whom he has imitated, when he describes the preparations for Griselda’s wedding to the young Marquis of Saluce.

The women were particularly dainty, and many sumptuary laws were enacted to restrain the excess of refinement in houses, furniture, and apparel. A very fine sort of thin, transparent linen, made in Cyprus, was much worn by the female sex. It resembled, but was not quite so indecent as the Coa vestis of the ancients. They also carried much jewelry, and were clothed in garments worked in silver and gold stuff. Their minds naturally ran on money:

“Julia. What thinkest thou of the rich Mercutio?

Lucetta. Well of his wealth; but of himself, so, so.”

—Two Gentlemen of Verona, act i. sc. 2.

The habits and head-dress of the men were often bespangled with precious stones, and their whole attire answered to their haughty bearing, which bespoke successful foreign ventures and a splendid style maintained at home. In innumerable ways they exemplified Dr. Johnson’s observation: “With what munificence a great merchant will spend his money, both from his having it at command and from his enlarged views by calculation of a good effect upon the whole.” Few of them would have dared to say with Bassanio:

“Gentle lady,

When I did first impart my love to you,

I freely told you all the wealth I had

Ran in my veins; I was a gentleman.”

—Merchant of Venice, act iii. sc. 2.

[Pg 92]

When Shakspere uses the expression “royal merchant” in the play from which we have just quoted, it is, as Warburton remarks, no ranting epithet; for several Italian merchant families obtained principalities in the Archipelago and elsewhere, which their descendants enjoyed for many generations, and others of their class made sovereign alliances. For instance, James, King of Cyprus, married Catherine Cornaro, daughter of a Venetian merchant, who gave her a dowry of 100,000 golden ducats.[36]

[31] The Cathedral of Pisa, one of the most remarkable monuments of the middle ages, owes its origin to such an expedition; for it was built with part of the rich booty taken from the Saracens at Palermo in the year 1063.

[32] This city was taken from the Genoese by the Turks in 1474, but the Christians were not all driven out. The late Father Theiner has published an interesting letter from the Papal Nuncio in Poland in 1579, in which he mentions having met some Kaffa people at Wilna and tells of their strange manner of obtaining a priest, reminding one a little of Michas and the Levite in Judges xvii.

[33] McPherson’s Annals of Commerce, vol. i. p. 562.

[34] Innes, Scotland in the Middle Ages, p. 309.

[35] Muratori, Ant. Ital., tom. ii. p. 54.

[36] The ducat was the great money of Venice, as the florin was of Florence, and bears in its name a proof of the more aristocratic government of the former city. The first gold ducats were coined by the Doge John Dandolo in 1280, and are inscribed I0. DANDVL. DVX.

A DAUGHTER OF THE PURITANS.

Rose Standish Howson—that was her name, and very proud she was of it. Back of the Mayflower, she knew little about her ancestors; but certain it was that in that well-filled vessel one of her forefathers had come to America, and, marrying a distant connection of the veritable Standish family, had handed this name down to all succeeding generations. Rose boasted, so far as it is proper for a well-bred New England girl to boast, that, however it might have been outside of her own country, here at least her lineage was most democratically noble; she belonged—and could prove it, too, out of a little book compiled by her grandfather—thoroughly to the old Puritan race. In all her books the name was written in full—Rose Standish Howson; and it was her unfailing source of regret that her only brother had not been called Miles. John Howson laughed good-naturedly at his sister’s foible, but was really quite as proud as she, though in a more passive way.

Their home was not in Boston. Let this important fact receive our prompt attention. But, since it could not be there, it was in the next best place—an old academic town; in which New England State matters little to our story. There for thirty years Rose Howson’s father had been the academy’s honored principal. His wife had died young, leaving only this son and daughter. John fitted for Harvard at the academy; Rose went steadily through grammar-school and high-school in her native place, then went to Boston with hopes of at least a two years’ added course of study there. It resolved itself into one brilliant winter and spring of hard work and exhausting pleasure, symphony concerts, Shakspere clubs, Parker Fraternity lectures, abstruse reading, and keenly exciting conversation; one merry June, one gay class-day, one delightful commencement, when Dr. Howson came to Cambridge to meet old pupils and friends, and see his son bear off the highest honors; then they went home for vacation, and before it was over Dr. Howson sickened and died.

The whole town was in a fervor [Pg 93] of excitement; there was a funeral, to which people came from far and near; resolutions were passed, and in the flush of enthusiasm John Howson, young as he was and just out of college, was elected on trial to fill his father’s place. So the brother and sister still lived on in their old home, but into it they infused a new manner of living. Fresh from the intellectual arena, they sought to shape society about them into some likeness to that they loved so well, and they found their old friends and playmates more than ready to meet them half-way. A book club was started, into which the current literature of the day was crowded, and from which, it was placidly affirmed, all “trash” was excluded; but Mill was there, and Darwin, and a strange mixture of German philosophy, which the young men, but more especially the young women, read, or fancied they read, and about which they talked much, after a fashion revealing more ideas than thought. There were “musicals” too, and a Shakspere club, and German and French conversations and readings, and the second winter after Dr. Howson’s death there were dramatic entertainments and concerts; and it came to pass that almost every afternoon and evening of Rose’s life was filled with some sort of intellectual work or pleasure. She was a capital housekeeper, and so her early mornings were occupied with household cares; but, later, she was always ready for a walk or talk, and her reading was done in snatches by day and by long hours of steady work late at night.

About religion “experimentally” she knew little. The old meeting-house, which the Puritan settlers had built, was still standing, but it had been enlarged and made over, though not beautified. There Rose had been accustomed to go Sunday after Sunday as a matter of course, and sometimes to the Friday evening prayer-meeting; but she was not “a Christian.” Once there had been a revival, when she tried to be converted, but she had failed. Then in Boston she had been taken to hear preachers who were not “orthodox” at all; she had almost feared them at first, because of strange names she had heard applied to them—they had German tendencies, rationalistic tendencies, were free-thinkers. But when she came under the spell of their presence and their eloquence she was fascinated. They appealed to what she thought the highest faculties of her nature—her intellect, her love for the beautiful, her reason. She missed it when she came home and she did more than miss it: she began to doubt. Was old Mr. Gray wiser than the cultured men she had been hearing? He claimed that they were wrong; how did he know that? How could she tell that he was not mistaken? In this one small town, originally occupied by orthodox Congregationalists only, there were now Orthodox Unitarians, Methodists, Episcopalians, Baptists, and Universalists. A Roman Catholic priest was serving there too, in a dingy hall in a back street, but “society” rarely noticed him or his work; he and his alike were out of its pale, anomalies, hardly worth mentioning except with pitying wonder or idle jest and scorn. What made Mr. Gray superior to any or all of these in his power of discerning truth?

And while Rose queried thus on Sunday mornings, sitting wearily in her accustomed place at the right of the pulpit, sometimes trying to find out how to be good, but oftener losing herself in memories of the [Pg 94] feasts of reason she had known for so brief and bright a while, some one came to town who was to influence her life greatly. Looking up suddenly from one of these reveries, she found herself still in the meeting-house, but opposite her was a new face, a lady’s, thin and pale, with searching eyes fixed upon hers, and after service the lady came straight to her pew and held out her hand.

“I am sure you are Miss Howson,” she said. “Your friend Grace Roland has told me much of you. I am Ellen Lawton.”

Rose’s heart leaped up. In those happy Boston days she had often heard Ellen Lawton spoken of as one of the most elegant and cultured women of her time, and she had read her writings with delight, but she had hardly hoped to meet her. It took her breath away with joy when she learned that Miss Lawton had come to live for a while in this quiet country place.

It was a season of keen delight. Rose had thought she knew what it was to revel in intellectual pleasure, but it was something new to meet one so superior to herself, yet so loving; always ready to listen to her ideas, to help her unfold them, and yet so calm and tranquil. Miss Lawton was an invalid, and, after that first Sunday, Rose never saw her at church again. Once, when Rose stopped on her way thither to leave her some flowers, Miss Lawton said that she was going to sit in the sunshine; would not Rose stay with her? And when Rose demurred, Miss Lawton said gently, “Shall we not please God as well in the beauty of his sunshine as in that bare and cheerless house where you know you do not like to go?”

This was the beginning of Rose’s first knowledge of Ellen Lawton’s so-called religious life; they sat and talked all that morning about it. With a sweet smile upon her calm face, the invalid said quietly that she believed there might be a God; she was not sure, of course; but if there was one, he was kind and good, and loved to see her happy. She made life as bright and beautiful as she possibly could always; it was given her to enjoy. Books and music and art and flowers were parts of her religion; beyond this world she did not look; what came after death she knew not and cared not; if there was a God, he was good and would be good to her; if there was not, the thought of annihilation did not distress her. Rose watched her closely after this; she never heard an impatient word or saw a hasty movement; the life was an exposition of what a great many people would call “the beautiful,” and Rose found in it more and more satisfaction for her extreme intellectual cravings.

One morning a servant ran in with blanched face to tell her that Miss Lawton was dead. Rose had known that heart-disease was the fatal malady which was surely sapping at her friend’s life, yet this blow fell upon her with an awful suddenness. She went to the house, where they left her to do as she would, for she was the nearest friend Miss Lawton had there; she went up to the silent room, and shut herself in alone with the silent dead. Ellen Lawton lay as they had found her; she must have risen in the morning and dressed with her usual dainty care; then, perhaps feeling some acute pang of the pain to which she was subject, she had sunk upon the couch by the window. Her face was, as in life, calm and noble; about her lay her books that she had loved, her rare pictures looked [Pg 95] down upon her, her flowers scented the room; outside the sun shone brightly on the grand hills she had been used to watch, finding in them food for heart and soul both, she said. None of these moved her now at all.

Rose went close to her and looked at her, and looked, and looked, as if she would waken her by the very fixedness of her gaze. What was this thing lying there, this beautiful clay, this voiceless, motionless, tenantless body? Yesterday it spoke to her, kissed her, loved her; what had changed it, gone out of it? The spirit? The soul? Where was that soul then?

She knelt down trembling, and put her hand where the heart had beat not five short hours ago. There was no movement now; and the silence in the room grew terrible. Where was that which yesterday she spoke with? Nowhere? Then to-morrow she herself might be nowhere and nothing.

Suddenly there came to her a memory which she had striven for years to banish. A stranger had preached at the time of that unforgotten revival; he had painted vividly and unsparingly the torments of the lost. Often in the night Rose had wakened from a dream of it, and found herself cold with horror, and cried out, “I never will believe it.” Now like a painting she seemed to see it all again, and through her mind rang the words with which the sermon had ended, “Doubt on as you will, O unbeliever, O careless soul, O faithless Christian! Laugh on as you will, forget as you will. But suppose that you wake up after death and find this true! What then?”

John Howson, hearing the news at school, hurried home at noon to comfort Rose, but she was gone. He found her in that room of death, rocking to and fro upon her knees, her hands held out over the dead, while she was whispering in hoarse tones: “Ellen, is it true? Tell me it is not true.” And no one answered.

John lifted her tenderly, and she clung to him like a little child. “Take me home!” she cried, quivering all over. She could not walk; he had to carry her, and all the way she clung to him as if the very touch of something that lived and loved was comfort. “O John! I am so glad you are alive,” she sobbed. “Dear John, do not die, do not die!”

He could hardly bear to leave her for afternoon school, and when he came home she was crouching by his arm-chair, while Abby, their old servant, sat looking at her with pitying horror. “You’d best do what you can for her, Master John,” she said, “or she’ll kill herself going on in this way.”

“No, no! not kill myself,” Rose answered hysterically. “It is awful to live, but it is worse to die.”

John sat down near her, and she took his hand and held it tightly. “I want to feel that you are here, and warm and well,” she said. “O John! tell me what is true.”

“What is true?” he repeated. “Why, I am, I hope; and you, dear child.”

“Oh! no,” she exclaimed, as if his tender lightness were unbearable. “Is God true? Is there a God? What comes after death?”

He answered her honestly; he had even less faith than she, but his doubts did not trouble him. He lived a life as upright and fair as his neighbors; whether there was a God or not, what difference did it make, so long as he behaved himself? This was John Howson’s [Pg 96] creed, if such a title could be applied to it.

How strong and kind he looked, how honorable he always was! Why should Rose worry, if he did not? Either there was no God, and what they did made no difference—they could live as they liked and get all the pleasure possible—or, if there was a God, he was too good to be ever angry with them. It was a consoling belief; she would take the comfort of it. But alone at night the horror returned. Suppose there was a God who demanded something—she knew not what—from his creatures; she could only express it by the vague term, “to be Christians.” She held her head between her hands and tried to think what that meant. Yes, she must be converted, and be sorry for all her sins, and join the church. How were people converted, and what church should she join? Perhaps she had better say a prayer. “O God!” she began, then paused. Her brain was reeling with the doubt whether there was any God at all; and even if there were, what was the use of prayer?

The next morning she went to Mr. Gray. With nerves unstrung by intense feeling, she had little thought left for ordinary greetings or for ceremony. The old man was jarred and hurt by what he thought her rudeness, never dreaming that he was dealing with a soul which was fast losing all care for earthly joys or pains, or for any earthly thing at all, in the one absorbing fear of eternal things. For forty years he had labored in this place in a calm routine, hearing something but comprehending little of the doubts through which the world without was passing. It filled him with horror to hear Rose talk; he had never imagined what thoughts had been working in the mind of his old friend’s child.

“What must one do to be a Christian?” she had asked abruptly.

He had not expected such a question, and looked surprised, but he answered simply enough: “You must believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, my child, and come to him in repentance.”

“And where is he?” Rose cried, “and who is he, and what does he want of me?”

Mr. Gray stared at her in amazement and sorrow. “My dear,” he said, “who is he? He is God, and he is everywhere, and he wants your heart.”

“How do you know that?” Rose exclaimed. “Tell me how you know it.

The old man laid his hand upon his Bible. “Where should I know it but here?” he asked.

“But other people think differently,” Rose said. “I have read it myself, and I don’t find what you preach. The Baptists read the Bible, and so do the Methodists, and so do the Episcopalians, and you cannot agree to be one. How do you know the Bible is true?”

It was of no avail to tell her of internal evidence, or of spiritual conviction, or of visible effects. Quickly enough it became clear that Rose Howson had no faith left in the Lord Jesus Christ as God. She did believe as an historical fact that he had lived once upon earth, and was man, and possibly something more than man; that was all. To everything Mr. Gray said she returned the answer, “How do you know it? Is not the Baptist minister a Christian?—and yet you differ. Is not the Unitarian minister a scholar, and does not he pray to God?—and yet you say he is mistaken.” And [Pg 97] when Mr. Gray reminded her of her father, and asked how he would have felt to hear her speak thus, she cried out that she was a woman grown, and it was her own soul she was talking of, and her father could not save that; fathers made very little difference when it was heaven and hell you were thinking about.

“All Christians agree on the vital points,” Mr. Gray said; “at least, all evangelical Protestants.”

“And what about the unevangelical Protestants and the poor Catholics? and who decides what are the vital points? and why cannot you and the Baptists commune together, then?” The eager questions were poured forth, overwhelming the listener.

Mr. Gray shook his head sadly. “I do not think you are in a fit state to speak of such matters, Rose,” he said. “The Lord Jesus Christ died for you. Pray to him that he will himself teach you.”

Rose stood up. “Good-by, Mr. Gray,” she said gently. “I am afraid I have troubled you. Perhaps you will say a prayer for me sometimes.”

“I will indeed, my child,” he answered her, with a very troubled look upon his face; “but you must pray too.”

“Pray?” she repeated to herself mechanically as she went out of the room. “I wonder how they do it, and what they mean by it, and what good it ever does? Pray? Oh! if I only could.”

After this Rose was never seen inside the old meeting-house again. Everybody learned that she was in some religious difficulty; most persons never mentioned the subject to her; some told her not to worry, but to trust; others that it made no manner of difference what she believed, so long as she was sincere. To the one she answered that the only belief she was sincere in was that she did not know what to believe; to the other she made no reply. But to John once she answered wearily: “If you sat here studying, and I told you the house was on fire, and you could smell it burning, would you keep still at your books, and trust and not worry, because other people said it was not your house?”

On one occasion she took up a Protestant Episcopal Book of Common Prayer which she found in her father’s library, and, turning its pages, came to the Apostles’ Creed. It comforted her to read it; she thought it must be a blessed thing to be brought up always with that impressed upon one, and never to know anything else. She had some Protestant Episcopal friends; they seemed very content. But, still idly turning the leaves, she came to the Thirty-Nine Articles, and her eye lighted on the words, “As the Church of Jerusalem, Alexandria, and Antioch, have erred; so also the Church of Rome hath erred, not only in their living and manner of Ceremonies, but also in matters of Faith.” So then even they could not be sure and settled in their belief, she said to herself; for if Rome and Jerusalem and Antioch had erred, why not the Protestant Episcopal Church of America? It was the closing drop of bitterness. John found her that noon in as terrible a state as on the day of Ellen Lawton’s death.

“Rose,” he said gravely, “for some time, as you know, I have doubted the existence of a God; but I will tell you now that my doubts on that point are settled. Wherever and whatever he may be, there surely is one; for I am convinced [Pg 98] that no one could suffer as you do without some reality to cause it.”

The unexpected words brought a ray of comfort; she lifted her poor pale face to his with a look of pitiful longing. “Then, John,” she said, “don’t you think he must know how dreadful the suffering is, and that he will tell me some day where to find him?”

The tears—a man’s rare tears—sprang to John Howson’s eyes. “I surely think he will, Rose,” he answered; and he stooped and kissed her with great compassion. His love was the only comfort Rose had now, and at times she found no comfort even in that.

Fanny Mason came to see her in the afternoon. People did not come to the house as freely as they used to come; Rose showed too plainly that she did not care to see them. But Fanny had been an intimate family friend always; the affection between the two girls was more like that of relatives than of friends. Fanny was not at all intellectual, had never known a shadow of doubt; she ran in to chat and gossip, not waiting for replies, and brought a sense of refreshment, or at least of change, to Rose’s burdened mind.

“To-morrow is Ascension Day,” she said. “The Episcopalians are going to have service and trim their church beautifully—white lilacs and wistaria and lilies of the valley and bunches of forget-me-not. It will be lovely; wouldn’t you like to see it?”

“I am tired and sick of prettiness and pettiness,” Rose said.

“Rose Howson! What next? You used to say that the beautiful satisfied you entirely.”

“I thought it did,” Rose answered sadly. “But where is it? All at once it failed me. Now I see a death’s-head behind all.”

“Rose! Not really?”

Rose almost smiled at Fanny’s scared face. “No, Fanny; not literally, at least. Once, though, I did really see it in the very centre of loveliness, and I cannot forget.”

“I wish you could forget,” Fanny said pityingly. “I wish we could be little girls once more, Rose.”

“No, no!” Rose answered, shuddering. “Not to live all these years over again. But, O Fanny! if I only could forget for ever so short a while!”

The strained, wild passion of her look and manner frightened Fanny; she tried to return to her former chatty lightness. “I’ll tell you what you had better do,” she said, “since you are tired of the beautiful. The Catholics are going to keep Ascension Day too. What a queer set they are! Do you know that they call this the month of Mary, and in their hall her image is dressed in lace and flowers, with candles burning around it all day long? It is not so pretty there, I assure you. Suppose you try that.” Then laughing as if she had suggested the most absurd of absurdities, Fanny went away.

The dark cloud of depression which had come upon Rose that morning, and had lifted slightly at John’s words, shadowed her now more densely than ever. She looked about the room which John’s taste and hers had made so fair. How everything palled upon her! What good was it to try to make life as beautiful as possible, if even in life she ceased to care for the beautiful? The strong, the true, the lasting, was what she needed now.

It seemed to her that there was no hope anywhere. She fled out [Pg 99] into the open air, and walked fast to escape her haunting thoughts; but there was no escape from self. Passing the hall where the Catholics had services, she saw an old woman climbing the steps, remembered Fanny’s words, and followed her. “Since the beautiful fails me,” she thought with a bitter smile, “I will look at what is not beautiful.”

It was a very dingy hall, and uninviting. On the side walls were poor wood-cuts representing the scenes of the Passion. On a plain white wood altar a lamp was burning. Near by hung a colored print of the Saviour, but as Rose had never seen him portrayed before—with his Heart exposed upon his breast, and great blood-drops falling from it. Rose shrank from the sight; it displeased her. Close by the altar-rail was a highly-colored and gaudily-decorated statue of the Blessed Virgin, with flowers distastefully arranged about it. The old woman had fallen on her knees before it, and was praying. Rose wondered at her.

But she was strangely conscious of a peculiar quiet in the place; it soothed her. She sat down on one of the benches, and took up a book lying there. The Key of Heaven it was called; a very soiled and worn book it was; she hardly liked to touch it. It opened at the Apostles’ Creed. “He ascended into heaven,” she read.

Who was “he”? Jesus Christ—God! So Catholics believed as well as Mr. Gray; in this they were agreed. But, oh! what difference did it make? God and heaven were so very far away—if indeed there were a heaven anywhere—that who on earth could tell anything about them? She looked up wearily from the book; again her eyes met the poor print of the Sacred Heart, the poor statue of the holy Mother. Like a flash the thought came into her mind, “Jesus Christ—God—ascended into heaven, and he had a heart like ours, and he had a mother.”

It was not as if she were uttering a belief—whether Jesus Christ was God she did not know; she was not even thinking about it then. But it was as if she had grasped a link in a mighty chain, which, if one other link could be supplied, would solve and settle all doubt for ever. Over and over she said the words, fearing to lose or forget them: “Jesus Christ—God—ascended into heaven, and he had a heart like ours, and he had a mother.” If this was true, how God in heaven must pity her, how he must love her!

And suddenly the tears were falling on Rose’s cheeks. When she had wept last she could not tell; certainly not since Ellen Lawton’s death, though she had often craved the relief of tears. Now they fell softly and plenteously, while she kept repeating the strange formula with a keen sense that it soothed her and she was resting; and oh! she had been so tired. A mother, a mother—how very sweet it must be to have a mother! And a God with a heart like ours, a heart that could be wounded and bleed and suffer sorely; oh! how one must love a God like that.

“John,” she said abruptly, when they were sitting by the study-lamp after tea, “what are Catholics? I mean, what do you know about them?”

“Not much of anything,” he answered in some surprise, “except as one is always coming upon them in history and the papers. Why?”

“What makes them different from Protestants? Aren’t you always coming upon them too?”

[Pg 100] “Not in the same way, child. You know that Protestants are not so—so obtrusive.”

“But why, John? I want to know about them.”

There was an animation in her manner which reminded him of old times; he saw that she was really in earnest, and set himself to answer her in his straightforward, kindly way, glad to notice any change for the better in her tone of mind.

“I have never thought very much about them, Rose,” he said; “but every general reader must come in contact with them somehow, even if, like me, he has not had personal acquaintance with them in society. Of course you know the distinguishing features of confession and transubstantiation, the papacy, the worship of saints and relics, prayer for the dead.”

“Are you sure they are all wrong?”

“Not at all. We were brought up to think them wrong, but I have never looked so deeply into the matter as to make such an assertion on my own judgment; it never has seemed worth while. However, if you care for my opinion, I will tell you what, from all I have read and heard, presents itself to my mind as the peculiar and fatal mark of Catholicism. It is its claim of absolute authority over the bodies and minds and souls of men—a claim which reached its height of tyranny in the declaration of the infallibility of the pope.”

“What does that mean, John?”

“Why, that whatever the pope may say—no matter who he is, remember, if he is only a pope—that thing you and I and every one must believe to be right. However, I mean to be just to all sects. If I have the idea rightly, their exact claim is this: that the pope, as pope, speaking to the whole church as the Head of the Church, cannot be mistaken, simply because God will not permit him to be. Do you understand?”

She was sitting in the full light of the lamp. He noticed the quiet, thoughtful look upon her face; it made him very happy to see it there.

“John,” she said after a minute’s pause, “why should it not be?”

“What, Rose?”

“I mean, if there is a God Almighty, why could he not keep a man from error in teaching, just as easily as he could make a man in the first place?”

“Really,” said John with an amused smile at what he thought her brightness, “I don’t see but that he could; that is, if you give up the idea that we are free agents.”

“But do they say he is not generally a free agent?” Rose asked, like one thinking out a problem. “Only, when God wants to use him to teach the church, he will not let him teach a lie. Why should not an Almighty God do that? O John! look here.”

She hurried to the bookcase, brought back and opened the Book of Common Prayer. “I believe in the Holy Ghost, the Holy Catholic Church,” she read. “Then there are those who do really believe it; who really think that now—to-day—there is a church where God speaks plainly and unmistakably, and always will speak so, and there can be no error?”

“Yes, Rose.”

Was it only the glow of the lamplight shining upon her face? Did his eyes deceive him, or was that creature, radiant with happiness and a bloom of beauty never witnessed there before—was this his poor and fading Rose of that very noon? Once in his life he had heard a [Pg 101] child laugh who had been suddenly and entirely released from excruciating pain—a low, sweet laugh most exquisite to hear in the sense it gave of indescribable relief. Such a laugh he heard now from Rose’s lips, which he had almost feared would never so much as smile again.

“John,” she said exultingly, “I have it! There is a Heavenly Father—God—and he made us all. And there is Jesus Christ—God—who ascended into heaven, and he had a heart like ours, and he had a mother. And there is a Holy Ghost—God—who is with the church, and so she cannot lie. And how those three are one, and how the blood of Christ saves us, we may never be able to explain; but, if there is a God, he will never let his church tell lies or err or make mistakes, and whatever his church says that we ought to believe, whether we understand it or not. And only Catholics claim an infallible voice. John, I am going to try it. I shall speak to the priest to-morrow.”

“You are your own mistress, Rose,” he said gravely. “You can do as you please. I only warn you that after that one act of your own choice, you must give up your reason and will to another.”

The color flashed more brightly in her cheeks. He was amazed as he looked at her; once again the fire was in her eyes, and the brilliant intellect shone in the face that had been dulled so long.

“I shall give up my reason and my will to God,” she said. “It is he who will speak to me, without erring and without lying. I do not expect to be as wise as my Creator, and I am sure I shall be none the worse for it when he who is wisdom itself teaches me. It is God that I am talking about, John, and not a mere man that can make mistakes. I am quite content to yield my intellect and my will to him.”

And then, as suddenly as it had come, the glow faded from her face; she was kneeling down beside him with that look of anguish in her eyes which for so many long weeks had wrung his heart with pity. “You know I have suffered,” she said, “but, John, it is only the outside you have seen; you can’t tell what it has been within. And now a great light is coming—I am sure of it. It is not the love of beauty or anything I used to crave. It is the thing I need and we all need; something stronger than we are: something that cannot by any possibility teach us a lie; something that cannot by any possibility err; something plain to hear and plain to see—infallible! I have not got it yet; I am only on my way to it. If it was in your power to stop me, would you do it?”

“I do not understand you, Rose,” he answered thoughtfully, “nor do I entirely follow your train of reasoning. Still, I grant that for a temperament such as yours has of late disclosed itself to be there is comfort in what you think you see. No, I would not say a word to stop you, my poor child! It goes against the grain to think of one of us becoming a Catholic; but if anything will help you, I shall bless the hand that brings relief.”

She looked full in his face with a look of grave surprise. “I did not think that of you,” she said; “you always have seemed so honest. Don’t you know that nothing in heaven or earth can satisfy me, unless it is the truth? No shams, no half-way things, but something like rock that will never fail. I did not think that of you, John!”

John sat alone and puzzled over [Pg 102] her words that night. “I always have to puzzle things out,” he said. “They never come to me like a flash, as they do to Rose. Stop, though! I am wrong there. She has been months in getting at it, and they were months that almost killed her. Why was it?”

Plainly enough he saw at last why it was. God, the soul, eternity—those things which are invisible—were more real to Rose than the visible things. And should they not be? He knew very well that he would be stung to the quick to be told that his body—his material, tangible, lower nature—had the upper hand in his life. No, his reason, his intellect—something intangible and invisible anyhow, by whatever name you named it—was the governing power. And if so, then why should not One invisible and intangible be the ruler of that, and claim from him more than a merely blameless life and an honest fame; demand submission of his will and reason and thought? John shook his head ruefully; the idea struck home; he did not like it, but there it was.

The next day Rose quietly laid before him her little Catechism, open at the very first section, and John read this:

“Question. Who made you?

“Answer. GOD.

“Q. Why did he make you?

“A. That I might know him, love him, and serve him in this world, and be happy with him for ever in the next.

“Q. To whose likeness did he make you?

“A. To his own image and likeness.

“Q. Is this likeness in your body or in your soul?

“A. In my soul.

“Q. In what is your soul like to God?

“A. Because my soul is a spirit endowed with understanding and free will, and is immortal—that is to say, can never die.

“Q. In what else is your soul like to God?

“A. Because as in God there are three persons and one God, so in man there is one soul and three powers.

“Q. Which are the three powers?

“A. Will, memory, and understanding.

“Q. Which must we take most care of, our body or our soul?

“A. Of our soul.

“Q. Why so?

“A. Because, ‘What doth it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?’

“Q. What must we do to save our soul?

“A. We must worship God by faith, hope, and charity; that is, we must believe in him, hope in him, and love him with all our heart.

“Q. How shall we know the things which we are to believe?

“A. From the Catholic Church of God, which he has established by innumerable miracles, and illustrated by the lives and deaths of innumerable saints.”

“John,” said Rose steadily, “be honest with God.”

* * * * *

Professor Howson is a name which no one hears now, though it was once supposed that it would rank among those of New England’s noblest scholars. But John Howson teaches still. People had often said of him that he would never marry; that his books and his sister were enough for him. He never did marry; but it was God and the church of God that satisfied him. Once, in a great city, an old friend of his collegiate days, who had not heard of him for years, met him face to face in his dress of a religious, and stopped him in utter amazement.

“John Howson! You are unmistakable, but how is this? I was told of your change, but did not know it had gone so far. Are not your Puritan ancestors groaning in their shrouds, man, because of such doings?”

[Pg 103] The priest returned a courteous answer, and would have turned to other themes, but his friend persisted. Then, not with the old outspoken frankness as of one who feared none, but instead, thoughtfully and humbly as in the very fear of God, there came this reply:

“Once I matched my mind with the mind of God, and judged him, and thought his will to be of no account. It was a great sin, and he saved me from it. After that I could only say, as another in like case once said, ‘I cannot give God less than all.’”

“A great sin?” his friend repeated. “I do not understand that.”

He saw a shade of peculiar awe creep over the countenance before him. “And is it no sin,” John Howson asked in a deep voice, “to hear said in the face of God that there is no God? to have counted your own judgment superior to his? to have given God the lie? One who is now of the mightiest saints thought that he did God service while he fought against him, and afterward he named himself the chief of sinners. But I did not so much as think of the service of God at all in matters of belief.”

“I can’t see the fault in that,” his friend said wonderingly. “If it was murder you had on your conscience, I might sympathize with you; but this!”

“You are fresh from Massachusetts,” said Father Howson, “and it is years since I was there. Do they still count the mind as nobler than the body, and the intellect as among their highest gifts?”

“Yes,” was the proud reply.

“Some time,” returned Father Howson with deep meaning in his tone, “we all shall have to learn that God judges sin of the mind by as terrible a judgment as sin of the body, and that he demands his gifts with usury. Believe me, it is better to forestall that judgment, and to meet that demand here than hereafter.”

And Rose? Long since she learned to say, “I have loved, O Lord, the beauty of thy house; and the place where thy glory dwelleth.” Long since she learned that there is One invisible who is fairer than any child of man, and to him she gave the heart which a wealth of intellectual and earthly loveliness had failed to satisfy. She has learned that there is a nobler Blood than any that the world can boast; His place is with the nobility of an eternal kingdom, whose peculiar marks of honor are poverty, and self-renunciation, and an utter lowliness of obedience, whereby every faculty of one’s nature is brought with a glad free-will into the obedience of Christ. One day the daughter of the Puritans heard another voice than theirs call her by that tender name: “Hearken, O daughter, and see, and incline thy ear: and forget thy people and thy father’s house. And the King shall greatly desire thy beauty: for he is thy Lord God.” Once before, but after sore struggle and heartrending suffering, she had heard that voice. Hearing it again, she rose up joyfully and followed it, as then, without delay.

[Pg 104]

PRUSSIA AND THE CHURCH.

III.

We have already alluded to that feature in the recent ecclesiastical legislation of Prussia which gives to the people the right to choose their pastors, and we have also seen how nobly the Catholics of Germany have thwarted this unholy attempt to create dissension and discord in the church. When it could no longer be doubted that the German bishops were immovable in their allegiance to the pope, Prussia sought, by holding out every possible inducement to apostasy, to create disunion between the priests and the bishops; but in this, too, she met with signal defeat. Nothing, therefore, remained to be done, but to devise measures whereby the administration of ecclesiastical affairs would be placed exclusively in the hands of the laity; since the breaking of the bonds which unite church and state would not have as a result that weakening of ecclesiastical power which is so ardently desired. This Professor Friedberg, in his German Empire and the Catholic Church, expressly states in the following words:

“If the government were to adhere to the plan of a total separation of church and state, what would be the consequence? Would the bishops lose their authority because the state no longer recognized it? Would the parochial system be broken up if unsupported by the state? In a word, would the church lose any of her power? It would argue an absolute want of perception and a total ignorance of Catholic history to affirm that she would. The stream which for centuries has flowed in its own channel does not run dry because its course is obstructed. It only overflows and floods the country. To continue the metaphor, we must first seek with all care to draw off the waters, and to lead them into pools and reservoirs, where what remains will readily evaporate.”

The Protestants of Prussia are opposed to the separation of church and state, because they are well aware that in the present condition of religious opinion in Germany the rationalists and socialists would at once get control of most of the parishes of the Evangelical church, if it were deprived of the support of the government; and, on the other hand, both they and the infidels are persuaded that the Catholic Church is quite able to maintain herself, and even to wax strong, without any help from the temporal power.

“One thing,” says the Edinburgh Review, “the state is quite at liberty to do. The state is not bound to pay or maintain churches or sects which it does not approve. Indeed, if these conditions are annexed to the acceptance of state payment, the church herself would do well to reject the terms. But will Prince Bismarck withdraw the stipend and set the church free? Nothing of the kind. There is no freedom of religious orders or communities in Prussia. The whole spirit of these laws is to make every form of religious belief and organization as subservient to the state as a Prussian recruit is to the rattan of a corporal. That we abhor and denounce as an intolerable oppression; and it is only by the strangest perversion of judgment that any Englishman can have imagined that the cause of true religious liberty was identical with the policy of Prince Bismarck.”[37]

To consent to a separation of [Pg 105] church and state would be a recognition of the independent existence of the church, which Prussia holds to be contrary to the true theory of the constitution of human society in relation to government and religion. This theory is that man exists for the state, to which he owes his supreme and undivided allegiance; whose duty it is to train and govern him for its own service alike in peace and war. All the interests of society, therefore, material, political, educational, and religious, must be subjected to the state, independently of which no organization of any kind ought to be permitted to exist. And in fact the whole spirit of the recent ecclesiastical legislation of Prussia is in perfect consonance with this theory. The Falck Laws deny to the church the right to educate her priests, to decide as to their fitness for the care of souls, to appoint them to or remove them from office; in a word, the right to administer her own affairs, and consequently to exist at all as an organization separate from the state.

It can hardly surprise us that the attempt should have been made to prove that this is in accordance with the teachings of the New Testament.

“The New Testament,” says the British Quarterly, “requires that the Christian shall be a loyal subject of the government under which he lives. ‘Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God; the powers that be are ordained of God: whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God.’”[38]

After quoting several texts from the Epistles of St. Paul, of the same general import, the writer in the British Quarterly continues:

“Now, it is impossible to find in the New Testament any injunctions of obedience to organized ecclesiastical power, like those here given of obedience to the civil government. It is not ecclesiastical authority, nor a corporate ecclesiastical institution, but the personal God, and the individual conscience in its direct personal relations with God, which is set over against an unrighteous demand of the civil authority in the crucial motto of Peter, ‘We ought to obey God rather than men,’ and in the teaching of Christ, ‘Render unto Cæsar the things which are Cæsar’s, and unto God the things which are God’s.’ Of conscience as an ecclesiastical corporation, or of conscience as an imputed or vicarious faculty, determined and exercised by one for another, the ethics of the New Testament have no knowledge.”[39]

It is hard to realize the ignorance or the bad faith of a man who is capable of making such statements as these. Let us take the last words of the gospel of St. Matthew: “And Jesus coming, spoke to them, saying: All power is given to me in heaven and in earth. Going, therefore, teach ye all nations,… teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you; and, behold, I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world.” Here surely is an organized body of men, receiving from Christ himself the divine command to teach all the nations of the earth their religious faith and duties, which necessarily carries with it the right to exact obedience. But, lest there be any room for doubt, let us hear Christ himself: “He that heareth you, heareth me: and he that despiseth you despiseth me. And he that despiseth me, despiseth him that sent me.”[40]

Again: “And if he will not hear the church, let him be to thee as the heathen and the publican. Amen I say to you, whatsoever you shall [Pg 106] bind upon earth, shall be bound also in heaven: and whatsoever you shall loose upon earth, shall be loosed also in heaven.”[41]

When Peter and John were brought into court and “charged not to speak at all, nor teach in the name of Jesus,” they should have submitted at once, upon the theory that the state has the right to exact supreme and undivided allegiance; but they appealed to their divine commission, just as the bishops of Germany do to-day, and answered, “We cannot but speak the things which we have seen and heard.”[42]

And in the council at Jerusalem, “an ecclesiastical corporation” surely, the apostles say: “For it hath seemed good to the Holy Ghost, and to us, to lay no further burden upon you than these necessary things”;[43] plainly indicating and using their right to impose commands and exact obedience. But enough of this. The persecutors of the church to-day are not at all concerned about the teachings of the New Testament. The attempt, however, to make it appear that only Catholics protest against the doctrine of absolute and undivided allegiance to the state is wholly unjustifiable. There is no Protestant sect in England or the United States which would submit to the intervention of the government in its spiritual life and internal discipline. Would the Methodists, or the Baptists, or the Presbyterians permit the state to decide what kind of education their ministers are to receive, or to determine whether they are capable of properly discharging their spiritual duties, or to keep in office by force those whom the church had cast off? They would go out to pray on the hillside and by the river banks rather than submit to such tyranny.

Is not the right of revolution, which in our day, especially outside of the Catholic Church, is held to be divine, based upon the principle of divided allegiance? Practically it is impossible to distinguish between loyalty to the government and loyalty to the state; and no man in this age thinks of questioning the right of rebellion against a tyrannical government. This divided allegiance marks the radical difference between Christian and pagan civilization. Before Christ there was no divided allegiance, because the individual was absorbed by the state, and nothing could have wrested mankind from this bondage but a great spiritual organization such as the Catholic Church; and this, we believe, is generally admitted by our adversaries. They fail to perceive, however, that there is no other institution than the Catholic Church which has the power to prevent the state from again absorbing the individual and destroying all civil and political liberty. If the church could be broken up into national establishments, and the entire control of education handed over to the state, the bringing all men to the servile temper which characterizes the Russians and Protestant Prussians would be only a question of time. Many will be inclined to hold that the general freedom, and even license, of thought of our time would be a sufficient protection against any such danger.

A little reflection, however, will suffice to dispel this illusion. No number of individuals, unless they are organized, can successfully oppose tyranny; and mere speculations or opinions as to the abstract [Pg 107] right of resistance can not stop the march of the state toward absolutism. The most despotic states have often encouraged the most unbounded freedom of thought, and we need not go beyond Prussia for an example. In no country in the world has there been more of what is called free-thinking, nor has any government been more tolerant of wild theories and extravagant speculations; and yet the free-thinkers and illuminati have done nothing to promote the growth of free institutions or to encourage civil or religious liberty. They are without unity or organization or programme. Many of them to-day are the strongest supporters of Bismarckian despotism. Even in 1848 they succeeded only in getting up a mob and evaporating in wild talk.

The divine right of resistance to tyranny would have no sanction or efficacy if it were not kept living in the hearts of men by supernatural religion.

This is thoroughly understood by the advocates of absolutism, who do not trouble themselves about doctrines of any kind, except when they are upheld by organizations, and for this reason all their efforts are directed to the destruction of the organic unity of the church. Had Prince Bismarck succeeded in his attempt to get the Catholic congregations which have been deprived of their priests to elect pastors for themselves, there would have been but another step to open schism, which would have inevitably resulted in favor of Old Catholicism. But, as we have seen, out of more than a hundred parishes, not one has lent itself to the iniquitous designs of the enemies of the church.

Another striking example of the perfect unanimity of thought and action which in Prussia exists between priests and people was given last year when the so-called State-Catholics tried to get up a protest against the encyclical letter of the Pope, in which he declared that the May Laws were not binding upon the consciences of Catholics. All the liberal papers of Germany were loud in praise of this project, which presented the fairest opportunity to Catholic government officials to curry favor by showing their acceptance of the Falck laws; and yet, in spite of every effort that was made, only about a thousand signatures were obtained, most of which were found outside of the eight millions of Prussian Catholics.

Mr. Gladstone, in his article on the “Speeches of Pope Pius IX.,”[44] says of the Catholic clergy that they “are more and more an army, a police, a caste; further and further from the Christian Commons, but nearer to one another and in closer subservience to the pope.” However near the Catholic clergy may be to one another, it certainly shows a great lack of power to see things as they are to maintain that they are losing the hold which more than any other class of men they have always had on the hearts of the people. The persecution in Germany has shown there that inseparable union of priest and people which is to-day as universal as the life of the church. Had there existed any seed of discord, it certainly would have sprung up and flourished in Prussia during the last four or five years.

What circumstances could have been more favorable to such development than those created by the Old Catholics in league with Bismarck? The unprecedented victories over Austria and France had set all [Pg 108] Germany wild with enthusiasm. “Deutschland über alles, über alles in der Welt,” was the refrain of every song. On the other hand, many Catholics, especially in Germany, had been prejudiced and somewhat soured by the false interpretations which were everywhere put on the dogma of papal infallibility. Just at this moment Dr. Döllinger, whose reputation was greater than that of any other German theologian, announced his separation from the church, and at once there gathered around him a party of dissatisfied or suspended priests and rationalistic laymen. Reinkens was made bishop, and the Emperor of Germany publicly prayed that the “certainly correct conviction of the Hochwürdiger Herr Bischof might win ground more and more.” Fortune smiled upon the new religion and everything seemed to promise it the brightest future. What has been the result? In a population of eight millions of Catholics this sect, with the aid of the state, German enthusiasm, and the whole liberal press, has been able to gather only about six thousand adherents; and they are without zeal, without doctrinal or moral unity, having as yet not even dared to define their position towards the Pope. Dr. Döllinger himself has lost interest in the movement, and its most sanguine friends have yielded to despondency. Old Catholicism was, in fact, impossible from the beginning. But two roads open before those who to-day go forth from the fold of the church: the one leads to the Babel and decomposition of Protestant sectarianism, the other to the unbelief of scientific naturalism.

To declare that Christianity is lying disjointed, in shattered fragments, and yet to pretend that human hands, with paste and glue, out of these broken pieces can remake the heavenly vase once filled with God’s spirit of faith, hope, and love, is an idle fancy. Into this patchwork no divine life will come; men will not believe in it, nor will it inspire enthusiasm or the heroic courage of martyrdom. Therefore they who leave the church, their native soil, have indeed all the world before them, and yet no place where they can find rest for their souls.

What the religious policy of the Prussian Liberals is, Herr von Kirchmann, to whom in a previous article we introduced our readers, informs us in the following words:

“The majority of the Liberal representatives are highly-educated men who have fallen out with the Christian churches, because they no longer accept their creed, and therefore hold as a principle that freedom of conscience for the individual is abundantly sufficient to satisfy the religious wants of the people. At best, they would consent to the existence of congregations; any organization beyond this they consider not only unnecessary but hurtful.”

This, then, is the Liberal programme: the individual shall have perfect freedom to believe, as he pleases, in God or the devil; but there shall be no ecclesiastical organization, unless a kind of congregationalism, which, having neither unity nor strength, can be easily rendered harmless by being placed under police supervision. These men of culture, as Herr von Kirchmann says, have fallen out with all the churches; and they are liberal enough to be willing to do everything in their power to make it impossible that any of them should exist at all, since without organic unity of some kind there can be no church, as there can be no state.

[Pg 109] But let us hear what Herr von Kirchmann has to remark upon this subject.

“This view,” he says, “may satisfy those who have reached the high degree of culture of the Liberals; but those who take it utterly ignore the religious wants of the middle and lower classes, and fail to perceive the yearning, inseparable from all religious feeling, for association with persons of like sentiments, in order, through public worship, to obtain the strength and contentment after which this fundamental craving of the human heart longs.”

To the existence of this feeling, and its yearning for the largest possible association, the history of all Christian peoples, down even to the present day, bears witness; for this reason nowhere have men been satisfied with the freedom of the individual, but have ever demanded a church with acknowledged rights and the privilege of free intercommunion.

“To the dangers which would threaten society if religious associations should be broken up, and faith left to the whim of individuals, these highly cultivated men give no heed, because they do not themselves feel the need of such support; but they forget that their security, the very possibility, indeed, of reaching the point at which they stand, rests upon the power of the church over the masses; and should they destroy this by allowing the congregations to break up into atoms, leaving the Christian creed to be fashioned by passion and ever-varying interests, according to the fancy of each and every one, nothing would remain but the brute force of the state, which, without the aid of the internal dispositions of the people, cannot save society from complete dissolution.”[45]

Herr von Kirchmann, then, adds his testimony to that of many other observers who, though they do not believe in the divine origin and truth of the Christian religion, yet hold that its acceptance by the masses as a system of belief, received on the authority of a church, is essential to the preservation and permanence of our civilization. This is a subject to which we Americans might with great profit give our thoughts.

As Emerson, who is probably our most characteristic thinker, has declared that he would write over the portal of the Temple of Philosophy WHIM, American Protestantism seems more and more inclined to accept this as the only satisfactory, or indeed possible, shibboleth in religion. The multiplication of sects holding conflicting creeds, while it has weakened faith in all religious doctrines, has helped on the natural tendency of Protestantism to throw men back upon their own feelings or fancies for their faith. This, of course, results in the breaking up even of congregations into atoms of individualism, and will, if not counteracted, necessarily destroy our character as a Christian people; and for us it is needless to say Christianity is the only possible religion.

Our statesmen—politicians may be the more proper word—though not irreligious, lack grasp of mind and depth of view, else they could not fail to perceive, however little they may sympathize with the doctrines or what they conceive to be the social tendencies of the Catholic Church, that just such a strong and conservative Christian organism as she is, is for us an indispensable political requirement. That none of the leading minds of the country should have taken this view is a sad evidence of want of intellectual power or of moral courage. The most that any of them feel authorized in saying in our favor is that a country which tolerates free-love, Mormonism, and the joss-house of [Pg 110] the Chinaman ought not, if consistency be a virtue, to persecute Catholics. In spite of appearances which mislead superficial observers, we are the most secular people in the world. No other people is so ready to sacrifice religious to material interests; no other people has ever to an equal extent banished all religious instruction from its national education; no other people has ever taken such a worldly view of its religion. The supernatural in religion is lost sight of by us, and we value it chiefly for its social and æsthetic power. The popular creed is that religion is something which favors republicanism, promotes the exploitation of the material resources of the globe, softens manners, and makes life comfortable.

The proposition to tax church property shows that a large portion of the American people have ceased to believe in religion as a moral and social power. A church is like a bank or theatre or coal-mine—something which concerns only those who have stock in it, and has nothing whatever to do with the public welfare. The school-house occupies quite other ground. The country is interested in having all its citizens intelligent; this is for the general good; but whether they believe in God or the soul is a matter of profound indifference, unless, possibly, to themselves, since this can in no way affect the progress or civilization of the American people. This is evidently the only possible philosophy for those who would tax church property. The popular contempt for theology encouraged by nearly all Protestant ministers is another evidence of the tendency to religious disintegration. There is but little danger that any church will ever get a controlling influence in the national life of this country; our peril lies in the opposite direction; and that so few of those who think should see this is to us the saddest sign of the times; but those who do recognize it cannot help knowing that the Catholic Church is the strongest bulwark against this flood-tide.

The social dangers of an open persecution of the Catholic Church are most clearly seen in Prussia to-day. Since the German chancellor entered upon his present course of violence five bishops and fifteen thousand priests have been imprisoned or fined, and about the same number of laymen have suffered for daring to speak unfavorably of these proceedings. Never before, probably, have the police been so generally or constantly employed in arresting men who are loved and venerated by the people, and whose only crime is fidelity to conscience. The inevitable consequence of this is that the officers of the government come to be looked upon, not as the ministers of justice, but as the agents of tyranny and oppression, which must, of course, weaken respect for authority. These coercive measures, from the nature of things, tend only to confirm the Catholics in their conscientious convictions, and the government is thereby instigated to harsher methods of dealing with this passive resistance. The number of confessors of the faith increases, the enthusiasm and devotion of the people are heightened, and it becomes an honor and a glory to be made a victim of tyranny. The feeling of disgrace which is attached to the penalties for violation of law is more efficacious in repressing crime than the suffering which is inflicted; but this feeling is destroyed, or rather changed, into one of an opposite character in the minds of the people when they behold their venerated bishops [Pg 111] and much-loved priests dragged to prison for saying Mass or administering the sacraments. No amount of reasoning, no refinement of logic, can ever convince them that there can be anything criminal in the performance of these sacred functions. In this way the ignominy which in the public mind follows conviction for crime is wiped away, and the sacredness of the law itself endangered.

This alone is sufficient to show how blind and thoughtless Prince Bismarck has been in making war upon the Catholic Church just at the moment when wise counsels would have led him to seek to add the strength of reverence and respect to the enthusiasm with which the creation of the new empire had been hailed. The spoilt child of success, wounded pride made him mad. How serviceable he might have found the moral support of the Catholic clergy Herr von Kirchmann has informed him.

“I myself,” he says, “from 1849 to 1866, with the exception of some intervals, lived in Upper Silesia, a wholly Catholic province, and, as the president of the Criminal Senate of a Court of Appeals, had the fullest opportunity to study the moral and religious state of the people, which in nothing is so truly seen as in those circumstances out of which spring offences against the law. Now, although this province of more than a million of men was thoroughly Catholic and entirely in the hands of the clergy; although the school system was still very imperfect, and the population, with the exception of the landowners and the inhabitants of the large cities, not speaking the German language, was thereby deprived of culture and of intercourse with the German provinces, yet can I unhesitatingly affirm that the moral condition of the people was in no way worse than in Saxony or the Margravate where formerly I held similar official positions. The number of crimes was rather less, the security of person and of property greater, and the relations between the different classes of society far more peaceable and friendly than in the provinces to which I have just made allusion. The socage and heavy taxes pressed hard upon the peasantry; nevertheless in 1848 insurrections against the landlords were not more frequent here than elsewhere. It was unquestionably the powerful influence of the clergy which, in spite of so many obstacles, gave to the people their moral character, and produced the general contentment and obedience which reflected the greatest honor upon the whole population. The vice of drunkenness, through the agency of temperance societies established solely by the priests, had been in an almost marvellous manner rooted out from among the people, and the general welfare made manifest progress. By means of my official and political position I had the opportunity to make the acquaintance of a large number of the pastors and curates, and still to-day I recall with pleasure my intercourse with these men, for the most part cultivated, but above all distinguished by their thorough gentleness of character. They were firm in maintaining the rights of their church, they were filled with the excellence of their mission, but they never thought of thwarting the civil authorities; on the contrary, they found in the clergy a great and efficacious support, so that this province needed fewer protective and executive officials than others.”[46]

No enlightened and fair government has anything to fear from the influence of men who are as firm in upholding the authority of the state as they are in asserting their own liberty of conscience; who will neither do wrong nor tamely submit to it. If, in the social, religious, and political crisis through which the nations of Christendom are passing, sound reason is ultimately to prevail and civilization is to be preserved, the necessity of an institution like the Catholic Church will come to be recognized by all who are capable of serious thought. [Pg 112] The divided allegiance, the maintenance of the supremacy of conscience, is essential to the preservation of the principle of authority in society. If it were possible to nationalize religion by placing all churches under state control, the authority of the state would necessarily become that of brute force, and would in consequence be deprived of its sacredness. The respect of Christian nations for the civil power is a religious sentiment; and if the church could cease to be, there would be a radical revolution in the attitude of the people toward the state. In Europe even now, in consequence of the progress of unbelief, respect for authority and the duty of obedience have been so far destroyed in the minds and hearts of the masses that government is possible only with the support of immense standing armies, which help on the social dissolution; and with us things would be in a still worse condition, were it not that the vast undeveloped resources of the country draw off the energies which else would be fatal to public order. Our strength and security are rather in our physical surroundings than in our moral resources. Our greatest moral force, during the century of our existence, has been the universal veneration of the people for the Constitution, which was regarded with a kind of religious reverence; but this element of strength is fast wasting away and will not pass over as a vital power into the second century of our life. The criticisms, the amendments, the patchings, which the Constitution has been made to suffer, have, more than civil strife, debased it to the common level of profane parchments and robbed it of the consecration which it had received in the hearts of the people The change which has taken place, though it have something of the nature of growth and development, is yet, unquestionably, more a breaking down and dissevering. The Catholic Church, by the reverence which she inspires for institutions, is, and in the future will be yet more, the powerful ally of those who will stand by the Constitution as our fathers made it.

Our statesmen, we know, are in the habit of looking elsewhere for the means which are to give permanence to our free institutions. The theory now most in favor is that universal education is the surest safeguard of liberty, and it is upon this more than upon anything else that we, as a people, rely for the perpetuity of our form of government. This hope, we cannot but think, is based upon an erroneous opinion of the necessary tendency of intellectual culture; which is to increase the spirit of criticism, and consequently, by dissatisfying the mind with what is, to direct it continually to new experiments, with the hope of finding something better. Now, though this may be well enough in the realms of speculation, and may be a great help to the progress of science, it most assuredly does not tend either to beget or to foster reverence for existing institutions of any kind; and this same mental habit which has already made American Protestantism so fragmentary and contradictory will beyond doubt weaken and, unless counteracted, destroy the unity of our political life. This is a question which does not concern us alone; with it is bound up the future of the human race. If the American experiment of government by the people fails, all hope of such government perishes. If we allow our personal prejudices to [Pg 113] warp our judgment in a matter so catholic and all-important, no further evidence of our unfitness for the great mission which God seems to have assigned us is needed. Unfortunately, we are at the mercy of politicians for whom all other questions than the present success of party have no interest, and who therefore flatter the passions of the people instead of seeking to enlighten them; and the insane hatred and fear of the church which the Protestant masses have inherited from the Old World prevents them from seeing what a source of strength and bond of union is her strong and firmly-knit organism in a social state like ours, in which there are so many elements of dissolution and disintegration.

Herr von Kirchmann, though, as we have seen, not a Catholic nor a Christian, is yet too profound a statesman not to recognize the supreme social importance of the church to the modern world.

“Human society,” he says, “cannot do without the principle of authority, of obedience, of respect for law, any more than it can do without the principle of individual freedom; and now that the family has been shoved into the background, there remains to uphold this principle of authority only one great institution, and that is the Christian churches, and, above all, the Catholic Church.

“The Reformation has so filled the Evangelical Church with the principle of self-examination and self-determination that she cannot at all take upon herself the mission of protectress of authority, of respect for law, as law; which is essential to modern society. She is also too far removed from the laity, and lacks those special institutions which would enable her energetically to uphold this principle.

“The same is true of all reform parties within the church, and must be applied to the Old Catholics, should they succeed in acquiring any importance. The Roman Catholic Church alone must be considered the true mother of respect for authority. She does not permit the individual to decide in matters of faith and discipline; and she most perfectly realizes the essence of religion, which cannot proceed from the individual, but must have its source in the commandments of God. In the bishops, in the councils, in the pope, the individual finds authorities who announce to him religious truth, and by the administration of the sacraments bring him nearer to God. Changes in faith and worship which, with the progress of science and of general culture, become necessary, are here withdrawn from the disputes of the learned and the criticism of individuals; in the councils and in their head, the pope, an institution is found by which modifications may be permitted without shaking faith in the teachings of the church.

“In the position of the priest toward the laity this relation of the individual to the church becomes most intimate, and numerous special ordinances cultivate the spirit of obedience and respect for the commands of ecclesiastical superiors, while they also serve the ends of Christian charity and benevolence. It ought not, indeed, to be denied that this repression of individual self-determination and this fostering of obedience may be carried too far, and to some extent has, in the Catholic Church, been exaggerated, as in civil society the cultivation of individual freedom and the repression of authority have produced an opposite excess; but precisely through the interaction of these extremes will the true mean be obtained; and therefore ought the state to seek in the Catholic Church that powerful institution which alone, by virtue of her whole organization, is able to ward off the dangers which threaten society from the exaggeration of the principle of individual freedom. But to do this the church must be left in the possession of her constitution as it has hitherto existed, and the state, consequently, should not interfere with her external power any further than its own existence demands. In this respect the principle of individual freedom which pervades all modern life is so powerful an auxiliary of the state that no fear of the influence of the church need be felt, of which a little too much is far less dangerous to society than too little.

“These are considerations, indeed, which are not in harmony with the programme [Pg 114] of modern liberalism, and will therefore have but little weight with those who swim with the current of the time; nevertheless, if we look around us, we perceive many evidences of the instinctive feeling of human society that in the Catholic Church may be found a protection for the harmony of social life which now no longer exists elsewhere. Only in this way can we explain the rapid growth of the Catholic Church in her strictly hierarchical constitution in America, and the increasing Catholic movement in England, together with the efforts of the Established Church to draw nearer to the Catholic; and this tendency would be far more pronounced had it not to contend against historical reminiscences which in England are more vivid than elsewhere. Similar reasons influence the government of France to seek rather to strengthen than to weaken the power of the church; and in this matter the unbelieving Thiers has not acted otherwise than the religious MacMahon.

“After the principle of authority had been shaken by revolutions and an unhappy war in France more than in any other country, the people knew not where to seek help, except in the fostering of religion and the support of the Catholic Church. Like grounds prevent Italy and Austria from coming to an open rupture with the church; they prefer to yield somewhat in the execution of the laws rather than suffer themselves to be deprived of her indispensable aid. Similar tendencies exist in the other German governments, and also among the rich and powerful families of Germany and Prussia. Everywhere, even where these families are not adherents of the Catholic faith, they feel that this church is a fortress against the anarchy of individual freedom which should be defended and not destroyed. The members of these families are not blind to the defects of the church; but they know that in the present age these are the least to be feared, while her power against the self-exaltation of the individual is indispensable to modern society. It is altogether a mistake to attribute this bearing of the wealthy classes of all civilized nations towards the church to selfish motives or to the cunning of priests; these motives may, as in all great things, slip in in isolated cases; but this whole movement in Europe and America springs from deeper causes—from causes which lie at the very bottom of our common nature, which can neither suffer the loss of freedom nor yet do without order and authority.

“About every ten years we are assured that, if only this or that is reached, the Catholic Church will of herself fall to pieces. Never has the attempt to bring about this consummation been made with more spirit and energy than in the literature and political constitutions of the last century; and yet this church lives still in our day, and what she has lost in temporal sovereignty is doubly and trebly made up to her in the growing number of her children and the gradually-increasing insight into the significance of her mission for human society.

“For this reason the present conflict with the church in Prussia ought not to be pushed so far as to bring her power as low as the state has brought that of the Evangelical Church. If the Catholic Church is to fulfil the great social mission which we have just described, and which consists essentially in her maintaining an equilibrium between freedom and obedience, which is indispensable to society and the state, her external power and internal organization must not be interfered with in a way to render the accomplishment of this exalted mission impossible.”[47]

Herr Joerg, the editor of one of the first reviews of Germany, has said that Prince Bismarck has done more to strengthen and make popular the Catholic cause in the empire than the two hundred Jesuits whom he has exiled could have done in half a century. This, we believe, is coming to be generally recognized. The war on the church was begun with loud boastings. Men of high position declared that in two years not a Catholic would be left in Germany. The prince chancellor disdained to treat with the Pope or the bishops, and defiantly entered upon his course of draconic legislation to compel to his stubborn will the consciences of eight millions of Prussian subjects. He is not able to [Pg 115] conceal his disappointment. With glory enough to satisfy the most ambitious he could not rest content, but must court defeat. All his hopes have fallen to the ground. The Old Catholics who were to have been his most powerful allies have sunk into the oblivion of contempt; the priests whom he expected to throw off the authority of their bishops have not been found; the uprising of the laity against their pastors has not taken place; the bishop who was to have put himself at the head of a German Catholic Church has not appeared; the Falck laws have not served the purpose for which they were enacted, nor have the numerous supplementary bills met with better success. He has indeed made his victims personally most uncomfortable; bishops and priests he has cast into dungeons, monks and nuns he has driven forth from their homes and their country to beg the bread of exile; laymen he has sent to jail for speaking and writing the truth; but with all this he has not advanced one step towards the end he aims at. He has not made a breach in the serried Catholic phalanx. His legislation has nearly doubled the number of Catholic representatives in the parliament; it has given new life and wider influence to the Catholic press; it has welded the union of bishops, priests, and people, and bound all closer to the Pope. From their dungeons the bishops and priests come forth and are received in triumph like conquering heroes; imprisonments and fines of Catholic editors serve only to increase the circulation of their journals. In the meantime the radicals and revolutionists are gaining strength, crime is becoming more common, and the laws aimed at the church are beginning to tell upon the feebler organizations of Protestantism. Since the law on civil marriage has been passed comparatively few contract matrimony in the presence of the Protestant ministers; great numbers refuse to have their children baptized or to have the preachers assist at the burial of the dead. The government has become alarmed, and quite recently circulars have been sent to the officials charged with carrying out the law on civil marriage, in which they are instructed to inform the contracting parties that the law does not abrogate the hitherto existing regulation concerning ecclesiastical marriage, and that they are still bound to present themselves before the clergyman and to have their children baptized as formerly. The service of the police, we need scarcely say, is not required to induce the Catholics to seek the blessing of the church upon their marriage contracts or to have their children baptized.

The result of all this is that many wise and large-minded men, like Von Hoffmann, Von Gerlach, and Von Kirchmann, have lost all sympathy with the policy of Bismarck towards the Catholic Church, as well as confidence in its success. They now thoroughly understand that, were it possible to destroy the church, this would be an irreparable misfortune for the fatherland. The state needs the church more than the church the state. She can live with Hottentots and Esquimaux, but without her neither liberty nor culture can be permanent. It must also be humiliating to Prince Bismarck to see with what little success those who have sought to ape him have met. Mr. Gladstone, from faith in the chancellor, thought to bolster up a falling party by “expostulating” with the Pope, and he has succeeded only in finding himself [Pg 116] in the company of Newdegate and Whalley. President Grant has been made to believe that the Pope is such a monstrous man that by means of him even a third term might become possible; and he will retire to the obscurity of private life with the stigma of having sought to stir up religious strife for the furtherance of his own private interest.

[37] April, 1874, p. 195.

[38] Romans xiii. 1, 2.]

[39] The British Quarterly, January, 1875, p. 17.

[40] Luke x. 16.

[41] Matthew xviii.. 17, 18.

[42] Acts iv. 20.

[43] Acts xv. 28.

[44] The London Quarterly Review, January, 1875, p. 160.

[45] Der Culturkampf, § 28, 29.

[46] Culturkampf, pp. 33, 34.

[47] Culturkampf pp. 44-47.

NOTRE DAME DE PITIE.

“Was ever sorrow like, unto my sorrow?”

There is in the Imperial Library at Paris an old copy of the gospels written on parchment, evidently of the fourteenth or fifteenth century, with the arms of Colbert on the cover. It once belonged to the church of Albi. At the end of the gospels is the Planctus, or Complainte de Notre Dame in the langue d’Oc—the old language of Southern France—full of naïve piety and charming simplicity. No one could hear unmoved the touching tone of reproach and grief it breathes throughout. It is in thirty-two stanzas, the lines of which, monotonous and melancholy, are like the repeated tollings of a funeral bell. The last words of each verse are an expression of exhausted grief—the dying away of a voice drowned in tears.…

It is entitled: “Here begins the Plaint in honor of the Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ and the sorrow of his most holy Mother.”

“Planh sobre planh! dolor sobre dolor!

Cel e terra an perdut lor senhor,

E yeu mon filh, el solelh sa clardor;

Jusieus lan mort an grande desonor.

Ay filh, tan mortal dolor!”[48]

The cry of Ay filh!—“Alas! my Son”—at the end of every verse is like a sob that breaks the plaint. This long wail of maternal grief, which no translation fully renders, was doubtless sung round many an effigy of the dead Christ in the dim old churches of Languedoc centuries ago, just as the people of the Pyrenees at this day gather around their dead to weep and improvise a dirge of sorrow. We were particularly touched at coming across this ancient document; for it seemed to echo the devotion to the Mother of Sorrows which we had found written all over southwestern France. Everywhere in this Terra Mariæ are churches and oratories in honor of Notre Dame de Pitié, most of which are monuments of an age as sorrowful as the holy mystery they commemorate.

It is remarkable how popular devotion turned to the Mater Dolorosa in the sixteenth century, when Christ seemed bleeding anew in this land of altars ruined and priests slaughtered by the Huguenots. Numberless are the legends of the apparitions of Our Lady of Sorrows in those sad days, which led to the erection of a great number of churches wherein she is represented holding her divine Son taken down from the cross—one of the [Pg 117] most affecting appeals that can be made to the human heart. For the long, sad procession of mourners who go weeping and groaning through this valley of tears—gementes et flentes in hac lacrymarum valle—constitutes the greater part of the human race. The widow, the orphan, the friendless, the infirm, the needy, and the laborer with little or no joy in life, when they turn towards Mary, love to find her at the foot of the cross in mute sorrow over the inanimate form of her Son, or with the wheel of swords in her bleeding heart, or some other attribute of human infirmity. Hence the names given to these mountain chapels by the sorrowful as a mark of their trust in this sweet type of grief: Notre Dame des Larmes, Notre Dame des Souffrances, de la Consolation, de l’Espérance—names which have balm in their very sound. Above all is the title which seems to include all other sorrows—Notre Dame de Pitié—the most common among the perils of the mountain streams and on the broad moors of the Landes. There are innumerable Pietàs, or Pitiés, all through this region—on the sands of the seashore below Bayonne, where the sailors go to pray before embarking on the perfidious waves of the Bay of Biscay; in dangerous mountain passes, as in the oratory of Pène-Taillade beyond Arreau; among country groves, as in the lone sanctuary near Lannemezan to which the husbandman resorts to be spared the ravages of hail among his vines and wheat-fields; in the valleys of Bigorre; on the Calvary of Betharam; on the heights near Pau; and at Goudosse, where the poor goîtreux of the mountains go to pray. Yes, the shadow of this great type of sorrow extends over all the land. There are several chapels of Notre Dame de Pitié in the ecclesiastical province of Auch that are particularly renowned. One of these is the beautiful chapel of Notre Dame de Garaison, in the Diocese of Tarbes, dear to every Catholic heart in the land, embosomed among the hills of the Hautes Pyrénées like a lily in the green valley, whose Madonna was solemnly crowned in 1865, by the authorization of Pope Pius IX., in the presence of forty thousand people. At the very entrance is a Pietà, melting the heart with the sight of the pale, inanimate Christ and Mary’s incomparable woe.

“Ay filh, tan mortal dolor!”

Within are dim Gothic arches, large gilt statues of the twelve apostles, and the holy image of the Mère des Douleurs, before which we went to pray amid devout pilgrims. At one side is the fountain of healing waters; behind is a garden of roses; and on the other side are cloisters shaded with acacias, in the centre of which is the white Madonna standing serene and holy in the peaceful solitude with outstretched arms, as if calling on all:

“Dites, dites une oraison

A la Vierge de Garaison

Vous qui en ces lieux amène la souffrance,

Bon pèlerins,

Accablés de chagrins,

Pour que vos cœurs s’ouvrent à l’espérance.

Dans ce séjour,

Dites avec amour,

Dites, dites une oraison,

A la Vierge de Garaison!”[49]

Near Gimont, in the department of Gers, is Notre Dame de Cahuzac, [Pg 118] in a pleasant valley on the left bank of a stream that bathes the walls of the church. Like all places of pilgrimage in this land of favored sanctuaries, it has its old legend, which is associated with a venerable elm, the relic of past ages. It was in the sixteenth century when a young shepherd, leading his flock at an early hour to a distant pasture, saw an elm in a garden by the wayside surrounded by an extraordinary light. The amazed youth fell on his knees—a spontaneous act in those days when the heart turned naturally to God at the moment of terror—stammered a prayer, and, unable to turn his eyes away, saw through the branches aflame, but not consumed, the wondrous form of Our Lady of Pity. As soon as he recovered his self-possession he ran to the Cistercian abbey at Gimont, and the monks, going to the tree, found the sacred, image of Mary, which they bore in procession to their church with songs of praise. The next day it was gone, and they found it again in the favored elm. Three times they bore it to their church: three times it returned to the tree. It was no use to contend with divine Providence. The garden was then purchased and an oratory built on the spot—a graceful monument of rural piety, to which one generation after another has resorted for spiritual favors and physical aid. It has its silver lamps and vessels; its walls are hung with golden hearts, valuable medals, and other offerings from the grateful votary. There is great devotion among Catholics to the one leper who returned to give thanks.

Cahuzac became renowned throughout the kingdom and attracted pilgrims of the highest distinction—lords, bishops, and cardinals. The archbishops of Auch, who bore the high title of Primate of the two Navarres, when they took possession of their see, came to place themselves under the protection of Our Lady of Cahuzac. Popes granted indulgences to the chapel, which thousands of pilgrims came annually to win—not only peasants from the neighboring fields, but the nobles of the land in penitential garb, with bare feet bleeding from the roughness of the way.

This holy sanctuary was saved, as it were, by a miracle from the Huguenots who came to lay it waste three centuries ago, the leader being struck down, as by an invisible hand, at the very door, to the consternation of his followers. It was closed at the Revolution, but again spared; and when better days arrived, it was reopened to popular devotion. The Abbé de Cahuzac, a young nobleman who had renounced the honors of the world and received holy orders at Rome, became chaplain of the church that bore his name. He served it with zeal and affection for more than thirty years, and at his death bequeathed a part of his fortune for its support, leaving behind him a holy memory still dear to the people.

A confraternity of Notre Dame de Pitié was founded in this chapel by Dom Bidos, abbot of Gimont, under the patronage of Cardinal de Polignac, which became celebrated in the province and included all ranks of society. Men of illustrious birth, beside the man of humblest condition, bore the lighted torch before the revered image of Cahuzac in the public processions.

The arches and walls of the church were, under Henry IV., covered with rich paintings, which [Pg 119] in time became half effaced. The church has been recently restored, and attracts great numbers of pilgrims from the neighboring departments. It consists of a nave and five chapels. Over the main altar is the revered statue, full of sweet, sad grace, at the feet of which so many have sought consolation. On one of the capitals in the nave is sculptured an episode from the old Roman du Renard, in which the fox takes the guise of a preacher to a barnyard auditory, who do not perceive the store of provisions already accumulated in the hood thrown back on his shoulders. This species of satire was one of the liberties of former times of which artists largely availed themselves.

Another chapel of Notre Dame de Pitié is at Sainte-Gemme, built against the walls of an old feudal castle—a cave-like oratory of the thirteenth century, beneath a square tower, simple, antique, severe. Its gilt statue of the Mother of Sorrows and a few old frescos of the Passion are the sole ornaments, unless we except the arms of the old lords of Sainte-Gemme, carved among the arches. When the castle was besieged by the Protestants in the sixteenth century, the châtelaine and her attendants betook themselves to the foot of the altar, where they prayed with fervor while the lord of the place defended it against the attacks of the enemy. A superhuman power seemed to aid him. After a few days the siege was raised, and he came, with his handful of brave followers, to ascribe the deliverance to Our Lady of Pity. The chapel became celebrated, and so great at times was the affluence of the pilgrims that services were held in the court of the castle before an altar set up beneath a venerable elm. Every Friday, in the good old times, the chaplain piously read the Passion according to St. John in this chapel, and then sang on his knees the Stabat Mater with the verse,

“Quando corpus morietur,

Fac ut animæ donetur

Paradisi gloria,”

to obtain a happy end for the dying.

In the middle of the sixteenth century Dominique de Cuilhens was appointed chaplain of Sainte-Gemme. He was born in the vicinity—in the old manor-house of Cuilhens, which falling into his possession in the year 1569, he at once drew up a will in which he founded the little hospital of St. Blaise for the poor, and bequeathed to the needy of the parish the annual sum of forty-five livres, which the magistrates of the place, who were the executors, continued to pay till 1789.

In 1648 the lord of Sainte-Gemme, about to join the royal army in Catalonia, made a will, in which, in order to encourage morality in the town, greatly weakened by the troubles of the times, he gave the interest of a thousand livres, to be distributed annually by the rector and consuls of the place to girls of irreproachable morals about to marry—a legacy regularly paid till 1792.

The widow of his brother, Marie d’Antras, in her will ordered her body to be buried in the sanctuary where the lords of Sainte-Gemme had been buried since the ninth century, and left extensive domains for the foundation and support of a chapel adjoining, to be served by three chaplains, who were to say two requiem Masses a week for her soul, a De Profundis at the end of every Mass, and perform a funeral service on the anniversary of her death. Moreover, the parishioners [Pg 120] were to be summoned by the ringing of the bell every Saturday at a late hour to join in the Litany of the Blessed Virgin, which the three chaplains were to say aloud, adding a De Profundis in her memory. Out of these domains were to be paid various legacies to relatives and domestics. They were seized by the revolutionary government and never restored to the church. The parish made an effort to save the legacy of the old lord to poor girls of good morals, but in vain. The chapel of Our Lady of Pity was also closed, and the government has never allowed it to be reopened for public worship, except during Passion Week, when Mass is still offered at the ancient altar and many come here to pray and receive the Holy Eucharist.

There is another chapel of Pitié near Puycasquier, the ancient Podium Asterii—the height of Astier—an old town of the middle ages. This is a votive chapel called Notre Dame de Gaillan, built to commemorate the cessation of a pestilence that once raged in the neighborhood, where on Whitmonday a dozen parishes around still come in procession to hear Mass, deposit their offering, and place under the protection of Mary their hopes for the coming harvests. It stands a short distance from the town, hidden in a deep, narrow valley between two streams, in the centre of a churchyard where lie whole generations of the dead. It is a long, narrow chapel with arches of the fourteenth century, not beautiful in style or ornament, but dear to a grateful people, who come here in procession on the twenty-seventh of April to fulfil the vow of their fathers when delivered from the plague. One would think the benefit only of yesterday, from the enthusiasm manifested when this day comes. The bells ring out joyfully from the very dawn. All the men, women, and children in the vicinity gather together, and, under the guidance of their curé, proceed to Notre Dame de Gaillan, the glory of Puycasquier, chanting the litany as they go. As soon as they reach the edge of the hill, where they can look down on their beloved sanctuary, they all fall on their knees and chant three times the invocation: Sancta Maria, Mater Pietatis, ora pro nobis! The Libera is sung as they pass through the graves in the churchyard, and the priest intones the Oremus when he comes to the door, and gives the absolution. Then they enter the church with the joyful Regina cœli, lætare, as if calling on the Virgin of Sorrows to rejoice over the resurrection of her Son at a season when all nature rises to newness of life. There is now a solemn pause of silent prayer. At eight o’clock precisely the priest reverently takes down the miraculous Virgin from its niche, and places it on a kind of trestle amid a profusion of flowers beneath a rich canopy. The litany is begun, and four notables of the town carry the statue to the churchyard gate, where it is received by four ploughmen whose privilege alone it is to carry the Virgin on these important occasions. Followed by the people in procession, accompanied by the local authorities in official array, and frequently escorted by the national guard under arms, they climb the heights of Puycasquier, winding around the hill till they arrive at the opposite side of the town, which they enter and proceed to the church, singing the martyrs’ hymn in honor of SS. Abdon and Sennen, the patrons of the parish—two noble Persians, [Pg 121] martyred in the early ages, who are honored in four country churches at about equal distances from Auch, devotion to whom became popular in France after their bodies were brought to Soissons in the time of Louis le Débonnaire. The Virgin of Gaillan is thus borne all around the parish, and then reinstated in her niche with acclamations.

Among other usages peculiar to Puycasquier which have come down from ancient times are two that are somewhat curious. On Easter Eve, at one o’clock in the afternoon, the mayor and sub-mayor, in all the majesty of their village consequence set off by their official regalia, proceed in solemn state to the presbytery, accompanied by all the town officers, the bells ringing, as is due, at a haute volée. The curé, thus notified, stands ready to receive them in the wide-open door. He invites them to enter, and hastens to present wine as a proof of his hospitality, which is drunk to the peace and happiness of the people under their rule. The two magistrates now pray the curé to accompany them to the church to sing the Regina cœli, and, placing themselves at his side, they escort him through the crowd, which by this time has assembled, to the holy place, where, in surplice and stole and pluvial, he intones the Easter hymn, which is caught up by the whole congregation. The curé then places himself once more between the powers that be and proceeds to the chapel of Gaillan, followed by a crowd of all ages and conditions in holiday attire, full of animation and joy, but not immoderate in their gayety. The Libera and Regina cœli are here chanted as on the twenty-seventh of April, after which they return to the parish church to sing the latter a third time at the Virgin’s altar. The day of the Resurrection thus duly announced, the curé is conducted by the mayor to the residence of the latter, where the table is loaded with cakes of all kinds, especially the tourteau[50] and paëte,[51] by no means unacceptable to appetites sharpened by so long a walk in the fresh mountain air. There is then an exchange of Gascon wit still more savory, with which the festival ends.

Another custom no less ancient and peculiar is connected with the Mass at Gaillan on St. Agatha’s day, which at least one member out of every family in the parish attends, to implore a blessing on the fruits of the earth. Before beginning the Holy Sacrifice, the curé solemnly blesses the loaves brought by his parishioners, and after the Mass is over they cut them in pieces, and, going to their fields, bury them here and there in the ground, setting up a little cross, often a mere thornbush twisted into proper shape.

Picasqué, petito bilo, gran clouqué—Puycasquier, small town, great belfry—is a proverbial expression associated with the town on account of the fine old tower, visible all over the neighboring country. It was fortunately spared when the place was ruined by the Huguenots three centuries ago. Around its base are held great fairs several times a year, the resort of all the people in the vicinity.

The baptistery of the parish church has a curious font of lead which is very ancient—probably more than a thousand years old, from the style. It is cylindrical in form and covered with bas-reliefs like the lead font at Strassburg. There is a swan—emblem of the purity of the soul after baptism. [Pg 122] An archer stands ready to attack it as soon as it issues from the regenerating waters, but the arrow he lets fly so vigorously is received by a lion passant in his shoulder, which marches resolutely on, undisturbed by the evil adversary. It is the Lion of the tribe of Judah, who saves the soul by his power and bleeding wounds.

The votive chapel of Notre Dame de la Croix, at Marciac, is another pious monument of Mary’s protection during a great pestilence. Over the doorway is the following inscription:

Marciacam cum dira lues subverteret urbem,

Ipsamet hanc jussit mater sibi Virgo dicari

Sub crucis auspiciis gnatique insignibus ædem.[52]

It is a pretty church, with an altar of jasper and tabernacle of white marble, over which is the Mother of Sorrows holding the body of the crucified Saviour. It was built at the repeated instances of a poor woman, who was at first treated as visionary or mad, because she asserted a divine mission for the cessation of the pestilence, which had carried off eight hundred and four persons in a short time. Her persevering piety was at length rewarded by the foundation of the chapel and the deliverance of her townsmen from the plague, which is to this day commemorated. Pope Innocent XI. encouraged the devotion to Notre Dame de la Croix by granting many privileges to those who went there to pray and perform some good work.

There is a chapel of Notre Dame de Pitié at Condom called the Piétat, now belonging to the Filles de Marie, but formerly to the Brothers of St. John of God, who served the sick. Near it is a miraculous spring called the Houn dou Teou, where pilgrims go to ask deliverance from their infirmities.

Near the historic Château de Lavardens is the chapel of Notre Dame de Consolation in the woods, quiet and solitary, surrounded by graves. The pensive and the sorrowful love to come here to pray undisturbed before the simple altar of Mary, Consoler of the Afflicted. It is one of the stations for the processions in Rogation Week. It is the very place to implore peace for the soul—and to find it!

There is another Notre Dame de Pitié at Aubiet, an obscure village on the right bank of the Arrats, about twelve miles from Auch. The houses are poorly built, the streets narrow and irregular, with nothing remarkable but the fine tower of the ancient church. It never was a place of much importance, except in a religious point of view, and has never recovered from its almost entire destruction by the Huguenots in the sixteenth century. In fact, it is only noteworthy for its religious associations and picturesque situation on a hill overlooking the fertile valley of the Arrats, which comes from Mauvezin on the one side, and goes winding through a delicious country, girt with vine-clad hills, towards Castelnau-Barbarens on the other. Though small, the town is ancient, and figures under the name of Albinetum in the old legend of St. Taurin, who was martyred some time in the fourth century in the Bois de la Verdale at the west of the town—a spot now marked by a cross and an old mutilated bust of the saint. A graveyard is near, where the villagers come to repose around the place watered by the blood of the holy bishop who converted [Pg 123] their forefathers ages ago. How venerable the religious traditions of a country which extend back to the first ages of Christianity, and how good to pray at the tombs of those who lived so near the apostolic times!

Small as Aubiet has always been, it formerly had five churches—a proof of the religious spirit that animated the people; but most of them were destroyed by the Huguenots in the sixteenth century. Among these was the parish church, in which was a chapel of the Five Wounds, built and endowed by the father of Père de Mongaillard, the Jesuit annalist of Gascony; and the church of St. Nicolas, where was established a confraternity of Blue Penitents under the patronage of Monsieur St. Jerome. Nor was the hospital connected with this church spared, though the holy asylum of human miseries, where there were numerous beds for the poor.

SS. Abdon and Sennen are venerated as the special patrons of the place. Père de Mongaillard, who lived in the seventeenth century, tells us that, in his day, the people called upon all the musicians of the country around to contribute to the pomp of the festival of these saints, on which solemn Mass and Vespers were sung and a procession made through the town. The day always ended with a great repast and public rejoicings. These customs have been perpetuated, more or less, to this day.

The most remarkable church at Aubiet is that of Notre Dame de Pitié, which dates from the year 1499. It was providentially spared by the Huguenots and became the parish church. The people, mourning over so many ruined sanctuaries, gathered with fresh devotion around the altar of Our Lady of Pity, with whom they were brought into closer companionship. This altar is still in great repute. The church has recently been repaired, and in one of its windows is depicted St. Taurin in pontifical robes with the martyr’s palm in his hand.

Father Mongaillard relates some curious customs connected with this church. One of the altars was dedicated to St. Eutrope, where a portion of his relics was enshrined and regarded with great veneration. The people brought wine for the priest to plunge a relic of the saint therein, and then carried it to the sick, especially to those suffering from dropsy or violent colic, who often found relief—a custom also common at Marciac, where there is a chapel to Sent Estropi, crowded with people on the last of April. This devotion is now discontinued. St. Eutrope of Saintes was one of the early apostles of the country. Notker, a monk of St. Gall, says he was consecrated bishop and sent into Gaul by St. Clement, the successor of the apostles.

Another singular custom at Aubiet was that of the boys of the place, who always assembled around the high altar to hear Mass, and the instant the priest elevated the Host cried repeatedly, in a loud voice: “Segnour Diou, misericordie!”—Mercy, O Lord God!—so that their exclamations, as discordant as they were singular, could be heard by the passers-by, and produced a profound impression on their minds.

The same father relates another practice in this church. When a child was brought for baptism, the priest poured the regenerating waters on its head three times, and the largest bell was rung to announce the event to the whole parish and admonish the people to pray for the new lamb of Christ’s [Pg 124] flock. If a boy, the bell was struck nine times, very nearly as for the Angelus; if a girl, six times were thought sufficient. And when it sounded, every one within hearing cried heartily: “God bless thee!”

Aubiet formerly had many clergy, and religious services were conducted with a splendor scarcely to be found now in the largest cathedrals. This was principally owing to a celebrated confraternity of the Blessed Sacrament, which was organized in 1526 by Cardinal Clermont-Lodève, archbishop of Auch, at the request of eighteen priests of the town, who, with uncovered heads and robed in their surplices, presented themselves for the purpose before that prelate when he came to make his pastoral visit. The act of foundation still exists. Every Thursday a solemn Mass was to be sung with deacon and sub-deacon in honor of Corpus Domini, and on the first Thursday of every month the Blessed Sacrament was to be carried in procession around the church of Notre Dame de Pitié.

This institution became very popular, for it was an outburst of faith, love, and reparation; and numerous legacies and foundations were made all through that century for its support by people of every condition. One of the priests, foremost in founding the confraternity, was the first to show his pious liberality. This was Jehan Jourdan, the elder, a venerable old man, who, in 1626, appeared before the assembled clergy of the place and begged them to accept, out of his devotion to the Holy Eucharist, the sum of two hundred and twenty crowns, that Mass might be offered in perpetuity at the altar of Our Lady of Pity for the welfare of the donor and his relatives during their lives and the repose of their souls after death.

This same Jehan, the elder, in his last will and testament, likewise founded seven votive Masses on every Friday in the year—one in honor of God the Father; another of the Holy Ghost; the third, of the Holy Trinity; the fourth, of Notre Dame de Pitié; the fifth, of St. Joseph; the sixth, for the dead; the seventh, in honor of the Holy Name of Jesus. The latter was to be sung with deacon and sub-deacon. All the chaplains were to assist devoutly at its celebration, and if any one failed to attend he was obliged to pay a fine of olive-oil for the lamps. No one was to be appointed chaplain unless a native of the place and doctus in musicâ, et non aliter.

Another remarkable foundation is still to be seen in an old Latin will of a notary at Aubiet. He requests to be buried before St. Peter’s altar in the church of Our Lady of Charity (as it was sometimes called). Among his curious legacies are nine sous for nine requiem Masses for his soul, showing what was the customary fee in those days. He also founds a solemn Mass of requiem at St. Peter’s altar every Wednesday, for himself and all his relatives who have died in a state of grace, for which purpose he bequeaths various lands.

Pierre Lacroix, in a will of the sixteenth century also, leaves a certain sum for his funeral expenses. Six torches are to burn around his bier, and eighty priests were invited to aid in the service. They are to have bodily refreshments: habeant refectionem corporalem. On the ninth day after his death all the priests of Aubiet are to assemble to pray for his soul. They are to receive duas duplas—two doubles—but [Pg 125] no refreshments. At the end of the month the eighty priests are again to be invited, who are to sing Mass for his soul; six torches, of half a pound each, to burn meanwhile. They are to be provided with bodily refreshments. At the end of the year the eighty are again to be summoned, and this time they are to have eight liards each pro labore et pœna, but nothing to refresh the body.

The lord of Beaupuy, who during his life always had three Masses a week celebrated, leaves at his death a legacy of seven and a half sacks of wheat a year from his lands at St. Mézard, with one-third of the produce of the vineyards, to be delivered to two priests, each of whom is to say one Mass a week for his soul.

Jehan Cavaré, a man of considerable distinction at Aubiet, makes several rich bequests and foundations to the different chapels of the place. At his funeral two wax torches of half a pound each are to burn. To the attendant priests qui cantabunt he gives three doubles and no bodily refection. If they do not sing, nothing is to be given them.

One hundred poor are to be fed on Good Friday with a loaf, wine, and one sardine each. The same obligation is imposed at All Saints, but this time there is no mention of the sardine.

Thirty crowns are to be given to two girls of irreproachable morals at Aubiet on the day of their marriage; and a woollen gown, all made, is to be given to twelve widows or poor single women of Mauvezin.

“Moved,” as he says, “by the grace of God and love for the church of Notre Dame de la Charité,” he also founds seven Masses a week in perpetuity in the chapel of the Blessed Sebastian, martyr. He also founds seven other daily Masses—one of them on Saturday, de lacrymâ Christi, in honor of the Holy Tears of Christ. For all these services he leaves numerous lands and revenues.

These and many other foundations, extraordinary for a small country village, express the reaction against the innovations of the age, and are remarkable proofs of the deep faith and piety of the people. And they are only examples of similar cases throughout the country, the records of which it does the heart good to ponder over. How pious are the formulas with which such bequests are made: In remissionem peccatorum suorum—Pro remedio animæ suæ et animarum parentum suorum, et aliorum pro quibus deprecare tenetur, etc. Everywhere they express devotion to the Blessed Virgin, and to some saint in particular, as well as to all the inhabitants of the heavenly country in general. This was in accordance with the traditions of the country, where the heart naturally turns to Jesus in the arms of Our Lady of Pity at the awful moment of death. St. Bertrand of Comminges, when his end drew near, had himself transported to the chapel of the Virgin and breathed out his soul at the foot of her altar. Bernard de Sariac, a distinguished bishop of Aire, founded on his death-bed a chapel in honor of Notre Dame de Pitié. The old lords of the country show, by the solemnity of their last bequests, their faith in Mary’s powerful assistance at the supreme hour of death. William, Count of Astarac, in his legacy to Notre Dame de Simorre in 940, says: “Inspired by God and the hope of Paradise, and in order to increase my reward [Pg 126] in the day of judgment, I give the most holy Virgin the following lands in Astarac.” Raymond de Lavedan, in 1253, left this clause in his will: “I give my land to St. Mary with all it bears towards heaven and contains in its depths.” There are a thousand similar examples of illustrious barons of the olden times whose tombstones in the Virgin’s chapel in many instances remain an enduring testimony of their devotion to Mary, though the building itself is demolished.

The confraternity of the Blessed Sacrament at Aubiet only admitted thirteen of the most notable persons of the town. Among other obligations, they had to accompany the Holy Eucharist when carried to any of the members who were ill, bare-headed, wearing surplices, and bearing lighted torches in their hands; to assemble in like robes on the first Thursday of every month; to follow the divine Host in procession; and every Thursday to attend a Mass of the Corpus Domini under the penalty of a fine. One peculiarity of this Mass was the Kyrie Eleison, which they sang with a thousand modulations:

Kyrie, Pater æterne, fontana Deitas, ex quo manant flumina rerum, ELEISON![53]

Kyrie, fons co-æternæ lucis et claritas, lucem formans primo dierum, ELEISON![54]

Kyrie, fons superne, redundant bonitas, panem mittens de cœlo verum, ELEISON![55]

Christe, lucis fons, lux de luce prodiens; Dei pinguis mons, quo pascente vivit esuriens et impletur pane vivente, ELEISON![56]

Christe, cordium via, vita, veritas; cibus mentium, in quo sistit summa suavitas et satietas consistit, ELEISON!

Christe, sumptio tui sacri corporis est refectio vires præbens immensi roboris, et molesta salutis demens, ELEISON!

Kyrie, decus amborum, Patris Natique, et duorum non duplex Spiritus; quo spirante lux datur morum, ELEISON![57]

Kyrie, qui veritatis lumen es diffusum gratis, dictus Paraclitus, dans solamen his desolaris, ELEISON!

Kyrie, sana palatum, quo gustamus panem gratum et missum cœlitus, in Marid per te formatum, ELEISON![58]

This is an example of the tropus or farcius, so common in the middle ages, which is a paraphrase or extension of the liturgy by inserting additional words between the important parts—as at the Gloria in Excelsis, the Sanctus, the Agnus Dei, etc.—the word farsus, farcius, or farcitus, as it was differently written by the monks of the middle ages, being derived from the Latin farcire, used by Pliny the naturalist, Apicius, and Cato the agriculturist, in the sense of filling, distending, enriching. Pope Adrian II. is said to have instituted these farci to be sung in monasteries on solemn festivals. They were the festivæ laudes of the Romans. Others attribute them to the Greek church. These farci were of three kinds in France: the usual liturgy being expanded by inserting additional words in Latin; or the text was Greek and the paraphrase in old French; or, again, the latter was in the vulgar tongue of [Pg 127] Oil and Oc. These paraphrases in the vulgar tongue became popular, not only in France, but in England and Germany. From them was derived the proverbial expression, Se farcir de Grec et de Latin—that is, to have the head full. These tropes or farcies of mixed French and Latin are still very common in southwestern France, especially in the popular Noëls, which are often rude lines in patois alternate with Latin, after the following style:

Born in a manger

Ex Mariâ Virgine,

On the chilly straw

Absque tegumine.

It is not surprising that, with daily High Masses and a perpetual round of imposing services, the people of Aubiet should feel the change when the place became impoverished, the number of priests diminished, and most of the churches destroyed at the invasion of the Huguenots. We are told that when the vicar was unable to sing High Mass on the festival of St. John the Baptist in 1623, there was universal murmuring, and the magistrates drew up a solemn protest against so unheard-of a scandal, which document is still extant.[59]

But the church of Notre Dame de Pitié, although profaned, was left standing. The admirable confraternity of the Blessed Sacrament soon revived, and with it many of the former solemnities. Père de Mongaillard tells us the Kyrie eleison farci was still chanted in his time.

We find a similar confraternity of the Blessed Sacrament at Touget, another village of Gascony, which suffered horribly from the religious wars. It was for a long time in possession of the Huguenots, who abolished the Catholic religion and ruined the churches. To repair these profanations the association was established, the statutes of which are still extant in the Gascon tongue. By these we learn that there were nine chaplains in honor of the nine choirs of angels; twelve laymen in honor of the twelve apostles; seventy-two other lay members in memory of the seventy-two disciples (husband and wife being counted as one); and seven pious widows in honor of the seven Dolors of the Blessed Virgin. They were all to be natives of the place, but “no ruffian, renegade, public usurer, or vicious person admitted among them.” Every Thursday all the members were to attend High Mass in the parish church, robed in their surplices. They were to accompany the Host in solemn procession through the village, at stated times, tapers in hand; sing the Office of the Dead before the door of any deceased member, and attend the requiem Mass for his soul. These and various other pious obligations were encouraged by the bishop of Lombez, who granted certain indulgences of vray perdon, especially on the festivals of St. Germain, St. George, St. Vincent, and St. Fritz, whose relics were honored in the church. [Pg 128] Such is the spirit of love, sorrow, and reparation which perfumes a few of the countless chapels of Our Lady of Pity in southwestern France, where so many hearts have forgotten their own grief before that of Mary! In all these sanctuaries, wan and desolate, she seems to plead for the nation. So pleads she all over the earth. Every mystery of religion is perpetuated in the church. Christ is always crucified somewhere on the earth. Mary is always sorrowing over his bleeding wounds.

We have seen her weeping over the door of many a tabernacle in Italy, as if over the Saviour wounded anew in the sacrament of his love. Who can turn away from the affecting appeal in this day of profanations in that unhappy land, where the very angels of the church veil their faces before the agony of the divine Sufferer—before Mary’s woes?… Around the altar sacred to her grief let us echo the ancient Planh referred to at the beginning of this article:

“I conceived thee without corruption; to-day my heart is broken with grief: thy Nativity was exempt from all suffering; now is the day of my travail—

“Alas! my Son, on account of thy torments!

“When thou wert born the shepherds came singing with joy, dancing to the sound of their pipes; now traitorous and cruel Jews come to seize thee with horns and cries, staves and swords.

“Alas! my Son, loving and beautiful.”

Ay filh! amaros e bel!

[48] “Woe on woe! grief on grief! Heaven and earth have lost their lord, and I my son; the sun its clearness; Jews have slain him, to their great dishonor. Alas! my son, what mortal grief!”

[49]

Say, say an orison

To the Virgin of the Garaison,

Ye who in this spot solace seek from pain,

Pilgrims so good,

’Neath sorrows bowed,

That your hearts may open up to hope again.

Here while you stay,

Say with love, say,

Oh! say an orison

To the Virgin of the Garaison.

[50] The tourteau is a round cake with a hole in the centre, made particularly for Palm Sunday.

[51] The paëte is a kind of biscuit for the Pascal season.

[52] When a dire pestilence came nigh destroying the city of Marciac, the Virgin Mother herself commanded this temple to be dedicated to her under the powerful protection of the cross and of her Son.

[53] O Lord, Father eternal, Fountain of the Deity, whence flow all things, have mercy!

[54] O Lord, Fount and clearness of co-eternal light, who didst make light on the first of days, have mercy!

[55] O Lord, Fount supernal, goodness overflowing, sending down true bread from heaven, have mercy!

[56] O Christ, Fountain of light, light from light proceeding; fruitful mount of God, on which feeding the hungry liveth and is filled with living bread, have mercy!

[57] O Christ, the way, the life, the truth of hearts; the food of minds, wherein abides the sweetest sweetness and fulness is contained, have mercy!

O Christ, the taking of thy sacred Body is a refreshment, giving mighty strength, and removing every obstacle to salvation—have mercy!

O Lord, the beauty of both, of the Father and the Son, and the spirit of each, yet not twofold, by whose breath the light of all right things is given, have mercy!

[58] O Lord, who art the light of truth, freely spread abroad, thou who art called the Paraclete, giving consolation to those who are desolate, have mercy!

O Lord, purify our taste, that so we may enjoy the gracious bread sent down from heaven, formed by thee in Mary’s womb—have mercy!

[59] “In the year 1623, and the 24th of June, in the town of Aubiet in Armagnac, in front of the parish church of said place, before noon, in the reign of the most Christian prince, Louis, by the grace of God King of France and Navarre, appeared before me the undersigned royal notary, and in presence of the witnesses whose names are hereunto affixed, Messrs. Jehan Gaillan, Jehan LaMothe, Jehan Gelotte, and Caillard Mailhos, consuls of said Aubiet, and Jehan Belloc, syndic, who, speaking and addressing his words to M. Jehan Castanet, priest and vicar of said church of Aubiet, represented to him, for want of a rector in said Aubiet, that from all time and all antiquity it had been the custom to celebrate in the parish church High Mass with deacon and sub-deacon on solemn days like the present; and whereas, because there was no one to aid him in performing the office, the divine service was omitted, the said consuls and syndic protest against the said Castanet, vicar aforesaid, etc.

“The said Castanet affirmed that he did everything in his power, but had no one to aid him.”

THE ETERNAL YEARS.

BY THE AUTHOR OF “THE DIVINE SEQUENCE.”

III.

THE CHARACTERISTICS OF GOD’S GOVERNMENT—ABUNDANCE.

We have adverted to the indirect government of the creation by God—to the government which he condescends to administer first through the primary laws which he has stamped upon the universe; and, secondly, through the moral and physical activity with which he has endowed mankind.

We are making vast and rapid strides in this day towards discovering and unravelling these primary laws. At the present moment we seem to have got ourselves somewhat into a tangle of knowledge, which threatens to asphyxiate us with the overpowering perfume of its lavish blossoms, like that of the exuberant growth of the tropical flora.

We are caught as in the meshes of a net, and are hardly allowed time to solve one problem and satisfy ourselves with a conclusion before some new tendril of the ever-growing parasite has flung another [Pg 129] flowering coil of verdure around us and arrested our steps once more. We have come upon the time long ago predicted by the Archangel Michael to the prophet Daniel: “Plurimi transibunt, et multiplex erit scientia.”[60] We are dazzled and bewildered; and some timid souls are like ostriches, which hide their heads in the sand, preferring not to see and know, and hoping that their ignorance and the ignorance of the multitude generally will serve as a dam to the coming flood, and leave us freed from a torrent of questions which, if once they are there, must be answered. It is to be regretted that these persons cannot learn to possess their souls in patience, and to watch calmly and intelligently the progress of this gigantic growth of science, assured that it will all arrange and classify itself in time, in perfect harmony with what they know to be true and enduring, and which they so dishonor by their apprehensions.

However, since this is too much to expect of many, there is nothing for it but to allow such people to keep themselves in peace in the way that suits them best; only not permitting them to discourage others from investigation and reverent inquiry. St. Thomas tells us that the end of all science is contained within the end of all theology and is subservient to it. Theology, therefore, ought to command all other sciences and turn to its use those things of which they treat. But we shall not arrive at this virile steadfastness until the real study of theology has become more general. There is very little in our modern education or habits of thought to teach that calm gaze into the depths of the divine mysteries which imparts such strength of mental vision that the soul ceases to be dazzled by the false light of falling stars. The robust vigor of the studious habits of old has ceased from among us, and the modern mind is attenuated and enfeebled by a vast variety of subjects indifferently explored, many of them received on trust and without inquiry, and all smoothed down to one dead-level of superficial thought and inadequate expression. Not that for a moment we would imply that mere habits of study are all that is needed. These habits may exist, and do exist to a great extent; but the silence and the solitude do not exist, and the studies themselves have long ago ceased to be of a nature to clear the mind for the gradual, patient, interiorly-evolved contemplation of the eternal truths which lie at the bottom of all things. The old scholastic philosophy and theology laid the only real foundation of all speculative knowledge, and built for us, for all future time, that solid fabric of theological truth in the received and authorized teaching of the great doctors of the church which, like a mighty magnet attracting to itself strong bars of iron, will draw within its own embrace all other truth and all other science, because “the end of science is within the end of theology.” Meanwhile, if we would not find ourselves swamped in the torrent of surmises, partial discoveries, inverted reasonings, and unreverential decisions, we must go back to the spirit and method of the ages which produced the deeply metaphysical thinkers and theological writers of old. The flood of events pours on, and the concussion of each tears through our daily life and ploughs up the hours and the days in hurried disorder, leaving no time for seed to [Pg 130] develop in the fallow soil, for the green blade to strengthen and the harvest to ripen. Modern inventions speed the latest intelligence into the innermost recesses of our homes, and we live like people in a house without doors or windows, open to every blast; while the age, whose needs seem most to call for contemplative recluses, on the contrary stamps contemplation out of the heart of man, and substitutes the paramount necessity for outward activity. There is no solace, there is no rest, but in prayer. There is no consolation but in cultivating thought in the hidden recesses of our minds, and, amid the racket of life, to go deep down into the silent caverns of our souls and dwell in an inner solitude with thoughts of eternal truth. The tendencies of the age have added a new difficulty to the treatment of many of the questions more or less inextricably mixed up with any largely philosophical views of the union of science with divine truth.

We have perverted our language because thought, of which language is the clothing, is perverted. We dare not handle questions that in themselves are pure, because we have allowed necessary words to represent unnecessary indelicacy. No word that expresses a necessary fact is in itself evil; but woe to the imagination which makes it so! Purity is always dignified. But if you take the white roses of innocence to crown a wanton, white roses will fall into disrepute; and this is what we have done with language. Words no longer only mean the thing they represent. They have been made to insinuate the foul underflow of evil fancy that corruption has poured forth. How shall we cleanse the source, that we may once more use language of strength and purity? How shall we again become manly and brave, and yet avoid the charge of being coarse and too outspoken? Only by going back to the noble candor of the great thinkers of old, and by trying to see things as they are in the mind of God, and not as they are in fallen man; by looking at the laws of creation as they came from the hands of the Creator, before man had written his running commentary of evil and sin, and thus defiled the glorious page. There are two forms of purity. The one is the purity of ignorance. The intellect that knows nothing of the species cannot predicate the accidents; and no doubt blank ignorance is better than an evil imagination. But there is another and a higher purity; it is the purity of an informed mind which, from the sublime heights of science, or, better far, from the depths of union with God in the all-pervading sense of his presence, has acquired that faculty of viewing subject-matter in the abstract which leaves no association of imagination or fancy to drag it down into the lower nature and so defile it. The more truly scientific a mind becomes, the more will it inhabit those cool, serene heights of passionless intellect. But the first, the truest, the absolutely sure science of theology is the one royal road to the habit of mind which can, as it were, stand outside its lower nature and contemplate facts and truths in their essential nature, divested of human contact or defilement; or, where both must be recognized, can eliminate the law from its abuse, and trace back the former to the bosom of the Creator; for “to the pure all things are pure.” This seems to be the faculty which is more and more dying out amongst us.

It is probable that some of the [Pg 131] hurry and absence of precision and of tenacious research which characterize the modern form of mind may be the natural result of the sudden rush of new discoveries which have taken us, as it were, by surprise and carried us off our feet. By degrees it is probable we shall, as a race, accept the changes in our condition, and shall become gradually adapted to the varied forms of life imposed upon us by the vast and multiplied combinations which every day are extending our power over the external world and opening new paths for activity and enterprise. Doubtless this power will increase rather than diminish, and at the same time take less hold upon us in a revolutionary way, and we shall lose some of that flurry and excitement which now characterize us—much in the way that the young colt of a week old starts no more than does the old mare when the engine rushes down the railway that skirts the field; and yet when railways first began both were alike alarmed.

But for the present we have lost much of our original moral and intellectual dignity. Upon such questions as interest us we are excited and flurried. Those which we do not affect to understand we cannot seriously listen to; and between the bustling activity of the first and the listless frivolity of the last it is not an easy task to bring forward old truths with new faces, old facts with a fresh moral, lest those who listen should persist in viewing the question from the wrong side, and in taking scandal where no scandal was meant.

We have set ourselves the task of investigating the chief attributes of God’s government of creation and its uniformity of design in complexity of action. To do this we must condescend to the primary and natural law which he imposed on our world when he called it out of chaos; and we must endeavor to explain what were the special characteristics of that law, and what light it throws upon the attributes of Him who gave it.

The three chief characteristics which we discover in the government of creation are abundance, patience or longanimity, and progression. The first command which the Creator uttered over the first recorded living and moving creatures of his hand was, “Increase and multiply.” This was the initial law of all that we see and know in the external world; and as no temporal law or material condition exists in God’s creation without its spiritual intention and inner meaning, this law is typical of what is beyond sight and belongs to the domain of faith. In attempting to define that command we find it conveys an impression, wider than the heavens and more diffused than the ambient air, of generosity, benevolence, and paternity. It is the law of “our Father who is heaven.” It beams upon us like the genial warmth of the noontide sun. It shadows us like the stretching boughs of a large forest perfumed with the dews of earth. It was spoken first to the products of the water and the denizens of the air; and again it was spoken over the two first beings created “after His own image and likeness.”

Wherever there is life, even life in its lowest form—and so low that science hesitates to pronounce upon it as being life, and stands uncertain how to designate evident growth without equally evident life, like the unintelligent but absolutely accurate formation of crystals—there too the law reigns of “increase and multiply.” [Pg 132] Attraction and affinity declare the law, and carry it on, while repulsion is but the inverse of the same; and though, for aught we know, and judging by induction, there is not one molecule added on our earth to the original chaotic matter, and all reproductions are composed of the same elements passing through varied forms and phases, nevertheless the same impulse governs all living things and everywhere represents the large, lavish benevolence of the God of life.

The animal creation is the unreasoning and innocent embodiment of the natural law, and carries out its mandates unconscious of the why and the wherefore; whereas in fallen man the natural law has overlapped the moral law, and the latter has become warped by the pressure of the former, making all things discordant. As abundance is one of the characteristics of the natural law, so the modes and forms of its execution lie at the very root of all creation. The Spirit of God, the brooding Dove, moved over the face of the waters. The same image of incubation and consequently of imparted heat (motion and heat being allied as reciprocal cause and effect), was in the mind of the old Egyptians when they carved a winged world amongst their mystic signs. So sacred, so holy, so full of deep-hidden meaning was the idea as it lay from all eternity in the divine Mind, that it was through the four thousand historic years which preceded the birth of the God-Man the mode through which God taught the chosen people to expect the Redeemer. It became the hope of every maiden to form one link in the long chain which was to lead up to the Messiah. It sanctified all the ties of domestic life and made them less a necessity than a high moral duty.

So universal was the sentiment that many, in the tenacity of their desire to carry on the holy tradition, and too earthly to perceive the sin of doing wrong that good might come, thrust aside the law of conscience rather than fail in what weighed upon them as an overwhelming necessity—to continue the natural line—that perhaps they, too, might form one of those from whose loins should spring the Saviour of the world. It was thus that a dignity was imparted to natural ties which surpassed among the Israelites the same sentiment among the Gentiles, but which was but a foreshadowing of their sacred and sacramental state in the church of God.

“Wisdom is justified by her children”; and all that God has ordained must reach its ultimate perfection in his church before it can pass into another phase. “Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall not pass of the law, till all be fulfilled.”[61]

As all things in creation are by and for him, as all culminate in him, so when the prophecies were accomplished, and Mary, the immaculate and virgin daughter of the House of David, had, through the operations of the Holy Ghost, become the Mother of God—the law “increase and multiply” having thus ascended to its mystical fulfilment and ultimate development—so from henceforth did it confer a new and more holy character on natural ties by consecrating them as the type and image, of what is spiritual.

The one end in view had survived through all, despite man’s ignorance, infirmity, and sin; and [Pg 133] that end once attained, the sinless Mother clasping to her bosom the Infant God who was from all eternity in the bosom of the Father, from that moment all that was human had a new and divine element in it. All creation, all life, all we have and are, became in a special way “holy to the Lord.” “Know ye not that ye are the temple of God? If any man violate the temple of God, him will God destroy. All things are yours, the world, or life, or death, or things present, or things to come: all are yours: and ye are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s.”[62]

Through long centuries man had failed to comprehend even while he felt the underlying mystery of creation. He looked on the fair fields of nature with undiscerning eyes. He hardly guessed at the enigma of the outer world as leading upwards to something nobler; and therefore he dragged the image of God down into the mire of his own existence. He even sought the Deity in what was below himself, worshipping, not men and heroes, but beasts and creeping things; because, being dominated by the idea of the great and all-pervading force of the laws of life and nature, the lower creation presented a more simple and abstract image of their potency. The idea of the principle of life haunted him like a dark and perplexing riddle. Its magnitude weighed upon him. Its universality perplexed him. He had not the light of truth in its plenitude to illumine the dark places of the earth. He could only make guesses at the typical meaning of creation; and as the whirr of life rushed ceaselessly around him without bringing any answer to his questionings, it became a relief to embody the idea which obseded him in the obscurity of inarticulate being, as affording, if not some solution, at least an absolutely simple and vulgar manifestation of the great fact, until the very scarabei became sacred; and with inverted moral sense, in lieu of seeking for transcendent and pellucid truth in what was above him, he dug down into the very miseries of his own degradation in his attempt to describe the incomprehensible, and that to a degree which we cannot pollute these pages by expressing.

Thus had man covered over with the veil of his iniquities and the thick darkness of his ignorance all the sanctities of life, until the church of God revealed to him that Christ is the head of the church, as the husband is the head of the wife, and placed matrimony among the sacraments; because as a sacrament only is it holy to the Lord, and because, as a sacrament, it is typical of that highest and most divine union of Christ with his church—that union which is her strength, her inviolability, her guarantee, and her ever-enduring and indisputable infallibility.[63]

How little did poor fallen humanity dream of the sanctity and dignity of common life until the church turned the full light of revelation on the laws of our being and taught us what those laws prefigured in the Eternal Mind! It is not until St. Paul wrote by inspiration that astonishing chapter to the Ephesians that the laws of being were really less awful in their hidden sanctity. They were never in themselves mean, miserable, and degraded. It is true the state of matrimony only foreshadowed a sacrament; for under the old law there were no sacraments in the specific sense in which we now use [Pg 134] the term in the Catholic Church. It was holy under the old law, and it may be said to have had a sacramental character; and that character was the anticipation of what it was to become when it should be raised into one of the seven sacraments of the church, and the type of Christ as head of the church. But at that time mankind was still in darkness. Humanity could not earlier review the expression of the mystery. Only the Gospel could open their eyes to the full understanding of the sacramental principle which alone makes life holy, and, O sorrowing, suffering hearts! which alone to you can make it endurable.[64]

See how the beneficent thought of God has touched all our common lot! See what flowers blossom amid the thorns, what gems of light sparkle in the dark ways of life, ennobling all, beautifying because sanctifying all, and enabling us, while the heavy burden of sorrow, disappointment, regrets, and even ruined hope, may seem to take all the color out of life, and to send us back to a treadmill existence and a gray, despairing twilight, to realize that nothing can alter the fact that we are holy to the Lord, and that in our daily, hourly lot, as husbands, wives, sons, daughters, masters, and servants, we are carrying on the ceaseless weaving of that web of sacred typical life which has from all eternity been in the mind of God as the law of our natural being, and in one form or another envelops, like the husks of the sweet nut, the gradually-ripening sanctity of those who, even in this life, are to touch on perfect union with their Creator.

Can any one seriously doubt that, if a greater and more hallowed veneration for the laws of our natural existence became more general and more intense, they would, in their typical and sacramental character, develop further heights of holiness—not as the exceptional ways of a few miraculous saints, but as the table-land of all humanity? As it was the hardness of heart in the Israelites which compelled Moses to give a law of divorce, so may it not be our hardness of heart, lessened indeed, but not yet melted, which leaves us so often such mere commonplace appreciation of natural ties, and thus fails to realize in them all that they possess and can yield?

Jesus is our father, our brother, our friend, our master, and our spouse. These titles are taken from our common life. But the abstract idea which these titles express by subdivision and restriction dwelt for ever in the mind of God as the form and fashion he would give to human life in his foreknowledge of the divine Incarnation, for which end solely do all things exist. What further thoughts can we need to make us tender over our own duties and our own condition? What a noble origin there is to all that we are apt to look upon as an encumbrance, a failure, a mere unfortunate accident! Our ties enchain us; then let us hug our chains, and find in wearing them “the freedom wherewith Christ has made us free.” All our life is a God-directed education of our souls; and the fashion of our human life is the mould which God has prepared for us each as individuals, save always where there is sin or its proximate occasion, or where a higher vocation—that sublime [Pg 135] infringement of the common law—comes to impel the soul to forsake all and follow the divine Spouse. Then all else melts before the furnace of divine love; the intermediate, ordinary steps which lead others to God through the sanctities of common life are cleared at one bound, and God puts in his claim to do what he will with his own.

To resume all in a few words: all we see around us, from the soil beneath our feet, through the vegetable and animal worlds, even to ourselves, is the working out of the first law of increase and multiply. Consequently, this being, as we have already said, the representative idea of the creation, its sacredness lies in that very fact, and dates not merely from the new dispensation nor from the old, but from the Eternal Mind before creation was. We have arrived at the facts which prove this representative idea by the aid of natural science, of which the old spiritual writers knew next to nothing, and who consequently, looking at nature through the black mists of man’s defilement, sometimes took distorted views of laws and facts the exquisite harmony of which come out in the deductions of modern research, and so establish the claim we are now making to the absolute beauty and sanctity of all the fashion of human existence as leading up by typical forms to spiritual truths. The witness of this like a golden thread in the dim web of patriarchal times may be found in the fact that it was the eldest son who officiated as the priest of the family, thus blending the natural and spiritual by making the former the basis of the latter. This was the reason of the envy and malice of Joseph’s brethren. He was not the first-born; and yet it was for him that his father made the sacerdotal coat of many colors. Therefore did they dip the coat in the blood of a kid, as in mockery of his sacerdotal character, given him by his father, but not acknowledged by his brethren.

Little did they dream that while, in the full exercise of their own free-will, they gave license to their thoughts of hatred, they were enacting as in a type the one great fact of the universe, the world’s one important history, the tragedy of all creation, when he who, though in his human nature he is the younger born of God’s children, holds, and for ever shall hold, sacerdotal rank over the elder and fallen Adam.

They who said, “See whether it be thy son’s coat or not,”[65] were the forefathers of those who exclaimed, “Let Christ the king of Israel come down now from the cross, that we may see and believe.”[66] They mocked at the father who claimed to have made his younger son the priest of his house, and their descendants declared of the great Priest of our race that “he ought to die because he made himself the Son of God.” In both cases their pretensions were turned into ridicule and treated as a crime. They dipped the sacerdotal coat of Joseph in the blood of a kid; but the great High-Priest they covered with his own blood, in derision of his claim to be their King and their God. And through it all, through the good and the evil, the adaptive government of God worked out his ultimate designs, turning the wickedness of men to his own glory and hiding the secrets of his providence beneath the course of events, the incidents of common life, the history of a people, of a tribe, of a family. We look back [Pg 136] on the long-drawn-out story and understand somewhat of the underlying mystery. But while it was going on it was but little even guessed at. God is unchangeable, the same for ever and ever. What he did then does he not do now?—for his church, his bride, above all, but also for all humanity, all the wide universe according to its measure, as it can bear it, when it can receive it; leading on by degrees so slow that to us they seem almost imperceptible, but which widen and spread like the rings on the surface of the water when a stone has been flung into its depths.

Our range of vision is so narrow, and our knowledge of even the past so limited and so full of inaccuracies, that we can do little more than guess at the manifold unrolling of the divine intentions. We know enough to fill us with hope as to the ultimate destination of all creation, and of ourselves as the children of God. We know not the future, save faintly as faith reveals it. Even of the past we know but dimly and in broken lines. To one only of the children of men, so far as the Holy Scripture informs us, was the past fully and entirely made known, so far as that was possible to a mortal man supernaturally sustained to bear it. How many in the hallowed, bold, and rash moments of inarticulate prayer have ventured in their lesser degree to say with Moses, “Show me thy glory”! As the thought grows upon us of God’s wonderful ways and of his unutterable love and beneficence, we too long to know with certain knowledge something of that Glory which the great lawgiver intuitively felt would be at once the knowledge of all and the consummation of every desire. “Show me thy glory.” Hear the answer: “Thou canst not see my face: for man shall not see me, and live. Thou shalt stand upon the rock. And when my glory shall pass, I will set thee in a hole in the rock, and thou shalt see my back parts: but my face thou canst not see.”[67] And thus Moses saw the back parts of Him who is from all eternity, through the aperture of time. He had revealed to him the far-off intention of creation. He looked back, in God, to the time before time “when he had not yet made the earth, nor the rivers, nor the poles of the world; when Wisdom was with him forming all things, playing before him at all times, playing in the world, and whose delights were to be with the children of men.”[68] The back parts were beheld by him, and even this he could not have endured in his feeble flesh had not the Eternal “right hand protected him.” All that the past could teach him in the flash of one moment was then made known to him. What floods of light, knowledge, and divine hope and expectation must that wonderful backward view have imparted to Moses, the man singled out of all mankind to read the past! But even with the strength which knowledge such as that must have conferred upon him, still he could not see the face of God and live. We are using weak human words, because they alone are given us. It was the forward look of God which Moses could not see and live. It was the unutterable Glory that is prepared for us in the future, with and through Jesus, that not even the man who had conversed with God as man speaks with his fellow-man, face to face, could see and live. Its stupendous [Pg 137] and exceeding brightness, would have shattered his being as the flash of lightning shatters the oak; even as our Lord revealed to one of his chosen saints that, could she perfectly realize his immense love for the souls of men, that moment of intense joy would snap the frail thread of her life with its excessive ecstasy. What Moses saw he tells us not. No word escapes him of that transcendent vision. He neither tells us of its nature nor of its effects upon himself. But who could marvel if, having had it, he was henceforth the meekest of men? What could ever again disturb the serene patience of him who could divine so much of the future from having seen all the past? And how impossible it must have been for any torments of pride to ruffle the calm serenity of one who was humbled to the very dust by the unutterably lavish and surpassing developments of love and grace and glory which his vision of the past bade him anticipate in that future which even he who had borne to see the past could not gaze upon and live!

As “the end of all science is contained within the end of all theology,” so the seeing the glory of God would be the knowledge of all history taken in its widest and fullest meaning; for if history could be truly written, whether as the life of an individual, the history of a nation or of the whole world, it would be the unravelling of the hidden providence of God working through all events to his own greater glory. The perfect sight is the perfect knowledge; and that cannot be obtained save through the “light of Glory,” which is the beatific vision. The perfect knowledge of God would be the knowledge of all things, not only of all science, but of all facts; for all are contained in him. The use of our faculties in the acquirement of knowledge or in its exercise is like the gathering up of fragments caught from the skirts of his garments as we follow slowly in his mighty footsteps; and the closer we get to him in our patient toil, the brighter is the lustre and the sweeter the perfume still left upon these shreds of the divine passage through the mazes of creation and the heaped-up centuries of time.

[60] Daniel xii. 4.

[61] Matthew v. 18.

[62] 1 Cor. iii. 16, 17, 22, 23.

[63] Ephesians v. 23, 32.

[64] This statement, if its terms are taken in a strict, theological sense, is not correct. In the sense that matrimony under the old law was holy, and foreshadowed a sacrament, it may be called sacramental. There were no sacraments, in the specific sense in which we now use the term in the Catholic Church, before Christ instituted them.—Ed. C. W.

[65] Gen. xxxvii. 32.

[66] Mark xv. 32.

[67] Exodus xxxiii. 18-23.

[68] Prov. viii. 22-36.

NEW PUBLICATIONS.

The Student’s Hand-Book of British and American Literature. Containing sketches, biographical and critical, of the most distinguished English authors, from the earliest times to the present day, with selections from their writings, and questions adapted to the use of schools. By Rev. O. L. Jenkins, A.M., late president of St. Charles’s College, Ellicott City, Md., and formerly president of St. Mary’s College, Baltimore. 1 vol. 16mo, pp. 564. Baltimore: John Murphy & Co. (New York: The Catholic Publication Society.) 1876.

This book has many excellencies. The author shows himself thoroughly versed in his subject. He writes with elegance, occasionally with force, as in the remarks on the influence of the Protestant Reformation on literature. His taste is true and his judgment sound. In fact, judging by the work itself, he would seem possessed of the qualities fitted to make him an admirable compiler of a literary manual.

The first sentence of the author’s preface explains the object of the book: “The compiler of this work has long felt the necessity of some text book of British and American literature which, in its general bearing, would be free from sectarian views and influences, and, in the extracts, be entirely unexceptionable in point of morality.” This sentence is open to misinterpretation. It is plain, however, from the general plan of Father Jenkins’ work, as well as from numerous passages in it, that he has had in view from the beginning to restore to the Catholic Church, the inspirer of the highest literature, the mother of Christian art, and the fosterer of the sciences, her rightful place in English letters. In most of the text-books used in schools her influence on thought and literature is altogether ignored and herself in too many instances derided. It is clear, then, what the learned author meant by freeing his book from “sectarian views.” While giving their lawful place to all writers, of whatever manner of belief or no belief, he had for his direct object the pruning out of all anti-Catholic and immoral passages, and the insertion of established Catholic authors who are systematically excluded from ordinary text-books.

No object could be better calculated to confer more lasting benefit on the minds of the young generation growing up around us, for whom chiefly the present work is intended. We open the book with eagerness, therefore, and turn over page after page with interest, often with admiration, until we come up to the present century, when, especially within the later half of it, Catholic literature in England and the United States has, from a variety of causes, received a new and remarkable impulse. It is hardly too much to say that Catholic questions are among the chief questions of the day here as well as in England; they have been such for the last fifty years; they promise to be such for at least fifty years to come; and Catholic writers to-day hold their own in every branch of literature. After three centuries of silence, of death almost, the church has risen again among these peoples who went astray, the voice of truth is heard, and its utterances are manifold. Surely there is reason to expect that due notice of such awakening, of such signs of life and hope, be taken in a literary text-book, which, after all, can only hope to make its way in Catholic schools. Yet here, in this crucial point, Father Jenkins’ work is singularly and lamentably defective. Whether or not he intended to supply the deficiency is not known to us; but those who took up the work after his death ought to have supplied it.

We turn to the book, and what do we find? The only Catholic writers of the century who are found worthy a place in this Catholic manual are, to take them as they occur: Dr. Lingard, Thomas Moore, Cardinal Wiseman, Dr. Newman, Aubrey de Vere, in England and Ireland; Bishop England, Robert Walsh, and Archbishop Spalding, in America. And these are all!

Where is Dr. Brownson? His name occurs in a casual note of the author’s, in [Pg 139] the same way as the names of Griswold, Cleveland, or Reid occur. Where is Dr. Pise, Dr. Huntington, George H. Miles, Dr. White, Colonel Meline, John G. Shea, Dr. R. H. Clarke, Archbishop Hughes—they simply run off the pen—together with dozens of others, many of whose names will not need recalling to the readers of this magazine? We shrink from extending the catalogue of the absent to England and Ireland.

Writers conspicuous by their absence are by no means restricted to the Catholic faith. Among strange omissions are the following: Southwell is in, but not Crashaw; Shakspere, but not Massinger, or Beaumont and Fletcher; Addison, but not Steele; all the earlier novelists are absent. The dramatists of the reign of Charles II. are ignored. Goldsmith is remembered, but Sheridan is forgotten. Scott is in, but Burns is out. Moore and Byron, and even Rogers, find their place; but Shelley and Keats are nowhere to be found. Dickens and Thackeray are here, but Bulwer Lytton is absent; and so the list goes on.

The book is supposed to reach up to the present day. The writers on political philosophy, the scientists, the theologians, many of the writers on history known to us as living among us still and destined to live long after us, are altogether omitted. Not a hint even of their existence is given. The “compiler,” as he styled himself, says in the preface that “whatever has relation to our common humanity, and interests all men alike, whether it be fictitious or real, in poetry or in prose, comes within the appropriate province of literature. Even popularized science is not excluded.” And he adds, strangely enough in the light of the chief defect we have noticed: “If, in the early periods, the name of an eminent divine or scholar is introduced whose writings might seem to belong rather to the department of science than belles-lettres, it is because he ranks among the few men of his epoch who were remarkable for intellectual vigor and general knowledge.” This being so, where are the English, Irish, and American Catholic theological, philosophical, and polemical writers of the last half-century?

Of course a work of this kind, which aimed at doing justice to our Catholic writers of the present century, would quite overrun the limits of an ordinary text-book of English literature. Still, the addition of two or three hundred pages devoted just to this subject is necessary to complete what in its present form is, for the purposes for which it was intended, quite incomplete.

The Eden of Labor, the Christian Utopia. By T. Wharton Collens, author of Humanics, etc. Philadelphia: H. C. Baird, Industrial Publisher, 810 Walnut Street.

Labor and Capital in England, from the Catholic Point of View. By C. S. Devas, B.A., Lecturer on Political Economy at the Catholic University College, Kensington. London: Burns & Oates, Portman Street.

These two publications may be combined in one notice. They treat of the same subject, essentially in the same spirit, though looking at it in different lights. Both deal with that momentous struggle between labor and capital which has shaken the world in all ages; both profess to find the solution of the economic problems of the day in the teachings of Christianity as interpreted by the Catholic Church; but one invokes the aid of the imagination in portraying what labor might be if all men were just and charitable; the other confronts the actual position of labor in England. Each is equally valuable in its own way, and both are champions of the rights of labor.

Mr. Collens’ work, The Eden of Labor, is the fruit of much thought upon the subject, a powerful imagination, and a feeling heart for those who labor. The author pictures Adam as founding a patriarchal empire after the fall, in which, under wise and equitable laws, labor was universally rewarded by competency and happiness. In the description of this antediluvian Utopia—of its system of government and society, of its condition and rewards of labor, of its land tenure, its trade, foreign and domestic, and its currency—the author gives himself the opportunity of promulgating his conception of the true doctrines of political economy. In this he takes issue with the liberal school of political economists which recognizes Adam Smith as its founder. He denounces its teachings as framed solely in the interest of the selfish and tyrannical employer of labor, and as leading irresistibly to the robbery and enslavement of the over-matched laborer. While admitting the [Pg 140] truth of Adam Smith’s law that “labor is the true measure of exchangeable values,” the author strenuously argues that he (Smith) and his disciples nullify the just results of that axiom by defending the specious but unchristian doctrine of “supply and demand,” which results in the supremacy of might over starvation, and by losing sight of their original affirmation of the common right of all to the use of “natural values,” which the liberal economists in the end surrender absolutely to the capitalist.

As a foil to his picture of the “Eden of Labor,” Mr. Collens gives, in his description of Nodland, or the empire of Cain, a history of the enslavement and misery of labor, and the corruption and tyranny of the “money lords,” consequent upon the surrender of society to purely selfish instincts, and its abandonment of laws which Adam had derived from his original intercourse with God. This second part may be regarded as a satire upon our modern civilization. An ingenious monogram representing Labor, half-starved, drawing a miserable subsistence from the reservoir of “Natural Values,” which at the same time feeds the plethora of Capital, is prefixed to the work and fully explained by the author in the appendix.

Philosophers from Plato to Sir Thomas More have sought, in their descriptions of Utopia under different names, to portray a commonwealth in which justice should reign and labor receive its rightful reward. In following the steps of those illustrious thinkers Mr. Collens has the opportunity of presenting to his readers, with freshness of treatment and originality of plan, his solution of the labor questions specially affecting this age. The danger besetting works of this kind, where the author is dissatisfied with the existing order of things, and feels a strong sympathy with oppressed labor, is that they insensibly verge towards the vindication of the theories of communism and the revolutionary rights of man. We are convinced that no conclusions could be more opposed, or even abhorrent, to Mr. Collens’ mind than these. His preface, written on “the Feast of the Holy Name of Jesus,” and the whole spirit of his work, bespeak him a fervent Catholic; but, if followed to a logical and forcible conclusion, it would be difficult to distinguish the goal to which the doctrines embodied in the author’s denunciation of the “appropriators of natural values” would lead from that seen at the end of Proudhon’s—“La propriété, c’est le vol.” This, however, is a defect inherent in all Utopias—not of their own nature, but from the fallen condition of man. With this caution we can safely recommend Mr. Collens’ work as both interesting and instructive.

Professor Devas’ pamphlet is on a more ordinary plane of authorship. It is historical and practical in the sense, as to the latter word, of treating of the existing facts of labor in England and their remedies. But we are not of those who would confine the meaning of the word “practical” solely to results immediately before us. A work like that of Mr. Collens, depending largely upon the imagination and investigating first principles, may be practical in the highest and most extensive sense, so far as it influences the original sources of human action. In his special treatment of the subject, however, Professor Devas has written a very able treatise. It is a reprint of three articles originally published in the Month, two of them containing the substance of a paper read before the Academia at Westminster. The first treats of labor and capital in general; the second, of the economic powers in manufacturing industries; the third, of their relative positions in agriculture. In his first article Professor Devas discusses the question whether contracts should be left to competition or a fair rate of wages—justum pretium—fixed, and, if so, how and by whom. He holds a middle view between the liberal economists who will listen to nothing but the rule of “supply and demand,” and the socialist school which denounces all competition and would have the state fix a compulsory rate. He cites the Nottingham hosiery trade as a case in point where wages are not fixed by competition, but by tariff determined upon at a periodical meeting of masters and workmen, in which the state of the market and all attending circumstances are mutually considered, and suggests this example as a mode of arriving at the justum pretium in all trades. In his chapter on manufacturing industries Professor Devas takes the bold ground of defending trades-unionism, not in its details but in its general principles. He is of opinion that the trades unions have been one of the chief agents in alleviating the condition [Pg 141] of the working classes and raising the rate of wages in England during the last forty years. In this latter conclusion he is supported by Dr. Young in his recently published work on Labor in Europe and America. In spite of the fact that the large strikes in England and upon the European Continent have been in the majority of special cases unsuccessful, the general result, according to Dr. Young, has been an advance of wages during the last twenty years. The effects of trades-unionism in Europe may be likened to the flow of the tide, which, repulsed as to each successive wave, yet gains slowly upon the beach. This advance, however, is not always aided by strikes; on the contrary, they have frequently postponed it, by the exhaustion of the struggle, for many years. Their potential combination, or what O’Connell, in a different agitation, called “moral force,” has been a more successful factor in obtaining justice for them.

Ordo Divini Officii Rectandi, etc., 1876. Baltimoræ: Apud Fratres Lucas, Bibliopolas.

Whether by the word “rectandi” the compiler of this guide for the clergy would imply that the principal duty devolving on them with regard to the Office is its correction rather than its recitation, we are unable to say. We do not, it is true, find the verb “recto” in the dictionary, but feeling confident, from the Ciceronian style displayed in other parts of the Ordo, that it must be good Latin, especially as it has appeared two years in succession, presume that it must be the dictionary which is at fault, and cannot suggest any other meaning for the word.

Whether that is its meaning or not, however, it certainly well might be.

We do not profess to have made a thorough examination of the book. It is full of misprints, as usual, of which the one just mentioned and the familiar “Resurect.” are good examples. Whether the putting of St. Anicetus for St. Anacletus, which was also noticed last year, can be considered as such seems rather doubtful.

There are some trifling omissions which really ought to be supplied. The anniversaries of the consecration of about forty of the bishops of the United States are passed by in silence. For what special reason the remainder are given it is hard to imagine, unless it be to remind those who use the Ordo that they ought to take notice of such an anniversary and find out when it occurs; but, unfortunately, it has just a contrary effect, for every one who sees the anniversary of another diocese noticed expects to be similarly reminded of his own, and only remembers that he has not been when the time has gone by.

The law according to which the feast of St. Leo varies between the 3d and the 7th of July is a matter of curious speculation. From its occurrence for two successive years on the 3d we are inclined to cherish the hope that it has finally settled down upon that day.

Why cannot we have an Ordo that would be creditable to the compiler and the publishers, and in which confidence could be placed? More care is all that is needed.

This notice has been delayed till this month on account of more important matter. It will probably do as much good now as if it had been published at an earlier date.

Sermons by Fathers of the Society of Jesus. Vol. III. London: Burns & Oates. 1875. (For sale by The Catholic Publication Society.)

It is somewhat rare to meet with sermons that will bear publication. The circumstances attending their delivery, the authoritative character of the priest, the sacredness of the time and place, tend to disarm the critical faculty and dispose the hearers to a favorable impression. Not so, however, when they are given to the world in book-form, to be subjected to the cool criticism of the closet. Sermons that can stand this test are certainly worthy of praise; and this merit, we are happy to say, belongs to the volume before us. The selected sermons are by Fathers Kingdon, Purbrick, Coleridge, Weld, and Anderdon—names already familiar to many of our readers. Their subjects are such inexhaustible themes as the Passion of Our Lord, the Holy Eucharist, Our Lady’s Immaculate Conception, etc., treated mainly in their devotional and practical bearings. They thus form a collection of spiritual reading rendered particularly attractive by many excellencies of style and expression. Regarded merely as sermons, they are models in their conformity to the accepted canons of this branch of composition. [Pg 142] The subjects are clearly divided, with an easy transition from point to point. The style throughout is graceful and flowing, and there are many passages full of eloquence—a kind of eloquence not merely ornamental but practical in its effects. The secret of it lies in that warmth and earnestness which can proceed only from those who are animated by a fervid zeal for the good of souls.

Father Segneri’s Sentimenti; or, Lights in Prayer. Translated from the Italian by K. G. London: Burns & Oates. 1876. (For sale by The Catholic Publication Society.)

Father Segneri is one of the greatest of the distinguished preachers of the seventeenth century. His name is frequently met in the Italian dictionaries, as an authority of the language. His sermons are based upon the classic models of eloquence. Though not as exhaustive as those of the great French masters of sacred oratory, they are more forcible in rhetoric and more luxuriant in style. We have a great desire to see the complete works of Father Segneri rendered into English, and those who have read the volume of his sermons, lately put forth by the Catholic Publication Society, will doubtless welcome anything bearing his name.

The little book before us is made up of pious reflections found among the papers left by Father Segneri, and evidently intended for his own private perusal. They give us a glimpse of the tender religious, seeking obscurity, craving the higher gifts, while the world applauds his brilliant and conspicuous talents. This contrast is always pleasing. The Sentimenti reveal how far this holy man had advanced in virtue, and how well founded is the reverence which has ever been felt for his sanctity.

Brief Biographies: French Political Leaders. By Edward King. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Son’s. 1876.

These are bright and readable sketches of various prominent Frenchmen of the day. Whether all of those whose biographies are given may be fitly designated “political leaders” is for the reader to satisfy himself and the future to determine. Mr. King does not aim at profound reflection. He cuts skin-deep and passes on. The title of the book seems to us suggestive of something more serious than this. The political leaders of France will influence more than France, and it would be worth considering who and what are the French political leaders of the day. Of what stuff are they made? Whither are they tending? In what do they lead? Is it a lead backwards or forwards? Mr. King passes such questions by, and contents himself with more or less interesting biographies of those whom he takes to be political leaders. Among them we find Henri Rochefort, but fail to find Louis Veuillot. Mr. King is like all non-Catholic writers—least at home when he comes across a Catholic. Among his leaders Mgr. Dupanloup, the Bishop of Orléans, very properly holds a place. We scarcely recognize the bishop, however, as painted by Mr. King. One sentence will suffice to show our meaning: “The haughty mind which sneered at the Encyclical Letter [which Encyclical Letter?] and the Syllabus became one of the most ardent defenders of illiberal measures.” By “illiberal measures” Mr. King seems to mean freedom of education in France, of which Mgr. Dupanloup has been a lifelong, and recently a successful, advocate. “The haughty mind which sneered at the Encyclical Letter and the Syllabus” is something new to us, particularly as Mgr. Dupanloup, long previous to the Council of the Vatican, wrote a pamphlet in defence of the Syllabus for which he received the special thanks of the Holy Father. It is to be hoped that all Mr. King’s biographies are not equally as accurate as that of Mgr. Dupanloup.

Five Lectures on the City of Ancient Rome and her Empire over the Nations, the Divinely-sent Pioneer of the way for the Catholic Church. A supplement to the student’s usual course of study in Roman history. By Rev. Henry Formby, London: Burns, Oates & Co.

In these lectures Father Formby essays the proof of what many a well-read student would at first hearing pronounce as a thesis exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, of demonstration—viz., that the Roman Empire, the arch-persecutor of the church of God, drunk with the blood of ten millions of martyrs, and nursing-mother of every heathen idolatry, had, in spite of these seeming contradictory [Pg 143] characteristics, a divine mission, fulfilled especially by her universal empire and the singular part she played in the formation of the political and social life of the nations of the world.

The learned author signalizes among other marks of the divine providence shown in the history of the mistress of nations, which point her out as a pioneer of the kingdom of Christ, the following remarkable classes of services rendered by her to the accomplishment of that work:

1. “The formation of the nations of the world into a political unity of government, in which there existed a great deal to foreshadow and prepare the minds of men for the future church; while every eye was taught to look up to the city of Rome, not only as the centre of all political action, but as supreme in religion, as well as the fountain of all civil honor and dignity.

2. “The preliminary mission of the Roman Empire to civilize the nations, and to promote among them education and the cultivation of literature and the arts of life, the care of which was to become, in a far higher and more effective manner, part of the mission of the future church.

3. “The mission of the Roman Empire to inculcate and preserve among the nations the knowledge of a certain number of the doctrines and virtues forming part of the original revelation which Noah brought with him out of the ark.

4. “The advantage, for the formation of the Christian society, of the firm establishment of the outward framework of good public order, of municipal liberties, and of the general peace of the world, including the necessary security for life and prosperity.”

These are weighty considerations, and worthy of a much more extended development than the author gives in the lectures before us. His thesis affirmed as probable (and we deem it no less), Roman history would need to be re-written, and by one who should be not only an historian, but a philosopher and a Christian. The perusal of these lectures cannot fail to interest the student, and particularly those who pretend to study the philosophy of history.

Popular Life of Daniel O’Connell. 1 vol. 16mo, pp. 294. Boston: Patrick Donahoe.

Public attention in these days is being more and more turned to O’Connell and the work he wrought. No later than last year the Holy Father held him up as a guide to Catholics in their conflict with powers leagued together against the church, against Catholic rights, and, as a matter of consequence, against all right. The more the great Irish leader’s life is studied, the more evident becomes the fact that freedom, liberty, right, were not to him merely national but universal claims. What he demanded for his own he would have granted to all, and in claiming his own he asked no favor; he called for none of what are known as heroic remedies; he appealed simply to the spirit of all sound laws and the sense of right that is in the conscience of all men. It would be well if, in future lives of him, this great, this greatest perhaps, feature of O’Connell’s character were brought out in stronger relief. For it is just this that makes him more than a leader of his people; it makes him a leader of all peoples who have wrongs to right and abuses to abolish. The small volume before us tells the story of O’Connell’s life in the conventional manner. “Popular” is on the title-page, and there is no reason why the “life” should not be popular. It “has been compiled from the most authentic sources,” says the preface modestly enough, and in this the value of the book is rated in a line. It is a compilation, and no more. As a compilation there is no especial fault to be found with it. On the contrary, the various parts are stitched cleverly together, so as to make a sufficiently interesting narrative. Compilations, however, are becoming too numerous nowadays, and the literature in which shears and paste-pot play the chief part is growing into a school, and a school that cannot be commended. It is not encouraging to open what the reader takes to be a new book, and find in it page after page of matter that has been writ or told a thousand times already.

Elmwood; or, The Withered Arm. By Katie L. 1 vol. 16mo, pp. 233. Baltimore: Kelly, Piet & Co. 1876.

The title of this story, though sufficiently thrilling, gives but a faint indication of the chamber of horrors that lies concealed between the pleasant-looking covers. The title of the first chapter is “Midnight,” and it begins as follows: “W-H-I-R-R! groaned the old clock. The sound rang throughout the immense [Pg 144] corridor, reverberating like the moan of a lost soul.” Three lines lower down, “A wild, unearthly yell” breaks “with fearful distinctness on the midnight silence.” Chapter III. begins: “Silence! Gloom! Remorse! Anguish! Alone! all alone!” and so on. We spare the reader the prolonged agony.

The story might be called a series of paroxysms, and, were it only intended as a caricature of the dime novel, would be one of the most successful that was ever written. Murder glares from every page, and agony reverberates along every line. There is an abundance of “tall, slight figures robed in white,” “ethereal oil-lamps,” “howling tempests,” “deathly faintnesses,” thrilling “ha! ha’s!” “blue chambers,” “north-end chambers,” “awful arms,” “blood-stained hands,” poison, murder, despair, agony, death. There are the usual heroes with the conventional marble brow and clustering curls around it, and the heroines, tall and stately, sylph-like and sweet, blonde or brunette, according to order. Everybody is Maud, or Elaine, or Edwin, or Herbert. One quite misses Enid, Gawain, Launcelot, and Guinevere. Of course there is no special quarrel with nonsense of this kind, beyond the regret that there should be found persons not only to think and write it, but sane persons to publish and propagate it. When, however, we find religion dragged in to give it a kind of moral flavor—dragged in, too, in the most absurd and reprehensible fashion—what might be passed over as a foolish offence against good sense and good taste becomes a matter of graver moment, to be utterly condemned as irreverent and harmful, however unintentional the irreverence and harm may be. It is necessary to be severe about this kind of literature. Uninstructed Catholics who, by whatever misfortune, have access to paper and types, do a world of harm, though they themselves may be actuated by the best motives possible. This book would do no more harm to sensible persons than cause a laugh, possibly a shudder, at its tissue of absurdities. But falling into the hands of non-Catholics, it would by many be taken as the natural outcome of Catholic teaching, and disgust them with everything connected with the Catholic name. The preface to the book speaks of “the moral conveyed in the following pages,” which, it says, “is too obvious to need particular specification.” Possibly; nevertheless, we thought it our duty to specify it above. The preface adds that the book was written “during some of the sweetest hours” of the writer’s life, “in the midst of the most charming surroundings, and solely for the eyes of a few friends.” It is to be deeply regretted, for the writer’s own sake, that one, at least, of her few friends had not the courage and kindliness to deter her from “sending forth upon its new and unexpected mission” a book that can only bring pain to the author and pain to those who feel bound to condemn it.

The Scholastic Almanac for 1876. Edited by Professor J. A. Lyons, Notre Dame, Ind. Chicago: Jansen, McClurg & Co. 1876.

This is modelled on the Illustrated Catholic Family Almanac, the first of the kind published in this country, only it is not illustrated. Its literary matter is very good, and in its paper, press-work, etc., it is a creditable publication.

The Spectator (Selected Papers). By Addison and Steele. With introductory essay and biographical sketches by John Habberton. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. 1876.

This is the first of a series to be made up of selections from the standard British essayists. The present volume contains careful selections from the Spectator. Those who care to see what journalism was in the days when Addison and Steele were journalists will welcome this series, so well begun in the elegant volume before us. It is to be feared that Addison or Steele would stand a poor chance of employment in the present “advanced” stage of journalism. Nevertheless, our editorial writers would do neither themselves nor their readers much harm in trying to discover what is the special charm that lingers about the pages of these dead-and-gone magazines. When they have made the discovery, they will be in a fair way to make it worth the while of an enterprising publisher, say a century hence, to wade through the pages of their journals for the purpose of unearthing the author of such and such articles, with a view to giving them again to the world.

THE

CATHOLIC WORLD.

VOL. XXIII., No. 134.—MAY, 1876.

THE ROOT OF OUR PRESENT EVILS.

When Mr. Dickens repaid the hospitality which he had received by his extremely humorous satires of this country, he called the attention of all Americans to the extent to which our national vanity was likely to blind us. Mr. Chollop’s opinion to the effect that “we are the intellect and virtue of the airth, the cream of human natur, and the flower of moral force,” has been secretly cherished by many better men.

The conviction of ordinary Americans is that our system of government is so evidently perfect, and the course of our development so manifestly healthy, that nothing but sheer blindness can account for any suspicion as to their future stability. To those who question the success of our future we are wont to reply by a smile of genuine pity, or by pointing to the results already achieved and the difficulties which have been surmounted. We have fused the most incongruous race-mixture into one homogeneous nation. We have occupied a continent, and laid the foundations of a great empire upon a comprehensive and stable adjustment of all the functions of government. We have eliminated the vast system of human slavery from which our ruin had been predicted. We have overcome the most powerful assault upon the integrity of our national existence; and any violent attempt upon our government seems at present to be both impossible of occurrence and hopeless of success.

It cannot be denied, however, that recent events have awakened in the minds of earnest and patriotic Americans a sense of uneasiness and anxiety very different from any similar feeling in the past. The professional politician sees in the corruption lately developed in Washington simply the evidence of decay manifested by a powerful organization which has enjoyed unlimited power and survived the issues which brought it into existence. He would persuade the people that a “rotation” is all that is necessary in order to restore things to an honest and sober condition. [Pg 146] Less thoughtful men demand a return on the part of officials “to the simplicity of our forefathers,” and applaud blindly every effort at retrenchment. All observant writers and thinkers deprecate any such impossibility and are quite clear as to the folly of attempting it. The Nation, March 16, says: “We confess that there is to us something almost as depressing in this kind of talk as in the practice, in which many of our newspapers indulge, of drawing consolation for the present corruption of this republic from the reflection that the corruption of the English monarchy one hundred and fifty years ago was just as great; because both one and the other have a tendency to turn people’s minds away from real remedies and throw them back on quackery.”

The feeling exhibited by this writer is not confined to himself; and the protest which he makes against disguise and quackery is extended much further than he himself has carried it. For the most part careful observers are willing to postpone the question of treatment until the public is settled as to what the malady really is. We are shaken out of our customary habit of mind by witnessing the disgrace and infamy which cover our present administration. Everybody feels that something ought to be done. But to pay particular attention to this portion of the body politic, without examining how far the disease extends and what is its source, is simply to run the risk of suppressing a symptom instead of curing a disorder.

The slightest attempt at candid observation reveals clearly that corruption is not confined to Washington. A few years ago it was supposed to be limited to a certain class of local politics; then it was restricted to the city of New York. Now it is proved to extend from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and to exist in every circle of society. The suspicion which once attached to the “ward politician” now hangs about our representatives and senators. Dishonesty in commercial transactions perpetrates renewed outrages. We shall soon have to establish fresh associations to insure our insurance companies and to guarantee our banks. The medical profession feels called upon to issue tracts in order to guard against the physical degeneracy of the entire race.

To deny that there is a pronounced, marked, and universal decadence in morality is simply to stultify all faculties of observation and to contradict the testimony of every sense. It is not necessary to repeat the list of scandals which are daily appearing, or to appeal to the conviction, which prevails everywhere, that we have seen but a small portion of those which really exist. It is the common sentiment that the next century will witness either a complete and radical reform of the present state of things, or else a condition far worse than the enemies of this country have ever yet predicted.

Startling as this conviction may appear, the only thing which ought to surprise us is that the present disorder has not been foreseen and is not now more fully understood. It would have been easy to predict the increase of wealth and the consequent increase of luxury in our midst. No sane person can doubt that these sources of temptation will be greater in the future. The presence of wealth, the possibility of attaining it, will call forth all the activity of the rising generation, and the keenness of the struggle, in [Pg 147] which all are free within the limits of the law, will tend constantly to lower the standard of honesty. The strictness of party discipline, the disgust which the mass of citizens have for attending to the details of politics, offer the widest scope for unprincipled adventurers. There are few careers in which quackery, fraud, and imposture cannot secure those fruits for the possession of which honesty and labor are forced to suffer and to strive.

It does not involve a cynical view of mankind to decide that where the occasion of sin abounds wickedness will increase and prove destructive, unless adequate means are taken to preserve the purity of a nation.

This restraining influence in the history of nations hitherto has been religion, which is supposed to furnish motives and to supply the strength and means of combating these evil tendencies, and of defining and consolidating public morality.

The religion under profession of which the older portions of the republic developed was professedly Christian and retained much of the traditional morality of the middle ages. There was no particular form of Protestantism which succeeded in impressing itself permanently upon the growing republic, although some connection of church and state was universally recognized in the early State constitutions. The rigid forms of Puritanism and Quakerism were well calculated to preserve frugality and simplicity of life as long as they could be maintained in rigidity. But no system of mere forms or external restraint could suffice for the direction of a civilization which, still in its infancy, presents so much richness and luxuriance of growth. Neither the austerity of the Roundhead nor the dignity of the Cavalier could hope to remain as the type upon which the American character was to be moulded. The external habiliments of the early generations were bound to disappear, as they have disappeared. But their principles—i.e., the beliefs of Protestantism—were to remain and to form the intellect and conscience of the American people. However great the influence of Southern statesmen upon our external constitution, the New England mind has wrought most powerfully upon the popular sentiment of the country. This action has been manifold.

The stock in trade, to use a homely comparison, with which Protestantism assumed its duty of providing for the moral and intellectual necessities of the American people was contained in the principles of the so-called Reformation.

In addition to the theory of private judgment, which was retained, with the utmost inconsistency, the early religion of this country reposed upon two fundamental and mischievous errors which were inherited from the authors of the Reformation. These were the heresies of justification by faith alone and the total depravity of human nature. If any proof were wanting of the strength and permanence of the religious instinct in man, it would appear in the fact that such monstrous delusions could so long receive the assent of those who professed at the same time perfect freedom of belief. These disgusting caricatures of Christian dogma have almost lost their control over human reason, and will remain only to demonstrate the needs of man and his weakness when acting in abnormal ways and under false traditions. But the fruit which they have borne will not speedily perish. After crystallizing [Pg 148] into a system and founding institutions for perpetuating its growth, the Calvinism of New England assumed all the proportions and manners of an established sect. The preachers were intellectually well worthy of the position which they enjoyed. Great eloquence, rich thought, and all the scholarship of which they were possessed were wasted in elaborate sermons proving, or attempting to prove, their dark and malignant creed. A large mass of the people, however, not attracted by the airs of Calvinism, were repelled by the heavy and metaphysical style of the Calvinistic pulpit.

Before the separation of the colonies from the mother country New England Calvinism had become sufficiently dry and devoid of sentiment to prepare the way for a more emotional religion. Thousands of eager souls drank in the enthusiasm of Asbury, Coke, and the other apostles of Wesleyanism. The founders of Methodism in America, though obliged to adopt some articles of faith as distinctive of their organization, owed their success to the fact that, discarding all reasoning, they appealed to religious emotion, and were mainly instrumental in founding that school of theology whose doctrine is that it matters little what one does or believes, provided one feels right.

Emotionalism has run its course and dies out in the Hippodrome, whither the official teachers of evangelicalism have led their congregations to receive from the ministrations of two illiterate laymen that spiritual stimulant which can no longer be obtained from educated preachers in the fashionable meeting-house.

While the ancient organizations of Puritanism continued, with more or less dilution of its original doctrines, another movement had arisen in the very heart of Calvinism. The Unitarian movement has proved a complete reaction against what are called the doctrines of the Reformation. It has resulted in the extinction of the religious sentiment. Its popular summary is to the effect, that it makes little difference what one feels or believes, provided he does right. From the society of the Free Religionists back to the original shades of Calvinism is a gloomy road for even the imagination to travel, but no one can pass over it in fancy without perceiving the utter impossibility of persuading one who has once emerged from, ever to return to, the earlier darkness.

To continue in a creed which involved blasphemy against the goodness of God and the denial of all the natural sources of morality, or to surrender one’s self to religious emotion without any solid intellectual principle, or else to place individuals in entire dependence upon their private perceptions of religious and moral truth, and finally pass from one degree of scepticism to another—one of these three alternatives was proposed as the occupation of the American intellect during the most active period of national growth.

The Egyptian darkness which Calvinism brings upon any thoughtful soul was the inheritance of the religious youth of the country. What virtue can exist when total depravity is daily preached? What bar does it put to the passions of man to know or to believe that his salvation does not depend upon his good life? What conception of the universe can he form who sees in it only the work of what a popular preacher has called an “infinite [Pg 149] gorilla”? Nothing is more pathetic than the history which we have of minds whose natural goodness vainly struggled against these detestable heresies. And if the religious heart of New England found in its creed nothing but discouragement, what was the effect of that religion upon the popular mind? Is it not mainly to its influence that all that is repulsive and hard in the Yankee character is to be attributed?

But, on the other hand, what has been left by the decay of emotional religion? It might have been prophesied with safety that the result would be simply a reaction. So far as can be observed, it is nothing more or less. The writer was not a little amused at reading lately in a Methodist paper an editorial charging strongly against the present style of revivals, under the heading of “Religious Fits.” The editor, in the course of his remarks, very bluntly asserted that religious fits are not much better than any other kind of fits—a proposition which sums up the vital weakness of Methodism. And when a whole nation or a large class is reduced to this condition, the recovery from the fit will be attended with great disaster. “The religion of gush,” as it has been forcibly styled, is fatal to morality. It is an attempt to feed a starving man upon stimulants. The appearance of strength which it gives is simply an additional tax upon the system. Emotional religion may succeed in quieting women who are secluded in domestic life, or even the weaker sort of men who are occupied solely in teaching it; but for the common mass, who are daily exposed to temptation, it is, at most, a salve with which the wounds inflicted upon conscience are plastered over. There is nothing in it to discipline the soul before trial, and nothing to repair its weaknesses after it has fallen.

With regard to the results of the naturalistic revolt against Calvinism there is little to be said. The charming writers who have given it prestige are not its product but its cause. In so far as they assert the dignity of human reason against Calvinism, to this extent they are in harmony with our natural instincts and have tended to produce a wholesome influence. But even transcendentalism is past its wane, and will be known in the future only by its literary reputation. Free religion has developed no permanent constructive idea. Its principal effect will be to obliterate whatever of Christianity has clung to the tradition of New England Protestantism. Its mission will be accomplished when all connection between the past and present shall have been effectually broken. It leaves us only a considerable amount of scientific knowledge which we should possess without it. Its morality staggers through the wide range extending from free love and spiritism into the undefined vacuity which it supposes to lie between these bolder theories and old-fashioned uprightness. Like emotional Protestantism, it is wholly incapable of withstanding any strain or of guiding and controlling the absolute individualism which it has created. If the Congregational pastor of Plymouth Church affords a sad example of the impotence of emotional pietism, the unfortunate plaintiff in the lawsuit against him is no less a melancholy instance of the aberrations of the last phase of American Protestantism.

There is little affectation of concealment, on the part of thoughtful Americans, of the conviction that [Pg 150] our national growth and the success of our government are subject to the universal laws according to which past empires have risen and perished. It is to be hoped that the success with which we have been blessed so far will not blind our eyes to this truth. We must have a solid basis of morality, or we are doomed to fall into such a condition as will make our absolute extinction a desirable thing. Whence is this new life to come? Is there anything in American Protestantism which can reverse its steady process of decay and disintegration? Has it any principles which can arrest for one moment the popular tendencies? We are unable to see in it even a “serviceable breakwater against errors more fundamental than its own”; quite the contrary. Its dogmatic front only serves to disgust those who mistake it for Christianity. Protestantism never converted a nation to Christianity or formed one. It could do neither even if it had an opportunity. In its latitudinarian aspect it directly fosters the present vagueness of moral convictions; while its emotional tendency only justifies the substitution of sentiment for reason and nullifies all attempts to subject the feelings to the judgment.

However one may be disposed to prefer the paganism which universally pervades our era to the unlovely fanaticism of earlier times, experience, both past and present, forbids the indulgence of any hope of future success springing from it.

It is hard to imagine what thought has been expended upon this subject by those who profess to see the way out of our present difficulties through a lavish system of public education. We hear declamations on this subject which fill us with bewilderment. If the public schools were able to furnish the people with sound moral instruction, we could understand something of the enthusiasm which describes them as the sources of national morality and as the salvation of the future. God knows we have no desire to cut off one ray of light; but the present moment is not one in which to indulge in madness. The sooner it is understood that our system of education is destroying the generation that is subjected to its influence, the better. It stands to reason that the great need of the hour is to save our children from its evils. Our public education barely succeeds in exaggerating all the moral and physical degeneracies of the day. To develop the desire and capacity for action and enjoyment, without providing means of guiding and restraining within wholesome limits the power thus produced, is simply to court disaster. We are suffering at present from aversion to hard labor and a quiet life from the unbridled desire of wealth and pleasure, from the absence of well-defined moral sentiment. The present system of education, so vehemently applauded, is an aggravation of all the morbid tendencies of our condition. This complaint will not receive much attention coming from this source, but it is finding universal utterance from the medical profession, and its justice will speedily appear to the most casual observer.

There is nothing in paganism, however brilliant its science or art, that can restore the health of a race which is morally corrupt. The “positive stage of development,” as it is styled by a certain class of modern writers, is an age of decrepitude. If the analogy be true which they hold to exist between the life of man and the development [Pg 151] of a race, we must expect death as soon as the “positive” era has been attained. The muscular epoch has passed. The age of delusions has left the mind incapable of anything but observing facts; the demand for artificial stimulants has exhausted the brain of the nation; and the body politic, though surrounded with luxury, is moribund beyond the power of recovery.

While we do not fully accept the analogy of positivism, we are convinced that neither Protestantism nor paganism can raise the nation from the slough in which it seems about to settle. Nor will it be saved by the infusion of fresh blood, as was the ancient world according to some ingenious writers. The Hun and Vandal and Goth would never have changed their originally savage state had they not met in the world that they destroyed an indestructible power which, after surviving the assaults of both Roman and barbarian, by its subtle constructive faculty altered the face of the earth. This power was Christianity, whose work of universal civilization was so fatally marred by the religious catastrophe of the sixteenth century.

Now that the false Christianity of our forefathers has developed its utter worthlessness as a guide, it will be well to inquire whether the religious system, which is historically identified with Christianity, contains any of those elements of stability so lacking in our civilization.

It is not to be expected that such a discussion, even if resulting favorably to Catholicity, will be sufficient to convert the American people to its faith, but it will greatly conduce to removing misconceptions and ignorance on the part of many of our fellow-citizens with regard to the relative merits of Catholicity and Protestantism.

No system can ever prove efficient which is unable to maintain its own integrity. No intellectual movement can hope to exert any large practical influence after it has lost its unity. Protestantism, having begun with a denial of the need of authority, was soon forced to contradict itself in practice in order to preserve its existence. But the principle which had given it life could not be disregarded, and the germ of discord, involved in the idea of a teaching body without any claim to be believed save what private conscience might be willing to concede to it, continued to produce disintegration without end.

The evils of our present exaggerated individualism are universally admitted. Men are united upon all points except those involving moral responsibility. While it is quite clear that in matters of science we are willing to trust to authority, on the other hand, in the more complex and easily perverted order of ideas (involving as they do the gravest consequences), every man is endowed with infallibility. This is simply an inversion of the natural order. The normal and rational order is preserved by Catholicity. With the Catholic Church religious truth as the basis of morality is a tradition whose bearing upon human science and politics always requires fresh application and is co-extensive with the possibility of human growth. But while this application of principle is left to individual effort and furnishes the proper exercise of the intellect, the excesses of individualism are always to be counteracted by a living authority. The ability of the church to maintain her unity has been [Pg 152] demonstrated and perfected in its operation by the storms which the last three centuries have launched against her. The opposition to her, on the contrary, has brought about its own destruction. If the absurdities of modern individualism are to be remedied, the cure lies in an earnest consideration of the claims of Christianity. Protestantism, though a grievous calamity, has served to settle for ever all those questions concerning the supreme source of doctrinal authority which had been raised by the intrigues of the secular power in the middle age. Now it is no longer possible to confuse the sentiment of obedience to authority by reference to unlawful sources. The attack of modern governments upon the church tends still further to circumscribe the limits of secular power, and to define clearly that which belongs to Cæsar and that which belongs to God.

The stability and permanence of Catholic thought are maintained in great measure by the prerogatives of the spiritual power, which promulgates and guards the divine tradition committed to its care. But the real power which that tradition exercises is its truth and its conformity with facts. The divine revelation is made to reason. It supposes a rational being. It is accepted on rational and convincing evidence, and becomes operative in virtue of divine grace. Its aim is to elevate and ennoble human nature and to heal its infirmities. In fulfilling this mission it acts in harmony with God’s other works, always above and with reason, but never against it. It puts no obstacle in the way of human science, which, as the Vatican Council declares, can only contradict revelation by being incomplete or by misinterpreting divine truth. It encourages labor in its development of nature as a means of discipline and as furnishing the necessary condition of peace and civilization. It stimulates art to search after beauty as a means of showing the necessity and embellishing the truth of heavenly doctrine. It is true that the Catholic faith does not permit the intellect to repose in any one of these occupations as its sole end. In the light of divine truth science and art are united by a synthesis; and the rest which faith forbids the soul to take in earthly pursuits is denied by its own nature. The synthesis which faith provides is sought restlessly and eagerly by the mind. Modern thought, which has been turned away from Catholicity, searches vainly for some principle of unity.

The faith which redeemed the ancient world and prepared the germs of that degree of civilization that has not been wholly destroyed by Protestantism, was in no respect like the withering, soul-destroying horrors of Calvinism. The doctrines which supplied matter for the intense intellectual life of the middle age, which corrected Aristotle and piled tome after tome of the close, serried reasoning of St. Thomas Aquinas, was in accord with human reason, vindicated the dignity and powers of man, and stimulated him with fresh vigor in every sphere of science, poetry, and art. Scholasticism was nothing else than an effort of human reason to demonstrate the reasonableness of Christianity. The present generation is so grossly ignorant of those eight hundred years of most intense life which formed Christendom that it is not capable of appreciating their influence and still less their character. But whoever will read the proœmium of the Summa Contra Gentiles [Pg 153] of the “Angel of the Schools” will see the difference between the constructive doctrine of the middle age and the reactionary delusions of the sixteenth century—the bitter fruit of that splendid revival of paganism. Protestantism, viewed as a system of doctrine, was simply an extravagant caricature of the supernaturalism of the Catholic Church. As a system of morality it was nothing else than the emancipation of the passions from the restraints imposed by Christianity. Having destroyed the necessary conditions of faith by denying authority, it presented the ideas of grace and sanctification in such a distorted manner as to render sacraments unnecessary and unmeaning, to do away with free will, merit, and natural goodness—in a word, to abolish human nature. Wherever the heirs of the so-called Reformers have revolted from the unnatural task of propagating their religious system they have left mankind, not simply bewildered by the darkness whence it has emerged, but without the heavenly guidance which genuine Christianity provides. It has robbed men of the light of heavenly doctrine, and has furthermore stripped them of the aid of the sacramental system, the means of the action of divine grace and of the growth of supernatural life, without which natural virtue and natural intelligence cannot long endure in purity.

The present state of our people calls for what Protestantism has not. Justification by faith could not save its first professor from breaking his vows and debauching another person equally bound; nor will its influence increase by repeating his famous dictum, Pecca fortiter sed crede fortius. The evanescence of genuine fanaticism on the part of evangelical religion is no guarantee of a better state of morals. Our people have got beyond simply believing and feeling; they wish to do right, but they are gradually coming to acknowledge that man cannot do right without knowing what he ought to do, viz., what is right; and the best and wisest will confess that they do not know what they ought to do, and that they can see nothing in the future from whence they may expect to learn. Whether they will be content to review the evidences of Catholicity we know not. Many are doing so, but the intense worldliness of the day is not favorable to serious thought on the part, of the multitude. Should, however, the authority of true Christianity be revealed to, and accepted by, them, we may justly expect a development of the utmost significance in the history of the world.

Catholicity not only preserves and restores the Christian truth of which men have been robbed by the heresies of the Reformation, but it preserves, sanctifies, and makes fruitful the natural goodness which remains in the individual, the race, and the nation. But above all things it applies those principles of natural justice and purity which are now so seriously jeopardized.

An unjust man can console himself, when transmitting his dishonest gains to his descendants, by reflecting that he is to be justified by faith alone. This has been done to our certain knowledge, and doubtless every New Englander can recall similar cases. A man who admits the injustice of his transactions can find ways of forgetting his indebtedness. The fraudulent bankrupt can revel in the wealth of his wife and children. Even the thief [Pg 154] who admits in the abstract the obligation of restoring that which he has stolen, without the assistance of the confessional is too apt to cling to that which he has once acquired.

We want, first, to hear the Catholic doctrine of the necessity of restitution in the place of maudlin denunciation of “carnal righteousness.” We want to have it well understood that no amount of exalted emotion will relieve the guilty thief until he has handed over his ill-gotten goods. We do not say that the neglect of this doctrine is the cause of the special cases of corruption which come before our eyes; but we freely assert that the spread of dishonesty is due to nothing less than the ineptitude and fatuity of Protestantism in this respect.

We further assert our conviction that no amount of preaching will change the present widespread disregard of the rights of property. These must be enforced in the private life of each man, backed by a supernatural principle. The means which the Catholic Church has provided for the support and assistance of the individual conscience is the confessional. This it is which has created the very sentiment of honesty that is now dying out among us for want of it. Antiquity did not possess this sentiment. The Greeks encouraged stealing and made a god of theft. The Romans acknowledged only the claims of hospitality and the force of law. Our barbarian ancestors grew and thrived upon piracy and pillage. It was no abstract or speculative doctrine which overcame their savage traits and established the new sentiment which condemns successful villany; nor will the present decay of honesty be arrested by any system which divorces it from the institution that has brought it into existence.

The most fatal symptom, however, of our lapse into paganism reveals itself in that department of morality in which the struggle is carried on with the most lawless of human passions. The morality of Protestantism offered no assistance to the individual in this conflict between reason and the excesses of that instinct which is at once the most necessary and at the same time the least governable. Developments such as Mormonism and the Oneida Community, the increasing frequency of divorce, and the freedom with which the maxims of the ancient Christian morality are questioned, are sufficient to illustrate the decay of fixed principles of morality. Such results are not strange when we recall the actual conduct of the founders of Protestantism. Nor is it unreasonable to expect a certain amount of laxity in an intellectual movement which constitutes each individual his own supreme judge and teacher of morals; but the worst is that the very source of purity is thoroughly vitiated. In ancient Christianity the laws of chastity were clearly defined, peremptory, and plainly set before the intellect. Modern individualism, having begun by denying man’s responsibility and asserting his necessary depravity, has placed the rule of virtue, not in reason, but in instinct. The old morality was a sentiment based upon dogmatic conviction. The modern Neo-protestantism has nothing upon which to depend for its purity of life except the natural feelings of modesty and shame. The very idea of attempting to subject sexual instinct to reason is scouted as an absurdity by popular writers. The license taken by those whose occupation is to amuse the [Pg 155] public every day increases in shamelessness. Art, whether pictorial or dramatic, will not listen to any suggestion of restraint, and the natural sentiment upon which our virtue rests is constantly being weakened.

It is foolishly supposed that this species of disorder, having gone to certain lengths, will at last return to rational limits. It is with some such notion that the enthusiasts, who profess to see in popular education a panacea for all evils, expatiate upon the future. This, however, is mere thoughtlessness. The development of the nervous temperament in the system of a nation is no remedy for this moral illness; on the contrary, the reverse is true. The result is the most dangerous form of sensuality. When an intense and excitable organism, quick in its intellectual movements, eager in its appreciation of beauty, is left to follow its own instincts in the application of wealth, we have the nearest approach to the ancient classic type of culture. The recent development of American art is a source of universal remark. Here the successful artist finds golden appreciation. The diva of the lyric stage, the painter and sculptor, meet with substantial welcome. The growing taste for beauty of line is well known and acknowledged. Extravagance in dress is becoming a national weakness. There is every indication that the next century will witness in our descendants a race more elegant in its tastes, more intense in its enjoyment of every form of beauty, than even the heirs of European refinement—a generation as unlike the ungainly type of Brother Jonathan as an Athenian of the age of Pericles was dissimilar to the rude Pelasgic fisherman of the Hellespont. We think of Greece most commonly in her æsthetic character and influence; but we must not forget that her immorality as recorded in history was hideously dark. The product of her sensuous and overwrought knowledge and enjoyment of nature spread with her literature and art. They brought death to the strong and vigorous race which had overcome the world. The annals of Suetonius and Tacitus, the calm records of current facts, are too obscene to bear circulation among ordinary readers of our day. The literature of their time has to be expurgated before it is fit to be perused by youthful students. The crimes which are charged by the apostle in his terrible invective against the heathen culture, which are rehearsed by Terence and Aristophanes, satirized by Juvenal, laughed at by Horace, celebrated in the flowing measures of Anacreon, Ovid, and Catullus, and coldly set down by historians as the public acts of the cultivated classes—these frightful excesses live to-day, with all their unnatural beastliness, in the exquisitely-wrought marbles and frescos of Pompeii.

There was never a case in which either a nation or an individual was cured of this species of corruption by increasing the æsthetic faculties and amplifying the temptations of wealth. But, it is urged, education gives the rising generation the ability to read, and therefore puts it in the way of acquiring sound instruction. Let it be understood that we believe no parent has a right to deny this instruction to his children; but we bespeak on the part of all earnest men the utmost attention to the practical issue of this theory, in order that they may see how incomplete it is as a safeguard to the virtue of the youth now [Pg 156] growing up. What is the nature of our popular literature? Upon what sort of reading is the newly-acquired art exercised? What is the ratio of books which furnish useful instruction to those works whose aim is solely to amuse and excite the imagination? And of the latter class, what is the proportion between the harmless and noxious publications? Those who receive only elementary instruction practically go to school in order to learn to read novels and the trashy and immoral periodicals whose costly illustrations and increasing number amply prove the increasing demand for them. The influence of the press is necessary and indispensable, but there is nothing in our literature which will in any degree restrain the tendencies of our civilization.

We wish it were possible to use language of sufficient force to express the reality of our perilous condition; for our people have already gone far enough in this direction to excite the utmost alarm. The moral corruption of New England is such as to threaten with extinction the vigorous race which originally inhabited it. The medical profession of this country is so profoundly impressed with the constant decrease in the birthrate of the native stock and with its marked physical decadence, that essays on these subjects are to be seen in every scientific periodical.

Ten years ago Dr. Storer called attention to the fact that, as far back as 1850, the natural increase of the population, or the excess of births over deaths, was by those of foreign origin, and that subsequently the ratio in favor of foreign parents was constantly on the increase. “In other words,” he says, “it is found that, in so far as depends upon the American and native element, and in the absence of the existing immigration from abroad, the population of our older States, even allowing for the loss by emigration, is stationary or decreasing.” Dr. Storer did not hesitate to attribute this fact to the criminal destruction of human life or to the suppression of the family by those whose natural instincts ought to procure its conservation. The evidences of this widespread evil are before us in every daily issue of the press.

The demands of pleasure, the numerous inducements to women to find their occupation outside of domestic life, and to shrink from the duties and cares of maternity—none of those temptations which furnish the occasion of this crime are to be met by increasing the size and beauty of our public schools or by providing the children of the poor with elegant accomplishments. Nor will the result be more favorable if the privilege of the elective franchise is added to the other extra-domestic responsibilities of American women. What, then, is to save us when marriage, if recognized, has ceased to be a desirable state, when luxury and nervous development have subjected the chastity of single life to the severest temptation, and when our inherited morality has vanished in the process of our growth?

If the native American race is not going to die out, it must learn from foreigners the secret of their vitality. Christianity has, in the confessional, the means of applying not only sacramental grace to the fallen and repentant, but of securing them from further disorder. Dr. Storer has told the country very plainly that “the different frequency of the abortions depends, not upon a difference in social position or in fecundity, [Pg 157] but in the religion.” In other words, the cultivated American is far below the ignorant immigrant in morality; and the reason of this is that the immigrant referred to is a Catholic and his employer is not.

Dr. Storer proceeds to observe: “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.” This touches the fundamental truth involved in the whole discussion—“an abstract morality” never can prove effective against any concrete evil. But the doctor further expresses his conviction, drawing the legitimate conclusion and stating the fact: “And there can be no doubt that the Romish ordinance, flanked on the one hand by the confessional and by denouncement and excommunication on the other” (he has previously quoted from the pastoral of a Catholic prelate), “has saved to the world thousands of infant lives.”

The American people is beginning to perceive that wealth and culture without true morality mean ruin. If it does not perceive that Protestantism is the cause of its present corruption, it at least confesses that its inherited religion is powerless to remedy the evils of the day. We cannot ask it to reject its false guide much faster than it is doing. We cannot tell how soon it will be able to receive the divine truth of Christianity. It will be no pleasure to us to have the old faith vindicated by the destruction of this people.

We beg to be allowed to preserve our Catholic population and to keep them pure and faithful, at least until non-Catholics can offer something which will meet their own contingencies. If this demand be persistently disregarded and our honest attempt to save ourselves be misconstrued into an assault upon others, we will do the best we can, at all events.

But, in the meantime, let all earnest men admit the reality of danger. Do not let attention be absorbed by particular manifestations of a disease which is universal. The evils which threaten our life will not be removed by retrenchment of government expenses, or by a temporary destruction of party tyranny, or by an ostentatious simplicity in official circles, or by “justification by faith,” or by pietistic feeling, or by acting out individual crotchets, or even by sound moral doctrine in an abstract form, but by the living truth of God, taught by him through human lips, applied by him with divine efficacy through the ministry of human hands. The truth which has saved the ancient world and has produced all that is desirable in modern civilization is alone able to preserve our nation in its future growth.

A FRENCH NOVEL.[69]

This title will prove a disappointment to those who only associate the idea of a French novel with that typical production of vicious and feverish literature to which the fiction-mongers of France have so long accustomed us, and whose corrupt influence has made itself felt far beyond the limits of the nation which gives it birth. Our present purpose is not to discuss one of those pernicious books, but to consider one which rises as far above their level by its artistic beauty and literary merits as by the nobler tone of its morality. A novel by a Catholic writer, impregnated from first to last with the spirit and principle of the faith, full of noble sentiments, and yet as amusing and as exciting as any “naughty” novel; a book where all the good people, even the holy people, are as charming, witty, odd, or fascinating as if they were anything but holy; a book that conveys in the characters and scenes it brings before us a great moral lesson, and which at the same time absorbs and excites us as powerfully as the cleverest novel of the sensational school, with its inevitable murders and forgeries and double marriages—the appearance of a novel such as this is surely an event that it behoves us to examine closely as the curious literary phenomenon which it is.

Mrs. Augustus Craven’s last work, Le Mot de l’Enigme, which, under the title of The Veil Withdrawn, appeared in The Catholic World simultaneously with its issue in the Correspondant of Paris, is known to most of the readers of the present article, but we would ask them if, when enjoying its persual, they have sometimes stopped to consider what a genuine achievement the book was, and how pregnant with promise for the lighter Catholic literature of the future? Any book by the author of the Récit d’une Sœur is sure to command a wide audience in Europe and America among readers of different languages and creeds; but there are reasons why The Veil Withdrawn should meet with a specially triumphant welcome from us Catholics, for it is in truth a triumph over prejudices whose narrow and tyrannical rule have hitherto been fatal to Catholic fiction. The Récit d’une Sœur, the peerless story that stands unrivalled amidst the literature of the world, taught many lessons to our day, but no one, perhaps, more important, considering its possible results, than that which it conveyed to Catholic writers—namely, that religion, in its most ardent form and its most rigid application, is compatible with the tenderest romance; that human hearts and imaginations, far from being chilled or fettered by the sublime truths of the faith, are kindled and enlarged by their influence; that human passions come into play as powerfully in souls ruled by the divine law as in those that reject and defy it, the only difference being that to the former they are weapons used in noble warfare, servants and auxiliaries, whereas to the others they are tyrants that strike only to destroy. The loves of Alexandrine and Albert revealed this [Pg 159] secret to the world, and this alone would have sufficed to immortalize the Récit. No romance ever reached the skyey heights to which these lovers soared; and yet, while their hearts sang their sweet love-song together, their souls were fixed on God, dreaming of heaven, where their love was to find its perfect consummation, scorning the pitiful meed of earthly happiness, unless it might lead them to the secure possession of the eternal bliss of which this was but the transient foretaste. “Pour la vie, c’est trop court!”[70] was Alexandrine’s reply when Albert asked her for the ring on which the words were graven, Pour la vie! And such should be the motto of all love worthy of the name.

This pure key-note is struck and sustained with a master-hand throughout the whole story of The Veil Withdrawn, and the success with which the principle it enunciates has been forced into the service of art is the point which we would invite Catholic writers in all countries to consider attentively. Our grand mistake, as a rule, is to assume that Catholic literature, in order to be true to its mission, must be constantly talking of holy things, bringing forward pious maxims and practices; that the heroes and heroines of its stories must be pious people, or else very wicked people whose final cause is the glorification of the pious ones who are to convert them; it must never deal openly with the great problems of life, never grapple with its deepest mysteries, never describe men and women as they ordinarily exist around us—human beings endowed at their birth with the fatal inheritance of Adam, with mighty capabilities for good and evil, with passions and instincts that have to work out their issue to ruin or to endless victory; souls where all the forces are clashing in deadly and desperate strife—these things are forbidden ground to the Catholic novelist. He may tread timidly on the outskirts of the battle-field, but he must not venture into the thick of the fight; he must not lift the veil and let us look upon the scene where this momentous combat is going forward, where nature and grace and all the allied enemies of the human heart are wrestling and striving in fierce war. These things would not be “edifying”; they would not be fit reading for young girls; they might put ideas into their heads and excite their imaginations. And why, we ask, is it invariably taken for granted that Catholic writers only write for young girls? Are there no Catholic men in the world? It might be urged, with better show of reason, that young girls are not obliged to read novels at all—stories, yes; but novels do not form any necessary part of their education. These are intended for men and women—people who have found out the “answer to the riddle,” learned some of the dark and painful lessons of life; who turn to the pages of a novel to find an hour’s harmless recreation, if nothing more, and to forget the dull round of care and vexing realities in the amusement or excitement of imaginary troubles and joys. We are far from saying that the novel has no higher purpose than this; but if it claimed no other, this, in itself, is a legitimate one. Human nature must have relaxation. The most ascetic saints sought recreation of some kind from the strain of work and contemplation. Still more must ordinary mortals seek it; and as novel-reading has become one of the easiest and most popular forms of [Pg 160] mental diversion, it is of the highest importance that it should be of good and wholesome quality. Now, a novel is neither good nor wholesome when it ignores the canons of art, and eschews the true study of human nature, and confines itself to pretty commonplaces and pious allusions and exemplary sentiments exchanged between namby-pamby people who are represented as in a state of society which, practically, has no prototype in real life, where strong passions and conflicting interests and fierce temptations have no existence, but where all difficulties are adjusted by a pious suggestion offered at the right moment by a friend or a book. Grown-up men and women will not be put off with this sort of thing, be they ever such good Catholics; when they take up a novel, they do so for interest or amusement, and, for lack of better, they fall back on the real novels, sensational or otherwise.

This is a lamentable state of things, and as fatal to Catholic writers as to their readers. It is this false idea of the character and requirements of Catholic literature which has brought it to the low ebb at which it now is among English-speaking Catholics, in spite of the growing numbers of a cultivated and intelligent audience. Every one recognizes the fact, and many deplore it, but no one has the courage to attempt the remedy. It would require, indeed, something more than any effort of individual influence to break down the prejudices and puerile traditions that fence in the authorized field of Catholic fiction in the present day, and it is difficult to say which calls for strongest denunciation—the prohibition which excludes certain subjects, or the large license given to the use of others. The Catholic novelist is forbidden to strike the deep, vibrating chords of nature and of souls, but he believes himself free to handle the most sacred subjects, to preach and moralize to the top of his bent. It is hard to speak of this folly as dispassionately as we should wish; but looking at it with all possible indulgence, is there not something in the stupid conceit and self-complacent audacity of it that may justly rouse indignation? We see grave men, who have graduated in the schools, give up long years to the study of sacred science, in order that they may some day be competent to speak worthily on these high themes, that they may learn how to balance the relations of right and wrong, and define the limits of temptation and sin, of cause and effect; and when, with knowledge ripened by study and meditation, they venture to write, it is in a spirit of great reverence and in fear and trembling. On the other hand, we see incompetent laymen, young ladies and young gentlemen fresh from school, utterly inexperienced, but well supplied with the boldness of inexperience and incompetence, dipping a dainty pen into a silver inkstand and proceeding to discourse in a novel of pious subjects—of prayer, and temptation, and sacraments, and priests and the priestly character, and controversial subjects—as flippantly as they might discuss the merits of a new opera or a new costume. And they fancy, forsooth, that this is doing good and giving edification! They imagine that it is enough to mention sacred subjects and emit pious or quasi-pious sentiments in order to reach the human heart and strike the sursum corda on its springs! One could afford to laugh at the silly delusion, if the danger did not lie so close to the folly of it. A [Pg 161] moment’s reflection and a little humility would suffice to convince these well-meaning persons of their mistake. Many of them might really attain their end of edifying if they had only the sense to confine themselves within the range of their powers. If a beginner, or one endowed with a delicate sense of music but limited musical ability, should attempt to perform one of Beethoven’s glorious sonatas, he would only irritate us by spoiling the masterpiece; but if the same person wisely contented himself with playing some simple air, he might afford genuine and unalloyed pleasure, touching some chord of feeling in the listener’s heart, evoking, mayhap, sweet memories of childhood, sacred and long forgotten. Few things provoke the disgust of an intelligent reader, pious or not, more than to come upon religious platitudes in a book ostensibly written to amuse; and the prospect of meeting with this kind of thing at every page is sufficient to prejudice him against a book which bears a Catholic name on the title-page. Even the name of a Catholic publisher brands it at first sight as “dull and silly.” Here, as elsewhere, the cause and effect react upon each other, and the puerile tone and absence of artistic treatment in the author, by failing to gain the favor and attention of the public, paralyzes the most energetic efforts of Catholic publishers, and those few Catholic writers who can command a wider audience are unavoidably driven to the Protestant publishers in order to secure a hearing.

Is it too much to say that a Catholic novelist who would successfully break through these narrow-minded and false theories, and courageously inaugurate a new reign in Catholic fiction, would be conferring a great benefit on our generation? We claim for Mrs. Augustus Craven the merit of having achieved this feat. The mission which she began in the Récit d’une Sœur was successfully continued in Fleurange, and may be said to triumph completely in The Veil Withdrawn. Her last novel is a book which appeals as strongly to the interest of the unbeliever and the heretic as of the most fervent Catholic. The moral lesson it conveys may be accepted or not, just as the reader pleases; it is there, brilliantly and powerfully delivered; but, like so many messages broadly written on the face of nature or faintly whispered to our hearts, we may hearken or we may close our ears to it, as we choose; the story still remains one of enthralling interest, full of tenderest romance, of fiery passion, of picturesque description, of sparkling repartee, of gay and pathetic and thrilling situations. With the skill of a real artist the author lifts the curtain and bids us look into the hearts of our fellow-creatures; she touches the hidden springs, reveals the dubious motives, evil sometimes blending with good so closely that it requires the finest analysis to discern their true proportions, to decompose the elements, and show where and how far each in turn prevails.

The two characters who stand out from the canvas as the leading figures in the picture are brought face to face in the most terrible conflict that human hearts can know. Ginevra—not a child, not a placid convent maiden suspecting no life beyond her “narrowing nunnery walls,” but a woman with a strong, impassioned soul—is first inebriated with the pure wine of permitted happiness; the cup is dashed from her, and she tries [Pg 162] to clutch it in defiance and despair. It eludes her still. She beholds her happiness wrecked, her life blighted, at the very outset. She does not take her rosary, and, with conventional propriety, accept the ruin of her young life with the resigned spirit and smiling countenance of a saint; far from it. The evil that is in her starts into activity and makes a fierce fight against her cruel lot. She plunges into the whirl of society, and tries to drown her misery in such consolations as excitement and gratified vanity can give. We follow her step by step in the perilous career, now trembling at her rashness, now rejoicing at her escape, but never, in the bottom of our hearts, believing that she will prove unworthy of her nobler self.

Let us glance over the story, not to analyze its merits as a work of high art and moral philosophy, but simply to review it in the light of a novel characteristic of our times and full of the stir of nineteenth-century life.

It opens at Messina, in an old palazzo, where Ginevra, blossoming out in her fifteenth summer, sits watching the sea through the half-closed window, listening to the wave sobbing on the beach, unconscious and dreamy, but already vibrating to the “low music of humanity” that stirs the unwakened pulses of her heart. She rivets our attention at the first glance as a creature whose beauty, sensitiveness, and dormant energy of character contain all the elements of some high romance. The description of her home and its inmates forms a charming and animated picture. Fabrizio, the learned and somewhat austere father; Bianca, the mother, with her tenderly brooding love; Livia, the sister, at first so misjudged, but destined to rise to such prestige amidst them all; Ottavia, the fussy, superstitious, devoted old nurse; Mario, the sombre and jealous-tempered brother—they all come before us with the reality of living characters whom we love, fear, or suspect as they gradually reveal themselves. The episode of the flower flung from the window in a moment of frolic and girlish vanity, and which leaves so deep a mark on Ginevra’s life, is cleverly introduced and prepares us for the retribution which awaits the poor child’s innocent misdemeanor. Her life glides on peacefully in the old frescoed saloon, where she cons her book and tends her nightingales, until one day, while high perched on a stool, ministering to her singing bird, the old majordomo flings the door wide open and in a sonorous voice announces Sua eccellenza il Duca di Valenzano! Ginevra starts, and so does the reader; for he knows instinctively that this visitor is the fairy prince of the story, destined to make the golden-haired maiden supremely happy or supremely miserable. Ginevra’s confusion, at being discovered by this illustrious intruder in such an awkward attitude and so childishly engaged, is charmingly described. She knows not whether to be terrified or delighted when the handsome duke goes forward and assists her to descend from her aerial standpoint. But old Don Fabrizio knows what to feel about it, and surveys the group in the embrasure of the window with a glance of stern displeasure. This high-born client of his has nothing in common with Don Fabrizio’s daughter, and it is with undisguised reluctance that the proud lawyer obeys the duke’s request to introduce him to the signorina.

[Pg 163] And now the story is fairly afloat, and we follow it with an interest that grows in proportion as the plot advances, rising in dramatic power at every chapter. We know that Valenzano is not to be trusted, that he has in him all the elements of a faithless lover and a cruel husband; but we surrender ourselves all the same to the charm of his manner, his genius, his irresistible fascinations. The love-making is as warm as the author dares to make it in a country where the freedom of Anglo-Saxon courtship is unknown, and where the course of true love runs smoothly between the contracting families on one side and the family lawyers on the other. Ginevra goes forth to her new life with a mixture of delight and fear that are like the foreshadowing of the flickered destiny that awaits her, and Livia’s voice strikes like a note of painful warning in the concert of the family joy and triumph and congratulation, when she reminds Ginevra that “marriage is like death”—a thing that we wait and watch for, but never know until we have passed the gates and it is too late to turn back. The description of the bridal festivities, when she goes home to her husband’s palace, and, worn out by the grandeur and the glare, takes refuge alone in the quiet starlight, and removes the circlet of glittering jewels from her brow, that cannot bear the pressure any longer, presents one of those pictures of life in the great Italian world that Mrs. Craven excels in depicting.

Life has now become like an enchanted dream to Ginevra. But the first touch of the awakening reality is not long delayed. One night, when the moon was high in the blue heavens and flooding earth and sea with a mystic glory, Ginevra and Lorenzo were sitting on the terrace, listening to the water lapping on the shore, to the nightingales trilling in the ilex groves; the young wife, hushed into silence by the ecstatic beauty of the scene, laid her hand upon her husband’s arm and whispered to him, “Let us lift up our hearts in prayer for one moment, and give thanks for all this beauty.” Lorenzo bent on her a look of tenderest love, and then murmured with a smile, as if answering the poetic folly of a child,

“‘Beatrice in suso, ed io in lei guardava.’[71]

Thine eyes are my heaven, Ginevra. I feel no need to raise my own any higher.” A cold chill like the first suspicion of a great sorrow crept over the young wife. But Lorenzo quickly chased it away, and she tries to banish the memory of it. But we do not forget it. Slight as the incident is, it has all the import of the first growl of the distant thunder, the small patch of cloud, “no bigger than a man’s hand,” upon the summer sky, that are the certain forerunners of the storm.

But the storm will not burst just yet, and meantime we follow Ginevra in her brilliant career, first travelling here and there with her husband, and finally enthroned as a queen in her delightful world at Naples. The first thing that makes us tremble for her is Lorenzo’s startled exclamation of anger—was it?—when he comes upon Donna Faustina’s card amongst those that are left at the young duchess’ door, and the latter, in surprise, asks what it means. He turns it off adroitly, and Ginevra dismisses it from her mind. The interval that follows is bright with incident and pictures of society in Naples and in Paris. We [Pg 164] see Lorenzo at work in his studio, where Ginevra sits to him as a model for his Vestal, and where his rapturous admiration of her beauty makes her recoil instinctively as from a homage unworthy of her, too much “of the earth earthly.” And yet this husband, who is almost an unbeliever, who smiles with indulgent fondness on his wife’s ardent piety, is glad enough that she should have religion to guard her from the perils that beset her on all sides; he recognizes the power and utility of her faith, and is careful not to shock it or to let her see how little he really shares it. Lando, the cousin and boon companion of the duke, now comes upon the scene, and for a time we side with Ginevra in her dislike and suspicion of him; but soon we find out our mistake, and acknowledge that, in spite of his loose principles and wild ways, he is kind-hearted and a stanch and loyal friend to Ginevra. He does his best to save both her and Lorenzo, though to the last he is unable to understand why any woman in her right mind should care so much more for her husband’s love than for his fortune, and why the ruin of the latter should be as nothing to her compared to even a passing breach in the former. The scene at the concert, where she first detects Lorenzo at a card-table, and it breaks upon her that her husband is a gambler, is finely introduced, and the conversation of Lando with the terrified young wife is admirably drawn. But we know that the real crisis in her peace and happiness has yet to come, and we hurry on till Donna Faustina enters. Lorenzo disarms us, and almost gains our sympathy for this evil genius of Ginevra, by the frankness with which he tells her story to the latter; but the relations between all three, as he now tries to establish them, are radically false, and it requires no prophetic eye to foresee how they must end. What barrier have either Faustina or Lorenzo to stem the torrent of passion when it breaks loose—outraged love and desire of revenge on her side, and on his the embers of a love that he fancies dead, but which it only needs the vanity of his own undisciplined nature and the spell of her guilty passion to fan into a livelier flame than ever? While the storm is rapidly rising in this direction, Gilbert de Kergy crosses Ginevra’s path; but she is yet far from suspecting that he is the messenger of fate to her, the one who is to exercise a supreme influence in her life and call out its energies in her soul’s defence with a courage that till now has never been demanded of her. We know how the battle is sure to go with Ginevra, as we foresee the issue with Lorenzo and Faustina. We see the force that will ensure the victory in the one case, just as we see how the want of it must lead to slavery and surrender in the other. And here again the skill and power of the author triumph and afford a striking contrast to the old system we have denounced. She never moralizes, or reminds us that Lorenzo, being a bad Christian, who never goes to Mass or the sacraments, is certain to fall, and that Ginevra, in spite of passions that sway her heart with such relentless power, will come safe out of it because of that restraining force which, like a mysterious presence, rules her even when she is unconscious of it—the author does not say these things; she proves them by making her characters demonstrate their truth and act out their conclusions. We will quote the passage where Gilbert and Ginevra [Pg 165] part, only to meet again in those sweet and tempting days at Naples. Gilbert has been lecturing on his travels with an eloquence that carried away his hearers. Then Ginevra says:

“I remained seated near the mantelpiece, and fell into a dreamy silence, while Diana sat down to the piano. She began to execute, with consummate art, a nocturne of Chopin’s, which sounded to me like the expression, the very language, of my own thoughts.… I woke up from my reverie with a strange thrill, and blushed to the very roots of my hair; for in lifting my eyes I met those of Gilbert fixed upon me, and mine were full of tears. I brushed them away quickly, and muttered something about the effect Chopin’s music always had on my nerves, and then rose and drew near to the piano, where Diana continued to pass her hands in rapid changes over the keys.… Gilbert remained silent and pensive in the place where I had left him, following me with his eyes, and perhaps trying to guess the real cause of my emotion.… When the time had come for me to go, and Mme. de Kergy clasped me to her heart, I no longer strove to repress my tears.… Gilbert gave me his arm and conducted me to my carriage without speaking. As I was entering it, he said in a voice that faltered slightly:

“‘Those whom you are leaving are greatly to be pitied, madam.’

“‘I am still more to be pitied,’ I replied, and my tears flowed freely.

“He was silent for a moment, and then he said:

“‘As for me, I have the hope of seeing you again; for I shall come to Naples, … if I dare.’

“‘And why should you not dare? You will be received and welcomed as a friend.’

“He made no reply, but when he had placed me in the carriage, and I held out my hand to him to say adieu, he murmured in a low voice: Au revoir!’”

And he keeps his word. He goes to Naples and meets Ginevra at a ball, whither she has rushed, half mad with despair and jealousy, reckless of everything resolved to drown the anguish of her heart in the intoxication of gayety and the adulation of the world, that until now she had carelessly despised. It was the night after the masked ball at the Festina, where, on the impulse of the moment, she and her beautiful friend Stella went as dominos to join in the fun and mystify their friends a little. Ginevra recognized Lorenzo’s stately figure the moment she entered the ball-room, and, terrified at finding herself alone in the crowd, seized hold of his arm, clinging to him in silence. Lorenzo, deceived by the color of her domino, mistakes her for Faustina, whom he is expecting. He stoops low and whispers a tender welcome in her ear. Ginevra, with a stifled cry, starts from him and rushes frantically from the scene. The next night, with the delirium of this discovery upon her, she goes forth in her loveliest attire to dispute the palm of beauty with the rest.

“I had my diamonds and pearls brought out, and I gave precise directions as to how I intended to wear them; this done, long before the time came I began my toilet and spent an endless time over it. So many women seem to take pleasure in making a triumphant entry into a ball-room, I said to myself, and in being flattered and admired, why should I not taste of this pleasure as well as they? I am beautiful, I know that—very beautiful even. Why should I not attract and indulge my vanity and coquetry like other women?”

And she does attract, and her vanity is satisfied to overflowing. Her beauty and the dazzling splendor of her jewels create a perfect furore the moment she appears. She announces her intention of dancing, and the noblest cavaliers in the room are at her feet in a moment, quarrelling for the honor of [Pg 166] her hand. Never was the triumph of a coquette more complete than Ginevra’s. Her youth and its instinctive love of pleasure vindicated themselves for a time, and she enjoyed her success to the full; but as the night wore on nobler instincts asserted themselves, worthier voices made themselves heard above the din of this ardent and puerile vanity, and Ginevra feels the cold chill of remorse stealing over her; a sense of vague misfortune takes possession of her and stills her feverish gayety like a touch of ice. Her last partner leads her to her seat, and she sinks into it exhausted and miserable.

“At the same moment,” she says, “I heard near me a voice well known though well-nigh forgotten—a voice at once calm, strong, and sweet, but which now sounded slightly sarcastic. ‘Although I cannot aspire to the honor of dancing with the Duchess de Valenzano, may I hope that she will deign to recognize me?’

“I turned around quickly. The speaker who stood there and thus addressed me was Gilbert de Kergy.”

The ordinary French novelist had here a fine opportunity for bringing matters to a crisis between Ginevra and Gilbert; but the present author uses it differently. Gilbert does not take advantage of the temporary madness of Ginevra to gain influence over her and beguile her from her allegiance to Lorenzo, faithless and cruel as he is. Gilbert is far too noble for this, and his first feeling, on beholding his ideal in this dangerous and unworthy atmosphere, is one of censure and poignant regret. Neither he nor Ginevra is of the conventional type of defaulters; both are good, high-principled, and brave; they are both practical Christians, and the idea of betraying their duty to God and to their own honor would have revolted them had it presented itself in its naked horror. But it did not. The approach was gradual, imperceptible. And here we have a great truth illustrated—one which it is customary in Catholic authors to ignore practically, if not theoretically: The possession of the faith and the practice of religion do not act as opiates on human beings, deadening their hearts and annihilating nature, and lifting them to a secure region where the great temptations of life cannot reach them, or where, if they do, they glide off harmless as arrows glance from the steel cuirass of the soldier. Ginevra is pure and true as ever woman was who vowed at the altar “that most solemn vow that a woman can utter”; she was, moreover, genuinely pious. Gilbert was the very ideal of manly chivalry and honor and goodness, an accomplished type of the Christian gentleman; but neither he nor she was fireproof when the time of trial came. He loved Ginevra before he knew it; and she, forsaken, humiliated, stung in her love and her wifely pride, is thrown into his constant companionship, not by her seeking, but through one of those accidents to which women of her class and circumstances are liable every day. She is grateful for Gilbert’s brotherly regard, she admires his noble life and his sentiments, so true, so different from those of other men; she is grateful to him for the frank rebuke which he spoke out at the ball when she was drifting she knew not whither. Step by step the friendship grows to a tenderer feeling, and at last culminates in a love whose depth and power Ginevra does not even suspect, so gradual has been its development. We tremble for her; but even when we see her tottering blindfold on the edge of the abyss, we feel certain she will never [Pg 167] take the fatal plunge. All this is depicted with infinite delicacy and rare psychological skill.

Livia now reappears upon the scene as one of the visible forces that are guarding Ginevra along the slippery road. Livia is one of the most striking and carefully drawn of the subordinate characters. It is worth mentioning en passant that here, as elsewhere, Mrs. Craven breaks boldly through the time-honored traditions of the Catholic novelist. The holier and more spiritual-minded her dramatis personæ, the brighter, more sympathetic and accessible they are. Stella, the heroic friend in days of sorrow, so gifted, so beautiful, so untainted with the spirit of the world where she lives and moves—Stella has the high animal spirits of a school-girl, the glad heart—le sang joyeux, as she herself calls it—of a happy child. Livia, who in her father’s home was pensive almost to melancholy, the moment she embraces the austere rule of the cloister, spending her days in the contemplation of heavenly things, grows as merry as a lark. Joy is henceforth the keynote and regulator of her life; we have no trace of the downcast face and solemn, mournful voice that have hitherto been characteristic of pious people in novels. No one pulls long faces here, or whines or sighs, except it may be those who have forsaken the fountain where true joy has its spring, to drink of the poisoned waters of this world’s pleasures, of sin, ambition, or folly. How winning, too, is Livia’s tender interest in the gay life of her brilliant young sister! She has not closed her heart against the actors on the world’s stage outside her convent gates, but keeps her sympathies wide open to all life and all humanity beyond them.

“‘Gina mia, you don’t tell me everything,’ she says one day that Ginevra is conversing with her through the grating. ‘Is it that you think I take no interest in your life now?’

“‘It is not only that, Livia, but it is difficult to talk about such trivial, foolish things in presence of these bars and looking at you as you stand behind them.’

“‘Nay, it is always good for me to hear you and for you to talk to me,’ replied Livia. ‘It is true that when Aunt Clelia comes here with her daughters, I put on a severe countenance now and then, and tell them pretty plainly what I think of the world; … but I must say that my aunt bears me no malice for it, for she counts on my vocation to get good husbands for Mariuccia and Teresina.… She does not look upon me as “jettatrice” at all now, I can tell you!’

“She laughed so merrily as she spoke that I could not help exclaiming with envy and surprise:

“‘Livia, how happy you are to be so gay!’”

The sense of humor, so essential to preserve the balance in true mental power, is not wanting in this story. Donna Clelia is lightly and brightly touched. She is everywhere true to herself; self-important, silly, and good-natured, she and her daughters are redeemed from hopeless vulgarity as much by their naïveté and naturalness as by the sheer inability of the author to depict vulgarity—a fact which we notice without comment, leaving our readers to decide whether it be a merit or a fault. Donna Clelia’s intense satisfaction at being able to parade “my niece, the duchess” is one of those touches that throw a character into striking relief. Her enthusiasm for the “view” from the baronessa’s house, where “not a donkey-boy, nor a cart, nor a horse, nor a man, nor a woman could pass in the narrow street but you saw them so plainly you could tell the pattern of their clothes,” gives us the measure of her artistic perceptions, [Pg 168] while her raptures over the situation “with the church on one side and the new theatre on the other … figurateir! so that the baronessa can let herself into the church on the right, and through a passage into her box in the theatre on the left,” is equally characteristic of the manners and minds of the society around her. The description of the splendid pageant of the Carnival, passing under Donna Clelia’s balcony, is as spirited a bit of picturesque writing as we have come upon for a long time. But we hurry on through these gay and vivid scenes, impatient for the crisis that is at hand between Gilbert and Ginevra. Nothing, so far, had prepared our heroine for its approach.

“Apparently,” says Ginevra, “and in reality, our intercourse was precisely what it had always been; every word he said to me might have been said before the whole world. I felt, it is true, that he spoke to me as he did not speak to any one else, and I, on my side, spoke to no one as I did to him. We were seldom alone, but every evening, in the drawing-room or on the terrace, he managed to converse with me for a moment or two when no one was by. He did not disguise from me that these stolen moments were to him the most enjoyable of the evening, and I knew they were the same to me. From time to time something indefinable in his voice, in his glance, even in his silence, made me shudder as at some threat of danger. But as he had never swerved by so much as a word from the position he had assumed towards me—that of a friend—my slumbering conscience did not awake!”

The awakening, however, came at last. The immediate occasion of it was an eruption of Vesuvius, which is described with a dramatic power worthy, if possible, of the sublime and terrible subject. The mountain is on fire; the lava streams forth from a rent in its side, and, strong and pitiless as fate, flows on over vineyards and villages and smiling gardens, spreading desolation before it. Ginevra, with a large party of friends, goes out to witness the magnificent spectacle from a safe eminence. She and Gilbert are thrown together and climb to the top of a hillock overlooking the scene of the conflagration. The flames rose on all sides as in some vengeful apocalypse, high, fantastic, awful. Ginevra could not take away her eyes from the sight, but gazed on it as on some mysterious apparition that held her spell-bound. At last she exclaimed:

“‘This is truly la città dolente! We have before our eyes a faithful picture of the last day!’

“Gilbert did not answer. He was a prey to some emotion more poignant than mine, and, in glancing towards him in the lurid glare of the fire, I was frightened by the change in his features and their strange expression. ‘Would to heaven,’ he muttered at last, ‘that it were so in reality, and that the last day were come for me! Yes, I wish I could die here, on this spot, near you and worthy of you!’

“In spite of the appalling scene around us, in spite of the roar of the detonations thundering above the dull noise of the lava, the accent of his voice struck upon my ear, and his words made my heart leap up with an emotion mingled with terror.

“‘You are growing giddy,’ I said, and my voice trembled. ‘Take care; the effect of looking long at this is sometimes to draw one on to the abyss.’

“‘Yes, Donna Ginevra,’ he replied in the same strange tone, ‘you are right; I am giddy and I am walking on to the abyss. I know it. I exposed myself rashly; I presumed too much on my strength.’

“The look which he fixed upon me in pronouncing these words gave them a meaning which it was impossible to misunderstand. It was no longer Gilbert who was speaking to me; it was no longer the man to whom I fancied I had granted only the safe privileges of a friend. The bandage which I had wilfully placed upon my eyes fell off in an instant, and, in the sudden emotion which [Pg 169] followed, the sight of the roaring flames that encircled us, the certain peril to which one step further would lead us, appeared to me as the exact representation of the danger to which I had madly exposed my honor and my soul! For one moment I covered my face with my hands, not daring to utter a word. At last I said in a voice of supplication:

“‘Monsieur de Kergy, cease to look upon the fire that surrounds us; lift up your head and see how, far above this hell, the night is calm and beautiful!…’

Gilbert’s eyes followed mine and remained for some time fixed upon the peaceful stars, that seemed, indeed, as far away from the terrible convulsion of nature as from that which was agitating our souls. Mine felt the need of a mighty help, and I murmured in a low voice, and with a fervor which had long been absent from my prayers: ‘O my God! have pity upon me.’ A long silence ensued, and then Gilbert said in a voice that was low and tremulous:

“‘Will you forgive me, madame? Will you trust yourself to me to lead you from this place?’

“‘Yes, I will trust you,’ I replied. ‘But let us make haste to leave it, for it is dangerous.…’

“‘Do not fear,’ he said in a tone that had resumed its wonted calmness; ‘we must make haste, but the only danger would be if you were to become frightened. Give me your hand.’

“He would have taken it, but I hesitated and made an involuntary movement, as if I meant to descend without his help.

“‘In the name of Heaven,’ he said quickly, and trembling with agitation, ‘don’t refuse my assistance in this extremity! You cannot do without it; you must give me your hand!’

“His voice was now almost imperious; I gave him my hand, and, grasping his arm firmly with the other, we descended the hill slowly together.”

But although this first victory is the sure guarantee of the ultimate one, Ginevra has a fierce battle yet to fight. Perhaps it will be better that our cursory notice of the story should, however, end here, and that we should leave our readers to discover the sequel for themselves: how the same strong hand which held Ginevra safe on the brink of the precipice led her faithfully through the peril, and brought her back, not only to the inward peace which follows every generous renunciation, every conquest over self, but how it finally won back her husband’s love, crowning them both with a joy such as they had never known in the days of their early happiness. The fitness of Lorenzo’s punishment, the wreck of his fortune through one passion and the vengeance brought upon his selfish pride by the other, is worked out with a constructive art of no mean order. The minor characters and their parts are carefully finished and satisfactorily disposed of. Livia to the last shines like a sweet, pure star above the horizon of Ginevra’s stormy life, pointing onwards and upwards with faithful hand, never too strong for pity or too far removed for sympathy, sorrowing with those who mourn, rejoicing with those who rejoice. Her interview with Ginevra after the fearful ordeal through which the latter has passed, when she comes like one who has been “saved, but through fire,” to seek consolation in the peaceful atmosphere of the convent, rises to a high degree of power. We are strongly tempted to quote the scene between Padre Egidio and Ginevra, but it is almost too sacred to be made matter of critical comment, and would lose, moreover, much in effect by being detached from the complete frame, and especially from the crucial experiences which prepared Ginevra’s soul for that touch of the divine hand which healed and strengthened and uplifted her in one instant. Such an episode can only be appreciated in its proper place as part of a whole which [Pg 170] justifies and glorifies it. The close of the story is full of deep pathos.

It is significant that this novel, which is recognized as the herald of a new era in Catholic literature, should have made its appearance at the same time in France and in America. May we not venture to infer from the coincidence that America, in harmony with sound Catholic teaching, placing greater confidence in human nature, may aid in redeeming Catholic English fiction, and prove to the world that the faith does not paralyze the imagination, but elevates it; leaving the novelist at liberty to deal with the deepest problems of life, to disport himself freely in the wide realms of fancy, nature, and the world, and, guided and enlightened by the Spirit of truth, to grasp with a firm hand and turn to the best account all those things that come within the scope and province of art?

[69] Le Mot de l’Enigme—The Veil Withdrawn. By Madame Craven. Translated by permission. New York: The Catholic Publication Society. 1875.

[70] “For life, is too short!”

[71] “Beatrice gazed upwards, and I on her did gaze.” —Dante.

CHARITAS PIRKHEIMER.[72]

“Good and evil fortune are to a brave man as his right hand and his left: he uses either equally well.”—Saying of S. Catherine of Sienna.

Charitas Pirkheimer, the eldest daughter of John Pirkheimer and Barbara Löffelholz, was born on the 21st of March, 1466. Her family was a distinguished one in the annals of Nuremberg, her native town, one of those old free cities of Germany whose burghers, as Æneas Sylvius, afterwards Pope Pius II., once said, were better lodged and more daintily fed than the kings of Scotland. Among the citizens of Nuremberg there was a kind of prescriptive aristocracy or patriciate composed of those families technically called “Rathsfähig”—that is, capable of being elected members of the ruling body or council of the little republic. Of those whose names occur again and again in this history one of the most ancient was that of the Pirkheimer, who, for at least a hundred and fifty years before the birth of Charitas, had been celebrated for their learning, piety, and statesmanship. Upright and honorable in their private life, as well as in the execution of their public trusts, they were looked up to by all, and their women no less than their men were distinguished for strength of character, love of learning, and solid, enlightened piety.

Nuremberg was at that time a centre of art and letters. Her youths went to Italy and studied at the old universities of Padua and Bologna, whence they brought back the prevailing enthusiasm for classical lore; the new art of printing had found in her citizens discerning [Pg 171] patrons; the streets were full of the beautiful houses of the rich merchants; churches and monasteries adorned with treasures of sacred art abounded, as even to this day the passing tourist can see; Albert Dürer, Adam Krafft, and Peter Vischer made their native city known far and wide in the world of art; while Regiomontanus drew his astronomical instruments from Nuremberg and published his works there, and his disciple, Martin Behaim, a Nuremberger by birth, discovered the sea-route to the East Indies. Literature was even more firmly established, and John Pirkheimer himself instituted a sort of academy after the model of those of the Italian princes. Wilibald, his only son and the last of his name, continued his work and became famous as the friend or patron of nearly all the renowned men of learning of his time.

Among these refining influences Charitas grew up, and early showed her enthusiasm for “polite” studies. The historians of Nuremberg, Lützelberger and Dr. Lochner, both Protestants, have left high testimony of the breadth of her intellect and the great consideration in which she was held by men of all parties. The latter calls her “a gifted, enlightened, pious, and prudent woman, who has conferred lasting honor on the Convent of St. Clare,” and who “deserves a high degree of respect for the firmness and dignity with which she withstood the storm of the Reformation, which to her and her community was a sorrowful event.” Lützelberger, in a lecture delivered at Nuremberg, said to his Protestant audience:

“The Reformation was a deep grief to her pious heart, accustomed as it was to the gentle amenities of convent life, and, if we would judge her aright, we must put ourselves entirely in her circumstances. But this done, she will appear to us peculiarly worthy of respect and consideration as a gifted and conscientious opponent of the new religion.… Both by speech and in writing did she oppose all attempts to convert her; and even if we differ from her, we cannot but admire her earnest conviction, her prudence and understanding, and especially the patience which she added to her other virtues.”

Her father, John, was at the time of her birth a doctor of civil law (the degree had been conferred at the University of Padua), and was shortly after called to the service of the Bishop of Eichstädt, William of Reichenau, as counsellor, in which capacity he also for some years served the Duke of Bavaria and the Archduke of Austria at their respective courts at Munich and Innsbrück. He was also often sent as envoy and representative to other courts, after which services he returned to his native city and died there, a member of the council. Of his seven daughters only one married—Juliana, the youngest; the rest all took the veil. Charitas and Clara were joined in a lifelong friendship in the Convent of St. Clare in Nuremberg. By all accounts the former seems to have entered the convent at the age of twelve, whether as a novice or a scholar we are not told. The convent had existed as a Clarist institution for two hundred years, when some nuns of Söflingen, near Ulm, had introduced the Franciscan rule; but the building, which was several centuries old, had been tenanted before by a community of Sisters of St. Mary Magdalen. All the nuns, with very few exceptions, were Nurembergers by birth and descent (this was a condition of their admittance); and as each generation of every illustrious family was represented [Pg 172] by one or two members, the convent had become peculiarly a cherished local institution, whose welfare was closely connected with that of the town. One of the council was charged with its temporal concerns, and gifts and bequests were often made to it by the citizens. It was also the school where the young girls of patrician family were mostly educated.

A model of strict observance and reformed rule, it was under the spiritual direction of the barefooted Franciscans, who, in the middle of the fifteenth century, under the protection of Pope Eugenius IV., had, in a time when discipline was relaxed in many of the houses of their order, taken up their abode in Nuremberg and put things upon the old ascetic footing ruled by the great reforming saint, Francis of Assisi.

Apollonia Tucher was Charitas’ best and dearest friend. They lived together more than fifty years, and died within a few months of each other. Through her Charitas also learnt to know and appreciate Sixtus Tucher, her cousin, the provost of St. Lawrence, also a prominent man in those days. Apollonia was at that time prioress and Charitas a teacher in the convent school. The provost kept up a regular correspondence with the two nuns, of which unfortunately one part has been lost; but all his letters are preserved, and were first translated into German by his nephew, Christopher Scheurl, and dedicated to a successor of his at St. Lawrence—Provost George Behaim. His advice to Charitas and her friend was a great boon, and now and then he would send little presents, such as gilt lanterns for the church, which he always accompanied by some symbolical warning. Among other things, he once reminded them that the convent life alone was not enough to save their souls. “There is no other way to deserve the eternal Fatherland,” he says, “but by industriously keeping all God’s commandments.” He also furnished them with books, a Commentary on the Liturgical Hymns and Sequences, 1494, and 1506, and the Discourse of St. Augustine on the Siege of Hippo. This was sent apropos of a siege in 1502 which Nuremberg suffered at the hands of the Margrave Casimir, and during which three hundred brave and noted burghers, all heads of families, lost their lives. On the occasion of her father’s death, in 1501, he writes to Charitas:

“Therefore we must not sorrow when a man has deserved to return from a strange land to his own country, from an inn to his own house, from work to rest, from death to life, from time to eternity, and especially when he has, by a blessed exchange, accumulated many good works; for we are all like unto merchants sent into this pilgrimage of earth, that with temporal goods we may buy and win eternal life.”

This learned and holy man died at the age of forty-six, in 1507, but not before he had seen his friend Charitas chosen abbess of St. Clare. She was only thirty-eight, but her strength of character made the choice unanimous; and if the nuns could have foreseen what a stormy time they would soon have to tide over, they would have congratulated themselves still more on their good sense in electing her. From henceforth she was the heart and soul of the convent: the nuns looked to her for advice, support, and comfort; the council saw in her a distinguished, learned, and enlightened countrywoman, the example not only of her own community, but of those in the neighborhood who followed her lead. One of the first events [Pg 173] that marked her rule was the attack of the plague which visited Nuremberg in 1505 and laid low one of her own spiritual family. She insisted upon nursing the sick nun, notwithstanding the remonstrances of her anxious sisters, and was rewarded by the recovery of the patient. In those years of peace and prosperity the convent fully vindicated its claim to being a house of happy labor. Besides the instruction given to the young girls of the city, the nuns were occupied in various artistic works, such as illumination, copying, and embroidery. Their particular industry was the manufacture of carpets and tapestries for hangings. They fulfilled orders for public and civic buildings, as well as for private families, and once the town council gave the imperial regalia into their hands for putting in order for the coronation of Charles V. at Aix-la-Chapelle. Nuremberg had the care of these venerated garments, and was jealous of its reputation; so that the nuns felt a high responsibility in being allowed to handle and repair such treasures. They carefully mended and re-embroidered the white dalmatic, and lined other pieces of the imperial dress, until they were fit to do honor to the care of the city of Nuremberg. The convent had also a library of some note for that time, the Scriptures and the fathers of the church forming the principal part of it. Charitas’ favorite among the latter was St. Jerome. She was solicitous concerning the daily reading of the Scriptures, both in Latin and in German, which was done in common as well as in private—a fact which she brought to her own defence in the evil days that followed. She might truly say that she stood on evangelical ground; for, as she wrote to the learned but scarcely Christian Celtes, she saw in Scripture the “field of the Lord, whence learning must draw the kernel from the shell, the spirit from the letter, oil from the rock, and blossoms from the thorn.”

She had much to do also to manage the temporal concerns of her house. The town demanded a yearly account of her stewardship; and in every report made by the council on her administration there is nothing but praise and recognition of her business talents. She corresponded with a circle of lettered friends whom she knew through her brother Wilibald, and these literary friendships form one of the most interesting phases of her life. Conspicuous among her friends was her brother himself, the friend of Albert Dürer, who has left us a portrait of him, the correspondent of Erasmus, the polished man of letters, the scholar of two Italian universities, for some time the head of the council of the republic, and the leader of the Nuremberg contingent in the war with Switzerland (1499). This last office he held when he was only twenty-nine, and he afterwards became the historian of the war. When the first beginnings of the Reformation disturbed and excited all thoughtful minds in Germany, he looked upon them as simple moral reforms, a renewal of ancient fervor and discipline. But as the true nature of the changes heralded by Luther broke upon him, he separated himself from the movement and rallied to the side of the church doctrines so ruthlessly attacked. He proved a great support to his sister in the days when the convent was under the ban of the triumphant Reformers of Nuremberg, and his opinion of the classical studies which some of the atheistic [Pg 174] literati would fain have exalted as the only learning fit for civilized men was clearly expressed in these words: “It is not my belief that Christian knowledge is incomplete without heathen literature. God forbid! Divine Wisdom needs no human inventions, and it is possible to attain to the highest point of theology without the help of Plato and Aristotle.” Wilibald was accustomed to write to his sister in Latin, as Sixtus Tucher also did, and Charitas’ style, notwithstanding her lowly opinion of her own proficiency, was such as to do honor to her education. He often sent her presents of books—for instance, the Hymns of Prudentius, the Christian poet, and some writings of her favorite doctor, St. Jerome. Later on he dedicated to her the works of Fulgentius, which he had edited. Both Charitas and her sister Clara were great admirers of Erasmus and diligently read his German translation of the New Testament (in 1516), as well as some works of the famous scholar Reuchlin (1520). To the former Charitas excused herself from writing “on account of her bad Latin,” but sent him many complimentary messages through her brother, and both he and Reuchlin spoke of her in high terms in their letters to Wilibald. Clara also was marvellously fond of books, and playfully told her brother that there was nothing she envied out of her convent except his library. The women of the Pirkheimer family all seem to have been distinguished for their love of art and books. Catherine, Charitas’ niece, was almost a transcript of her aunt and showed a wonderful strength of character. The abbess’ married nieces were earnest and generous women, a great support to the convent in the evil days that followed; and her sister Sabina, the abbess of a Benedictine monastery on the Danube, was a patroness of sacred art, the friend of Dürer, who sent her designs for her illuminations and took great interest in the school of miniature-painting established in her community.

Celtes was one of Charitas’ correspondents, and dedicated to her his compilation of the works of Roswitha, the poet-nun of Gandersheim in the tenth century. On the occasion of his being attacked by robbers she writes him a letter of condolence, in which, in the style of the day, she alludes to “the precious treasure of true wisdom, which is the noblest and only possession wherein consolation may be found”; but at another time she thinks it due to her conscience to speak to him of a higher wisdom, and says:

“Your worthiness, of which I am a humble follower, will pardon me for being also a lover of your salvation, and therefore do I beseech you from my heart, not, indeed, to give up worldly knowledge, but to add to it that higher one which will lift you from the writings of the heathen to the sacred books, from the earthly to the heavenly, from the creature to the Creator. For although no kind of knowledge or experience ordained of God is to be despised, yet a virtuous life and the study of theology is to be considered above everything; for man’s mind is weak and may err, but true faith and a good conscience can never err.”

Christopher Scheurl, a clever jurist and called the Cicero of Nuremberg, who had learnt letters at the University of Bologna, dedicated his book on “The Use of the Mass” (Utilitates Missæ) to Charitas, and sent it to her from Bologna, where it was printed in 1506, through his uncle, Sixtus Tucher. In his dedication Scheurl says that in all his life he has only known two women—the [Pg 175] pious Cassandra of Venice and Charitas of Nuremberg—who “for their gifts of mind and fortune, their knowledge and high station, their beauty and their prudence, could be compared to Cornelia, the mother of the Gracchi, and to the daughters of Lælius and Hortensius.” He praises her that, following the example of her illustrious ancestors, she has preferred “the book to the wool and the pen to the spindle,” and proved her high degree of mental culture by such remarkable letters as he had seen and received.

Albert Dürer was also often in communication with the sister of his friend Wilibald. He, with the administrator of the convent, Kaspar Nützel, and another companion, had gone in 1518 to the Reichstag at Augsburg, where the painter was to take the old Emperor Maximilian’s portrait. They wrote her a joint account of their doings there, which she received in the same jesting spirit as it was written; for she says she “cried for laughing” when she read it. She also touches on the political questions of the day, and playfully gives them each his lesson to learn in Augsburg. The convent administrator was to admire in the Swabian Confederation “an example of strict observance”; the secretary of the council, Lazarus Spengler, was to observe “the apostolical life in common” of the members; and the painter to take note of the fine buildings for which Augsburg was famous, in case they might some day want good designs for the rebuilding of the convent choir. She also bade them not to forget the “little gray wolf” among the stately black and white habits of the religious of Augsburg (her nuns wore a gray habit), and alluded to the three men as the captive “sand-hares”—a name given to the burghers of Nuremberg, first in scorn, but now become a mere jest.

Charitas’ mind was like a diamond of many facets; she was no angular, sour ascetic, narrow in her sympathies and petrified in her prejudices, but a genuine, warm-hearted woman, with as much love for innocent mirth on the one hand as for the widest researches of learning on the other. With her the words of her contemporary, Abbot Trithemius, were true—“To know is to love”—and her affection for her own family, no less than her appreciation of the intellectual movement of the age, is shown in her voluminous correspondence. She and her brother often exchanged little simple domestic presents, and she delighted to send him sweetmeats, preserves, and cakes made in the convent, often with her own or her nieces’ hands.

But she was not destined to end her life in these pleasant and peaceful interchanges of friendship. The storm was brewing, and the “new learning,” or new doctrine, as it was called, was beginning to take formidable proportions and go far beyond the needed reforms which Pope Adrian VI., one of the noblest men who ever sat in the apostolic chair, so anxiously recommended to the nuncio Chieregati on the occasion of the Reichstag at Nuremberg in 1522. Charitas grieved to see holy things indiscriminately attacked, often with unworthy motives cloaked by the convenient plea of conscience and zeal for the Gospel, and grieved still more to hear no voice among her learned friends raised in defence of all she held dear. At last, however, Jerome Emser, licentiate of canon law at Leipsic, and private secretary of Duke George of Saxony, published [Pg 176] a masterly defence of the old faith, and Charitas eagerly read it through and caused it to be read aloud to the nuns during meals. The sisters and the abbess of the Convent of St. Clare at Eger, who had sent her Emser’s writings, begged her to acknowledge them in a letter to the author, which she accordingly did, writing in fervent, unconstrained terms and thanking him in the name of her sixty sisters and all other convents of her order. But this letter fell into other hands, and in a distorted, mutilated shape, and accompanied by a malicious commentary on its sentiments and motives, was published by an enemy of Emser and Charitas. Even her brother Wilibald, who had not yet seen through the real motives of the Reformers, was vexed at her taking part in the fray, and told her she had better have held her tongue. This was the beginning of a teasing persecution of pin-pricks which gradually became serious and well-nigh insupportable as years went on. Her brother, when he had fully rallied to the Catholic party, had left the council and could be of little practical use to his sister, while the majority of the council were decidedly hostile. The convent’s administrator especially used his station and authority only to torment the poor nuns. Charitas at this time began to keep a diary, of which her biographer has made good use. Dr. Lochner, the historian of Nuremberg, recognizes that many evil deeds were done in the name of religion; and as to the case of the Convent of St. Clare, he says that “it was the victim of that force which at many times clothes itself in the garb of a moral and divine reform, without being any the less mere force, the right of the strongest.”

In 1524 Charitas says:

“There came to the convent many strangers, men and women, but especially the latter, to tell the nuns the new things that were being taught from the pulpit, and to represent to them what a ‘damnable’ state was that of the religious life, and how impossible it was for them to be saved in the cloister, adding most unceremoniously that nuns were all the devil’s creatures. Many citizens spoke threateningly of withdrawing their relatives from the convent, whether the persons in question wished it or no.”

As may be supposed, these attacks made no impression on the sisters; but the town council, ready enough now to seize upon any pretext, ascribed their steadfastness to the influence of their spiritual directors, the Franciscans, and ordered the convent to be put under the control of the new preachers. Charitas immediately drew up a petition, which was approved by the community, in which she represented to Kaspar Nützel, the administrator, that this was the first time for forty-five years that she had seen her sisterhood in grief, and went on to beseech him, as he had always been her friend and supporter in temporal matters, so, now that she required his help more than ever, he would not fail her in this spiritual distress. She likewise wrote to Jerome Ebner, another of the highest dignitaries of the council, whose daughter Katharine was one of her community; and to Martin Geuder, her brother-in-law, to whom she touchingly appealed on the ground of the innocence and evangelical character of the community.

“I beg of you,” she says, “do not allow yourself to be persuaded by those who untruly say that the clear word of God is hidden from us; for, by the grace of God, this is not so. We have the Old and New Testaments here as well as you who are out in the world; we read it day and night, at meals, in the choir, in Latin and in German, [Pg 177] in common and in private. By God’s grace we know well the holy Gospels and St. Paul’s Epistles, but still I think he is more praiseworthy who fulfils the Gospel’s precepts in his actions than he who has them always on his lips, but does not act up to them.” She continues: “We desire to be no burden or offence to any one; but if any one can point out an abuse, let him do so, and we will gladly reform it. For we acknowledge ourselves to be weak creatures, who may go easily astray, and who do not dare to take pleasure in good works. We only ask that no one shall do us wrong and violence, and that we shall not be forced to do that which we consider a disgrace and against our eternal salvation.”

Charitas’ former petition to Nützel was now supplemented by a more formal petition of the convent, addressed to the town council. She protested against the violent change meditated, and repelled the idea of submitting to spiritual directors imposed by the republic; she asked the councillors why they should object to a few women voluntarily living in common, and besought them not to root up a time-honored institution which was so intimately connected with the annals of their native city. Part of the council was decidedly in favor of less violent measures, and by the advice of these members the intrusion of Lutheran directors was put off for a time and affairs left to take their own course; but the lull was but momentary. People still besieged the convent, threatening its inmates and disseminating scandalous rumors in the town, and the poor nuns lived in daily fear of some outbreak. This was in the Advent of 1524, and in March, 1525, the storm broke loose again.

One of those frequent and useless disputations on the subject of religion which made such a characteristic feature of the sixteenth-century movement took place at Nuremberg at the beginning of March. Eight religious of the Carmelite, Franciscan, and Dominican orders took the Catholic side against seven preachers of the Lutheran doctrines (among them the famous Osiander) under the leadership of the prior of the Augustinians at Nuremberg. The debate lasted for eleven days, or five sessions, without any shadow of an accommodation appearing possible, and at the sixth session the Catholic doctors gave in a written statement to the effect that the affair had become a discussion such as by imperial mandate was strictly forbidden, and that, as there was no impartial judgment to be looked for, the presidents of the colloquium being known adherents of the new doctrines, they thought it best to retire from the useless conflict. The council, however, had attained its end, and prepared an opportunity for formally introducing the new religion into the republic. The convents and monasteries were ordered to give up their rule and the members to enter the world again. Four of the male communities did as they were bid; the Dominicans and Franciscans still refused to comply. The former were compelled to leave in 1543, and the latter stood their ground till the last brother died. They were, however, forbidden to preach and hear confessions, and the direction of both convents of women, St. Clare and St. Catherine, was taken from them.

The first open attack on St. Clare was made five days after the religious disputation, on the 19th of March, 1525. A deputation from the council demanded admittance into the interior of the convent, and, though Charitas pleaded the “enclosure” [Pg 178] and offered to gather the community at the grated window through which it was customary to speak with strangers and men, she was forced to accede to their demand and admit the councillors into the winter refectory. The two representatives began with a honeyed address, telling the assembled nuns that, now the light of the Gospel was fully manifested in the city, it were a shame that they alone should be denied the privilege of seeing it. Therefore a learned and distinguished preacher, Herr Poliander, of Würzburg, would impart to them this knowledge, and, the Franciscans being removed, the council would provide the nuns with suitable confessors. The abbess heard them out, and then retorted that her nuns were well stored with Gospel knowledge, which had been clearly preached to them before, and that the connection between their order and the Franciscans was of long date and authorized by papal and imperial decrees, but that, if they were to suffer violence in this matter, God and their conscience urged them to declare that it was so, and that they protested against such violence being used. The councillors said that, since they objected to secular [73] priests as confessors, they might choose one of the Augustinians (who had apostatized), since they too were “religious.” But Charitas answered: “If we are to have religious, why not leave us the Franciscans? We know and honor them and have had long experience of them; but as to the order you name, we also know how lax its discipline has grown.”

“Nay,” said the councillors, “you will soon not have that to complain of; for these brothers will doff their cowls and enter into another state.”

To which the abbess replied: “That is no comfort to us. They could only teach us to follow their example; and as they have taken to themselves wives, they would have us take husbands. God forbid!”

The useless conversation was carried on some time longer, and on Charitas asking the reason why the council so oppressed her sisterhood, and whether they had committed any offence, the councillors were forced to allow that the “council knew of no offence or abuse on their part, but, on the contrary, only of honor, diligence, and modesty,” but that in other communities it was not always so, and the new laws must be enforced everywhere alike. The very next day Poliander, the Lutheran preacher, came for the first time to preach to the reluctant nuns, while on the 21st of March the Franciscans were allowed to pay their charges a farewell visit, administer the sacraments, say Mass, and preach. This was the last time the nuns enjoyed these holy privileges; henceforward the dying were deprived of the Viaticum and Extreme Unction, and Mass was no longer said in the convent chapel. On the 22nd Charitas assembled a chapter of her nuns, which decided on presenting a second petition to the council, and the abbess sent to ask Kaspar Nützel to come in person to the convent. He consented and sent her a friendly message, but it was clear he expected submission. He came and set before the community the advantages of gracefully giving way and the evil they would entail on themselves by resistance; but Charitas answered to the point: that, although he had spoken [Pg 179] in friendly terms, he had not mentioned the real subject of the dispute—i.e., the question of who should be the convent’s spiritual directors. “We see,” she said, “that every means is being used to drive us to accept the new doctrines, but until the whole church accepts them neither will we. Nothing will part us from the fellowship of the universal church nor from the vows we have vowed unto God.” She then offered to let the administrator ask each nun her opinion separately during her own absence; but Nützel saw that this would be useless, and even refused to take the petition, whereupon the abbess read it aloud before him. The gist of it was contained in the prayer that, in the name of the Gospel-freedom which the times had so extolled, no violence should be done to the consciences of the nuns. They begged also that if their confessor was taken from them, at least no one should be imposed upon them in his place. But it was evidently in vain, although Nützel reluctantly pledged himself to represent their case to the council. Before he left the convent, however, he attempted to cajole the abbess out of her firm resistance to his wishes, and, taking her aside, begged her to put her authority and influence on his side, telling her that she might personally do much to prevent even bloodshed, and that, if he could only win her over, he would think himself sure of the city and the neighborhood. Indeed, many pinned their faith to her steadfastness and looked to her example for support in their own temptations. But neither flattery nor threats could win her over, nor even the hint that by her obstinacy she would confirm others in contumacy, and bring upon her native town the vengeance of the peasants who had risen in arms against the Catholics. To this she answered calmly that it was well known that the peasants had risen because, in the midst of this new preaching of fraternity and evangelical freedom, they saw a way to abolish the custom of vassalage, and meant forcibly to possess themselves of that which their richer brethren were so glibly prating of in theory. As the second petition had remained without effect, Charitas drew up a third, a model of clearness and logic. Quoting St. Paul, she said, “I can do all things in Him who is my strength,” and she again assured the council that nothing would drive the sisters out of the church. This paper was signed by all the nuns. She also asked through Nützel for a secular priest, a holy man of the name of Schröter, for a confessor, since the council was determined that the Franciscans should no longer serve the convent; but this prayer was also refused.

Things grew worse and worse. Poliander preached vile and opprobrious sermons to the poor nuns, upbraiding and accusing them; and when he left Würzburg, two others, Schleussner and Osiander, succeeded him and preached regularly three times a week in the chapel. A sharp and degrading watch was kept over the nuns, as the council suspected them of stopping their ears with cotton-wool or exercising other petty devices to escape the words of the distasteful sermons. This continued throughout Lent, and the violence of the preachers inflaming the passions of the people, the nuns lived in daily fear of seeing the latter put into execution their frequent threat of burning down the convent. The serving-girls could hardly go out of the [Pg 180] house in safety to purchase provisions, and the friends of the nuns had to use all manner of subterfuges to be able to visit them in peace, while every knock at the door frightened the poor women as if it heralded their doom. But worse was yet to come. On the 7th of June three of the councillors, Fürer, Pfinzing, and Imhof, visited the convent and laid before the nuns five propositions with which the council demanded instant compliance: an inventory was to be taken of all the convent possessions, a laxer rule introduced, the religious dress laid aside, the grated window replaced by a common one of glass, and free permission granted to every nun to leave if she chose, taking with her whatever dowry she had brought to the convent, or a suitable remuneration for the services done during her stay there. Charitas wisely showed a disposition to yield in minor matters, in which she knew that the council would find means at any rate to force her compliance, but on the matter of the religious vows she stood firm, answering:

“In so far as my sisters owe me any personal obedience and consideration, I am ready to forgive them the debt, but I cannot absolve them from vows vowed unto the Lord; for what are we poor creatures that we should lay hands on the things that are God’s?”

The council allowed her four weeks to make up her mind to these changes, and promised, in case of compliance, to protect the convent; but if these conditions were resisted, neither the house nor the nuns would be either protected or supported. Charitas called a chapter together and announced her determination to have nothing to do with an “open convent,” at the same time asking the sisters’ opinion on the council’s proposal. The nuns unanimously (there were nearly sixty of them) declared that they did not wish to be “made free” after the council’s pattern of freedom; they meant to keep to their vows and maintain their rule, and begged the abbess not to forsake them. She then swore to stand by them as long as they would stand by their vows, and exhorted them to steadfast courage and fervent prayer. Her friends in the council, seeing that their influence was too weak to help the convent, advised her to consent to the lesser propositions, and accordingly the inventory was quietly made and handed over to the authorities; the grating was taken down, and, at Wilibald Pirkheimer’s suggestion, some part of the nuns’ habit was dyed black and assumed only at the parlor window and in the gardens, while in the private parts of the house the usual gray garb was worn. But the nuns steadfastly refused to change the rule or to consider themselves absolved from their vows, and, unless they were to be forcibly ejected from the convent, there was no possibility of carrying out these two important changes. But the council was prepared for anything, and soon even this last violent act was publicly enforced.

Dame Ursula Tetzel had already tried some months before, with the help of her brothers, to get her daughter Margaret, who had been for nine years in the convent, to leave it and come home; but the girl herself vigorously resisted the attempt, and Charitas represented it to the mother as an infringement of the rights of the convent. Things had marched rapidly enough since then to enable Dame Tetzel to renew the attempt with more certainty of success; and accordingly she, with the wives of the two councillors, [Pg 181] Ebner and Nützel, who had each a daughter in the convent, determined to take their children home at all hazards. They gave the nuns a week’s notice, and on the 14th of June appeared with a number of their male relations in two large conveyances or wagons. A great crowd had collected round the convent door, and a considerable excitement prevailed; the street and the churchyard were full. Charitas, on her side, had requested two of the councillors, Pfinzing and Imhof, to be present as witnesses of the disgraceful scene she foresaw. The young nuns, respectively nineteen, twenty, and twenty-three years old, fell on their knees before the abbess, weeping and entreating her not to let them be taken away. They even wished to hide themselves; but this, of course, Charitas forbade and led the girls with her to the chapel where they had taken their vows. She prayed and wept with them, and hesitated taking them over the threshold into the presence of their mothers; but the latter came into the chapel and violently upbraided their children, who with tears piteously begged to be left alone. Katharine Ebner especially spoke in eloquent tones for more than an hour, and, as the councillors afterwards said, “She spoke no word that was weak or useless, but talked with such force and cogency that every word weighed a pound.” Her mother stormed, and Held, the brother of Dame Nützel, threatened her “like an executioner,” but Katharine continued speaking in her own behalf and that of her friends: “Here will I stand and not move one step; and if you employ force, I will complain to God in heaven and every man upon earth.” She was rudely dragged forward, but, stretching her arms towards the abbess, cried out: “Dear mother, do not let me be driven away from you!” Four persons, however, seized hold of her, and amid loud cries on all sides she was dragged over the threshold of the chapel, where she and Margaret Tetzel fell over each other, the latter having her foot crushed in the crowd. Dame Ebner followed her daughter with angry threats, telling her that if she did not go willingly she would fling her down the stairs and break her head on the pavement below. At last poor Charitas could stand it no longer and took refuge in her cell, while the councillors who had witnessed the scene declared that, had they foreseen such a sad sight, they would not have come for a world of money, and never again would they lend the sanction of their presence to such violent proceedings.

The poor young nuns were put in the wagons and driven away, but they still cried out to the crowd that they were suffering violence and demanded to be taken back to their convent. Dame Ebner got so incensed that she struck her daughter on the mouth, and the poor girl bled all the way home. There were many in the crowd who cried “Shame!” and would gladly, had they dared, have attempted a rescue, but the strong hand of the “trained bands” of Nuremberg was not to be defied in vain. Charitas never saw her spiritual children again, but she heard from time to time that they were still unchanged in their feelings. Clara Nützel ate nothing for four days after she was taken away, and day and night cried to be taken back again.

This scene of violence made a great stir at the time and awakened much sympathy for the convent, and at least it had this good effect: [Pg 182] that no more forcible abductions were attempted. Some time later one nun, Anna Schwarz, whose sisters had left the other convent of Nuremberg, St. Catherine, left St. Clare of her own accord; she was the only one who voluntarily gave up her vows. In this case, however, her mother was not well pleased and by no means urged her to leave. The community was now reduced to fifty-one members, and of these none henceforward left the convent, unless by the call of God to a better and more peaceful life.

In the following autumn Melanchthon visited Nuremberg, and, though their views now differed, his friendship with Pirkheimer was not weakened. He inquired into the state of affairs, and, together with the administrator, Nützel, visited the convent and had a long conversation with the abbess. She says in her diary: “He was more gentle and discreet in his speech than any of the new teachers I have met before”; and, indeed, she had long had the greatest esteem for the young and ripe Greek scholar.

“He spoke much of the new doctrines,” she continues; “but when I told him that we did not place our hope in our own works, but solely in the grace of God, he replied that in that case we might be saved in the cloister quite as well as in the world. Indeed, we agreed in the main on all points, except concerning the vows, which he holds not to be binding, but yet strongly disapproved of the violence that had been done to the nuns to force them to give up their vows. He took leave of us in a very friendly manner, and afterwards strongly reproved the administrator and the other councillors for having forbidden the Franciscans to celebrate divine service at St. Clare, and having dragged the children out of the convent against their will; indeed, he told them that, between themselves, he considered that therein they had committed a grievous sin.”

Charitas dated from his visit a quieter state of things and the cessation of many petty persecutions on the part of Kaspar Nützel. She says of Melanchthon in her diary: “I hope God sent this man to us at the right time; …” and later in a letter she writes thus of the administrator: “Would to God every one were as discreet as Master Philip; we might then hope to be rid of many things that are very vexatious.”

Although the three young nuns were not restored to the convent, their parents, smarting under the many insinuations made against their conduct, conveyed to the abbess, through Sigismund Fürer and Leonard Tucher, a formal acknowledgment of their satisfaction at the “manner in which the girls had been brought up and their health cared for”; while the two men added of their own accord that as to the girls they must tell the truth—i.e., that if it depended upon them, they would be back at the convent before evening. Kaspar Nützel himself said the same thing to the abbess, thanking her for the care bestowed on his daughter’s physical and moral well-being, and acknowledging himself indebted to the convent for this favor. But, better than this, he soon wrote a letter in which he distinctly stated that he regretted having several times “overstepped his legitimate authority in his attempts to convert her to the new doctrines,” and promised that in future he would attend with peculiar zeal at least to the temporal concerns of the convent. Their possessions had, however, been so curtailed during these troublous times that they almost literally subsisted on alms.

On All Souls’ day, 1527, the same two councillors who had witnessed [Pg 183] the forcible taking away of the young nuns two years before, and two other associates, were commissioned to institute a domiciliary visitation in the convent and to speak in private with each sister, with a view to elicit their grievances and give them a chance of speaking freely. The poor nuns were very much frightened at the proposal, but Charitas only made this remonstrance:

“Worthy masters,” she said, “you are somewhat vehement confessors. It has pleased our rulers to abolish private confession to one man, and now you require us poor women to confess to four men at once, and lay open to them all our spiritual needs!” And as the men were rather staggered, she continued: “You say many abuses among us have come to the ears of the council. We should like to hear them detailed. We have been driven and oppressed like worms for three years, and would gladly, if we could, have hidden ourselves under a stone like worms; but if we have offended in anything, let it be clearly brought home to us.”

The men looked at each other, and one said: “This point is not yet settled”; while another asked helplessly: “What am I to say? I do not understand the matter.” At last they went through the form of examining each nun alone and separately, and got tired and left off when they had examined thirty-nine. The preacher Osiander once held a discussion with Charitas for four hours without any result but both parties remaining stronger in their own belief; and on another occasion, when Dr. Link, formerly an Augustinian, and now preacher at the hospital, sent her a controversial pamphlet, she answered him in writing, argument for argument, and made all who saw her defence marvel at the clearness of her logic and the ease of her style. He had put himself forward as an example (doubtless because he had been, like her, a religious), but she answered:

“Forgive me if I do not care to follow the example of any man; our example is Christ, and, even if we were to look for models among men, it would be strange if we sought for them among living men while such men as St. Augustine, St. Jerome, St. Cyprian, and others are set aside and disowned.”

Later on she again wrote to him:

“If God does not inspire us with love for your new faith, we cannot of ourselves force our hearts to it. We should deceive ourselves and do violence to our conscience (which is wrong) if we were to listen to the threats or persuasions of men. It is no luxurious life, God knows, that keeps us in our convent; neither is it any belief that simply to have taken the veil assures salvation. We do not place our hope in the conventual rule, but in the mercy of God and his only Son. I hold none of my nuns back against their will; if they choose to leave, they are free to do so. I only ask that they should not be forced to do it, as has happened already on one occasion.”

Towards the end of 1528 came a time of negative peace for the nuns, and, as the “silver wedding” or jubilee of the abbess fell about Christmas time, the convent prepared itself for a modest festival in honor of this event. It was the first time that an abbess had held her office for so many years, and the celebration was looked upon with so much the more interest that no former abbess had gone through such stirring and troublous times during the period of her abbess-ship. The festival was put off till Easter, 1529, and was long remembered by the nuns as one of their few red-letter days. Their friends from the town sent them presents of wine, fruit, cakes, and preserves, and Pirkheimer and Dame Ursula Kramer, his neighbor, both sent their plate to adorn the nuns’ table on the occasion. This pleased the simple [Pg 184] women immensely, and Katharine, Charitas’ niece, wrote in glowing terms to her father, giving him an account of the festivities of the day. We will quote a few passages from her letter:

“In the morning the whole community came to the mother, each sister bearing a torch, and the prioress put a crown upon her head and led her to the choir, where we said the Office for the day and then sang the Mass as best we could. Then the mother took the Blessed Sacrament from the tabernacle and exposed it, and the community knelt to adore it and make a spiritual communion. We comforted ourselves with the words of St. Augustine: Crede et manducasti (Believe, and thou hast eaten). The mother then sat by the altar, and one by one we all went up to her and embraced her, … and she had her hands full of rings, and gave each of the sisters one as a pledge of their renewed espousals with their Bridegroom and of their resolve to be true to him; … although it has not been the custom hitherto with us, the mother thought that, considering these exceptionally sad years, it would be a remembrance of the obedience and earnestness with which we have hung together through these vicissitudes.… Then we took the mother to table, … and you, dear father, have proved yourself a generous host. The sisters said, ‘Oh! that Master Pirkheimer were here to see how we are enjoying his good gifts’; and your plate and Dame Kramer’s delighted us also mightily.… At last, at night, we had a little dance. The old nuns danced as well as the young ones. Mother Apollonia Tucher, who has been fifty-seven years in the convent, took hold of me and turned me round; … and the dance was so hearty that the mother said, ‘Dear children, spare my tables.’”

This was the last joyful event of Charitas’ life. Three months after this festival her niece Crescentia, Pirkheimer’s daughter, died, and the wicked tongues of the town took occasion to wag against the nuns, accusing them of worrying her to death; but Pirkheimer himself put down these scandalous rumors by publicly thanking the community for the care bestowed on his child, and by making a special gift to the convent in recognition of it. He also singled out the sisters who had had special care of his daughter during her illness, and sent them tokens of his gratitude; and, not content with this, he left the convent fifty gulden in his will, which they received after his death.

Another cross befell the abbess in the loss of reason of two of her nuns—a circumstance of which her enemies did not fail to make good use; but, the two sisters being perfectly harmless, except at long intervals, no removal was necessary, and they went about their common duties peacefully until their death.

In 1530 Charitas lost her well-beloved brother Wilibald, which was a sad break-up to her; but before he died he published an Apology for the Convent of St. Clare, which greatly comforted, if it did not help, the nuns. But the council contemptuously overlooked this as it had done all previous petitions.

Two years after her brother’s death the noble Charitas Pirkheimer followed him to a better land, and her sister Clara was chosen abbess in her stead. Her friend Apollonia Tucher died within a few months, on the 15th of January, 1533, and the new abbess the following month, whereupon her niece Katharine became abbess and ruled the community for thirty years. She was the last abbess but one; for towards the end of the century the last nun died and the convent reverted to the town.[74] But the good [Pg 185] fight had been fought, and the noble defeat only brought fresh and eternal honor on the name of the Clarist Order; for, as says Montaigne, “There are defeats that dispute the palm with victories,” and Lacordaire comments thus on the saying: “This noble axiom applies no less to moral than to military defeats, and we should never tire of inculcating the principle that as long as honor and conscience are safe, so long also is fame deserved.”

[72] Charitas Pirkheimer, Abbess of St. Clare at Nuremberg. By Franz Binder. Herder, Freiburg im Breisgau. The biographer, Franz Binder, has compiled the life of Charitas, which we have condensed in the present article, from trustworthy sources, the principal ones being the Works of Wilibald Pirkheimer, in Latin, published at Frankfort in 1610; MS. letters of the Pirkheimer family preserved in the town library at Nuremberg; Charitas’ own diary, published at Bamberg in 1852; Dr. Lochner’s Biography of Celebrated Nurembergers, published in 1861; and other less important and shorter works in which passing reference is made to the events of Charitas’ life.

[73] Literally lay priests, but, we think, referring to seculars.

[74] The church of St. Clare at Nuremberg remained for a long time closed. It was then opened again and soon afterwards given over to Protestant worship. It was subsequently used for commercial purposes, as a magazine of wares, a market-place, and place for local exhibitions, and finally as a barracks. In 1854 it was given back to the Catholics of Nuremberg as their second church. In the following year its restoration was begun, and on May 13, 1857, the Church of St. Clare was publicly consecrated anew for Catholic worship.

MYSTERIES.

“It might have been.” We say it oft,

With aching heart, with streaming eyes;

We grope with eager, outstretched hands

After another’s slighted prize.

We call a life a wasted life.

O mourning souls! be not too sure.

Out of great darkness may come light,

And, after evil, hearts grow pure.

God only knows. We leave to him

The things that are not what we would,

And trust that in his own good time

He will do that which he sees good.

His will be done. The quivering lips

Must say it, though with bitter tears.

His will! It is enough, enough

To hush our murmurs, soothe our fears.

He overrules all pain and sin,

Makes dire disgrace work out his word.

Poor souls, bow down before his might

And trust all myst’ries with the Lord.

ARE YOU MY WIFE?

BY THE AUTHOR OF “PARIS BEFORE THE WAR,” “NUMBER THIRTEEN,” “PIUS VI.,” ETC.

CHAPTER XV.

A TRIP SOUTHWARD.

When the first overflow of emotion had subsided, Sir Simon drew a chair close to the sofa and wanted to hear every detail about Raymond’s illness—what the doctor had done, and, if possible, everything he had said about it at each visit. When Franceline had told the little there was to tell beyond the one terrible central fact, it was Sir Simon’s turn to be catechised. He submitted willingly to the inquisition. He went over the story of Clide de Winton’s letter, and all the happy consequences it had entailed—the hard-hearted Jew sent to the right-about, the rest of the duns quieted, all Sir Simon’s difficulties happily settled. Clide’s name was openly mentioned in the course of the narrative, and coupled with epithets of enthusiastic admiration and gratitude—he was a noble-hearted fellow, true as steel, generous as the sun, delicate as a woman; it was impossible which to admire most, his generous conduct or the delicacy with which he had done this immense service to his father’s old friend. Franceline said nothing while this panegyric was being sung, but she could not hide from herself the fact that it was sounding in her ears like the sweetest music. She had found out long since why Clide’s name had become a dead-letter with Sir Simon, why he never even alluded to his existence in her presence; since he now broke through this reticence, was it not a proof that the motive of it had been removed, and that he was free to speak of Clide, and she to listen, and that consequently no barrier existed any longer between their lives? The truth was that Sir Simon had come to the conclusion that the barrier was of no great importance to either of them by this time. He was not given much to diving into the depths of human hearts, analyzing their motives and impulses; and he did not give other people credit for spending their lives in such unprofitable work as brooding over sentimental grievances and pining after the impossible. It was evident that if Franceline had been in love with Clide, she must have either died of it by this time or got over it. She had not died, ergo she had got over it. There was no harm, therefore, in singing that fine young fellow’s praises in her hearing, and it was a great satisfaction to the baronet to be able to pour out his grateful eulogies to a sympathizing audience. So they went on playing at cross purposes, each perfectly unconscious of what was uppermost in the other’s thoughts; Sir Simon settling it in his own mind that Ponsonby Anwyll would carry the day, now that everything else had adjusted itself so satisfactorily, while Franceline dreamed her own little dream, and fancied it must be the reflection of it in her father’s thoughts that filled his eyes with those gentle sunbeams as his glance met hers.

Sir Simon, having emptied his budget of news, proceeded to unfold [Pg 187] his programme, and was agreeably surprised to find that he was to be spared the trouble of defending it. Franceline was overjoyed at the prospect of seeing a new country, and Raymond acquiesced in everything as placid and innocently happy as an infant. So it was agreed that they would start for the south without the loss of a day, if possible. Angélique was called into council and ordered to begin to pack up at once. To-morrow morning Dr. Blink should decide what climate was best suited to Raymond, who was now the person to be chiefly considered. Meantime, Sir Simon took rather an unfair advantage of the medical man by biassing the inclinations of both patients towards a certain sun-girt villa on the Mediterranean, where myrtle and olive groves were said to crown every hillside, where the vine and the orange and the pomegranate grew like wild flowers elsewhere, mirrored in the sea that is “deeply, darkly, beautifully blue.”

“When did you come home—to England, I mean?” said M. de la Bourbonais when the baronet paused in his glowing description of a Mediterranean sunset.

“This morning. I came straight on here from Dover. The lawyer wanted that deed that led to my finding the snuff-box. I must go back with it by the early train to-morrow; it is absolutely necessary that it should be forthcoming to prove the validity of Lady Rebecca’s marriage settlement.”

“Marriage settlement!” exclaimed Raymond and Franceline together. “Do you mean that she is going to be married?”

“Good gracious, no! Poor soul, she’s gone—gone to her great account,” said Sir Simon, shaking his head with becoming solemnity. “She died three days ago. It was a happy release, a most merciful release! She really had nothing to regret, poor, dear soul.” And her step-son heaved a dutiful sigh, and drew his hand across his forehead with a gesture expressive of resigned sorrow.

Raymond was in no mood to laugh, even if the subject had been less solemn; but he could not but remember—and Sir Simon knew he must remember—how often this mournful event had been devoutly invoked by both of them in days not so long gone by. It was probably the recollection of this that prompted his next question.

“How did she leave her property?”

“Oh! admirably; nothing could be kinder or juster,” replied the baronet, heaving the tribute of another sigh. “She left her £50,000 to me unconditionally, chargeable merely with a life legacy for three old servants; the jointure, you know, reverts to the estate. So you see the duns would not have had so long to wait even if De Winton had not come to the rescue. She was an excellent woman. Of course one feels the blow, but it really would be selfish to regret her; she was a great sufferer, and it was a happy release.”

“Then you did not stop in London to ask if there were any letters at your bankers’?”

“No; were there any?”

“There was one from me—or at least written at my request.”

“Ha!”

Sir Simon looked up, full of curiosity. Franceline feared she was in the way of some explanation, so made an excuse to leave the room about some tisane it was time for her father to take.

“You must be more puzzled [Pg 188] than ever now to know why I refused to let my pockets be examined that night,” said M. de la Bourbonais, resorting to his old trick of fixing his spectacles to hide his shyness.

“Why was it?” said Sir Simon, pulling out his cigar-case, and carefully selecting one of the choice Havanas, as if he had the remotest intention of lighting it; it was only an excuse not to have to look at Raymond.

“You may remember that there were little pâtés de foie gras at dinner; they looked like petits pains?”

“I remember it perfectly; and excellent they were. I had just got the recipe from the Frères Provençeaux; it was the first time Dorel had ever made them. Well?”

“Franceline was, you know, very ill just then; she could eat nothing. I fancied these might tempt her, so I slipped a couple of them into my pockets with some bonbons. This was why I would not turn them out. I was ashamed to exhibit my poverty to all those men, especially to that stranger who had been taunting me with it; I would not let him see what a poor devil I was, and to what straits poverty drove me to get food for my sick child.”

“My poor Raymond!” was all Sir Simon could say, and he grasped his hand.

“Then you remember I came back? I was rushing home when it occurred to me that I had done a mad thing; so I threw away the pâtés and the bonbons, and went back and made a fool of myself, as you know. I think I must have been mad. I know I had been taking a great deal of wine to keep me up; anyhow, I did not reflect, until I saw the effect of my presence, what a preposterous act it was, and that you should have been all fools to see any proof of my innocence in it.”

“You might have trusted me,” said Sir Simon reproachfully. “I would have believed you—I did believe you in spite of my senses. I came to the conclusion you were, as you say, either mad or drunk, and had taken it unawares. Why didn’t you write to me?”

“I did. I wrote you a full account of it all; but, as ill-luck had it, your letter telling me to send back the ring arrived before mine left. I was so incensed at your suspecting me that I tore up the letter. I was a fool, of course; but you know of old that pride is my weak point. It was not until I was struck down by illness, and brought face to face with death, and with the thought that I was going to leave my child friendless in the world with a dishonored name, that I resolved to sacrifice it, and for her sake to write to you and ask you to take charge of her and do what you could to clear my memory from the stain that my own vanity and folly had fixed upon it. Father Henwick wrote to you to this effect in my name on Tuesday. The letter is lying at your bankers’.”

“I was as much to blame as you. I ought to have known you better than to mistrust you; I ought to have known there must be some mistake in it,” said Sir Simon, rising and going to the window. “I ought to have written to you to ask you for an explanation, and so I was always intending to do; but what with the excitement of Clide’s finding his—of his finding out my difficulties and so on,” he continued, checking himself in time before the murder was out, “and then poor, dear [Pg 189] Lady Rebecca’s telegraphing for me, I nearly lost my head, and kept putting off writing from day to day, in hopes that you would write.”

“Is monsieur going to stay to tea? Because, if so, it is time I began the omelette,” said Angélique, following Franceline into the room, carrying a tray with something on it for M. de la Bourbonais.

But Sir Simon said he must be going that very minute. How the time had flown, and he had so many things to see to at the Court! Raymond was rather exhausted when his friend left, but he slept sounder that night than he had done for a long time.

* * * * *

The warm southern spring had burst its green bonds and flown suddenly into the arms of summer; it lay disporting itself in the splendor of new-clad flowers along the shores of the Mediterranean, laughing up at the dazzling sky like a babe smiling into its mother’s face. Everything was fresh, lustrous, and dewy. The sun was not too hot to be enjoyable, the birds were not too tired to sing, a light breeze came fluttering from the sea to cool the vines, and died away in sighs and whispers amidst the ilex-grove that made a background to the white-washed villa where a group of three persons were sitting out on the terrace under the shade of a broad veranda. I dare say you have recognized the young lady in the fleecy muslin dress. The pink tint in her ivory complexion is a decided improvement; but it has not so changed her that you could forget her. She looks stronger now; there is an energetic grace in her movements that tells of improved health; so, too, does the warmer glow of the dark gold hair and the more animated glance of the eyes. You see she has brought her doves with her, and seems to have many interesting things to say to them as they perch on her head and her finger, and utter that, to her, melodious chant of theirs, but which Sir Simon Harness has the bad taste to find wearisome and lugubrious.

“Could you persuade those doves of yours to cease that dismal noise just for ten minutes, Franceline? It’s working under difficulties, trying to correct proof-sheets while they keep up that dirge.”

Franceline, deeply offended, carries off her darlings to the other side of the house, without deigning any further comment than a toss of her pretty head at the speaker and a look of mild reproach at her father, who yields a tacit consent to the insult by his silence. Moreover, when Franceline and “those doves of hers” are out of sight, he breathes an audible sigh of relief and proceeds to read the contested sentence aloud again. There was a good deal of arguing and bickering over it; Sir Simon insisting that the epithet was too strong and should be modified, while M. de la Bourbonais maintained that whether he applied the term “patriot cast in the rough antique mould” to Mirabeau or not signified very little, since the facts as he stated and construed them applied it far more forcibly. They were squabbling over it still when, half an hour later, Franceline came back, apparently in a forgiving mood, and expressed her wonder how people could go on quarrelling when everything around was so full of peace, in a world where all created things were steeped in beauty and in bliss; where life was not a struggle, but a joy; where nothing was needed but [Pg 190] the will to vibrate to the pulse of love with which the great mother’s breast was heaving, to respond to the sun’s wooing and the wind’s wafting, to the music of flowers and birds, to be a voice in the choir and a grain of incense on the altar, to live, to love, and to be happy. What were proof-sheets worth if they could not swell the glad concert and sound their chime in the joy-bells of life? They were sounding their little chime, though, in spite of the frequent clash of arms they gave rise to between the author and his pig-headed Tory critic. The crisp little rolls of paper were an immense superadded interest to Raymond—and consequently to Franceline—in their new life of golden sunshine. They would come to an end soon now; a few more bundles of proofs, then a pause of solemn expectation, and the great work would appear immortalized between the boards.

CHAPTER XVI..

FOUND AT LAST!

While the three inmates of the white-washed villa were watching the days go by, and wondering if to-morrow could possibly be as happy as yesterday and to-day, Clide de Winton was living a very different life in his lodgings near the asylum. He had not yet been permitted to see the lady whom he believed to be his wife. She had fallen ill with an attack on the lungs which had very nearly proved fatal, and during the six weeks that it lasted it was impossible to let any one approach her except the familiar faces of the doctor and her attendant. She had rallied from this illness only to return to her old delusion with a fonder intensity than ever. Day after day she decked herself in her faded flowers and ribbons, and stood or knelt at her window, stretching out her arms to the mid-day sun, calling to him with the tenderest words of endearment, and telling him her passionate love-tale over and over again; then turning from this to paroxysms of despair more violent than formerly, and which threatened at each crisis to shatter the fragile vase and send the feeble spark flying upwards.

“And now she courted love; now, raving, called on hate.”

Clide had repeatedly asked to see Mr. Percival, but the desire for an interview was evidently not mutual; for, although no refusal was ever sent, the promises held out by the medical man were continually broken; the visit of Mr. Percival was always “unexpectedly prevented” by one cause or another. Stanton arrived at the conclusion that he did not wish to meet Clide, and that, moreover, he was constantly at the asylum unknown to them, and that the only way to see him would be to lie in wait and collar him, and make him speak out by main force, since he would not do it otherwise. Mr. de Winton saw difficulties in the way of this summary method of proceeding, but his valet entreated him to leave it in his hands and not trouble himself about that. Clide had small confidence in the diplomatic skill of his man, but he could trust him not to do anything dangerously rash; so he asked no questions, but let him follow his own devices for catching Mr. Percival. That gentleman, however, proved himself a match for Stanton. [Pg 191] He was not to be taken either by stratagem or force; and though Stanton dodged about the park gates, and recruited a small police force, amongst little boys on the lookout for a penny, to skulk about late and early to watch the comers and goers from the asylum, and give him timely warning, it led to nothing but vain hopes and frequent disappointments.

Clide was growing sick to death of the miserable business. He had been more than two months now stationed at his post. Isabel’s illness had made two-thirds of that time utterly useless to him; but it was now a full week since the doctor had declared her convalescent, and he seemed no nearer the solution of her identity than when he first descried her through the panel of the door. He determined at last one morning to go in and speak out his mind to the medical man. He told him that he insisted on an interview with Mr. Percival, or else he would take steps in the matter which might be disagreeable to all parties. It was quite inexplicable, he said, that they should not have been able to find an opportune moment or letting him approach the patient all this time, and the persistent obstacles that were thrown in the way of an interview with the man who called himself her guardian led him to infer that both Mr. Percival and the doctor were in league to prevent her identity being tested and established.

The effect of this broadside was startling. But although it took the doctor entirely by surprise, it did not throw him off his guard or disturb his presence of mind. He looked at the speaker for a moment in silence, and then said in a perfectly cool and collected manner:

“I see there is no use in playing at this game any longer. I have humored you up to this, and borne with your mania, because I knew it was a mania. It has been plain to me from the third time I saw you, Mr. de Winton, that you were yourself the victim of a delusion and an eligible candidate for a lunatic asylum. I have prevented Mr. Percival from taking steps to have you confined—the law empowers us to do so when a madman threatens the security and honor of another—because I hoped the monomania would wear itself out with patience. I find I have been mistaken. I shall interfere no farther with Mr. Percival in his legitimate desire to protect the lady who is under my care from your persistent persecution. She is no more your wife than she is mine. Your story about her is as groundless as the ravings of a man in fever.”

While the doctor delivered himself of this attack Clide stared at him in stupefaction. He saw the medical man’s glance fixed on him with the expression of one who was versed in the art of reading the mind through that lucid and faithful interpreter—the eye. But though he was both shocked and indignant, he was not a whit frightened; he bore the scrutiny without flinching, without dropping his lid once.

“You are a clever tactician, I see,” he said coolly. “Carrying the war into the enemy’s country is one of the desperate strategies of a daring general, but it is sometimes more fatal to the invader than to the invaded. You have now thrown off the mask and shown me exactly what manner of man I have to deal with, and I shall resort to other means than those I have hitherto employed for seeing the patient whom I am now absolutely [Pg 192] and fully convinced is no other than my unhappy wife.”

He rose, and was leaving without further parley when the doctor cried out:

“You can see her this moment, if you choose—that is, if you choose to be guilty of homicide. I am prepared to state before the first men in the faculty, and to stake my character on the assertion, that—if she be your wife—the sight of you, supposing that it brings recognition, will be fatal to her life by causing the rupture of a vessel on the brain. Come back with any qualified witnesses you think fit, and I will repeat this in their presence, and then, on your responsibility, I will conduct you to the patient.”

Clide made no answer, but left the house, and was soon on his way to Piccadilly in a cab. The admiral had come to town the night before; it was partly the desire to be able to give his uncle some definite information concerning the inmate of the mad-house that had driven him to burn his ships and have it out with the doctor.

The cab stopped, and as Clide alighted he was accosted by a friendly voice and the grip of a heavy hand on his shoulder.

“Hallo, De Winton! How are you? Where have you turned up from?”

It was Ponsonby Anwyll’s voice; he looked in the highest state of elation, blonder and burlier than ever, the very picture of good temper, good digestion, and general prosperity.

The sight of him jarred on Clide; he had naturally a vindictive feeling toward poor Ponsonby since that random shot of Sir Simon’s about his making Franceline a good husband by and by. He did not believe a word of it; but it made him feel savagely to the young squire, nevertheless. How dare he behave so as to get his name coupled with hers at all?

“I have been hanging about town for some time,” returned Clide as stiffly as he could without being uncivil. “I suppose you’re on leave? Or perhaps quartered somewhere hereabouts?”

“Quartered! No such luck! We’re vegetating in Devonshire still, I’m sorry to say; but there’ll soon be an end of it for me. I mean to sell out and settle down one of these days. I’ve come up to try and get a month’s leave. I think I’ll succeed, too, the colonel is such an awfully good fellow; and what do you think I’m going to do with it? Where do you think I’m going to spend it?”

“How should I know?”

“At Nice! Sir Simon Harness has asked me over to stay at his villa there; the De la Bourbonais are there, you know. You’ll be glad to hear that Franceline has made a splendid recovery of it, and the count has picked up wonderfully too.… Oh! I beg a thousand pardons. Pray allow me!…” This was to an old lady whose umbrella he had whisked into the middle of the street with a touch of his stick, that he kept swinging round while he held forth to Clide. When he had picked it up and dusted it, and apologized three times over, he went on to say: “Why shouldn’t you run over and see them all too, eh? You used to be very friendly with the count, eh? And Sir Simon would be enchanted to see you. There’s nothing he likes so much as being come down on by a friend unawares, you know.”

“I never gratify my friends in [Pg 193] that respect,” said Clide freezingly; “I always wait to be invited. Are you to be a large party at the villa?”

“I don’t fancy so; but I really don’t know. The only invitations I know of are myself and Roxham. He’s a capital fellow, Roxham; I’m glad we are going together. I wish you’d come too, though, eh? Perhaps you’ll think it over and pop down on us one of these days when we least expect it? Have you any message for Sir Simon or any of them?”

“My best respects to M. de la Bourbonais and his daughter. Good-afternoon. A pleasant journey to you!”

“Wish me good-luck about the leave first!” said the good-natured, obtuse dragoon as he strode on, laughing.

“The lumbering idiot! How I should like to kick him! The impudence of the lout calling her Franceline!” This was Mr. de Winton’s soliloquy as he stood looking after Ponsonby, giving at the same time a pull to the bell as if the house were on fire.

The admiral was out. Cromer, his old valet, who had first sounded the signal about Isabel, happened to be at his master’s for the day, and said he believed he had gone to see Master Clide. Clide jumped back into his cab and told the man to go like the wind, as he wanted to overtake some one. His reflections on the way were none of the pleasantest. What was bringing Ponsonby Anwyll to spend a month at Sir Simon’s while M. de la Bourbonais and his daughter were there? What but to marry Franceline? Had she, then, so completely forgotten Clide? Why not? If his love for her had a tithe of the unselfishness it boasted, he ought to be the first to rejoice at it; to be glad that she was happy and was about to become the wife of a good and honorable and warm-hearted man whom she loved. Did she love him? could she love him?—a lump of red and white clay with as much soul as a prize bull! She that was such an ethereal, lily creature—how could it be possible? What could any girl see in him to love? If this was an irrational and unfair estimate of Ponsonby’s outward and inward man, it was natural enough on Clide’s part. No man, be he ever so reasonable, is expected to do justice to the claims of any other man to be preferred by the woman he loves. But Clide was more savage with Sir Simon even than with Anwyll. What business had he to go meddling at making a match for Franceline? Why could he not have let her alone, and let destiny take its course—or, to put it in a more concrete shape, let Clide de Winton take his chance? Clide did not consider that his chance virtually had no existence whatever in Sir Simon’s calculations. He believed that Isabel’s identity was established beyond a doubt, and that this fact, much as he might regret it, excluded Clide for ever from having any part in Franceline’s destiny. He believed, moreover, or he wished to believe—which with the sanguine Sir Simon meant one and the same thing—that Clide had quite got over his passion malheureuse for Franceline, but, whether he had or not, it could not be helped; he could not marry her, and it was preposterous to expect that she was to remain unmarried out of consideration for his feelings. Here was an admirable settlement in life that presented itself, and it was Sir Simon’s duty, as her self-elected guardian and her father’s oldest friend, to do all in his power to secure it to her.

[Pg 194] Oh! but if Franceline would but wait a little longer—it might be such a very little while—until Clide was free! “What a pitiful thing a woman’s love is compared to a man’s! If I had been in her position, and she in mine,” he thought, “I would have waited a lifetime for her!”

You see Clide was assuming, in spite of his oft-sighed hopes to the contrary, that Franceline did love him. He argued the point bitterly in his mind, accusing her and acquitting her and cursing his own fate all in the same breath, as he rattled over the stony street. But the cursing brought no relief. Help was nowhere at hand. In the old story-books, when a man found himself at bay with difficulties, he called the devil to the rescue, and the devil came. These delightful legends generally represent him in spectacles and a bottle-green coat; they may sometimes differ as to the precise color of the coat, but they all agree that he was the most accommodating practitioner, often volunteering his services without waiting to be asked. When it came to striking a bargain, no one was more liberal than he. The man in difficulties made his own terms: unlimited wealth, a long life with the lady of his choice, the sweet triumphs of revenge—one or all of these the devil would concede with the utmost generosity; all the client had to do in return was to scratch his name to a bit of paper, signing his soul away—a sort of post-obit bill to be presented at some period that was not always even of necessity specified.

If this obliging old legendary personage had appeared at this juncture to Clide de Winton, I suspect he would have had little difficulty in striking a bargain with him. To be free; to burst at once this odious, insufferable chain that must soon be dissolved by death; to be able to seize the prize that was about to be snatched from him at the very moment he felt sure that a little delay would have secured it to him for ever—to obtain this Clide would have signed away his life, ay, and his soul’s life too, for the asking. No evil one, it is true, presented himself in a bottle-green coat or any other visible attire, but one, nevertheless, got close enough to the distracted lover’s ear to whisper a proposal audibly. An invisible devil jumped into the cab with him, and sat close to him all the way from Piccadilly home, and never ceased urging, pleading; no tongue of flesh ever spoke more distinctly:

“You have the game in your own hands. The doctor is out now. You know your way to her room. No one will stop you. Go straight up, and walk in, and address your wife; you are her husband, and have a right to do it. The shock will kill her; but what of that? What is life to her that any merciful man should wish to prolong it? Death will be the cessation of mental and bodily anguish to her, poor raving maniac, and it will set you free—free to marry Franceline. You know Franceline loves you. The mercy will then be for her too; if she marries Ponsonby Anwyll, it will be only to please her father. She will be miserable; it will break her heart. Go and save both her and yourself.”

When the tempter comes armed with such weapons as these, and finds us in the mood in which Clide was as he drove home through the noisy streets into the quiet suburb, the issue of the struggle, if struggle there be, is hardly doubtful. [Pg 195] There was a struggle in this case. You could see it in the feverish movements of the tempted man; he could not sit still, but kept shifting his limbs as we are apt to do when there is no other escape from the steady contemplation of our thoughts. One moment he leaned back with his hands thrust deep into his pockets, and stared out of the window; the next he started forward and bent down on his knees, as if examining closely something at his feet. He took off his hat, smoothed it with his coat-sleeve, pushed back his hair, and put his hat on again. This physical agitation seemed to bring him no relief. He drew out his pocket-book and read over attentively the memoranda of the day before—appointments at the club, with his tailor, books that he had dotted down for reading; but while he perused these commonplace items the voice of the tempter kept on whispering, louder and louder, sweeter and sweeter. The dusty cab was the temple of a vision. Franceline stood before him, with her arms outstretched; she drew nearer, she called him by his name; he felt her breath upon his cheek, the soft touch of her hand in his. Could sin come to him in such guise as this? His features for a moment were convulsed, swayed by the terrible conflict. Gradually the combat ceased, and an expression, not of calm, but of rigid determination, settled on them; the dark brows drew together, making that black line across the forehead which gave to Clide’s face its peculiar, strong individuality. He had not accepted the tempter’s arguments, but he had accepted the issue they pointed at, twisting reasons to his own purpose, and adopting the sophistry of passion: “I will go and accost her. Ten to one—what do I say? a hundred to one, she is not my wife. The absence of the silver tooth ought to have convinced me of that long ago. It ought to have settled the non-identity from the first; for Percival says he never heard of such a thing. As to its killing her, supposing she be my wife, it’s all nonsense; the fellow is in Percival’s pay, and that’s why he has fought out so against my seeing her. I’ll defy him once for all, and make an end of it one way or another.”

Clide did not, or would not, see the palpable paradox that there was in this train of reasoning; but deafen himself as he might by sophistry and inclination, he could not drown the voice of conscience, that clamored so as to make itself heard above every other.

“Has the admiral been here?” was his first question as he sprang out of the cab and rushed up-stairs.

“Yes, sir; him and Mr. Simpson.”

“Ah! Simpson. Are they long gone?”

“Not above a good quarter of an hour. They’re not gone very far; they’re over yonder,” said Stanton, with a knowing jerk of his head in the direction of the asylum.

Clide started.

“What do you mean? What are they gone to do there?”

“They’re just gone to have it out with the doctor, sir. Mr. Simpson says it’s all gammon about your not being let see her. He’s gone over to insist on seeing her himself—him and the admiral; and if the doctor refuses to let them up, Mr. Simpson’ll set the law on him.”

“Good God! they will kill her. They have done it already perhaps! I am too late to stop them!” [Pg 196] said Clide, white to the lips, and taking a stride towards the door. The room reeled round him. Was he going to be an accomplice in the murder of his wife? He would at that moment have renounced Franceline for ever to prevent the act that a few minutes ago he was bent on committing.

Stanton was frightened.

“Stay you here, Master Clide,” he said, taking him by both arms and forcing him into a chair. “Don’t you take on like that. I’ll run across and stop ‘em. There an’t no ‘arm done; the doctor’s never in the ‘ouse at this hour, and they never ‘ud let them hup without him. You stay quiet while I run after them. I’ll be back in no time.”

Clide made no resistance; he let himself drop into the chair in a kind of stupor. The sudden reaction, coming close upon the fierce mental conflict he had gone through, acted like a blow on a drunken man; it stunned and felled him.

“Go, then, and be quick, for God’s sake!” he muttered.

* * * * *

Ten minutes went by, and then fifteen, and Clide began to wonder what was keeping Stanton.

He could bear the suspense no longer, but took up his hat and went to see what caused the delay.

Stanton, meantime, had not been amusing himself. In answer to his inquiries the porter informed him that the two gentlemen he was looking for had called at the house and asked to see the doctor, and, on hearing that he was out and not expected home for half an hour, had declined to come in, but were walking about the place waiting for him. Stanton hesitated a moment whether he should run home at once with this reassuring news to his master, or fetch the admiral and Mr. Simpson, and bring them back with him; he decided for the latter and set off to look for them. The grounds were spacious and thickly planted enough to admit of two persons easily getting out of sight for a few minutes; but when Stanton had looked all round, walking hastily from avenue to alley, and could see no trace of the two gentlemen, he began to think they must have changed their minds and gone away. He went on, however, a good way behind the house until he came on a low brick wall that he fancied must mark the limits of the premises. He was about to turn back when he heard a loud, shrill scream proceeding from the other side of the wall. He ran along by it till he saw a door that was ajar, and then, without pausing to consider where he was going or what he was doing, rushed in and ran on in the direction of the scream. Presently he heard voices raised in angry strife. A few more steps brought him in presence of Admiral de Winton, Mr. Simpson, and a third gentleman. They were disputing violently. The admiral was supporting a woman who had apparently fainted; the stranger was expostulating and trying to take her from him; Mr. Simpson was standing between them, speaking in loud and authoritative tones:

“Very well, very good; we shall see if it is as you say. But we must see for ourselves; we must find out if there was nothing in her crying out ‘Clide! Clide!’ the moment she saw this gentleman and heard his voice. Stand back! Don’t lay a finger on him or on her! I do know what I am doing—I know better than you do. Stand off, I tell you!”

The stranger was, however, determined to make a fight for it, and [Pg 197] was answering in a bullying, insolent manner when Stanton came up.

“I know that voice! Where have I heard it?” was the valet’s first thought as the loud, harsh tones fell on his ear.

There was a garden seat close at hand. The admiral was carrying the fainting woman towards it. Stanton ran forward to help.

“Go to the house and call for proper assistance,” said Mr. Simpson shortly to the stranger. “You know where to find it, I suppose; you know the house.”

“I know I sha’n’t move from this while my child is at the mercy of two escaped lunatics! That’s what I know,” retorted the other savagely.

The words were not out of his mouth when Stanton was at his throat, collaring him with both hands.

“You scoundrel! I’ve caught you at last,” he said. “You villain of villains! I’ll do for you! He’s the fellow that called himself Prendergast, and that’s master Clide’s wife!”

All this took much less time to enact than to relate. The scream which had brought Stanton to the spot had been heard by an attendant; there was always one on the watch in the neighborhood of the patients’ garden, and she came hurrying up in an instant.

“Who are you all, and what are you doing here?” she cried, casting an alarmed look at the three men and at the lifeless figure stretched on the wooden seat.

“A couple of escaped lunatics!” shouted Mr. Percival, struggling furiously. Stanton was holding him by the collar, while Mr. Simpson pinioned him from behind, the admiral standing meantime, bent in eager scrutiny, over the strange figure, decked out in faded flowers and ribbons, that lay insensible before him.

“Come here!” he said, beckoning to the attendant; “come and attend to this poor creature, and leave those gentlemen to settle their business alone.”

The woman evidently felt that this was what it most concerned her to do; she allowed the admiral to lift the patient in his arms, while she guided him into the house. They had just entered by a back door when Clide de Winton walked by in search of Stanton. The porter had directed him to “somewhere about the grounds,” and, after looking in vain up and down the avenues, he was going to give it up in despair when he saw the door in the garden wall, now wide open, and heard a voice which he recognized as Stanton’s, “Come on! You may as well give in and come quietly; bad language and kicks will only make it worse for you, you rascal!”

Clide was quickly on the spot, and beheld Stanton and Mr. Simpson wrestling desperately with a man whose fury seemed a match for their united strength.

“I’ve caught him, Master Clide! We have him tight—that rascal Prendergast! You an’t he? You be choked for a —— liar!”

Clide stood for a moment confounded. There was not a trait of resemblance, as far as he could see, between the stout, full-bodied man with jet black hair, and the gray-haired, thin, miserable-looking mortal whom he remembered as Mr. Prendergast. His first idea was that Stanton had made another outrageous mistake, as in the case of Miss Eliza Jane Honey.

“Who are you? You are not the Mr. Prendergast I knew, are [Pg 198] you?” he said, addressing the stranger.

“Of course I am not! I never saw you or this madman in my life! My name is Mathew Percival; my daughter is unfortunately a patient in this asylum, and this fellow will have it that she is his wife!”

“My master’s wife, you scoundrel! Don’t think to come over us with making believe not to understand! She’s Mr. Clide de Winton’s wife!” said Stanton, taking a tighter grip, as if he feared the prize might make a sudden dart and escape from him.

“You are the man who called himself Prendergast, and whose niece, as you then called her, I married!” said Clide. The voice and the broad Scotch accent were unmistakable, though the speaker had made an effort to disguise them. “You say she is your daughter now. Speak the truth at once. The patient in yonder house is the Isabel Cameron whom I married. Let him go, Simpson! Stanton, let go your hold on him! Speak out now.”

Mr. Prendergast, or Percival, looked down sullenly for a moment, as if making up his mind how to meet this challenge; then he looked up with the dogged, defiant air of a man at bay who is resolved to die game. He was going to speak, when a woman, the same attendant who had just left them, came running up in breathless haste.

“Stanton! Which of you is Stanton?” she cried.

“It’s me!”

“Then go as fast as you can and fetch your master! His wife is calling for him; run quickly, or it will be too late. She is dying!”

“I am his master! I am her husband! Take me with you!” said Clide, turning so white that Stanton thought he was going to faint and made a movement to give him his arm; but Clide waved him away and walked on with a steady step.

Something between a cry and an oath escaped from Percival; he made no attempt to follow them, but muttered more to himself than to his companions:

“The murder is out! There is nothing more to tell. She is his wife, and I am the Prendergast he knew.”

Stanton’s fury had subsided in an instant, quenched by the chill which those words of the attendant had thrown upon the group: “She is dying!” What had human passion or earthly vengeance to do now with Isabel or Mr. Prendergast? In the presence of the Great Avenger all other vengeance was silenced. The three men walked on toward the house without exchanging a word. The porter let them in. The doctor, he said, had not yet returned. It did not matter; they would wait, not for him now, but for Death.

When Clide entered the room, he beheld Admiral de Winton seated beside the dying woman’s bed; her face was lifted toward his with a mute expression, half of yearning, half of fear, while she listened to the soothing words he tried to speak to her. The moment Clide appeared her eyes turned toward him. There was no mistaking the identity now; those eyes, so faded and dim, were the same that had first fired his foolish heart with their dark young radiance. The cheeks, once round, were wan and hollow, the glossy, ebon hair was specked with gray, but the face was that of his long-lost wife, the Isabel of his boyish love.

“You have come!… You have come to say that you forgive [Pg 199] me!” she said in faint, low tones, fastening a wistful, trembling glance on him; for Clide did not advance at once, but stood on the threshold, arrested by the mournful spectacle.

“Isabel!” he exclaimed, approaching softly, and he knelt down and leaned over her.

She looked at him so long without speaking that he began to fear she did not know him after all. He raised the little hand to his lips, and then stroked it caressingly; the action, the touch, seemed to strike some chord long sleeping.

“Clide, Clide!” she murmured, and the tears rose and rolled in large drops down her cheeks. His heart was wrung with pity; there was no room for any other feeling. If she had wronged him as deeply as he had ever feared, he forgave it all. He remembered nothing but that they had once loved each other, that she had suffered cruelly, and that she was dying.

“My poor Isabel! I forgive you with all my heart, as I hope to be forgiven; so help me God!”

He let his head fall on the pillow beside her and wept silently.

Admiral de Winton made a sign to the attendant that they had better withdraw and leave them alone; she hesitated a moment, and then followed him and closed the door softly behind her. And so they were once more together—those two who had been joined and parted, and reunited now for a moment only before the final parting. No one disturbed them, no eye looked behind the curtain while that last sacred interview lasted. For three hours Clide knelt by the side of his dying wife, her hand in his, her head resting on his breast. He whispered words of tenderness and mercy to the wearied spirit; he told her of a Love greater than his, and of a pardon mightier and more availing, of which his was but the pledge and the forerunner.

At sunset she died.

TO BE CONCLUDED NEXT MONTH.

[Pg 200]

NAPOLEON I. AND PIUS VII.[75]

In the Life of Pope Pius VII. Miss Allies has given us a picture of rare beauty and deep interest. We think, however, that the title of the book has not been well chosen. It is not a biography of Pius VII., but a history of the efforts of Napoleon Bonaparte to make the Papacy an appendage and support of the vast empire which he had founded with his sword. The materials for the narrative have been drawn chiefly from the Mémoires of Cardinal Consalvi and the Memorie Storiche of Cardinal Pacca, both of whom were witnesses of the facts which they relate. The author is also greatly indebted to the recent work of d’Haussonville, L’Eglise Romaine et le Premier Empire.

The shock of the Revolution of 1789, which unsettled everything in Europe—ideas, customs, laws, government—could not possibly have left the church undisturbed. In France the goods of the clergy were declared to belong to the nation. The churches were turned into temples of Reason, the convents converted into barracks, the priests who remained faithful to their consciences guillotined or sent into exile. The new republic, “one and indivisible,” aspired to be also universal, and soon the clash of arms resounded throughout Europe. Napoleon, at the head of the army of Italy, gained those brilliant victories which kindled in his heart the flame of an all-devouring ambition. He was ordered to march upon Rome, and he wrote to Cardinal Mattei: “Save the pope from the greatest of evils; be persuaded that I need only the will in order to destroy his power.” Pius VI. was in consequence forced to sign a treaty in which he gave up a considerable part of his territory, and in the following year (1798) the French republic invaded Rome. The reign of the popes was declared to be at an end; the Holy Father was dragged away into captivity, and in August, 1799, died at Valence. The following November the cardinals met in conclave in Venice under the protection of Russia, England, and Turkey, and elected Barnaba Chiaramonti, who took the title of Pius VII., and on the 3d of July, 1800, entered Rome amidst universal demonstrations of joy. Just two months before Bonaparte had led his victorious troops across the Alps, and, having triumphed over Austria, had a Te Deum sung in the cathedral of Milan for the deliverance of Italy from infidels and heretics—the Turks, namely, and the English. Shortly afterwards he informed Pius VII. of his wish to open negotiations for the arrangement of religious matters. The First Consul was preparing to assume the purple. “I did not usurp the crown,” he said; “it was lying in the mire: I picked it up. The people placed it on my head.” He felt, however, that an empire founded upon “blood and iron” could not dispense with the moral support of religion. He therefore determined to enter into a Concordat with the pope. This resolution, we are bound to believe, sprang purely from political and selfish motives. Whilst fortune [Pg 201] smiled upon him Napoleon cared for religion only so far as it served his ambitious ends. To Menon, in Egypt, he wrote: “I thank you for the honors you have paid to our prophet.” In India he would have been for Ali, for Confucius in China, and in Thibet for the Dalai Lama. Consalvi was despatched to Paris to enter into articles of agreement with the First Consul. When the cardinal presented himself before Bonaparte, he turned abruptly upon him and said: “I know what brings you to France. I wish the negotiations to begin at once. I give you five days, and, if at the end of that time matters are not arranged, you must return to Rome; for my own part, I have already provided against such a contingency.”

After many discussions the First Consul declared that he was ready to ratify the Concordat. Joseph Bonaparte, Bernier, and Crétet were to sign for the French government, and Consalvi, Spina, and Caselli for the pope. At the appointed hour and place they all met. Bernier held in his hand what he said was the Concordat, and, as the cardinal claimed the right of signing first, he attempted to get him to affix his signature without looking at the document; but a glance showed Consalvi that a spurious paper had been substituted, and he refused to sign his name. The Concordat was to be proclaimed at a public dinner on the following day; so the discussions were reopened and continued through the whole night, but no satisfactory conclusion was reached. The hour for the dinner arrived, and when the cardinal entered the banquet-hall Bonaparte called out to him in a mocking tone:

“So you wish to break with me, Monsieur le Cardinal? Well, be it so! I have no need of Rome! I have no need of the pope! If Henry VIII., without the twentieth part of my power, was able to change the religion of his subjects, how much more able am not I! In changing the religion of France I shall change it in all Europe, in all places where my power is felt. When will you go?”

“After dinner,” replied the cardinal with seeming unconcern. This outburst of wrath was meant to frighten Consalvi: Bonaparte had really no intention of breaking so suddenly with the pope. Again negotiations were begun. The Concordat was signed, and Joseph was deputed to take it to the First Consul to obtain his placet; but the great man tore the paper into a hundred pieces. Finally, however, he yielded, and the public exercise of religious worship was again permitted in France.

But when Bonaparte published the Concordat, he added to it the “Organic Articles,” by which many of its provisions were practically annulled; and he was even guilty of the falsehood of making it appear that these articles were part of the convention with Pius VII. He was resolved to rule the consciences of men in the same absolute way in which he commanded his army. The bishops were required to submit all their official documents to the prefects of the departments. To prelates who were particularly zealous pastorals were sent, made to order by the central bureau at Paris. A bishop was not permitted to appoint or remove a priest without Bonaparte’s permission. Public worship was placed under the supervision of the police.

On the 16th of May, 1804, the senate voted that Napoleon should assume the title of emperor. Two months before, with premeditation and in cold blood, he had had the [Pg 202] Duc d’Enghien assassinated at Vincennes; and this stain upon his name made him the more anxious to receive the imperial crown from the consecrated hands of the pope. A middle course was not open to Pius VII. He had either to accept Napoleon’s invitation or to declare himself his enemy.

With the understanding that the “Organic Articles” should be repealed, and that the constitutional clergy should make their retractation in his hands, the pope set out for Paris. In his long journey he was permitted to stop but twice, and upon his first meeting the new emperor he was treated in the most uncivil manner.

On the eve of the coronation Pius VII. received a visit from Josephine. She came to unburden her heart to him. The church had never blessed her marriage with Bonaparte, and she felt that this would probably be her last opportunity to have this matter arranged. The pope declared that he would not assist at the coronation unless the marriage was first contracted according to the rite of the church. The duplicity of Napoleon had deeply wounded the Holy Father, and the emperor’s wrath could not shake the pope’s firm resolve. During the night preceding the coronation, therefore, Cardinal Fesch performed the marriage ceremony in the chapel of the Tuileries in the presence of two witnesses. When the moment for the coronation came, Napoleon took the crown from the altar of Notre Dame, and himself placed it on his head. He had given the Holy Father his word that there should be but one coronation; in violation of this promise he had himself crowned a second time in the Champ de Mars. He crammed for his interviews with the pope, in order to astonish him by his knowledge of church history. Already he was pondering over the thought of keeping the Holy Father in France. The archiepiscopal palace was to be fitted up for Pius VII. and reserved exclusively for the Pontifical Court. When this was intimated to the pope, he replied that it had not been unforeseen; before leaving Rome he had signed a formal abdication, in case he should be forcibly detained in France. The document was in Palermo in the hands of Cardinal Pignatelli; the emperor might imprison Barnaba Chiaramonti, the simple monk, but not Pius VII., the Vicar of Christ.

The subject was dropped. The petty jealousy and dread of rival power or popularity which was so marked a feature in Napoleon’s character could not be concealed whilst the Holy Father remained in Paris as an independent sovereign. He was not allowed to celebrate pontifical Mass at Notre Dame on Christmas day; and he was hurried off to Mâcon before Easter, and thence continued his journey back to Rome, having refused to assist at the ceremony of Napoleon’s coronation at Milan as King of Italy.

Jérome Bonaparte, a younger brother of Napoleon, had married a Protestant girl in the United States, and the emperor, who wished his brothers and sisters to make matrimonial alliances with the most powerful families of Europe, applied to the pope to annul the marriage. Pius VII. declared that he had no power in the case. Napoleon sought revenge by meddling still further with the affairs of the church in Italy, and by taking forcible possession of Ancona, a portion of the papal territory. The Holy Father protested in a letter dated the 13th of November, 1805, which [Pg 203] Napoleon did not find time to answer till January 7, 1806. In those two months he had brought to a close one of his most brilliant campaigns, had conquered the emperors of Austria and Russia, and dictated terms to all Europe.

In reply to the protest of the Holy Father Napoleon wrote to his ambassador at Rome in the following style: “The pope has written me a most ridiculous, a most foolish letter. These people thought I was dead.… Since these idiots do not object to the possibility of a Protestant occupying the throne of France, I will send them a Protestant ambassador.… I will change nothing outwardly, if people behave themselves with me; but otherwise I shall reduce the pope to be bishop of Rome. Really, nothing is so wanting in sense as the court of Rome.”

Only the Emperor of Russia and the King of England he declared were masters in their own states, because they had no pope to trouble them.

A month later (February, 1806) Pius VII. received another letter from Napoleon.

“Your Holiness,” he wrote, “must profess the same regard for me in the temporal order as I profess for you in the spiritual order. All my enemies must be your enemies. That an Englishman, a Russian, a Swede, or a minister of the Sardinian king should henceforth reside in Rome or in any part of your states is entirely unfitting. No vessel belonging to any of these states should enter your ports.”

The Holy Father replied that he was unable to assent to demands which were opposed to the character of his divine mission, “which owns no enmities, not even with those who have departed from the centre of unity.” Napoleon attributed the pope’s firmness to the counsels of Consalvi, and he determined to drive him from office. “Tell him,” he wrote to his ambassador, “that but two courses remain open to him: always to do what I wish or to quit the ministry.” He also informed the cardinal that none of his movements were unknown to him, and that for the first compromising act he should answer with his head; he would have him arrested in the streets of Rome. “These priests,” he said, “keep the soul for themselves and throw me the carcass.”

All this storm of imperial rage had broken upon the Head of the church because he had dared defend the honor of a Protestant girl, the daughter of a simple American citizen, against the attacks of the most terrible monarch of Europe.

Napoleon’s dream was to found a great western empire like that of Charlemagne, and for the accomplishment of this design he saw that the co-operation of the pope was necessary. He was therefore willing to defend the pope on condition that he should become his tool and lend himself as an obedient slave to his ambitious projects. But when he saw that there was no hope of bringing Pius VII. to accept his views on this subject, he began to govern the church after his own fashion. The bishops and priests who did not conform to his wishes were thrown into prison or forced to keep silence. He had his victories proclaimed from the pulpits; he furnished pastorals and exhortations in which it was made to appear that he was the defender of the faith, fighting against infidels and heretics; he recommended that prayers should be said that “our brothers, the persecuted Catholics of Ireland, might enjoy liberty of [Pg 204] worship.” “Inform M. Robert, a priest of Bourges,” he wrote, “of my displeasure. He preached a very foolish sermon on the 15th of August. L’Abbé de Coucy is a great worry to me. He keeps up too great a correspondence. I wish him to be arrested and put into a monastery.… It is really shameful that you have not yet arrested M. Stevens. People are too sleepy; else how could a wretched priest have escaped?… I see from your letter that you have caused a curé of La Vendée to be arrested. You have acted very wisely. Keep him in prison.” All religious newspapers—save one, the Journal des Curés, whose publications were strictly supervised—were suppressed. “No priest,” said Napoleon, “should bother his head about the church except in his sermons.” A special Sunday each year was set aside to commemorate the coronation and the victories of the Grande Armée; and in the sermon preached on that day particular mention was to be made of those who had fallen at Austerlitz. M. Portalis was charged with the preparation of a new imperial catechism, which was published in August, 1806. The children of France were taught that “the honor and the service of the emperor is one and the same thing as the honor and service of God”; that those who were wanting in their duty to Napoleon rendered themselves worthy of eternal damnation; and that God had given the crown not only to him, but to his family. The French bishops submitted in silence to this orthodox imperialism.

The next step was to deprive the pope of his temporal power. As Pius VII. had refused to enter into the emperor’s plans for the founding of a great western empire, he was to be imprisoned. Napoleon had just annihilated the wonderful troops of Frederick the Great, and from his palace at Berlin he once more dictated terms to the Holy Father. “Let the pope,” he wrote, “do what I wish, and he will be repaid for the past and the future.”

All Europe, save England, was lying helpless at the feet of the conqueror; and that the pope should continue to defend the interests of a Protestant country against the power of a second Charlemagne was an impossible supposition.

But Napoleon was now so great that he refused to enter into personal correspondence with Pius VII.; so he wrote to Eugene Beauharnais, the Viceroy of Italy, with instructions that he should communicate his letter to the pope.

“They say,” wrote the emperor,” that they want to publish all the evil that I have committed against religion. The idiots! They ignore, then, that there does not exist a spot in Italy, Germany, or Poland where I have not done more for religion than the pope has done evil.… What does Pius VII. mean by denouncing me to Christendom? Does he imagine that their arms will fall from the hands of my soldiers?… Perhaps the time is not far off when, if this meddling in my affairs does not stop, I shall acknowledge the pope to be nothing more than bishop of Rome, holding a rank in all respects similar to my bishops.… In two words, this is the last time that I consent to treat with these wretched priests of Rome.”

The pope replied to these insults in a letter full of meekness and humility, in which he declared that he had refused Napoleon nothing which his conscience would permit him to grant. Napoleon gave orders for the occupation of Rome by the French troops under General Miollis; and the army passed [Pg 205] in through the open gates of the city on the 2d of February, 1808. The pope was a prisoner. The Neapolitan cardinals were carried off by force; and in March all who were not natives of the states of the church were ordered to leave Rome. The dethronement of the pope was proclaimed with the sound of the trumpet, and his dominions were declared irrevocably united to the kingdom of Italy. The Holy Father signed the bull of excommunication, and in the night of the 5th of July, 1809, General Radet broke into his apartments, arrested him and Cardinal Pacca, hurried them into a closed carriage, and drove out of Rome through the Porta Pia, accompanied by a detachment of gendarmes. The pope, who was ill and weak, was driven in great haste through Italy to Savona, a fortified town near Genoa, where he was imprisoned.

Europe was dumb, the press was silent, and people dared not even express sympathy for the Holy Father. Napoleon tried to make the world forget that there was a pope; but he himself was often reminded of his existence. Many dioceses were without bishops, and the pope refused to confirm those who had been appointed, so long as he was deprived of his liberty. The emperor had some of the highest dignitaries of the French church to write to the prisoner of Savona to represent the evil consequences of this refusal; but to no purpose. All the cardinals were summoned to Paris to grace the Imperial Court. The Penitentiaria and Dataria were also removed thither. Napoleon sent a circular to the bishops, ordering them “to suppress the prayer to St. Gregory VII., and to substitute another feast for that of this saint, whom the Gallican Church cannot recognize.” Everything was “to be organized as if no pope existed.” No priest was to be ordained without the emperor’s permission. “Give orders,” he wrote, “to the prefect of the Taro department to choose fifty of the worst priests at Parma and fifty of the worst at Piacenza.… Let them embark for Corsica.”

The time had now come when Napoleon was resolved to be divorced from Josephine. He consulted the Archbishop of Bordeaux and his clergy on the subject. Their reply was unfavorable, and he summarily dismissed them and had the vicar-general and the superior of the seminary deprived of their offices. One day, after a very silent repast with the empress, he broached the subject to her. She fell fainting to the floor; the emperor summoned the chamberlain and had her carried to her apartments. Her adieu to sovereignty was effected under trying circumstances. A grand reception took place at the Tuileries on the evening of her departure. She assisted at the funeral of her worldly greatness, and the fate of Napoleon was decided at the same moment by a few hurried words spoken by two courtiers as they were leaving the imperial presence. Negotiations for the marriage of Napoleon with the Grand Duchess Olga, sister of the Czar of Russia, were all but concluded. That night M. Floret, the first secretary of the Austrian Embassy, whispered to M. de Sémonville that the emperor might easily have the hand of Marie Louise of Austria. This was related to Napoleon; the alliance with Russia was broken off; and two years later came the retreat from Moscow, when the arms fell from his soldiers’ hands. But to espouse a daughter of the Catholic house of Austria it was necessary to obtain not [Pg 206] only a civil but also a religious divorce from Josephine. No other authority than that of the pope, Cardinal Fesch declared, would be otherwise than “uncertain or dangerous” on the subject; but to apply to the captive of Savona would be useless. Napoleon therefore created an ecclesiastical tribunal for the occasion, over which his uncle, Cardinal Fesch, was appointed to preside. The emperor first attempted to make it appear that his marriage with Josephine in 1804 was invalid, because it had taken place without witnesses or deed; but the cardinal was able to show that this was not true. He next alleged as a cause of illegality the absence of the parish priest; but the faculties conferred upon Fesch by Pius VII. more than supplied this deficiency. As a last resort Napoleon declared that he had never consented to the religious marriage, thus openly confessing that he had deceived Josephine, Cardinal Fesch, and the Holy Father. This statement, however, was probably an after-thought and false, which is not surprising in an habitual liar like Napoleon. The tribunal was threatened with the anger of the emperor if it kept him waiting beyond a certain day. As it had been created only to do his bidding, his marriage with Josephine was declared null; but let us remark that the Holy Father had nothing to do with this business; he was not even consulted, as he had already given proof of what might be expected from him in the case of Jérôme Bonaparte and Miss Paterson. Nearly all the cardinals were at this time living in Paris. Fourteen of them gave it as their opinion that the divorce had been rightly granted; thirteen others asserted that the tribunal was incompetent, and that the case should have been submitted to the pope. In consequence they determined not to assist at the marriage of Napoleon and Marie Louise. When Cardinal Fesch reported this to the emperor, he got into a fit of rage. “Bah! they will not dare,” he exclaimed; and when Cardinal Consalvi, the leader of the thirteen, came to a public audience at the Tuileries eight days before the ceremony, Napoleon came up to him, stopped before him, gave him a thundering look, and passed on without speaking a word. As he entered the chapel of the Louvre for the wedding he wore an air of triumph; but his countenance grew dark when he perceived the thirteen were not there.

“Where are the cardinals?” he asked in an irritated tone.

“A great number are here,” was the reply.

“Ah! the fools; but they are not here,” said Napoleon with another glance at the empty seats. “The fools, the fools!”

He declared that it was his intention to cause the resignation of these individuals, and that henceforth they were to be deprived of the Purple. In this way arose the title of Black and Red cardinals. The property of the thirteen was seized and their income went to swell the public treasure, whilst they were sent to different provincial towns and placed under surveillance.

The difficulty as to the appointment of bishops to vacant dioceses had not been settled. In May, 1810, Napoleon despatched two cardinals, most favorable to his pretensions, to Pius VII., whom he still held a prisoner in Savona, to persuade the pope to confirm the bishops appointed by the emperor; but the Holy Father was immovable. Napoleon thereupon resolved to make his own bishops and dispense with [Pg 207] the papal confirmation. Cardinal Fesch, who had accepted the title of Archbishop-elect of Paris, now refused to take possession of his see without the approval of the pope.

“I can force you to obey me,” said Napoleon to his uncle.

“Sire, potius mori,” replied the cardinal.

“Ah! ah! potius mori—rather Maury. Be it so. You shall have Maury.” Cardinal Maury accepted, and in a few days his vicar-general was arrested and sent to the dungeon of Vincennes, where he remained till the fall of the empire. About the same time Vincennes opened its gloomy gates to Cardinals di Pietro and Gabrielli. This was in 1811. Pius VII. had been in prison for two years. Napoleon now ordered his jailers to treat him with greater severity. No person was allowed to see him without the emperor’s permission; and for violating this regulation some priests from Marseilles were thrown into a filthy dungeon. All letters to and from the Holy Father were submitted to the inspection of the keeper of the prison.

“It is useless for the pope to write,” said Napoleon; “the less he does, the better it will be.… The less that which he writes reaches its destination, the better.… I trouble myself very little as to what he may do.… Let him be told that it is distressing for Christendom to own a pope so ignorant of what is due to sovereigns, but that the state will not be disturbed, and good will be effected without him.”

On the 8th of January, 1811, experts sent from Paris entered the episcopal palace at Savona, where the Holy Father was confined, opened his doors and drawers, searched his correspondence, unsewed his clothes, and broke open his desk, in order to discover something that might incriminate him. They even took away his breviary and the Office of the Blessed Virgin. He was also ordered to deliver up the Ring of the Fisherman; but, justly suspecting that it would be used for fraudulent purposes, he broke it in two and handed the pieces to Napoleon’s agent. A moral terrorism reigned over the religious world in France and Italy. The emperor’s vengeance pursued even ladies who gave alms to the Black cardinals. The cardinals, bishops, and priests who had spoken against his tyranny were in prison; the rest remained silent.

Napoleon now called a National Council to devise measures for governing the church without the assistance of the pope. The French bishops had for the most part been kept ignorant of the precise nature of the trouble between himself and Pius VII., and he intended by this new move to impress upon the mind of the Sovereign Pontiff that he could nor rely upon the support of the bishops. First, however, a deputation was sent to the pope to urge upon him the pressing necessity of conforming without further delay to the will of the emperor. Pius VII. was at this time in very feeble health, and Napoleon did not hesitate to bribe his physician, Dr. Porta, that he might inform the members of the deputation of the most favorable opportunity to take advantage of the weak and suffering state of the Holy Father to wring from him the desired concessions. For some days those who surrounded him were able to attest the presence of all the symptoms of madness.

“You will have seen,” wrote his jailer to the Minister of Worship, “by my last letters that the uncertainty of the pope when he is left to himself goes to the [Pg 208] length of affecting his reason and his health. At present the mental alienation has passed off.”

Still, the bishops sent by Napoleon to Savona were obliged to return without the pope’s signature to the document of concessions. The National Council was opened on the 17th of June, in the Cathedral of Notre Dame, under the nominal presidency of Cardinal Fesch. The opening discourse was delivered by Mgr. de Boulogne, Bishop of Troyes, who spoke in eloquent and burning words “of the Supreme Head of the episcopate, without whom it resembles a branch separated from the tree and withered, or a vessel tossed by the waves without rudder or steersman.”

“This see may be removed,” he said, “but it cannot be destroyed. Its magnificence may be taken away, but never its strength. Wherever this see shall establish itself it shall draw all others around it.” These words fell like burning coals in the midst of the assembly and produced great emotion. The effect had not died away when the Bishop of Nantes arose to comply with the formality of asking each prelate whether it pleased him that the council should be opened. “Yes,” answered the Archbishop of Bordeaux, “saving the obedience due to the Sovereign Pontiff, to whom I bind myself and whom I swear to obey.” Then Cardinal Fesch in a loud voice read the oath as prescribed by a bull of Pius IV.: “I acknowledge the Holy Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman Church to be the mother and mistress of all other churches; I promise and swear perfect obedience to the Roman pontiff, the successor of St. Peter, Prince of the Apostles, and Vicar of Jesus Christ on earth.” One by one the bishops bound themselves irrevocably to the cause of Pius VII. Napoleon was furious and berated his uncle for “getting up one of his scenes.” Two laymen were appointed to be present in his name at all future meetings of the bishops.

Some of the courtier prelates drew up a fulsome address to Napoleon, a kind of treatise on state theology, which they presented to the members of the council for their signature. Mgr. de Broglie, Bishop of Ghent, declared he would never sign it. Another bishop proposed that “the liberty of the pope” should be demanded. This was received with a confused murmur of applause; but Cardinal Fesch, who dreaded the wrath of his nephew, declared that the time was inopportune for such a request. Napoleon, unable longer to restrain himself, ordered the council to put an end to its “idle debates.” He gave the members eight days to devise an expedient for providing bishops for the vacant sees. As a sign of his displeasure he refused to receive the council officially at the Tuileries. The bishops, he said, had “acted as cowards.” In answer to the demand to find an expedient for providing bishops for the vacant sees without the confirmation of the pope, the council declared that it would first be necessary to send a deputation to consult Pius VII. This declaration was carried by Fesch to his imperial nephew. He was received with an outburst of anger. Napoleon would soon show the bishops their place. When the cardinal attempted to reason with him, he rudely stopped him: “What! theology again! Where did you learn it? Be quiet; you are an ignoramus.” He threatened to dissolve the council and organize a system of state religion, but finally drew up a decree himself, in which he falsely asserted that the pope had [Pg 209] made the desired concessions. The bishops were deceived, and, with two exceptions, voted in favor of the decree. A little reflection, however, convinced many of them of the fraud which had been practised upon them, and they recalled their votes. Suddenly, on the 11th of July, Napoleon dissolved the council. The following day, at three o’clock in the morning, Mgr. de Broglie, Mgr. de Boulogne, and Mgr. Hirn, who had taken a prominent part in opposing the decree, were arrested in their beds and carried off to the prison of Vincennes. In August five cardinals and eight bishops, partisans of the emperor, were sent to Savona to make still another effort to win over Pius VII. to Napoleon’s plans. The Holy Father, who was so closely guarded that no one was allowed to see him except his bribed doctor and the jailer, was in total ignorance of all that had passed in the National Council. For five months, from September, 1811, to February, 1812, these cardinals and bishops used every argument and artifice to induce the pope to sign the decree of the council.

Their efforts were successful. Pius VII., worn out with importunities, feeble in body and in mind, wrote the brief of adhesion. But Napoleon was not satisfied. He was already organizing his army for the fatal Russian campaign, and he wrote to his Minister of Worship the following instructions: “I send you the original papal brief. Keep it and communicate its contents to nobody. I wish to find the bishops in Rome on my return, to see what we can do.… The truth is, the church is experiencing a crisis.” His victory over Russia was, in his imagination, already an accomplished fact; he would return the undisputed sovereign of all Europe, would gather the bishops in Rome, and would give to the church, as he had given to the state, a Code Napoléon.

On the 24th of January, 1812, the Holy Father wrote to him in the most unaffected and simple manner, and begged to be permitted to consult disinterested counsellors and to have free communication with the faithful. Napoleon disdained to answer this letter, but sent through his Minister of Worship the following notification to the deputation at Savona: “His majesty deems that it is unfitting to his dignity to answer the letter of the pope.… His majesty pities the ignorance of the pope, and compassionates a pontiff who could have played so great a part, but who has become the calamity of the church.… His majesty understands these matters of ecclesiastical jurisdiction better than the Holy Father.… If the pope cannot make a distinction which is simple enough to be grasped by the most uncultivated seminarian, why does he not voluntarily descend from the papal chair and leave it to a man who is less feeble in mind and better principled than he?” And now, just as he was setting out on the Russian campaign, he ordered that Pius VII. should be transferred from Savona to Fontainebleau.

The Holy Father was unwell, but to this no attention was paid. Just before reaching the Mont Cenis he fell dangerously ill. The journey was not interrupted. A bed was fitted up in the carriage and a surgeon procured, who, with the instruments that might be needed, accompanied him. When they reached Fontainebleau nothing was prepared, and the pope had to pass the first night in the porter’s lodge. [Pg 210] A Guide-book of Paris, published at this time, informed the French that they possessed a “papal palace” in their capital. But the end was drawing near. On the 24th of June, 1812, Napoleon crossed the Niemen at the head of an army of five hundred thousand men. As he reached the opposite bank his horse stumbled and fell. His fatalism led him to consider this a bad omen. The Russians fled before him, and, after the victories of Smolensk and Borodino, he rode into Moscow on the 15th of September. It was silent as a desert, and the Kremlin, where he took up his residence, was like a tomb. At midnight from a hundred quarters the flames burst forth, and in the lurid light of the burning city the army began the fatal retreat. The weather, which had been fine, suddenly grew cold; sleet and snow and rain beat with merciless fury upon the men, from their benumbed hands their arms fell, and by the roadside they laid down to die. On the 18th of December Napoleon arrived, a fugitive, in Paris. In this one campaign he had lost 250,000 men, half of whom had died of cold and hunger.

With the beginning of the year 1813 he wrote to Pius VII. and begged him to believe that his feelings of respect and veneration were independent of circumstances. Shortly afterwards he went to visit the Holy Father at Fontainebleau, and upon their first meeting for eight years he embraced him with every mark of affection. The health of the pope was wretched, and advantage was taken of his weak condition to obtain still further concessions.

Upon the promise of Napoleon to liberate the imprisoned cardinals, bishops, and priests, Pius VII. signed the Concordat of Fontainebleau—an act which he almost immediately recalled, and which he never ceased to regret. When the faithful Pacca, after so long a separation, was at length admitted to his presence, he expressed his admiration for the pope’s heroic constancy.

“But finally,” cried out the Holy Father in anguish, “we have sullied our conscience. Those cardinals dragged me to the table and made me sign.”

Pius VII. was still held a prisoner, and Napoleon acted as though the Concordat of Fontainebleau still existed. He appointed bishops, imprisoned priests, and drafted seminarians to fill up his decimated regiments.

The victories of Lutzen and Bautzen were more brilliant than important. In August, 1813, the Emperor of Austria declared against his son-in-law. Then came the crushing defeat of Leipsic, and Napoleon was slowly driven back upon France, closely followed by the allied armies. Orders were sent to remove Pius VII. from Fontainebleau, and a few days later the war was raging at the very gates of the palace which he had so recently occupied. Finally, on the 10th of March, 1814, when all hope was lost, Napoleon signed a decree which restored his dominions to the pope. Since his removal from Fontainebleau Pius VII. had been driven about through various parts of France, closely guarded; but now that he turned his face toward Rome, his journey assumed the appearance of a triumphal procession, and at length, on the 24th of May, 1814, the Feast of Our Lady, Help of Christians, he re-entered the Holy City amid the universal enthusiasm of his people. Just one month before, in the palace of Fontainebleau, Napoleon signed [Pg 211] the decree which declared his empire at an end; and, a fallen sovereign, he passed out in silence through the ranks of the men whom he had so often led to victory.

In his last meeting with Josephine he took her hand and said: “Josephine, I have been as fortunate as any man upon earth. But in this hour, when a storm is gathering over me, I have in the wide world none but you upon whom I can repose.” And in St. Helena he said to Caulaincourt: “If I live a hundred years, I shall never forget those scenes; they are the fixed ideas of my sleepless nights. I have had enough of sovereignty. I want no more of it; I want no more of it.”

It is not easy to form a just estimate of the character of Napoleon. We have heard veterans who had fought at Austerlitz and Lutzen declare that when he rode along the line his glance did so blind the eye that they could not look upon him; and they thought so. This light of glory still enshrines his memory and dazzles us, to prevent us from seeing him as he was. No one has ever doubted his surprising strength; his almost incredible power to bear labor, whether of body or mind; his wonderful intellect, which grasped things with equal ease, in general and in detail; his unequalled ability to organize an army, a nation, or a continent; his courage, which rose superior to the most crushing defeat.

But with these great endowments he had a coarse and selfish nature. He was as ready to lie as to tell the truth. No act that was expedient was bad. His ambitious ends sanctified all means by which they could be attained. Dissimulation, deceit, hypocrisy, betrayal of friends, imprisonment, murder, assassination, he was ready to use indifferently as his purposes demanded. Without moral convictions himself, he believed others equally devoid of them. To assign conscience as a reason for anything was in his eyes pretence and hypocrisy. The religious scruples of the pope and cardinals he held to be mere obstinacy and ill-will. When Pius VII. declared he had not the power to annul the marriage of Jerome with Miss Patterson, Napoleon saw in this only a desire to take revenge for the way in which he had been insulted at the coronation. After having persecuted bishops and priests, keeping many of them in prison, during his whole reign, he had the impudence to declare in St. Helena that the priests were all for him as soon as he allowed them to wear violet-colored stockings. He was the coarsest reviler and insulted all whom he feared or hated. The pope and the cardinals were “idiots and fools”; the republicans were “mad dogs and brigands”; the King of Prussia was “the most complete fool of all the kings on earth”; the Spanish Bourbons were “a flock of sheep”; De Broglie, the Bishop of Ghent, was “a reptile”; the priests who disapproved of the Concordat were “the scum of the earth”; and of the philosophers he said: “Je les ai comme une vermine sur mes habits.” His conduct towards women was coarse and contemptuous. They ought to know nothing and were not fit to have opinions. He told Madame de Staël to go home and knit her stockings; the greatest woman was she who had the most children—he wanted soldiers. He did not conceal his contempt for men. “Every year of my reign,” he said in St. Helena, “I saw more and more plainly that the harsher the treatment men received, the [Pg 212] greater was their submission and devotion. My despotism then increased in proportion to my contempt for mankind.” From 1804 to 1815 he sacrificed to his mad ambition not less than five millions of men. Several thousand French subjects were shot merely for desertion. Each principal town had its place aux fusillades. The prisons of France were filled with his victims. A more thorough tyrant than he never lived. Liberty of all kinds was odious to him. He hated all whom he could not enslave. To be free was to be his enemy. While he reigned men spoke with bated breath, the press was fettered, and the church was in chains. In his own family he was a despot; he gave his brothers crowns, but only on condition that they would become his slaves; and when Lucien thought that even royal honors might be bought at too dear a price, he was forced to leave France.

His jealousy was surpassed only by his vanity. “Go,” said he to his soldiers, “kill and be killed; the emperor beholds you.”

He had a barbaric love of vulgar display, and this was one of the passions which impelled him to his bloody wars. No man ever had less heart. If he loved any one, it was Josephine, and her he sacrificed without a pang. Remorseless as destiny, which was his god, he trod out with the iron hoof of war right and life, and where he passed there was wailing and desolation as after pestilence. In his last illness on the desolate rock of St. Helena he spoke with reverence and feeling of religion. From the hands of the priest sent to him by Pius VII. he received the sacraments of the church. For six years he had held in cruel confinement Christ’s vicar, the gentlest of men; for six years he himself pined in living death on the barren island of St. Helena. It was the 5th of March, 1821, that he died. On the tomb of St. Peter Pius VII. offered up the divine Sacrifice for the repose of the soul of Napoleon.

[75] The Life of Pope Pius VII. By Mary H. Allies. London: Burns & Oates. 1875.

MODERN ENGLISH POETRY.

Mr. Stedman, the author of The Victorian Poets, appears to be a painstaking and conscientious writer. He has read with extraordinary industry all the poetry of the period to which his criticism is limited, including not a little which, if he deemed it his duty to study, it was not worth his while to name. He has brought to this study a highly, although we think not methodically, cultivated mind and a retentive memory. He has a remarkable fluency of diction, bordering occasionally on volubility, and a certain fecundity of illustration; but his words have at times a vagueness, not to say inaptness, of application which is not suggestive of clearness or depth of thought. His work, he will pardon us for thinking, is rather an “essay in” technical than “philosophical criticism.” He himself appears to be conscious of this; for he writes in his preface: “If my criticism seems more technical than is usual in a work of this kind, it is due, I think, to the fact that the technical refinement of the period has been so marked as to demand full recognition and analysis.” Furthermore, he informs us that he “has no theory of poetry”; and we must own that, in the absence of any theory of poetry, a philosophical criticism of it seems to us to be out of the question. The qualities he requires of it “are simplicity and freshness in work of all kinds, and, as the basis of persistent growth and of greatness in a masterpiece, simplicity and spontaneity, refined by art, exalted by imagination, and sustained by intellectual power”; but does he understand what he means by this? We do not. Are we to understand that the only inseparable qualities, the only properties, of poetry which must characterize “work of all kinds”—by which we presume he means every real poetical production—are simplicity and freshness? What does he mean by simplicity? what by freshness? Does he refer these qualities to expression only? If so, what does he mean by “simplicity not being excluded from the Miltonic canon of poetry”?

In the higher efforts of poetry, he tells us, we must still have simplicity; but instead of freshness we are there to look for “spontaneity.” Are, then, “simplicity and spontaneity” the basis of persistent growth (we must own that even the meaning of this expression is hidden from us) and of “greatness in a masterpiece”? No; it must be “simplicity and spontaneity refined by art, exalted by imagination, and sustained by intellectual power.” But will not the simplicity, and most assuredly the spontaneity, disappear in the “artistic refinement”? Still more difficult is the idea of “simplicity and spontaneity exalted by imagination” being the “basis” of a poetical “masterpiece.” Poetry is the offspring of the imagination. Its excellence depends absolutely on the force and vigor of that intellectual power. There can be no poetry in its absence. And what other is imagination than intellectual power?

The poetic feeling we believe to be the echo of the soul to God in [Pg 214] the presence of all his works. It is the emotion—really rapture—which wells up within it at the contemplation of the sensible images in which he reveals portions of his beauty in every variety and combination of form, proportion, color, touch, scent, and sound. Let the poet stand alone by the long margin of the sea on a still summer day. What but it is that profound emotion of which he is so intensely conscious as he looks out upon the immense ocean in its still unrest, which the blue heavens only seem to limit because his power of vision can reach no further, and when he hears the mellow murmur of the wavelets as, rearing themselves in graceful curves, they fall in low whispers along the yellow sands, as if depositing some message from infinitude, and then rapidly withdraw?

What else is that indefinable transport, resembling, only in an infinitely inferior degree, the ecstasy of a saint, which holds in suspense all our faculties as, in the languid heat of summer-tide, we stand at the foot of craggy heights between which in distant ages some river has found for itself a channel; and, as we gaze into the impenetrable shade of the dense thickets which cover their sides, hear the distant sound of falling waters, and scent the fresh perfume of the breathing foliage, the river flowing past us at our feet, to be almost immediately hidden from our view by projecting headlands, covered, they too, with the living darkness of foliage crowding upon foliage, trees on trees?

The delightful trance into which the poetic soul is lulled by the beauty and truth of God speaking through even the least of his works defies analysis; but we may say of it with some confidence that the objects that provoke it never weary of their charm. And wherefore? Because they do not obstruct the instinct of immortality, the yearning for infinitude, which is a passion within the soul of the poet, but is wholly absent from no one in whom God’s image is not quite effaced. On the contrary, their apparent endlessness, their want of boundary and definite outline, suggest infinitude, and awake the echoes of immortality from their profoundest depths, and minister to the deep yearning of the soul for something more lovely than aught of which it has been hitherto cognizant.

This it is which accounts for the immense superiority of Gothic to Grecian architecture—a superiority so complete as to elevate it into quite another sphere of beauty. The pleasure we experience at the sight of the highest efforts of a Greek architect is almost exclusively æsthetic, sensible, artistic. It is occasioned by sharpness of outline, grace of form, beauty of proportion. In these is the only poetry it can express; which can never, consequently, mount to sublimity. It can only be beautiful at best. It pleases the sense, but the soul—of the poet, at all events—soon wearies of them.

But the Gothic cathedral, with its soaring arches interlacing one another, its many naves, aisles, chapels, and recesses, its endless wealth of tracery and sculpture, its clustering pinnacles and spires pointing heavenwards, the deep shadows of its buttresses, and its many mounting roofs—in short, the utter absence of definiteness of outline, and its grandeur as well as grace of form and beauty of proportion—respond, and powerfully, to the soul’s craving for infinitude, impatience of limitation, and heart-yearning [Pg 215] for the infinitely Beautiful and True.

This poetic sense it is which causes all mere human pleasures so soon to pall upon us. For it is impossible for the human soul to experience any save a transient pleasure from aught less than the infinite and eternal. Life itself is not a pleasure, because we know it is passing away. If we believed we should be annihilated at death, the pain of life would be intolerable.

We hold, therefore, that this suggestiveness—which must not be confused with obscurity, an element antagonistic to poetry—must underlie every expression of poetry, whatever form it may take. A didactic poem is a contradiction in terms, although such a production may abound in poetical passages. It reminds one of the pictures one sees sometimes in which the painter represents with great accuracy a melon or grapes, a glass with wine in it, knives and forks, a loaf of bread, a cheese sometimes, not omitting the maggots, or a lobster tempts his brush—in short, anything which goes into the human mouth for bodily sustenance. Ordinary folk gape with wonder at the cleverness of the imitation; but there is no one so dull as to suppose that there is in it any of the poetry of art.

The visible creation is the expression of the divine Idea in it. It is impossible, consequently, that it should not express, in all its infinitude of forms, modes, color, scent, sound, etc., the truth and beauty of Him who conceived it. It would be contrary to reason to suppose that he sent it forth into objective existence as a mere toy for the amusement of his august creature, as we throw dissolving views of grotesque figures upon a white surface for the amusement of children. It was to convey to us intimations of himself, as well as snatches of his happiness. The spherical form of the unnumbered worlds; the limited power of our visual organ, which can only see the beginnings of things; perpetual motion; sound and scent, which fail not when they are no longer within the reach of our senses; the revolution, in never-ending cycles, of years, seasons, weeks, and days; renewed life never failing to come forth from rest and repose—ay, even from death and corruption; imaginary horizons, vanishing distances, light prevailing over darkness; the thrill of awful pleasure with which the created soul of man apprehends this deep meaning of things—that spiritual instinct to which time is a pain, eternity a rapture—in all are mirrored, in every variety and form of grace and loveliness, as well as of unsightliness and horror, Infinitude, Immortality, God the infinitely lovable, because he is the infinitely Beautiful and True.

In proportion to the strength of this instinct is the excellence or inferiority of the poetic gift. From this must it draw all its highest inspirations. Poetry is, in fact, its advertent expression; and thus the poet is, like God—only, of course, after a secondary and imitative fashion—a creator (ποιητὴς). He avails himself of some of the illimitable wealth of imagery in which God has expressed, or given objective existence to, his own one but infinitely varied idea, and, by fresh combinations, throws them into really new forms or creations. Out of many examples that come to mind—for excellence in this is less uncommon than in the higher order of poetry, of which the crown and [Pg 216] lord of nature form the material—may be quoted the following creation of a midsummer noon in the Earthly Paradise, by Morris:

“Within the gardens once again they met,

That now the roses did well-nigh forget;

For hot July was drawing to an end,

And August came the fainting year to mend

With fruit and grain; so ‘neath the trellises,

Nigh blossomless, did they lie well at ease,

And watched the poppies burn across the grass,

And o’er the bindweed’s bell the brown bee pass,

Still murmuring of his gains. Windless and bright

The morn had been, to help their dear delight;

But heavy clouds, ere noon, grew round the sun,

And, half-way to the zenith, wild and dun

The sky grew, and the thunder growled afar;

But, ere the steely [76] clouds began their war,

A change there came, and, as by some great hand,

The clouds that hung in threatening o’er the land

Were drawn away; then a light wind arose

That shook the light stems of that flowery close,

And made men sigh for pleasure.”

This brings us to another, and an important, point in which it is our misfortune to differ from Mr. Stedman. He regards poetry as an art. He treats it as such throughout this work; and as such he criticises it. Hence his criticism is almost exclusively technical; hence, too, it exhibits frequent inconsistencies. For example, amongst the properties he assigns to the highest poetry, which we have already quoted, he places spontaneity. By this term he means, we presume, a freedom from effort, the unbidden outflow of imagination, not the labored product of teaching and practice. But this is utterly inapplicable to art, which supposes instruction, clumsy first efforts, and perfection acquired only by years of toil. What there is of art in poetry is limited, or nearly so, to its expression; and even here the less there is of art, and the more of what Mr. Stedman means by spontaneity, the loftier and the more genuine the poetry. It is no praise but a depreciation of Matthew Arnold’s or Tennyson’s poetry to trace the inspiration of one to Bion and Moschus and of the other to Theocritus. In good sooth, he does the laureate injustice in the far-fetched examples of imitation of Theocritus he ascribes to him. It is the blemish of nearly all our modern poetry that its expression is so labored, so technical. For this it is that, in the highest poetry, nearly all who have tried it have failed; none more signally than Tennyson in Queen Mary. One only has succeeded—Sir Aubrey de Vere. Another—whom, because he has so foully outraged the moral sense of all mankind, we prefer not to name until he has made reparation, and who, if he had not cast from him all sense of the beautiful and the true, might have been perhaps the greatest poet of the age—is as remarkable for the originality and unstudiedness of his expression as for the brilliance and fecundity of his imagination.

Mr. Stedman literally limits poetry to expression. In a passage at the side of which is the marginal index, “What constitutes a poet,” he writes: “Again, the grammarian’s statement is true, that poetry is a means of expression. A poet may differ from other men in having profounder emotions and clearer perceptions; but this is not for him to assume, nor a claim which they are swift to grant. The lines,

“Oh! many are the poets that are sown

By nature—men endowed with highest gifts,

The vision and the faculty divine,

Yet wanting the accomplishment of verse,”

imply that the recognized poet is one who gives voice, in expressive language, to the common thought and feeling which lie deeper than ordinary speech. He is the interpreter; moreover, he is the maker—an artist of the beautiful, the [Pg 217] inventor of harmonious numbers which shall be a lure and a repose.”

It is clear from this unintelligible and self-contradicting passage that the writer has no theory of poetry. Yet in it he makes a very definite attempt to sketch such theory, although he before told us that he has none. What he means by it being “a grammarian’s statement” that “poetry is a means of expression” we know not. Had he asserted that poetry is the poet’s means of expression, we could have understood him without agreeing with him; but he identifies poetry with its expression. Say they must co-exist; but they are not identical. There is not a human soul without a body, nor a leaf without the sap of the tree; but great confusion would ensue from identifying the one with the other. He goes, however, even further than this. It seems to be his idea that no one can be a poet who does not write poetry. It is true he uses the term “recognized,” but he goes on to describe the poet as “an artist of the beautiful, the inventor of harmonious numbers.” But it is not necessary, for any one to be a poet, that he should be recognized as such. There are those who “want the acomplishment of verse” through the very intensity of the poetic gift. Their intuitions are so profound that language sinks under the task of conveying them; expression is overwhelmed. People never write more feebly than when under the influence of strong emotion. For this reason it is, too, that poetry may sometimes be improved by the travail of art, the less, however, in proportion to the inspiration of the poet. There are those, pre-eminently Shakspere, in whom the expression is nearly as inspired as the poetry.

Ingenium miserâ fortunatius arte

Credit, et excludit sanos Helicone Poëtas

Democritus.

In more than one passage Mr. Stedman approaches the truth about poetry, as when he says that “poets differ from other men in having profounder emotions and clearer perceptions”; and again when he writes: “Certain effects are suggested by nature; the poet discovers new combinations within the ground which these afford.” If for “effects” had been substituted “conceptions of the beautiful,” it would have been very near a sufficiently accurate description of the creative power of the poet; but he is hampered by his identification of poetry with its expression, and so, even here, substitutes “effects”—which really has no meaning in the context—for ideas. Poetry is the intuition of the Beautiful and True as expressed in nature and in man, not an analysis of its causes and effects. Not the least inspired of modern poets, Rossetti, has very exquisitely sung this theory of poetry in a sonnet on “St. Luke the Painter”:

“Scarcely at once she [Art] dared to rend the mist

Of devious symbols: but soon having wist

How sky-breadth and field-silence and this day

Are symbols also in some deeper way,

She looked through these to God, and was God’s priest.”

The fault of almost all the modern English poets is that they are too artistic. Certainly their poetry cannot be blamed as carmen quod non.

Multa dies et multa litura coercuit, atque

Perfectum decies non castigavit ad unguem.

But it makes too much display of labor. We admire its artistic skill, and that is its principal attraction. We feel that it is not nature which is hymning amidst so much art. The result of such obvious effort betrays the handicraft of the artisan rather than the inspiration of the poet. It is the Versailles fountains [Pg 218] instead of Niagara. It cannot be too much insisted on that poetry is not one of the fine arts. The greater number of modern English poets, however, treat it as such, as much as is possible with only the imagery of words for their material. They are disciples rather of Horace than of Democritus. There is plenty of labor and litura, and of verse perfectum decies ad unguem; of ingenium miserâ fortunatius arte but little. They surpass in mountain-labor the forgotten Lucilius, who in versu faciendo sæpe caput scabunt, vivos et rodunt ungues; but they have too little of “the sacred madness of the bards” for admission into Helicon. The reason is not far to seek. We notice a similar phenomenon in Greece when religious belief was forced to retire before scepticism and the prating sophists. To the sceptical temper of the age is undoubtedly owing the labor devoted to expression, which has done all it could to reduce poetry to an art. It has also occasioned a certain subjectivity, if we may use the word—a painful mental analysis—which is fatal to poetry.

Robert Browning is the greatest offender in this regard. So painfully intense, in truth, is his introspection that he pays far less attention to expression than his contemporaries. Cut off from the divine suggestiveness of nature by his hard materialism, he does nothing but think; and thinking poetically rather than syllogistically is an unamalgamation. Thought and expression are alike confused, rugged, and difficult. The reader, without even melody of rhythm to help him on, stumbles and gropes through intricate sentences, parentheses in parentheses, a startling image here and there; anon a whirring flight of poetry, or what resembles it; but the wings soon droop, and the poet is on the earth again, or lower than the earth—anywhere but soaring heavenwards. He has in him the making of a poet. Had he the Catholic faith, his imagination would carry him to great heights and keep him there. He might have soared nigh to Shakspere. His talent is dramatic—which is to say, his poetic gift is of the highest order; but nature has no divine suggestiveness to him, the hollow shell whispers no eternity in his dull ear; for him man has no end, events no purpose; and inasmuch as man has a definite end, and a sublime one, to which events definitely contribute, he is not able to create men and women, a destiny, or destinies, in any of which should there be a living verisimilitude. A plot in which men, women, and children talk and act as men, women, and children do talk and act is out of his reach. His highest effort is the dramatic poem, in which, however, occur at times passages of great dramatic power, showing what he could have done had he not been a heathen.

Mr. Tennyson has been the subject of various articles in The Catholic World; but so markedly does he contrast with Browning, and so noteworthy is the different bias given to the poetry of each by the materialistic spirit of the age, that we cannot afford to pass him by here in complete silence.

We may look in vain in the poetry of the laureate for passages of dramatic force such as now and then light up the creaking, groaning poetry of Browning; but he never grovels, as the latter does very often indeed.

Tennyson has strong sympathy with the one faith, and, as one may think, a kind of supernatural bias in [Pg 219] its favor, or he too, like the author of Paracelsus and Bishop Blosegram’s Apology, might have used his poetry as a fantastic costume for crude psychological problems and for the mind-darkness of doubt. The distinguishing characteristic of his poetry is the exquisitely artistic finish of its expression. Every line shows signs of careful toil. His genius has been without doubt hampered by it. He is more artist than poet; and, as though conscious of this, he seems to claim inspiration by an affectation of oracular obscurity. Yet not unseldom the refined simplicity of word and phrase, the grace of imagery, and all the artistic brilliance of choicest ornament express poetry, although never of a very high order. An elegiac poem such as In Memoriam, of nearly seven hundred quatrains, however beautiful in expression, has “unreal” on the face of it; and that is fatal to its pretensions as a poem. Yet are there indications here and there of true poetic feeling.

Painful is it, and not without shame, to have a difference with all the world of criticism. But if we have reason, our fellow-critics will not disdain us; and if we have not, we throw the blame on our theory of poetry. But there is a modern poet—Rossetti—whom, on the whole, we must place on a higher pedestal than Tennyson. With an equal simplicity of word and phrase, a refinement of expression not inferior, he has the art, if it be the result of art, to conceal his art. It is true he has all the artistic finish of Tennyson—so much so that we cannot but feel that it is an artist who is singing to us; but the artist disappears in the poet. We must disenchant ourselves of the thrall of his poetry before we can criticise the artistic perfectness of its expression. It is not only that, as Tennyson, he paints scenes of nature and human doings with consummate art; but, true poet that he is, he catches the very life of nature and it throbs within his verse. His soul echoes to the Beautiful and the True imaged in nature through all her modes and forms of color, scent, and sound; he reads their meaning; and when he reproduces them, as Mr. Stedman has it, “in different combinations,” they are as suggestive of those ideas of God as the very images of nature herself. Take, for example, the eleventh song in The House of Life—The Sea Limits:

“Consider the sea’s listless chime:

Time’s self it is made audible—

The murmur of the earth’s own shell.

Secret continuance sublime

Is the sea’s end: our sight may pass

No furlong further. Since time was

This sound hath told the lapse of time.

“No quiet, which is death’s—it hath

The mournfulness of ancient life

Enduring always at dull strife.

As the world’s heart of rest and wrath

Its painful pulse is in the sands

Lost utterly, the whole sky stands,

Gray and not known, along its path.

“Listen alone beside the sea,

Listen alone among the woods;

Those voices of twin solitudes

Shall have one sound alike to thee.

Hark where the murmurs of thronged men

Surge and sink back and surge again—

Still the one voice of wave and tree.

“Gather a shell from the strown beach

And listen at its lips: they sigh

The same desire and mystery,

The echo of the whole sea’s speech.

And all mankind is thus at heart

Not anything but what thou art:

And earth, sea, man, are all in each.”

This is poetry of the loftiest kind.

We cannot forbear quoting one more example of his “quality.” It is poetry which reaches near to Shakspere. “The poet of the world” himself might have thus grandly imaged lust—with more nervous terseness, may be; but the structure of dramatic numbers exacts that, and we do not yet know [Pg 220] that Mr. Rossetti is not equal to the drama.

“Like a toad within a stone

Seated while time crumbles on;

Which sits there since the earth was cursed

For man’s transgression at the first;

Which, living through all centuries,

Not once has seen the sun arise;

Whose life, to its cold circle charmed,

The earth’s whole summers have not warmed;

Which always, whitherso the stone

Be flung, sits there, deaf, blind, alone—

Ay, and shall not be driven out

Till that which shuts him round about

Break at the very Master’s stroke,

And the dust thereof vanish as smoke,

And the seed of man vanish as dust:

Even so within this world is lust.”

Thus much we have quoted in support of a criticism which will not be readily assented to by all. Our space does not admit of our quoting more. But we refer the reader to The Blessed Damozel as a gem not to be outshone; and, for dramatic power joined to the loftiest poetry, to A Last Confession.

Next after Rossetti, if at all after, comes William Morris. In the form and sound and bias of their numbers there is a close resemblance. The imaginings of the latter flow more profusely, perhaps because he does not tarry to spend so much care upon his art. Indeed, whilst the art of Rossetti is faultless in its way, a seldom blemish, like a minute blur in a diamond of the best water, may be detected in that of Morris, as the word “now” thrice in three successive quatrains, the word “golden” in five successive lines, in a scene, of almost tragic pathos, of Sir Galahad, a Christmas Mystery—the finest music he has smitten from the chords of no feeble instrument:

“Why not, O twisting knight, now he is dead?”

But amidst so much finish and faultlessness slight fallibilities like these are, as it were, a relief. The truth is, the artistic spirit in both, which (and no wonder) is all enamored of mediæval art—art in those ages of faith when she appeared in forms of beauty as sublime as faultless—is too forgetful of the living, breathing, moving present. That they should drink in inspirations of the Beautiful and the True from the forms in which that most poetic age embodied them, is well; but the art—the poetic expression—was natural to that epoch; it is not natural to this. If this is made too conspicuous, as we think it is in both these poets, there is a risk of mannerism; and mannerism is an artistic blemish. The attempt to entice men away from the turbid and muddy torrent of sounding hap-hazard words, which, setting in from Johnson and Gibbon, has swollen into an inundation of all but sheer nonsense from the babbling tributaries of the cheap press, to the nervous grace of simple words and simple sentences and the suggestive imagery of pure nature, is a service to letters as well as art, for which alone they and Tennyson, and all the poets of that school, deserve to be crowned. But aught by which so profoundly artistic a renaissance is needlessly dissociated from the present should have been carefully eschewed. In the matter of words we do not think that such as “japes,” “dromond,” “whatso,” the substitution of the ending “head” for “hood” in words for which universal custom has decreed the former, and so on, are a needed revival of the obsolete. We think, too, that simplicity of grammatical construction has been pushed to the verge of affectation. Still, it is so artistically done, is so beautiful in itself, and evidences such a return of leal homage from hideousness to the rightful Beautiful and the True, that it goes against us to complain.

It is time that the appointment [Pg 221] of a poet-laureate should cease in England. It is an anachronism. It is almost an insult to the world of letters. These are not times in which people are likely to accept the criticism of the British crown or of the crown’s advisers as decisive of a poet’s merits. So, too, there is such a dearth of independent, trustworthy criticism, it has become such a follow-the-leader kind of business, that if the crown merely caps the opinion of the contemporary public, there is every chance of the wrong man being put in the wrong place. At any rate the appointment should not be limited to one. There should be “power to add to their number.” We have no hesitation in assigning a higher niche to either Rossetti or Morris than to Tennyson. In two respects Morris surpasses Rossetti. We have as yet from the latter no sustained efforts such as The Earthly Paradise of the former, and the poetic fire appears to be kindled in him with less effort. We are quite sure that it is in no spirit of challenge or rivalry that he takes Tennyson’s very own theme in The Defence of Guenevere, King Arthur’s Tomb, Sir Galahad, a Christmas Mystery, and The Chapel in Lyoness; but it is an involuntary expression of conscious power. In all the Idyls of the King there is not a passage of such vivid poetry as the following in The Defence of Guenevere:

“‘All I have said is truth, by Christ’s dear tears.’

She would not speak another word, but stood

Turned sideways, listening like a man who hears

“His brother’s trumpet sounding through the wood

Of his foe’s lances. She leaned eagerly,

And gave a slight spring sometimes, as she could

“At last hear something really; joyfully

Her cheek grew crimson, as the headlong speed

Of the roan charger drew all men to see.

The knight who came was Launcelot at good need.”

The poetry of the Idyls, glittering and charming as it may be, is cold and pulseless by the side of King Arthur’s Tomb, a poem which rises to the utmost height of tragic pathos. The description of the remorse of Guenevere for merely ideas of disloyalty to her kingly husband which she had permitted herself to entertain, as well as of the satisfaction she made, is poetry in its noblest form, short of the drama. But we should never meet throughout all the poetry of Tennyson such blemishes as those we have already quoted, nor such as

“I tell myself a tale

That will not last beyond the whitewashed wall”

—an image which is beneath the dignity of poetry, whilst it rather dulls than quickens our idea of the fleeting nature of his tale; or

“… till the bell

Of her mouth on my cheek sent a delight

Through all my ways of being.…”

But for a poetry so lofty and so inspiring we can well afford to pay the penalty of a few blemishes.

We think that he shares with Tennyson, to a certain extent, the fault of obscurity—never, as Tennyson, in single passages, but in the design and end of entire pieces. We cannot suppose, for example, that he has not a definite end and purpose in The Earthly Paradise; but it is an immense defect that it must be very carefully studied in order even to conjecture one; that it does not readily occur, and still more that, study it as one may, he cannot feel quite sure he has conjectured rightly. And we feel this very serious defect the more keenly because in several of the separate portions of that poem we are afraid to trust ourselves implicitly to the poet; we dare not throw ourselves into his imagination, fearful whither it is to bear us. This is specially remarkable in Cupid [Pg 222] and Psyche. The subject startles us from the first. Gods and goddesses whose memory only remains as the long-passed-away images of falsehood instead of the Beautiful and the True, especially sensuous impersonations of impurity, are a subject which is calculated to scare rather than attract us. But we gain confidence as we read on. Had Byron sung of it, we should have luscious and sensuous imagery of base suggestiveness. Had it been the theme of a living poet, we should have had shameless obscenity. Our poet transfigures it into purity itself. Not an unchaste image shocks the soul. The whole subject is etherealized—we would say, if we felt quite sure of its purpose, even spiritualized. As we interpret it, the heathen myth, although used without stint, is, by the inimitable genius of the poet, stripped of all impure suggestiveness, and is even made a vehicle of exquisite beautifulness for conveying one of the most touching revelations of the great poem of humanity. Psyche (the soul) is represented to us undergoing by the power of divine love all sorrow, overcoming superhuman difficulties, succored always, when hope was well-nigh gone, by guardian angels, until,

“Led by the hand of Love, she took her way

Unto a vale beset with heavenly trees,

Where all the gathered gods and goddesses

Abode her coming; but when Psyche saw

The Father’s face, she, fainting with her awe,

Had fallen, but that Love’s arm held her up.

“Then brought the cup-bearer a golden cup

And gently set it in her slender hand,

And while in dread and wonder she did stand

The Father’s awful voice smote on her ear:

‘Drink now, O beautiful! and have no fear;

For with this draught shalt thou be born again,

And live for ever free from care and pain.’

“Then, pale as privet, took she heart to drink,

And therewithal most strange new thoughts did think,

And unknown feelings seized her, and there came

Sudden remembrance, vivid as a flame,

Of everything that she had done on earth,

Although it all seemed changed in weight and worth,

“Small things becoming great, and great things small;

And godlike pity touched her therewithal

For her old self, for sons of men that die;

And that sweet new-born immortality

Now with full love her rested spirit fed.

Then in that concourse did she lift her head,

And stood at last a very goddess there,

And all cried out at seeing her grown so fair.”

This is the inspiration of true poetry. Nothing at all approaching it can be found throughout the poetry of Tennyson.

In contrast to the soul led by divine love, the poet depicts her sisters devoured by envy and hatred, until, deceiving themselves the while with the dream that they too were objects of delight to divine love, the one having reached “the bare cliff’s rugged brow,” her end of life,

“She cried aloud, ‘O Love! receive me now,

Who am not all unworthy to be thine.’

And with that word her jewelled arms did shine

Outstretched beneath the moon, and with one breath

She sprang to meet the outstretched arms of Death,

The only god that waited for her there,

And in a gathered moment of despair

A hideous thing her trait’rous life did seem”;

and the other

“… rose, and, as she might,

Arrayed herself alone in that still night,

And so stole forth, and, making no delay,

Came to the rock a-nigh the dawn of day;

No warning there her sister’s spirit gave,

No doubt came nigh her the doomed soul to save,

But with a fever burning in her blood,

With glittering eyes and crimson cheeks, she stood

One moment on the brow, the while she cried,

‘Receive me, Love, chosen to be thy bride

From all the million women of the world!’

Then o’er the cliff her wicked limbs were hurled,

Nor has the language of the earth a name

For that surprise of terror and of shame.”

Can anything be grander than this imaged suicide of the evil human soul? And the glowing description of Psyche content to forget her father and her father’s house, and finding the fondest delight in sequestering herself alone with her divine Lover, whom she never sees, only whose voice she hears, is the most exquisite piece of poetic imagining [Pg 223] to be met with anywhere. But the poem deserves a criticism to itself.

We have here to pause. We had hoped to apply similar canons of criticism to others of our modern poets. We had selected Buchanan, Adelaide Procter, Matthew Arnold, Aubrey de Vere, and especially his father, whose mantle has descended on him. Sir Aubrey de Vere is the only one of the modern poets who has written a poem belonging to the highest order of poetry—Mary Tudor, a historical drama—which, although at a long distance from the dramas of “the poet of the world,” is the nearest to them that has been written since his day.

[76] This epithet, to our mind, is a blemish in a very beautiful creation. In the midst of lofty and suggestive natural imagery it abruptly sinks us to a vulgar matter-of-fact struggle of men at fisticuffs armed in the product of the blacksmith’s shop.

ON THE FIRST OCCASION OF THE FORTY HOURS’ DEVOTION IN THE NEW CATHEDRAL OF BOSTON.

“No word shall be impossible with God.”

O blessed bells! ring joyfully to-day;

O incense clouds! float gladly up to heaven;

All glory, honor, power, and praise be given

To Him whom earth and sea and sky obey.

Behold, the conqueror doth assert his sway

Here where men once would fain have died unshriven,

Proclaimed the Holy Faith unholy leaven,

And drove its followers out as Satan’s prey.

But now, beneath a great cathedral’s dome,

The Sacred Heart doth beat, and men adore;

Our Lord hath found at last a glorious home,

In spite of unbelief that rages still.

“Thy kingdom come,” pray we as ne’er before,

Whose eyes have seen his power to work his will.

March, 1876.

[Pg 224]

SIR THOMAS MORE.

A HISTORICAL ROMANCE.

FROM THE FRENCH OF THE PRINCESSE DE CRAON.

VII.

“This is very singular!” cried Sir Roger Lassels, master of the earl’s household, as they passed the edge of the wood. “I had made a bet with myself that we would follow the road on the bank of the river. At all events, the expedition will not be a very long one, since they have given me no order for provisions. It is true, however, that our poor young lord’s head is not as sound as it might be. Ah! well, in the time of the late duke things were not managed in this fashion. When they were going into the country, the duke would send for me eight days in advance. ‘Lassels,’ he would say—‘my dear Lassels,’ slapping me on the shoulder, ‘above all take great care that we shall want for nothing. Prepare everything in advance; because in matters of cooking, you know, I hate nothing so much as the uncertainty of the ‘fortune of the pot.’ He was right, very right, was the duke. The duchess used always to say on seeing our wagons passing by: ‘With Roger Lassels they carry everything with them.’”

In the meantime the first rays of the sun were not slow in dissipating the heavy mists of morning; the air became pure and exhilarating, and the northern pines, which grew in great profusion in that portion of the forest, imparted to the atmosphere a sweet, pungent odor. Myriads of dewdrops, more brilliant than diamonds, were suspended from the points of the leaves, which the slightest breath of air was sufficient to call down in a laughing shower. Creeping vines, thickly laden with blossoms, crossed and recrossed the road, almost hidden by the thick verdure with which it was overgrown. The birds saluted the return of day with a thousand joyous songs; the deer and young fawns bounded beneath the heavy shade of the forest. All nature wore an air of majestic beauty, calm and tranquil; the heart of man is alone found to remain always in a state of agitation and unrest.

“Oh! what a beautiful shot,” cried a voice from the crowd, on seeing a large grouse, its wings dripping with the dew, flying slowly above their heads.

“Take it, then!” cried another.

“For what purpose?” exclaimed Northumberland.

Sir Walsh, hearing the voice of Lord Percy, took advantage of that moment to urge his horse beside him, and declare the pain it caused him to see his friend so deeply depressed.

“What could you expect?” replied Percy. “All is ended with me. I have renounced everything. I am detached from everything earthly. A single moment has dissipated all the illusions of my short and miserable life—illusions in which so many others remain for ever enveloped. I believed that henceforth a word would be sufficient to answer my every thought; to suffer alone, [Pg 225] while awaiting death, which is only the beginning of life. Might I not thus believe myself to be almost shielded by evils, since I was determined to endure them all? One evil only I had not foreseen—that of being made the cause of suffering to others; of becoming, in the hands of an unjust and barbarous ruler, an instrument destined to destroy my friends! Ah! it is this that makes me rebel, that bows me to the earth and surpasses everything that I have yet been made to suffer. I go at this moment to arrest the Archbishop of York—to conduct him, doubtless, on the road to execution; and the day will come when those who loved him will exclaim, while they point the finger of scorn at my abode: ‘There lives the man who arrested the great Wolsey, the venerable friend who had reared and educated him in his own house!’”

“The great Wolsey!” replied Walsh, astonished.

“Yes, great,” said Northumberland. “When he will be no more, then will they forget his faults and appreciate his great qualities. He has known how to keep the lion chained, so that you have only seen him lap; but you will know him better if he ever gets the chance to use his teeth.”

“Who is this lion?” asked Walsh.

“I cannot name his name,” replied Northumberland angrily; “he is one whose claws tear the heart and destroy the innocent; one who is—But never mind!” And he abruptly ceased speaking.

After riding for some time through the forest, they at last emerged into a vast plain, in the midst of which appeared several villages; and very soon they found themselves near a church, whose ringing chimes announced the beginning of the divine Office.

“Ah!” said Sir Roger Lassels to himself, “there is to be Mass at the chapel of Sir William Harrington.”

At that moment the Earl of Northumberland turned to Sir Walsh. “If agreeable to you,” he said, “we will stop and hear Mass. We shall, at any rate, arrive soon enough at Cawood. You will have an opportunity, if you are curious, of visiting the monuments Sir William Harrington has had erected to the memory of his parents in this chapel, founded by him in order that prayers may every day be offered for the repose of their souls.”[77]

“I ask nothing better,” replied Sir Walsh.

They all entered the chapel, where Mass had already begun. A great number of the inhabitants of the surrounding country were assembled, and Lord Percy found himself close beside a woman, still very young, but whose features seemed to have been entirely changed by misery and suffering. Two small children knelt beside her and held to her coarse, black woollen gown.

“Mother, I am very hungry yet!” said the eldest in a voice as sweet as that of a young dove. “Brother has eaten up all the bread.” And he laid his head against her shoulder.

The young woman looked at the child, and her eyes filled with tears.

“My dear child,” she replied in a low, choking voice, “I have nothing more to give you; this evening, may be, I shall find something to buy bread with. If your father were living, we would be very happy; but, my son, a poor widow is cast [Pg 226] off by all the world, even though she is too feeble to work for bread for her children.”

Tears streamed from her eyes as she pressed the starving child close to her bosom.

Northumberland listened to the woman’s mournful complaint, observing especially that she did not murmur; she only wept. The expression of her pale and suffering face, as well as the feeling she had expressed of entire abandonment, filled his soul with pity.

“Such as these,” he said to himself—“such as these indeed have a right to complain of life and its miseries. I have ignored them. Shut up in my castle, I have even forgotten the orphan. Of no possible service to my kind, the earth supports me like an arid, sterile plant. Cruel selfishness! Is it, then, essential for all to smile around me before I can think of those who are crushed by poverty and misfortune? My tears, my sighs, my regrets, have all been in vain, have vanished into thin air; there remains for me nothing but duty to my neighbor, and that I have not done!”

Greatly agitated, he remained for an instant motionless, then, leaning over toward the woman, he requested her to leave the chapel for a moment.

Surprised that any one should think of speaking to her, she raised her eyes, all streaming with tears, to his face, while astonishment was painted on her emaciated features.

She arose, however, and followed him out, and they stopped a short distance from the chapel.

“You weep!” said Northumberland compassionately. “You are a widow, it seems. Are you not able to support your children?”

“Alas! sir,” replied the young woman without hesitation, “my husband died in a strange land while on a voyage which would have secured us a living; and I, a stranger in this country where he has left me, and where I have no relations, no friends, to assist me, have been brought down to extreme poverty. My work has scarcely sufficed to keep us alive, and to-day it has failed entirely.”

“Poor woman!” said Northumberland, putting some pieces of gold in her hand, “hereafter have no fears; I will take care of you and your young children.”

“My God!” cried the woman, falling on her knees—“bread, bread for my children! Are you an angel sent from heaven to save us? O sir! who will thank you for me? Ah! it shall be my poor children and your own! May they love and bless you as I do this moment.”

“Alas!” replied Lord Percy, “I have no children; I shall never have any! But you, poor mother, can at least rejoice in the happiness of possessing children to love and cherish you.”

In spite of the painful recollections awakened in his soul, when Percy returned to the chapel his heart was overflowing with a secret and sweet consolation; he felt that henceforth he would find brothers and friends in these unfortunates, whose father he would replace by taking upon himself their support.

When the Mass was ended, they all remounted their horses to continue their journey. They had scarcely started when they were joined by a troop of horsemen as numerous as it was brilliant, being composed of a great number of the most distinguished gentlemen in the province, who were proceeding to York to assist at the installation of their archbishop. At their head [Pg 227] rode old Robert Ughtred, chief of one of the oldest Yorkshire families, whose valor and merit had been admired by all his contemporaries. Six of his sons accompanied him. At his side rode Clifton, Lord d’Humanby, his friend and relative; Thomas Wentworth, of Nettlestead; Sir Arthur Ingram de Temple, Lord of Newsam; Walter Vavassour; John de Hothum, Lord of Cramwick and of Bierly; William Aytoun, Swillington; Meynill, Lord of Semer and Duerteton, together with a crowd of others. They recognized with astonishment the Earl of Northumberland, and eagerly approached to salute him.

This meeting, but little agreeable at first, became still less so when informed of the object of their journey. Percy, however, deemed it inexpedient to let this opportunity pass of creating for himself a sort of justification for the future. On being told, therefore, that they would spend two days at the little village of Cawood before going to salute the archbishop, he assured them he would be most happy to do the same and not separate from their company; but he was forced to go where he had been ordered, and that it was a mission on which he proceeded with the greatest reluctance and sorrow.

The travellers, astonished at his singular explanation, looked inquiringly at each other; but as they regarded the Earl of Northumberland with great deference because of his rank, his well-known worth, and the affection they cherished for the memory of his father, they held their peace, and continued their journey until within a very short distance of Cawood.

* * * * *

Notwithstanding the resolution taken by Cardinal Wolsey that the ceremony of his installation should be attended by the least possible éclat, he could not prevent the entire nobility of the province from assembling to do him honor and to express on this solemn occasion their affection and joy. The little village of Cawood and the castles around it were crowded with visitors. The archbishop’s courtyard was constantly filled with carts laden with game, fruits, and all kinds of provisions, sent to him from every direction to assist in doing honor to the entertainment it was customary to give on these occasions.

Wolsey felt touched to the heart by these testimonials of friendship and esteem, in which there was no reason to suspect that self-interest mingled its destructive poison. Nevertheless, he felt more than ever depressed, and his spirit was overshadowed by dark and terrible presentiments, in spite of all his efforts to dispel them.

It was the hour for the repast taken by our fathers at noon, and Wolsey found himself seated opposite the salt-cellar which divided the table, and served also to designate the rank of the guests. In those remote times a common expression prevailed: “It takes place above or below the salt.”

The chaplains were seated around him, quietly discussing the foundation of the cathedral of York. Some of them stated that the Venerable Bede alleged in his writings that it was Edwin the Saxon, King of Northumberland, who, having embraced the Christian faith in the year 627, was the first to build a wooden church, which he afterwards rebuilt of stone. But the others contended, the monument having been pillaged and devastated by the Danes, then burned by the Normans, together with a portion [Pg 228] of the city, the title of founder could only be accorded to Archbishop Roger, who commenced the erection of the superb edifice in 1171, and to his successors, John of Romagna and William of Melton, who had the honor of completing it after forty years’ labor. They insisted that it would assuredly be just to include among them Robert Percy, Lord of Bolton, who had all the wood cut employed in the construction, and Robert Vavassour, who had furnished the stone.

The archbishop for a long while had finished eating. He had listened patiently to their lengthy discussions. When he saw at last they had nearly concluded, he arose to say grace; but at the moment they were standing with bowed heads awaiting the act of thanksgiving, the black velvet robe of Dr. Augustine, his physician, became entangled in the foot of the large silver cross that was carried before the archbishop. This cross was standing in one corner, resting against the tapestry, and the robe made it fall with its entire weight on the head of Dr. Bonner, who sat on the opposite side of the table. He uttered a piercing cry.

They all rushed toward him.

“What is the matter with him?” demanded the archbishop, who had seen nothing of the accident.

“The cross,” explained Cavendish, his master of the horse—“the cross, which was leaning against the wall, has fallen in Dr. Bonner’s face.”

“In his face! Is he bleeding?” cried Wolsey.

“Yes,” replied several of those who surrounded the wounded man, “but it is nothing serious; the skin only is broken.”

“Ah!” said Wolsey, and he stood motionless; his head sank on his breast, as though he had suddenly fallen into a profound reverie.

“Woe is me!” he at length exclaimed, “woe is me!” And the tears coursed down his cheeks. He quickly wiped them away and retired immediately to his bedroom, where no one dared follow him without being summoned.

The attendants of the cardinal, however, were extremely apprehensive, having remarked the sudden change in his manner and the extreme pallor which had overspread his countenance. Dr. Bonner especially earnestly insisted that Cavendish should go to him at once.

He finally resolved to do so. On entering the apartment he found the archbishop on his knees, and remarked that the floor of his chamber was wet with tears.

Wolsey made a sign for him to retire; but the faithful servitor stood near the door and hesitated to obey him. The cardinal then called him to assist him in rising to his feet, feeling, he said, extremely feeble.

“Alas! my dear lord,” said Cavendish, “what is it that so deeply grieves you? and why will you withdraw from your trusty servitors, if it is in their power to assist you?”

“I thank you, Cavendish,” replied the cardinal, inclining his head, “but listen to me. My poor friend, I am going to die very soon—I have a presentiment of it; and God, in his mercy, often sends us these warnings, in order that we may not be surprised by death. The cross of York has fallen: it represents myself.”

“Why think you so?” asked Cavendish earnestly. “This cross fell because it was struck; nothing could have been more natural than such an accident.”

“No! no!” exclaimed Wolsey, [Pg 229] “it was not at all natural, but it is only too true. York is overthrown! Augustine is my accuser; he makes my own blood flow in making Bonner bleed, the master of my faculties and spiritual jurisdiction. My destiny is accomplished. My doom is sealed. Cavendish, if you doubt it, you will soon be convinced. My shadow, the sound of my name alone, is sufficient to alarm them; already I am no more, and yet this remnant of life makes them tremble, even in the midst of their triumphs. It is necessary for their peace that my last breath be extinguished; they have resolved and they will accomplish it!”

“No! no!” cried Cavendish, deeply moved. “The king loves you; he will defend you! All love you,” he continued warmly. “See with what eagerness they hasten hither to give you the most earnest assurances of their devotion.”

“That is true,” replied Wolsey, who was becoming more calm, and was greatly relieved by the presence of Cavendish. “It is the only feeling of joy I have experienced in a long time; but I am grieved not to have received any token of remembrance from the young Earl of Northumberland. His intellect, goodness, and his many amiable qualities have always made me regard him with the greatest esteem and affection. They say he loves solitude, and I am well assured that he receives no visitors; but I very much fear he cherishes bitter recollections of the court and Anne Boleyn. However, he should not take it ill that I have helped to prevent him from marrying such a woman!”

Whilst Wolsey was speaking a great noise was heard in the courtyard. Cavendish, at the cardinal’s request, immediately went out to ascertain the cause. He had advanced but a few steps when he encountered another equerry, coming in all haste to announce the arrival of the Earl of Northumberland.

Overjoyed at hearing the name, Cavendish at once returned to inform the archbishop.

“Here is Lord Percy himself, who also comes to congratulate your grace!” he exclaimed the instant he came in sight of Wolsey.

“The dear child!” cried the cardinal, his heart overflowing with a gush of tenderness. “Cavendish, you are not mistaken. Eh? Ah! I shall never forget him! Let us go and receive him, Cavendish.”

He advanced with a tottering step, and more rapidly than he was able, toward the staircase which Northumberland had just ascended. On seeing the archbishop approaching to meet him Lord Percy felt his heart suddenly throb with a sensation of inexpressible wretchedness.

“He comes to meet me!” he exclaimed.

He found him so much changed, so old and worn, that without his vestments he would scarcely have recognized him.

“He also has found the cup of life embittered!” said Northumberland. “Sorrow carves deep furrows on the brow, and with her haggard finger impresses every feature.”

He turned anxiously to look for Walsh, but found he was no longer near him. In the meantime Wolsey advanced rapidly toward him, and, taking him in his arms, pressed him closely to his heart.

“You are most welcome, my dear lord! How happy I am to see you!” he exclaimed. “But why have I not been informed of your coming? I should, at least, have [Pg 230] been prepared to give you a better reception; for you must know that what formerly required but a moment to effect I am now scarcely able to execute at all. But you will, I hope, appreciate my good intentions; and if I am ever so happy as to be re-established in my fortune, I shall then be able to express more worthily the joy I feel at receiving you in my house.”

“I thank your lordship,” answered Northumberland.

But he was unable to utter another word. However, he embraced Wolsey, though with great excitement of manner, his hands trembling visibly in those of the archbishop.

“Let us go,” continued Wolsey glancing at the followers of Lord Percy. “I am glad to see you have remembered the advice I gave you in your youth, to love and take care of all your father’s old domestics; that is why, I suppose, you have brought so many of them with you.”

“Yes, I prefer them,” replied Northumberland. And Wolsey went and took them each by the hand, praising their fidelity and recommending them to love their young master as he himself had always done.

The more Wolsey exerted himself to assure Northumberland of the gratification he experienced at his coming, the less strength Percy felt to thank him. However, the cardinal begged to be allowed to accompany him to his bed-chamber, where they might be alone, except Cavendish, who remained near the door, as his duty required him.

For a moment they sat in silence. Wolsey regarded Lord Percy with astonishment on observing the latter change color and become every instant more and more embarrassed. At length, arousing himself suddenly to a determined degree of resolution, he approached, and, laying his hand gently on the arm of the archbishop, said in a voice tremulous with emotion: “My lord, I arrest you on the charge of high treason!”

Wolsey sat so completely stupefied that he was incapable of uttering a word; they gazed at each other in mournful silence.

“Who has induced you to do this?” the cardinal at length exclaimed, “and by what authority do you it?”

“My lord,” replied Northumberland coldly, “I have a commission that authorizes me; or that compels me, rather,” he continued in a low voice.

“Where is this commission? Let me see it?”

“No, my lord, I cannot.”

“Then,” cried Wolsey, “I will not submit to your authority.”

As he said this, Sir Walsh pushed Dr. Augustine, whom he had arrested, rudely into the apartment. “Go in there, traitor,” he cried; but perceiving the cardinal, he fell on his knees before him, and, removing his cap, bowed almost to the floor.

Wolsey turned pale on seeing Walsh; he at once recognized him as being an officer of the king’s palace, and knew he would not be there without an express order.

“Sir,” he exclaimed, “rise, I implore you! My Lord of Northumberland comes to arrest me! If he has a commission, and you are with him for that purpose, you will be pleased to let me see it.”

“My lord,” answered Walsh, “if it please your grace, it is true that I have one; but we cannot permit you to see it. They have added to the paper on which it is written some instructions that we are bound not to make known.”

[Pg 231] “Then,” cried Wolsey, melting into tears, “all is over with me! They deprive me even of the means of defending myself, and my cruel enemies behold all their schemes accomplished. It is well, sir,” continued the archbishop, turning his back on the Earl of Northumberland; “I consent to surrender myself to you, but not to my Lord of Northumberland, who comes here only to enjoy my discomfiture. As to you, I know you; your name is Walsh, and you are one of the officers of the king, my master. Therefore I do not demand your commission; his will is sufficient. I am perfectly aware that the greatest peer in the realm is liable to be arrested by the lowest subject, if such be his majesty’s good pleasure. This is why I shall obey you without delay. Begin, then, to put your orders into execution. If I had known them, I would have assisted you myself; but, at least, I submit.”

Saying this, the archbishop seated himself in silence; but the tears continued to flow rapidly down his cheeks.

Meanwhile, Lord Percy felt so deeply wounded by the suspicion manifested by the archbishop, and his believing him to be actuated by a principle of low revenge and cruelty in coming to arrest him, that he was about to withdraw without offering him a solitary word of consolation, as he had intended; but a sudden feeling of compassion induced him to return and take a seat by his side.

Wolsey was deeply moved by this.

“My lord,” he exclaimed, “I swear before God I am innocent of all the crimes my enemies impute to me, beyond doubt, for the purpose of securing my death! I have committed many errors, I know; but it has been against God and against myself that I have committed them, and not against my king, whom I have always served with an inviolable fidelity. I have possessed great riches; but I employed them in founding great and useful establishments. I have held correspondence with foreign princes, and have acquired great influence in their councils, but I have always used it in the interests of my king and the state. And now he has abandoned me to the malice of my enemies, and does not hesitate an instant to believe all the calumnies they have heaped upon my head! No, I shall indulge in vain illusions no longer. I go now to my death; and it is my king who strikes the fatal blow! Ah!” continued Wolsey, transported by his feelings, “would I might appear before him, that I might justify myself in the face of heaven and earth! Then I should fear no man living under the sun. But, no; it will not be thus. I shall die without vindication, in the depths of some obscure prison, some noisome dungeon! Not a friend has remained faithful; not a single voice has been raised in my defence!”

“Friendship,” replied Northumberland, “is but a vain word, a beautiful sound that dissolves in the air, a shifting sand requiring the one who reposes on it always to remain on his guard, to beware; for one-half of the world is too frivolous and the other half too selfish for any confidence ever to be placed in them.”

“Therefore you yourself feel no compassion for me?” said Wolsey, looking at him.

“You are unjust!” replied Lord Percy. “God is my judge how deeply I have suffered in being [Pg 232] forced before you in my present capacity. But tell me, how am I to arrest the destroying tempest or turn aside the falling thunderbolt? Have they not crushed me also?”

* * * * *

After two long days had passed, during which the archbishop was entirely deprived of all communication with those around him, Northumberland came to inform him that everything was arranged for the journey and it was time to depart.

“Alas! where are you going to take me?” cried Wolsey, to whom this departure seemed the first step toward condemnation and death.

In that fatal moment he felt an attachment for every stone and every spot connected with the abode which, until this time, he had regarded as the most gloomy place of exile.

“Not to be able to die in peace!” he mournfully exclaimed. “Where are you going to take me, Lord Percy?”

“I cannot accompany you,” sadly replied Northumberland, who had endeavored during the preceding days to make him regard his condition with less terror; “but I know that Sir Walsh has orders to deliver you at Sheffield Park, and place you in the hands of my father-in-law, the Earl of Shrewsbury; and you need suffer no anxiety, nor doubt but that he will gladly exert himself to have you well treated as far as depends on him. To-night you will sleep at Pomfret.”

“At the castle?” demanded Wolsey.

“No, no,” replied Lord Percy: “at the abbey. I am certain of it. I swear it! I have myself sent the order for you to be received there. O my father!” continued Percy, who felt more and more deeply grieved, “I must now leave you.” (And he fell on his knees before the archbishop.) “May God be with you! But first give me your blessing. I indeed have need of it! I have never forgotten the care you bestowed on me in my childhood.”

“My dear son,” said the archbishop, “may the Lord Almighty, the God of Israel and of Jacob, for ever bless you! We shall meet no more but in him.”

As the archbishop extended his hands and laid them on the head of Percy, and while he bent affectionately over him, Walsh entered, followed by a number of armed men; and the sound of smothered sighs and stifled cries was heard.

“What is that?” exclaimed Wolsey in alarm.

“Nothing, my lord,” answered Walsh in an imperious tone. “As you could only take four of your men with you, I feared the others would make too much disturbance at your departure; consequently, I had them shut up in the chapel.”

“Sir,” cried Wolsey indignantly, “I will not leave this place until I have seen and bade farewell to all my servants. You cannot have been authorized to treat me with such a degree of cruelty. My Lord Northumberland, since you have seized for the king’s benefit the little money I possessed, and have left me nothing to give them, at least permit me to thank them for their services and mingle my tears with theirs.”

“We thought it would be painful for you to witness their grief,” replied Northumberland, “and wished to spare you the infliction. But they shall be summoned.”

As soon as the door of the chapel was opened they gathered in a crowd around Wolsey, kissing his hands and his vestments.

[Pg 233] “My children,” he said to them, “weep not; we shall meet again very soon, I hope. My Lord Northumberland, I recommend them to you! You will take care of them—I feel assured of it.”

He then hastened to depart, feeling his courage ready to desert him. At every step he took his anguish redoubled; and when he reached the great courtyard, he turned his eyes for a moment toward the high, black walls of the castle he was leaving, then glanced at the mule assigned him to ride. Cavendish followed with his almoner and two of his valets. But a new grief awaited Wolsey, already overwhelmed with sorrow. Scarcely had they opened the outer gate of the castle, when they perceived without a crowd of gentlemen of the province, whom Walsh had summoned, in the king’s name, to come and secure the arrest of the archbishop; because the whole country was in a state of commotion, and more than three thousand men had gathered along the route, in the plain, and as far as the moats of the castle, around which they assembled as soon as they were informed of his arrest. They were powerless to oppose his departure, but followed him for several miles, shouting incessantly: “God save his grace, and perish his enemies who have forced him from us!” They regarded the noblemen who surrounded him with wrathful scowls, without reflecting that, while feeling it necessary to obey the king, the lords were as deeply disaffected as themselves, and in their turn accused the Earl of Northumberland of having seconded Walsh in this enterprise.

During the journey they unceasingly manifested the greatest regard for the archbishop, and only left him after seeing him committed into the hands of the Earl of Shrewsbury, whose castle was situated near the confines of Yorkshire, a short distance from the town of Doncaster.

TO BE CONTINUED.

[77] The son has now ceased to invoke in this once hallowed spot the divine mercy on the souls of his fathers; the bells no more announce the vows nor the regrets of the heart; the august Sacrifice is never offered up but in the gloomy silence imposed by persecution.

SENNUCCIO MIO, BENCHE DOGLIOSO E SOLO.

FROM PETRARCH.

My own Sennuccio, though bereft of thee,

Weeping and lonely, me this thought sustains:

That from this breathing tomb, these fleshly chains,

Thy soaring spirit nobly set thee free.

Now the twin poles by thee discovered are,

The wheeling lights, and all the starry ways:

Thou seest our seeing falter from afar;

So thy delight the pain of loss allays.

But I beseech thee in that far third sphere

Greet Franceshino and the bard divine,

Cino, Guitton, and all thy comrades there;

And tell my Love, tell her what tears are mine,

And what dark moods of wilder sorrow breeds

The thought of her sweet face and saintly deeds.

SCANDERBEG.

“Oh! how comely it is, and how reviving

To the spirits of just men long oppressed,

When God into the hands of their deliverer

Puts invincible might

To quell the mighty of the earth, th’ oppressor,

The brute and boist’rous force of violent men,

Hardy and industrious to support

Tyrannic power, but raging to pursue

The righteous and all such as honor Truth.”

—Samson Agonistes.

The Turks, from their first appearance upon European soil, have been a danger to the peace and civilization of Christendom. When their fierce hordes crossed the Bosporus, bearing aloft the standard of the crescent, it was a boast among them that the sign was but a temporary emblem of their power, and that when she had waxed to the fulness of her orb—donec Lunæ totus impleatur orbis, as was insolently said to an ambassador of the West—her silvery sheen would change to the golden glory of the sun, and blaze from an eastern sky over prostrate and Mohammedan Europe.

With one foot upon Constantinople and the other on Rome,[78] the colossus of Islam would have projected an awful shadow over the Christian world. Efforts tremendous and long sustained were made to lift itself up; but this it could never do, and it has fallen and is broken, but in its fall covers fair provinces and crushes a multitude of unfortunate Christians. If the Turks have ceased to be a stirring menace to the nations, we must ascribe the curbing of their power to divine Providence, which brought forward at critical times a number of men mighty by the sword or through the word—Huniades, Matthias Corvinus, Ladislas of Hungary, St. John Capistran, Cardinal Julian Cesarini, Scanderbeg, St. Pius V., Don John of Austria, Mark Anthony Colonna, Sobieski, and others—who fought their advance towards the Adriatic and along the Danube. As this great Ottoman inundation rose higher and higher, until it seemed as though the work of the church for a thousand years would be swept away in fewer days, God spoke: “I set my bounds around it, and made it bars and doors; and I said: Hitherto thou shalt come, and shalt go no further: and here thou shalt break thy swelling waves.” (Job xxxviii.)

In the fifteenth century several independent princelings, called despots by the Greeks, were in possession of the rich and populous district of Albania, which stretches along the coast of the Adriatic and Mediterranean Seas, and corresponds geographically to the Epirus of the ancients. One of the noblest of these chiefs was John Castriot, who came of an ancient family in Lower Macedonia. His wife, Woïzava, presented him with nine children, and among them that George, born in 1404, who was destined to become the defender of his persecuted race, the Christian Gideon, as he was hailed by Pope Paul II., and [Pg 235] the hero of his native country against the Turks. Several omens are reported to have accompanied his birth and signified his future greatness. Without denying that these may have been something more than mere accidents or freaks of the imagination, we only certify that as the child grew up he developed a strength of character and an aptitude for arms which his after-successes amply justified and the inherent nobility of his parents had prepared.

“Fortes creantur fortibus et bonis;

… nec imbellem feroces

Progenerant aquilæ cotlumbam.”[79]

—Horace.

Sultan Mohammed I. had invaded Albania in 1413, and obliged John Castriot to deliver up his four young sons to him as hostages. He immediately, and against the solemn promise made to their father, caused them to be circumcised and educated in the Mussulman religion. George, our hero, was the youngest. He was endowed with a prodigious memory, and soon learned to speak the Greek, Turkish, Arab, Illyrian, and Italian languages. A handsome person, unusual bodily strength, and vigorous mental qualities won for him the warm affection of the next sovereign, Amurath II., who changed George’s name to Scanderbeg—i.e., Beg or Lord Alexander—and at the early age of eighteen gave him the rank of sangiac and command of five thousand horsemen on the confines of Anatolia. His personal prowess and military skill in Asia Minor brought him into considerable notice, and he was given a command in the European provinces of the empire. This was a difficult position to be placed in; for he had not forgotten that he was born a Christian and had been impressed into his present service. He felt a great dislike to turn his arms against co-religionists and countrymen. His brothers were dead, and now his father died in 1432. At this juncture the sultan very unjustly took possession of his hereditary dominion, and, sending his mother and sister Mamisa into exile, put a pasha over the country. Scanderbeg did not immediately pronounce himself against this act of treacherous spoliation, although several Albanian noblemen, proud of his renown and convinced that he was not at heart attached to his new creed, corresponded with him secretly, urging him to come and put himself at the head of the Christian population to free the country from the infidel. The Albanians have always been distinguished for their spirit of nationality, and, like the inhabitants of all mountainous regions are remarkable for independence and love of home.

The favorable moment to declare himself had not arrived but his plans were maturing. At last, after a great battle lost by the Turks at Morava on the 10th of November, 1443, he concerted with his nephew Hamza and a few trusty friends of Christian origin, forced, like himself, to serve the foreign tyrant, and by a skilful ruse and very sudden irruption at the head of six hundred Albanians, who hastened to join him as soon as his defection was known, he obtained possession of Croia, the capital of his paternal dominions. The Turkish garrison, not so much by his orders as from an uncontrollable impulse of outraged feelings in the populace, was put to the sword. Scanderbeg was [Pg 236] just twenty-nine years old. He publicly renounced Mohammedanism and renewed his profession of the Catholic faith. The chiefs of Albania were then invited to meet him. When they came together at Croia, they called him their deliverer, unanimously proclaimed him Prince of Epirus, and soon collected an army of about twelve thousand men. While the troops were being raised, the civil service and revenues of the state were reorganized. Besides a large immediate contribution from his own countrymen, he obtained two hundred thousand ducats from his neighbors, the Venetians, and had a large source of income in the salt-mines near Durazzo.

Petralba was next taken, and this success brought new accessions of men and means to prosecute the war. Within a month after the first blow had been struck every fortress except one was captured, and every Turk either killed, a prisoner, or in flight. Sfetigrad could not be surprised, and, leaving a force of three thousand men to watch it and cut off supplies, Scanderbeg retired with the rest of the army to Croia for the winter, and occupied himself in making an alliance with the republic of Venice, which held several towns along the coast of Dalmatia, and in preparing for the inevitable struggle the sultan would make to recover the country. Amurath did not dissemble his anger at the revolt of one whom he had treated, he said, with so much kindness and taught the use of the arms he was now turning against him. Being engaged at the time against the Hungarians, he put off revenge until the spring, thinking that he could at any moment easily subdue the undisciplined bands of Albania; but when a truce was concluded and spring opened with fair weather for an imposing campaign, he sent Ali Pasha in command of forty thousand men, his orders being to crush the insurrection at a single blow. Scanderbeg had by this time reduced Sfetigrad and strongly fortified and garrisoned the more important towns. He now took the field with only fifteen thousand troops, knowing that in such a country as the one he was to defend a very large force would be difficult to handle and impossible to feed. His tactics were generally those of partisan warfare. His little army was composed partly of cavalry from the northern, and partly of a hardy and active infantry from the southern section of the country. His object was to wear out the enemy by a stout resistance at every point, and harass the retreats which the very vastness of the Turkish armies would necessitate by the impossibility, if for no other reason, of providing for so many mouths. Only occasional raids were made in force upon the fertile plains of Thessaly and Macedonia to capture horses, cattle, sheep, and to gather in grain to be stored in the fortified towns. During the war of Albanian independence, which lasted a quarter of a century, the Turks always, except towards the end, repeated the fatal blunder of sending immense armies, consisting in some cases of two hundred thousand men, into a country where they could be maintained only for a single and brief campaign, and to fight a general who was sure, from his bravery, skill, and thorough knowledge of every torrent, mountain pass, road, and valley, to turn defeat into overwhelming disaster. It was thus that the army of Ali Pasha was drawn by wily manœuvres into a narrow district only [Pg 237] ninety miles from Croia and opening into the very heart of Albania. The upper end was very contracted, and here Scanderbeg drew up his main body of troops, to the number of ten thousand, which were posted in three divisions en échelon. As soon as the enemy was well engaged in the valley three thousand horsemen, who had been watching their slow advance, came down at its lower end, which had been left quite unguarded, while fifteen hundred irregular infantry lay in ambush on either side amidst the woody acclivities. As soon as the Turks came up to the Albanians they halted, tried to deploy, but could not, repeatedly charged and swept up in heavy columns against the small but solid masses who evenly filled the gap and made it impossible to flank them. The Turks after a while began to waver and fall into still greater disorder. Ali Pasha had blundered.

The Albanians now took the offensive. The signal-clarions sounded, and, while the Turks were attacked in front, the cavalry from the lower end of the valley charged them in the rear, and the infantry that lay in ambush came rushing down on both sides with terrific cries and sword in hand to complete their discomfiture. It was now a slaughter; and although the battle lasted only four hours altogether, over twenty thousand infidels were killed or wounded. Few prisoners—not more than two thousand—were taken. The rest of the enemy, under cover of darkness and from sheer exhaustion on the part of the victors, escaped through the now open passage at the lower end of the valley.

When Scanderbeg had entered Croia in triumph, he announced the victory by letters to Pope Eugenius IV. and several Christian princes; and while some of the twenty-five captured battle-flags were distributed among the confederate chiefs, others were suspended in the principal church of the capital.

Amurath was so alarmed by this defeat—not, perhaps, so much from what he had to fear on the side of the immediate victors, but from the encouraging effects it might have in leaguing the Christian princes against him—that he wrote a letter from Adrianople, offering Scanderbeg peace on certain conditions. But when these were discussed in the council at Croia, they were declared unjust and humiliating, and Scanderbeg was advised to reject every sort of condition and insist on the complete independence of Albania. The answer to this letter announced his intention of holding out to the last extremity, and began with these valiant words: “From our camp near Croia, August 12, 1445. George Castriot, surnamed Scanderbeg, soldier of Jesus Christ and Prince of the Epirotes, to Othman, Prince of the Turks, greeting.” A second army under Fizour, and a third and larger one under Mustapha, were successively defeated, but not without considerable loss in men and damage to the country. During the inroads of these fierce barbarians into Albania they perpetrated the most horrible massacres without regard to age or sex, and heaped the most brutal outrages upon the inhabitants. The handsomest girls were seized for the seraglios of the sultan and his wealthy minions, the prettiest boys were kept to minister to their unnatural lusts, while youths of a maturer age or less attractive appearance were circumcised, educated in the Mohammedan religion, and drafted [Pg 238] into the Janizaries. Others who were not butchered on the smoking ruins of their homes were driven in chains to the slave markets, while many were made eunuchs and set to guard the harems of their masters in Asia Minor.

Mustapha Pasha, although he had been defeated, was entrusted with another army, but with a similar result, and even worse; for he himself was taken prisoner. Twenty-five thousand golden ducats were paid for his ransom. Scanderbeg now made a razzia on a large scale into Macedonia and returned laden with an immense booty of every description. His fame was so solidly established by these victories that the republic of Venice sent a magnificent embassy to compliment him and convey to him the news of his appointment as governor-general of all the Italian possessions along the Adriatic and in the interior, where the important cities of Scutari and Alessio were situated. His name was enrolled in the Golden Book at the head of the list of Venetian nobles.

The revolt of the Janizaries having obliged Amurath to leave his luxurious retreat at Magnesia and once more resume the management of public affairs, he determined to conduct in person the war against Scanderbeg. He soon appeared at the head of a formidable army before Sfetigrad, which surrendered after a gallant resistance. During the siege the Turks lost in one of the assaults six thousand men. Satisfied, apparently, with this single victory, the slothful sultan retired into Macedonia after leaving a strong garrison in the captured fortress. Scanderbeg hovered on his flanks and rear, making many prisoners and taking a large amount of stores and war material; then, after seeing him well out of the country, he turned towards Sfetigrad and sat down before it on September 20, 1445, with eighteen thousand men, among whom were adventurers from almost every country in Europe, Germans, French, and Italians being the most numerous. For want of artillery no regular siege could be conducted, and Scanderbeg was repulsed with heavy loss in his attacks on the place. Hearing that Amurath was preparing to return, he hastily concentrated his available troops around Croia, which was provisioned for a long resistance. Some large, unwieldy pieces of cannon, directed by Frenchmen, added to the strength of the capital. The sultan was slow in his movements, and did not appear as soon as was expected. In the meanwhile Scanderbeg was encouraged by receiving congratulatory letters from Pope Nicholas V., which were brought to him by two Franciscans, one of whom was a bishop. The winter of 1449-50 had been passed by him in the saddle inspecting every fortress, going into every part of his dominions to encourage the people and hasten the levy of troops. The coming tempest was naturally expected to assail the capital; and to make its neighborhood a howling wilderness, the whole country around Croia was ravaged by his order, for a distance of from fifteen to eighteen miles, so completely that not a house or a bridge was left standing, and not a road passable; every growing and living thing was either destroyed or removed. The enemy could find no shelter there.

On April 15, 1450, the sultan appeared before the city with an army of one hundred and sixty thousand fighting men and a host of camp-followers. Uranocontes commanded inside and repelled numerous assaults, while Scanderbeg, with [Pg 239] a force of five thousand picked cavalry, hovered about the outskirts of the enemy, inflicting considerable loss in men and stores, but above all annoying the long line of communications by which the army drew its daily supplies. Amurath finally tired of the siege, and, being convinced that the mountains and valleys of Epirus were not worth his time, his trouble, or his money while richer conquests awaited him, charged a certain Yousouf to leave the camp and seek Scanderbeg, to try and induce him to accept the single condition of an annual tribute of only ten thousand ducats. After a two days’ search he was found, but instantly rejected even this almost nominal condition attached to the independence of his country. Knowing that he could not take Croia by assault or maintain his army any longer in such a country, the sultan slowly retreated and died soon afterwards at Adrianople, on February 5, 1451. He was succeeded by his son, Mohammed II., who renewed his father’s offer, but with no better result.

The news of Amurath’s ill-success before Croia made a great noise in Italy, and even beyond. The kings of Hungary and Aragon, and Philip, Duke of Burgundy, sent complimentary missions to the Albanian hero, and presents of money and provisions. King Alphonsus of Aragon, who was also King of Sicily and Naples, sent him four hundred thousand bushels of grain. Among other rich presents that he received from this magnificent monarch was a helmet or casque of the finest Spanish steel, lined on the inside with Cordovan leather and soft silk, and covered on the outside with the purest gold artistically chased and embossed by an Italian jeweller and studded with precious stones. Scanderbeg was very proud of this really regal headgear, and ranked it along with his famous sword, a veritable Excalibur, the blade of which was of perfect Damascus workmanship, and the handle a blaze of Oriental gems set with exquisite skill by a Persian lapidary. This weapon was a present from Amurath on giving him his first command. With it he killed at least two thousand Turks in his war of independence, and it was looked upon by his enemies with a species of superstitious awe. During one of the informal truces between the Turks and Christians Sultan Mohammed begged to see the blade of which he had heard so much. It was sent to him and tried by the best swordsmen of his army, but not one of them could perform the feats that its owner had been seen to do with it; and when it was returned, the sultan told him this and asked the reason. “I sent your highness the sword,” said Scanderbeg, “but not the limb that wields it!” When he went into battle, it was always with his right arm bare and his shoulder perfectly free. He was so tall and strong that a few years later, when he went over to Italy to assist King Ferdinand, and had occasion to meet the commander of the enemy’s troops—the famous condottiére Count Piccinino, whose stature, it is true, was small, but still that of a grown person—he took him by the belt with one hand, and, slowly raising him up, impressed a courtly kiss upon the forehead and as gently set him down again. He looked so brave and handsome that even his foes applauded.

“His haughtie helmet, horrid all with gold,

Both glorious brightnesse and great terrour bredd:

For all the crest a dragon did enfold

With greedie pawes, and over all did spredd

His golden winges; his dreadfull hideous hedd,

[Pg 240]

Close couchèd on the bever, seemed to throw

From flaming mouth bright sparcles fiery redd,

That suddeine horrour to faint hartes did show;

And scaly tayle was stretcht adowne his back full low.”

—Spenser.

In May, 1451, Scanderbeg married the Princess Donica, daughter of Arrianites Thopia, one of the most influential lords of Albania, and connected on his mother’s side with the imperial family of the Comneni. He received at this time from King Alphonsus five hundred arquebusiers, the same number of expert crossbow-men, and a few pieces of artillery with their cannoniers. We have only space to mention the events of the next years: how successive armies of Turks were defeated; how Scanderbeg himself was repulsed with a loss of five thousand men in an attack on Belgrade; and how, during a lull in the war, he was invited over to Italy by Pope Pius II. to the assistance of King Ferdinand, son of his old friend Alphonsus, who was hard pressed by his rival, John of Anjou. (Raynald. Annales Eccl. ad an. 1460, num. lx.) He contributed greatly to the victory won at Troja on Aug. 18, 1462, and for his services was created Duke of San Pietro, in the kingdom of Naples. He remained in Italy a little over a year. Recalled to Albania by the appearance of the Turks, he repulsed Sultan Mohammed from Croia; but his own losses and the new plans of the enemy, which consisted in sending only small armies under experienced generals—one of whom, Balaban Badera, was an Albanian renegade—with orders to avoid battle if possible, but to remain in the country at all hazards, made him feel that his cause was failing, and that, unless relieved from the west, he must sooner or later succumb. In this emergency he went to Rome and appealed to the pope and cardinals to preach a new crusade. The example of the broken-hearted Pius II. showed how fruitless it would have been for them to do so. Paul, indeed, wrote to all the Christian princes, but he got nothing but fair words in return. The great schism had lamentably diminished the prestige of the Papacy, and a multitude of heretics more or less openly preluded that Reformation which would soon divide Christendom itself into hostile camps. The pope gave him three thousand golden florins and conferred upon him the insignia of the cap and sword which is annually blessed by the pontiff on the vigil of Christmas for presentation to the prince who has deserved best of the church. Scanderbeg lodged while in Rome in a house which, although rebuilt in 1843, still retains over the door his portrait in fresco and the laudatory inscription set up soon after his death. The street and an adjoining little piazza under the Quirinal gardens have long perpetuated his name as the Via di Scanderbeg. He left Rome in disappointment and sorrow.

“Ah! what though no succor advances,

Nor Christendom’s chivalrous lances

Are stretched in our aid? Be the combat our own!

And we’ll perish or conquer more proudly alone;

For we’ve sworn by our country’s assaulters,

By the virgins they’ve dragged from our altars,

By our massacred patriots, our children in chains,

By our heroes of old, and their blood in our veins,

That, living, we shall be victorious,

Or that, dying, our deaths shall be glorious.”

—Campbell.

On his way back to Albania he was allowed to recruit in the Venetian territories a force of thirteen thousand men, which he commanded in person. His former little army in the field was captained by his faithful friend Tanusios, and after planning together the two generals attacked the Turks around Croia [Pg 241] on two different points, while a vigorous sortie was made by the besieged, during which Balaban, the Turkish commander, was killed. His death and the suddenness and vigor of the triple attack threw the enemy into confusion, and they were completely routed. We pass over other battles and victories, by which Scanderbeg’s resources were finally exhausted. The end had come. During the winter of 1466-7 he was making a tour of inspection, and while in the city of Alessio, or Lissa, as it is sometimes called, where the ambassador of Venice and the confederate chiefs of Albania had convened to meet him and combine for one last and desperate effort, he was seized by a fever which proved fatal. After addressing a solemn and pathetic discourse to his principal officers, he embraced them one by one, and gave orders to his only son John to cross over to his Neapolitan fiefs with his mother, and there wait until some favorable occasion might present itself to return and put himself at the head of his countrymen as his father had done. He died during the night of January 17, 1467, after having received the Viaticum and Extreme Unction, and was buried in the cathedral church of Alessio. His death caused a profound sensation throughout Europe. Mohammed exulted over the loss of one whom he called the sword and buckler of the Christians, and immediately poured his troops into Albania; but it was not until the year 1478, when Croia surrendered on conditions which were afterwards basely violated, that the war ended. Since that time the infamous Turks have lorded it over the land made glorious in legendary lore by the son of Achilles, in history by King Pyrrhus, and in modern times by Scanderbeg. The presence of those barbarous Asiatics in any part of Europe is one of the foulest stains upon the moral sense and the politics of Christian governments.

When Alessio was captured the infidels dug up the remains of the great warrior and divided his bones among the soldiers, to be worn in rich reliquaries as amulets of courage. His countrymen still sing of him as their national hero, and the Turks frighten naughty children with his terrible name.

After Scanderbeg’s death many Albanians emigrated to Italy, either in the suite of his son or independently. The most remarkable colony was in Calabria, where as late as 1780 their descendants, numbering about one hundred thousand, retained the dress, manners, and language of their ancestors. Another colony, not so numerous, is scattered about the Abruzzi. The last lineal descendant of the hero was the Marquis of Sant’Angelo, who was killed at the battle of Pavia by the hand (as Paulus Jovius says) of Francis I.

Most of the Albanians remained Christians until the middle of the seventeenth century, when the majority conformed, outwardly at least, to the Mohammedan religion. The popes have tried hard to keep alive the Catholic faith among the population, and, under the circumstances, with considerable success. Pope Clement XI., of the (now) princely family of Albani which emigrated from Albania in the sixteenth century, and settled at Urbino, established a purse of four thousand scudi in 1708 for the support of three students from that country in the Propaganda College. The Catholics there do not now number more than ninety thousand. There are two archbishoprics, [Pg 242] Antivari united with Scutari, and Durazzo, and three bishoprics, Alessio, Pulati, and Sappa. These sees are usually filled by Franciscans, who, with a few Propagandists (with one of whom, now bishop of Alessio, we have the honor of being acquainted), are the only missionaries in the country. We conclude our article with a bibliographical notice of the subject, because, as Dr. Johnson used to say, a great part of knowledge consists in knowing where knowledge is to be found.

The original source of information upon which all subsequent writers, whether with or without acknowledgment, have drawn is a work by Marino Barlezio, a priest of Scutari, who, besides being a native of the country about which he wrote, was an almost constant companion of Scanderbeg and an eye-witness of most of the events which he relates. He was a scholar and penned very excellent Latin, which greatly adds to the charm of his narrative. We give the full title: De Vita et Moribus ac Rebus præcipuè adversus Turcas gestis Georgii Castrioti clarissimi Epirotarum Principis, qui propter celeberrima facinora Scanderbegus, hoc est Alexander Magnus, cognominatus fuit. Libri xiii. It is not certain where this curious book was first published. Some say at Rome as early as 1506, but this is extremely doubtful; others at Frankfort in 1537 (in folio). A German translation by Pinicianus was published in 1561 in 4to, with woodcuts; and a French one, the language of which is quaint and racy, by Jacques de Lavardin, in 1597. Independent biographies have been written in Latin by an anonymous author at Rome in 1537 or earlier, in folio; in Italian by T. M. Monardo, Venice, 1591, and almost immediately translated into Spanish and Portuguese; in French by Du Poncet (Paris, 1709, in 12mo), a Jesuit, who took upon himself to refute the calumny of Machiavelli and Helvetius, that Christian principles and practices can never develop the qualities of a perfect soldier, a hero. Other French biographies are those of Chevilly (Paris, 1732, 2 vols. 12mo), and Camille Paganel (ibid. 1855, 1 vol. 8vo), which is the best we have read. In English there is one by Clement C. Moore, an American (New York, 1850), and another by Robert Bigsby, an Englishman (London, 1866); while we have also, from the graceful pen of Benjamin Disraeli, The Rise of Iskander, a tale founded on Scanderbeg’s revolt against the Turks (London, 1833). A Summarium or epitome of his life is preserved among the MSS. of the Royal Library at Turin; and the Grand Ducal one at Weimar treasures among its rarities a MS. parchment called The Book of Scanderbeg, composed of three hundred and twenty-five leaves, each of which is beautifully illustrated with figures in india-ink representing scenes from civil and military life in the fifteenth century. It was a present to the Albanian hero from Ferdinand of Aragon. Two Latin poems have been published about him, one by a German named Kökert at Lubec, 1643, and the other by a French Jesuit, Jean de Bussières, at Lyons, 1662, in eight books; finally, one in Italian, called La Scanderbeide, by a lady named Margherita Sarrocchi, without date or place of publication; but it sometimes turns up in book-sales at Rome.

Scanderbeg’s large gilt cuirass, damaskeened with designs of Eastern pattern, is found in the Belvedere collection at Vienna. It is supposed to have been one of his trophies captured in Anatolia.

[78] It was a common boast of the more ambitious sultans that they would some day feed their horses at the tomb of St. Peter.

[79] The good and brave beget the brave;
… Fierce eagles breed not harmless doves.
The family standard of the Castriots, which Scanderbeg carried in his battles, was a black, double-headed eagle on a red field.

[Pg 243]

THE CHURCH AND LIBERTY.

Men are governed more by their sympathies than by reason. Weak arguments are strong enough when supported by prejudice which is able to withstand even the most conclusive proofs. We do not pretend to say that this is wholly wrong. Our feelings are in general sincerer than our thoughts; spring more truly from our real selves; are less the product of artificial culture and more of those common principles of our nature which make the whole world akin. But since in rational beings the feelings cannot be purely instinctive, it follows that they are more or less modifiable by the action of the intellect, which in turn is also subject to their influence. Prejudice, therefore, may be either intellectual or moral, or the one and the other; the most obstinate, however, is that which is enrooted in feeling and springs from sympathies and antipathies; and this is usually the character of religious prejudice. The tendency to make religion national, which is a remarkable feature in the history of mankind, together with the fact that states have always been founded and peoples welded into unity by a common faith, has as a rule thrown upon the side of religion the whole force of national prejudice, which, though it does not touch the deep fountains of immortal life and of the infinite, revealed by faith, is yet an immense power, more than any other aggressive and defiant. As the Catholic Church is non-national, it is not surprising that she should often be brought into conflict with the spirit of nationalism.

Christ was himself opposed by this spirit; on the one side he was attacked by the religious nationalism of the Jews, and on the other by that of the Romans. These enemies surrounded the early church. There was the internal struggle to free herself from the bonds of Judaism, a purely national faith; and there was the open battle with the Roman Empire for the liberty of the soul and her right to exist as a Catholic and non-national religion. Heresies and schisms have invariably been successful in proportion as they have been able to rouse national prejudice against the universal church. To pass over those of more ancient date, we may safely affirm that but for this Luther’s quarrel with Tetzel would never have given birth to Protestantism. The conflicts during the middle ages between popes and emperors and kings, together with schisms and scandals, had accustomed the public mind, especially in Germany and England, to look upon the successor of St. Peter as a foreign potentate; nor was it easy, in the state of things which then existed, to draw the line between his spiritual and his temporal authority. He came more and more to be considered an Italian sovereign who had usurped undue power, and thus in Germany and England Italians grew to be both hated and despised; and this more, probably, than kings and parliaments helped on the cause of Protestantism.

The Catholic faith was made to appear, not as the religion of Christ, but as popery, a foreign idolatrous superstition, which had by artful [Pg 244] means insinuated itself amongst the various nations of German blood; and to throw off the yoke of Italian despotism was held to be both political and religious disenthralment. The specific doctrines of Luther and the other heresiarchs had merely an incidental influence. In England, where the separation from the church was more complete than elsewhere, there was the least doctrinal departure from Catholic teaching; which is of itself proof how little any desire for a so-called purer faith had to do with the movement. The appeal to the Scriptures was popular because it was an appeal from the pope. That the Reformation was not an intellectual revolt, at least primarily, there is abundant evidence in the indisputable fact that the most enlightened and learned people of that age—the Italians—remained firm in their attachment to the old faith; and even in Germany, which was comparatively rude and barbarous, the cultivators of the new classical learning, which had been revived in Italy, were for the most part repelled by the coarseness and ignorance of the preachers of Protestantism, who in England found no favor with men like More and Wolsey, scholars, both of them, and patrons of letters.

As Protestantism did not spring from intellectual convictions, but from passion and prejudice—national antagonisms, which had been intensified by ages of conflict and strife, and which became the potent allies of the ambition and rapacity of kings and princes—it is but natural that Protestants, continuing the traditions of their fathers, should still be influenced in their opinions of the Catholic Church more by their antipathies than by reason, and that these antipathies should invariably run with the current of national prejudice. Hence the objections to the church which really influence men are not religious but social. A Protestant who accepts the Bible as the word of God, and receives in the literal sense all that is there narrated, could not with any show of reason make difficulty about believing the teachings of the church; nor can one who trusts to himself alone for his creed feel great confidence that those who are supported by the almost unanimous consent of all Christians for fifteen hundred years, and of the great majority even down to the present day, are less certain of salvation than himself. But when he comes to consider the social influence of the church, he finds it less difficult to justify his dislike of Catholic institutions; for in this direction he is upheld most strongly by traditional prejudice. That the church fosters ignorance and immorality is to his mind axiomatic. He still thinks that the darkness, the scandals, and crimes of the middle ages, which he always exaggerates, are to be ascribed to her and not to the barbarians. The labors of the learned have long since shown the old Protestant theory, that the church sought to keep the people in ignorance, to be not only groundless, but the reverse to be true; and that not less false is the charge that she encouraged immorality, however corrupt some who have held high ecclesiastical positions may have been. But as we have quite recently discussed these questions,[80] we turn to the subject of the relative influence of the church and of Protestantism upon civil liberty. Discussions of this kind, though not new, are nevertheless full of actual interest. [Pg 245] The subject of social liberty profoundly influences the practical controversies of the age, and bids fair to become of still more vital moment in the future. The adversaries of the Catholic Church never feel so secure as when they attack her in the name of freedom. She is supposed to be the fatal foe of all liberty, intellectual, religious, and social.

For the present we shall put aside the controversies concerning liberty of thought and discussion, and confine ourselves to the examination of the relation of the church to social freedom. And it will be necessary, in order to institute a comparison between her action and that of Protestantism, to go back to the first ages to study her early efforts in behalf of human rights.

Those great battles for human liberty were fought, not by Christianity, but by the Christian Church. The religion of Christ was from the beginning corporate and organized; and it was through its organization that it exerted its influence upon individuals and upon society. To understand, therefore, the true relation of the church to liberty, we must study her history in the past as well as in the present. In fact, it is only in the light of the past that the present can be understood. The clear perception of her spirit and action during the centuries which preceded the advent of Protestantism will enable us to see how far and in what respect the politico-religious revolution of the sixteenth century was favorable to social freedom.

Human society, like the heavenly bodies, is guided by two forces, the natural tendencies of which are antagonistic, but whose combined action, when properly harmonized, produces order. Authority and Liberty are the centripetal and centrifugal forces of the social world; but, unlike those which govern the motions of the planets, they are indefinitely modifiable by free human agency. To regulate these two powers is the eternal political problem, which is never solved because the factors of the equation are ever varying and consequently never known. The exaggeration of the principle of authority is tyranny; of that of liberty, anarchy; and the excess of the one is followed by a reaction of the other, so that, whichever preponderates, the resulting evils are substantially the same. Tyranny is anarchical, and anarchy is tyrannical; and both are equally destructive of authority and liberty.

Though authority and liberty, as applied to human society, are relative terms, they presuppose the absolute, and therefore have as their only rational basis the existence of a personal God; and hence the social order is, in its very constitutive elements, religious. In view of this fact it is not surprising that the state, which is the symbol of secular society, should be drawn to usurp the functions of the church, the symbol of the spiritual order. As a result of this tendency, pre-christian history shows us a universal subordination of religion to the temporal government, or, what is practically the same, the identification of the two powers; since, where both are united, that which regards man’s present, visible, and urgent wants will always preponderate.

The direct consequence of this was the destruction of liberty; indirectly it also undermined authority. The state was absolute, and under the most favorable circumstances, as in the Græco-Roman [Pg 246] civilization, recognized the rights of the citizen, but not those of man; and even the citizen had rights only in so far as the state saw fit to grant them. The logical development of the absorption of all power by the state may be seen in imperial Rome, in which the ruler was at once emperor, supreme pontiff, and God.

When the Christian, though willing to obey Cæsar in temporal matters, reserved to himself a whole world upon which he would permit no human authority to trespass, he asserted, together with the supremacy of his spiritual nature, the principle to which modern nations owe their liberties. It would indeed be difficult to exaggerate the influence of this assertion of the sovereign rights of the individual conscience. It contains the principles of all rights and the essential elements of progress and civilization; it is the necessary preamble to every declaration of human liberties; the logical justification of all resistance to tyranny, and of every reaction against brute force and consecrated wrong. It is the impregnable stronghold of freedom, without which the sentiment of personal independence which the barbarians brought with them into European life would have been powerless to found free institutions. That sentiment was as strong in the North American Indians; in the Tartar and Turkish hordes which swept down from the table-lands of Asia upon fairer and more fertile regions; and yet with them it only subserved the cause of despotism. It is, indeed, inherent in human nature. To be self-conscious is to wish to be free and to take delight in the possession of liberty. This feeling finds a sanctuary in the heart of every boy who roams the forest, or plunges through the stream, or beholds the eagle cleave the blue heavens. It was as active in the breasts of the early Greeks and Romans as in the barbarians who rushed headlong upon a falling empire. The love of liberty was, in fact, with them a sublime passion, and yet they were unable to found free institutions because the state, absorbing the whole man, made itself absolute.

They lacked, moreover, that of which the barbarians were also deprived—the knowledge of the worth and dignity of human nature. Man, as man, was not honored; to have any rights did not come of our common nature, but of the accident of citizenship. Slavery was consecrated as being not only just but necessary; and the slave was outside the pale of the law. Woman was degraded and infant life was not held sacred. In nothing is the contrast between modern and ancient civilizations more striking than in their manner of regarding human life. With us the life of the unborn child is under the protection of conscience, of public opinion, and of the law equally with that of the highest and noblest. Its value to the state, to society, to the world, is not considered; we think of it only as a creature of God, endowed by him with rights which men may not violate. But this doctrine is unknown to paganism. In Rome the father was free either to bring up his child or to murder it; even the laws of Romulus grant him this privilege, with the nominal restriction of obtaining the consent of the nearest of kin; but under the empire his right to kill his newly-born infant was fully recognized. The abandonment of children by their parents was a universal custom, and one of which the Emperor Augustus [Pg 247] approved in the case of the infant of his niece Julia. If child-murder was not a crime, abortion, of course, was no offence at all, and was universally practised, especially among the rich. The contempt in which human life was held is seen also in the public games—in which hundreds of men were made to butcher one another merely for the amusement of the spectators—as well as in the power of life and death of the master over his slave.

It has been maintained quite recently that those who gave their approval and lent the countenance of their presence to these inhumanities were not therefore cruel; that, on the contrary, many of them were kind-hearted and benevolent; but this, if we grant it, makes our argument all the stronger, since it proves that the system was more vicious than the men. A social state which does not respect life is incompatible with liberty. It would be vain to seek for the origin of our free institutions in any supposed peculiarities of our barbarous ancestors. Nothing short of a radical revolution of thought as to what man is could have made civil liberty possible. It was necessary to re-endow the individual with absolute and inviolable rights in the presence of the state. Man had to be taught that he is more than the state; that to be man is godlike, to be a citizen is human; but this he could not learn so long as he remained helplessly under the absolute power of the state; nor could he, with the conviction that the state is the highest and that he exists for it, make any effort to break the bonds of his servitude. Before this could be possible he had to be received into a society distinct from, and independent of, the state; he had to be made fully conscious that he is a child of God, in whose sight slaves have equal rights with kings. It was necessary to bring out man’s personal destiny in strong contrast to the pagan view, which took in only his social mission, and this narrowly and imperfectly.

This is what the Christian religion did: it created a personal self-consciousness which made heroes of the commonest natures. The Roman died for his country; the Christian died for God and for his own soul’s sake. He was not led to brave death by the majesty of the city, of the empire, or by the memory of the victories which had borne his country’s arms in triumph through the world, but by his own individual faith and duty as a man with a personal and immortal destiny. When the Christian appealed from emperors and senates and armies, from the power and force of the whole world, to God, it was the single human soul asserting itself as something above and beyond this visible universe. Never before had the eternal and the infinite come so near to man; never before had he so felt his own immortal strength. He was lifted up into the heaven of heavens, stood face to face with the everlasting verities of God, became a dweller in the world that is, and the garments of space and time fell from his new-born soul. He was free; strong in the liberty with which Christ had clothed him, he defied all tyrannies. “As we have not placed our hope,” said Justin to the Emperor Antoninus, “on things which are seen, we fear not those who take away our lives; death being, moreover, unavoidable.” The pagan Roman knew, indeed, how to die; but his death, though full of grandeur and dignity, was sombre and hopeless; he died as the victim of fate. To the [Pg 248] Christian death came as the messenger of life; he died as one who is certain of eternity, as one whose soul is free and belongs to himself and God. This sense of a personal destiny which is eternal, of infinite responsibility, gave to the individual a strength and independence of character for which we will seek in vain among the religions of paganism. It is a feeling wholly distinct from the barbarian’s dislike of restraint. The love of wild and adventurous life neither fits men for the enjoyment of liberty nor predisposes them to grant it to others.

The more we study the history of Christian nations, the more profound is our conviction that without their religion they could never have won their liberties, which even now without this divine support could not be maintained. It is to our religion that we are indebted for the creation of popular free speech. Before Christ gave the divine commission to the apostles, philosophers had discoursed to their chosen disciples, and orators had declaimed to citizens, on the interests of the state; but no one had spoken to the people as moral beings with duties and responsibilities which lift them into the world of the infinite and eternal. There were priesthoods, but they were mute before the people, intent upon hiding from them all knowledge of their mysteries. Religious eloquence did not exist; it first received a voice on the shores of the Lake of Genesareth and on the hills of Judea, in the preaching of Jesus, who remains for ever its highest exponent, speaking as one who had authority with godlike liberty on whatever most nearly touches the dearest interests of men; speaking chiefly to the people, bringing back to their minds the long-forgotten truths which prove them the royal race of God. The preaching of God’s word with the liberty of Heaven, which no earthly authority might lessen, became the great school of the human race; it was the first popular teaching, and like an electric thrill it ran through the earth. It belongs exclusively to the religion of Christ. Mahomet, who sought to borrow it, was able to catch only its feeble echo. This free Christian public speech is unlike all other oratory; it possesses an incommunicable characteristic, through which it has exercised the most beneficent influence upon the destinies of mankind. It is essentially spiritual, lifts the soul above the flesh, and creates new ideals of life; inspiring contempt for whatever is low and passing, it begets enthusiasm for the divine and eternal. It is a voice whose soul-thrill is love, the boundless love of God and of men, who are the children of this love, and therefore brothers. This voice cannot be bought, it cannot be silenced. Currit verbum, said St. Paul, and again from his prison-cell: “But the word of God is not fettered.” On innumerable lips it is born ever anew; and always and everywhere it is a protest against the brutality of power, an appeal in the name of God, our Father in heaven, in behalf of the poor, the oppressed, the disinherited of humanity. Men may still be tyrants, may still crush the weak and sacrifice truth and justice to their lustful appetites; but the voice of God, threatening, commanding, rebuking, shall be silent nevermore.

Festus will tremble before Paul; at the bidding of Ambrose Theodosius will repent; and before Hildebrand the brutal Henry will bow his head. At the sound of this voice all Europe shall rouse itself, [Pg 249] shall rush, impelled by some divine instinct, into the heart of Asia, to strike the mighty power which threatened to blight the budding hope of the world. If we would understand the relations of the church to liberty, we must consider the influence of this free speech, which, without asking the permission of king or people, impelled by a divine necessity, made itself heard of the whole earth. Over the door of his Academy Plato had inscribed: “None but geometers enter here”; over the portals of the church was written the word of Christ: “Come to me, all ye who labor and are heavy laden.” “All you,” exclaimed St. Augustine, “who labor, who dig the earth, who fish in the sea, who carry burdens, or slowly and painfully construct the barks in which your brothers will dare the waves—all enter here, and I will explain to you not only the γνῶθι σεαυτόν of Socrates, but the most hidden of mysteries—the Trinity.” This new eloquence was as large as the human race; it was for all, and first of all for the poor and the oppressed. It was not artistic, in the technical meaning; it did not captivate the senses; it was not polished. There was no showy marshalling of words and phrases, no sweet and varied modulation of voice, no graceful and commanding gesture. Around the altar were gathered the slave, the beggar, the halt, and the blind—the oppressed and suffering race of men. If with them were found the rich and high-born, they were there as brothers—their wealth and noble birth entered not into the church of Christ. Here there was neither freeman nor slave—all were one. Thus in every Christian assembly was typed the humanity which was to be when all men would be brothers and free. To this new race the apostle of Christ spoke: “My brothers,” he said, or “My children”; and though all history and all society shrieked out against him, his hearers felt and knew that his words were God’s truth. The heart is not deceived in love. “I seek not yours,” he said, “but you; for God is my witness how I long after you all in the heart of Jesus Christ.… I could wish that myself were accursed, if only my brethren be saved.” And then, with the liberty which love alone can inspire, he threatened, rebuked, implored, laid bare the hidden wounds of the soul, nor feared to become an enemy for speaking the truth. To the great and rich he spoke in the plainest and strongest manner, reminding them of their duties, denouncing their indifference, their cruelty, their injustice; and then, in words soft as oil, he breathed hope and courage into the hearts of those who suffer, showing them beyond this short and delusive life the certain reward of their struggles and sorrows. He taught them that the soul is the highest, that purity is the best, that only the clean of heart see God; that man’s chief worth lies in that which is common to all, derived from God and for him created. Human life was perishing, wastefully poured through the senses on every carnal thing. No love of beauty or truth or justice was left. The mind was darkened, the heart was paralyzed. The great, strong human passions that bore the people of Rome in triumph through the earth were dead; everywhere, in religion, in art, in manners, was the deadly blight of materialism; a kind of delirium hurried all men into animal indulgences fatal alike to soul and body. To a race thus glued to the earth by carnal appetites came the [Pg 250] voice of the apostle, preaching Christ and him crucified; telling of the divine love that had bowed the heavens and brought down to men God’s own Son to suffer, to labor, to die for them. He was poor, he was meek and humble, he fasted, he prayed; he comforted the sorrowful, gave hope to the despairing; he offered up his life for men. Such as he was those who believe in him must be. To serve the lusts of the flesh, to be heartless, to be cruel, to be unjust, is to have no part with him. The greed of gold and of pleasure had reduced the masses of men to slavery and beggary; those who would follow God’s Son in the perfect way were to sell what they had, to give to the poor. The whole race of men was fallen, sunk in sin; the disciples of Christ were bidden to separate themselves from a world which had denied God, that, having received faith, hope, and love through union with him, they might bring to the dying peoples a new life.

The Christian religion turned the mind’s eye from the contemplation of beauty of form to the inner life of the soul; from thoughts of power and success to principles of right and justice. All the forces of society had been brought together to develop in its highest potency the passion of patriotism, which, bending to its purpose all the powers of individual life, had created mighty states, embellished them with art, crowned them with victory, made them eternal in literature that cannot die; but on the altar of all this glory man had been sacrificed. Patriotism had failed, hopelessly failed, to satisfy the unutterable longings of an immortal race. It was based upon false principles and perverted instincts. Man’s end is not more fulfilled in citizenship in a great and prosperous state than in the possession of vast wealth. The religion of patriotism was a low and material creed without eternal verities upon which to rest. Power was its divinity, and it was therefore without mercy; success was its justification, and it consequently trampled upon right. It is not surprising that such principles should have created states whose chief business was to prey upon the human race, and which, when conquest was no longer possible, were brought to ruin by the viciousness of their essential constitutions. In fact, patriotism, as understood by the pre-christian states, was a denial of the principles out of which the common law of Christendom has grown. It placed the interests of the nation above those of the race, and thereby justified all inhumanity if only it tended to the particular good of the state.

In contradiction of this unjust and narrow spirit, the Christian preacher declared that man’s first duty is to God, as his first aim should be to seek God’s kingdom by purifying and developing his own moral nature. He declared that man is more than the state, as God is more than the world; inspiring in another form those views of the paramount worth of the individual soul without which there could be no successful reaction against the slavery and degradation of paganism. “The world,” said Tertullian, “is the common country and republic of all men.”

These principles gradually worked their way, through “the foolishness of preaching,” into the minds and hearts of the masses and became the leaven of a new society. Let us examine their action more specially. In the church the brotherhood [Pg 251] of the race was from the earliest day not only taught but recognized as a fact. “There is neither Jew nor Greek,” said St. Paul, “neither bond nor free, neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” This doctrine is stated in various places in the New Testament with such emphasis as to leave no doubt of its true meaning. It is equally certain, however, that the apostles did not proclaim the emancipation of the slaves. “Let those who are servants under the yoke,” said the same apostle who declared that in Christ there was neither bond nor free, “count their masters worthy of all honor, lest the name of the Lord and his doctrines be blasphemed.”

It was not the spirit of the Christian faith to encourage visionary schemes or to awaken wild dreams of liberty; but rather to subdue and chasten the heart, to make men content to bear worthily the ills of life by giving to suffering a meaning and a blessing.

The misery of the pagan slave was extreme, but it was also hopeless. He believed himself the victim of relentless fate, from whose power death was the only deliverance, and he therefore rushed wildly into all excess, giving little thought to whether he should live to see the morrow. Suffering for him was without meaning—a remediless evil, a blind punishment inflicted by remorseless destiny. For this reason also his wretchedness excited no pity. Even as late as the time of St. Ambrose the pagans were accustomed to say: “We care not to give to people whom the gods must have cursed, since they have left them in sorrow and want.”

But with the preaching of Christ, and him crucified, came the divine doctrine of expiatory suffering—of suffering that purifies, regenerates, ennobles, begets the unselfish temper and the heroic mood. When the Christian suffered he was but filling up the measure of the sufferings of Christ. The slave, laboring for his master, was not seeking to please men; he was “the servant of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart”; “knowing that whatsoever good any man shall do, the same shall he receive from the Lord, whether he be bond or free.” Masters in turn were taught to treat their slaves kindly and gently, even as brothers; “knowing that the Lord both of them and of you is in heaven, and with him there is no respect of persons.”

Thus, without attempting to destroy slavery by schemes that must have been premature, the Christian religion changed its nature by diffusing correct notions concerning the mutual rights and duties implied in the relations of master and slave. The slave as a brother in Christ is separated by a whole world from the slave who is a tool or chattel. Who can read St. Paul’s Epistle to Philemon, written in behalf of the fugitive slave Onesimus, without perceiving the radical revolution which Christianity was destined to make in regard to slavery? “I beseech thee for my son, Onesimus: … receive him as my own heart; no longer as a slave, but as a most dear brother. If he hath wronged thee in anything, or is in thy debt, put it to my account.”

This is after all but the application of the teaching of Christ: I was hungry, I was thirsty, I was sick, I was a captive, and ye fed me, ye gave me to drink, ye visited me; for inasmuch as ye have done this for the least of my brethren, ye have done it for me. In every suffering and wronged human being [Pg 252] there is the Christ to be honored, to be loved, to be served. Whosoever refuses to take part in this ministry places himself outside the kingdom of God.

Slavery, from the Christian point of view, is but one of the thousand ills entailed upon the human race by the transgression of Adam; it is enrooted, not in nature, but in sin; and as Christ died to destroy sin, his religion must tend to diminish and gradually abolish its moral results. The freedom of all men in Christ which the great apostle so boldly proclaims must in time find its counterpart in the equality of all men before the law. Indeed, the admission of the slave into the Christian brotherhood logically implied the abolition of slavery. It so raised the individual by giving him the knowledge of his true dignity, and so softened the master’s treatment, that the moral elevation of the whole class was the inevitable result. In this way the church made the slave worthy to be free, and from this to liberty there is but a step. “We teach the slaves,” said Origen, “how they may beget in themselves a noble spirit, and so become free”; and it need not surprise us, therefore, when Lactantius testifies that among Christians already in his day the difference between master and slave was but formal; in spirit both were brothers and fellow-servants of Christ. Nor is it remarkable that as evidence of this moral regeneration we should find the slaves among the early martyrs. There is an example of the sentiments which Christians entertained for their slaves in the self-reproaches of St. Paulinus in his letter to Sulpicius Severus: “He has served me,” he wrote; “he has been my slave. Woe to me, who have suffered that he who has never been a slave to sin should serve a sinner. Every day he washed my feet, and, had I permitted it, would have cleansed my sandals; eager to render every service to the body, that he might gain dominion over the soul. It is Jesus Christ himself whom I venerate in this youth; for every faithful soul comes from God, and every one who is humble of heart proceeds from the very heart of Christ.” Men who felt so lovingly and so deeply for their fellows could not long consent to hold them in bondage. “We have known,” wrote Pope Clement to the Corinthians, “many of the faithful to become bondsmen that they might ransom their brethren.”

Pagan masters, such as Hermes and Chromatius, on the occasion of their baptism gave freedom to their slaves; and holy women, like St. Melania, induced their husbands to follow this example. “Every day,” wrote Salvian in the fifth century, “slaves receive the right of citizenship and are permitted to carry with them whatever they have saved in the house of their master.” And we know, upon the authority of St. Gregory of Nyssa, that these manumissions frequently took place at Easter and other solemn festivals of the church. After the conversion of Constantine the influence of the church induced the civil authority to relax the severity of its legal enactments concerning slaves. Their manumission, especially from religious motives, was facilitated and the cruelty of masters was restrained. The successors of Constantine, particularly Justinian, continued to act in the same generous spirit, until finally, in the sixth century, all the harsher pagan laws were abolished, and men who had been slaves were even admitted to holy orders. This wonderful change in the policy of [Pg 253] the Roman state had been wrought by the pressure of Christian influences. The voices of the great preachers, St. Chrysostom, St. Ambrose, St. Augustine, never wearied in pleading the cause of the slave; the councils of the church placed them under the protection of the ecclesiastical law; the bishops and priests defended them against the cruelty of their masters; and when once they were free, the church clothed their liberty with an inviolable sanctity. In other ways, too, religious influences were at work to destroy slavery. The universal custom of the ancient pagan nations, which deprived captives of war of their freedom, was an unfailing source of supply to the slave markets. Though the church was unable at once to erase from the battle-flags of the ancient world the Væ victis, she found means to alleviate the lot of the captive.

We have quoted the words of St. Clement to show that in his day already Christians not unfrequently took upon themselves voluntary servitude in order to redeem their brethren. The property of the church was considered best employed when used for the redemption of captives. For this purpose the bishops were permitted to sell even the sacred vessels of the altar. “Since our Redeemer, the Creator of all things,” wrote Pope St. Gregory, “has vouchsafed in his goodness to become man, in order to restore to us our first liberty by breaking, through his divine grace, the bonds of servitude by which we were held captive, it is a holy deed to give to men, by enfranchisement, their native freedom; for in the beginning nature made them all free, and they have been subjected to the yoke of slavery only by the law of nations.”

A council held at Rome under this great pope (A.D. 595) decreed that slaves who wished to enter the monastic life should receive their liberty; and so great was the number of those who availed themselves of this privilege that the masters on all sides loudly complained of it as an intolerable abuse. The church of the middle ages went still further in the warfare for human liberty. Slavery existed among the Germanic races which overran the Roman Empire and took possession of its territory; and with them, too, the slave was the property of the master, who had the right to exchange, to sell, or even to put him to death.

The struggle which had been but begun amidst the corruptions of ancient Rome with an effete and dying race was renewed with the wild and rugged children of the forest. In this great battle for the rights of man the monks came forward as the leaders. In many convents it was forbidden to have slaves, and when the wealthy took the monastic habit they were required to emancipate their slaves.

A council held in England in 816 ordained that at the death of a bishop all his English slaves should be given their freedom; and at the Council of Armagh, in 1172, all English slaves in Ireland were emancipated. The Council of Coblentz, held in 922, declares that he who sells a Christian into slavery is guilty of murder.

Numerous decrees of ecclesiastical synods condemned the slave-trade, and with such efficacy that by the end of the tenth century slaves were no longer sold in the kingdom of the Franks.

In the British Islands this abuse was not eradicated till towards the close of the twelfth century. In Bohemia it was abolished in the [Pg 254] tenth, and in Sweden in the thirteenth century. The church continued to buy slaves in order to give them their liberty. The right of asylum was given to those who fled from the cruelty of their masters. The historical records of manumission in the middle ages, as preserved in testamentary acts, almost universally assign religious motives for the emancipation of slaves.

The efforts of the church in the first centuries of Christianity, and later too, in behalf of the weak and the oppressed—woman, the child, and the slave—are intimately connected with the progress of civil liberty. It is impossible for us, who are the children of two thousand years of Christian influences, to realize the full significance of her enthusiastic devotion to the people, poor, suffering, and degraded, in an age in which no other voice than hers pleaded for them. In order to do this we should be able to place ourselves in the midst of the old pagan world, so as to contemplate the abject condition to which the masses of men had been reduced—a state so pitiable that possibly nothing short of the appearance of God himself, in poverty and sorrow, could have inspired the courage even to hope for better things.

The history of heathenism, in the past as in the present, is marked by contempt for man, by the degradation of the multitude. In this respect the civilization of Greece and Rome was not different from that of India and China in our own day. If in Christian nations, after long struggles and terrible conflicts, a better state of social existence has been brought about, we owe it to Christ working in and through his church. To render liberty possible an intellectual and moral revolution had to take place. New ideas as to what man is in himself simply, new sentiments as to what is due him by virtue of his very nature, new doctrines as to what all men owe to all men, had to be preached and accepted before there could be any question of civil reform in the direction of larger and more universal liberty. Institutions, laws, constitutions are mechanical, the surfaces of things, social garments which, unless they cover and protect some inner life and divine truth, are merely useless forms. Liberty, individual and social, is inseparable from self-control, which is born of self-denial. Good men cannot be made by good laws any more than by good clothes. Man, of course, is influenced, in part educated, by what he wears as by what he eats; but it does not follow that the wisest course would be to hand over the children, body and soul, to cooks and tailors. Not less unreasonable is it to surrender them to politicians to be drilled and fashioned by the mechanical appliances of government.

Liberty is of the soul; it is from this sanctuary that it passes into the laws and customs of society. Men who are slaves in heart cannot be made free by legislative enactments. The church of Christ taught men how to be worthy to be free by showing them liberty’s great law—self-denial; by restoring to the soul the sovereignty of which it had been deprived since the gates of Paradise were barred; by clothing human nature with inviolable sacredness and inalienable rights; by proclaiming that man, for being simply man, is worthy of all love and respect.

When Christ came, the slave, without honor and without hope, was everywhere. The master was like his [Pg 255] slave. Surrounded by human herds, to whom vice in its most degrading forms had become a necessity, he breathed in an atmosphere of corruption against whose deadly poison he was powerless to contend. His life was a fever alternating between lust and blood. The debauched are always cruel, and as men sank deeper into the slough of sensual indulgence the cry for carnage grew fiercer. Nothing but the hacking and mangling of human bodies could rouse the senses, deadened by the gratification of brutish passions. Here and there a stray voice protested, but only in the sad tones of despair. Hope had fled; the world was prostrate; in the mephitic air of sensuous indulgence the soul was stifled; the poor were starving and the rich were glutted; a thousand slaves could hardly feed the stomach of Dives; and Jesus Christ took Lazarus in his arms, and in a voice from heaven called upon all who believed in God and in man to follow him in the service of outraged humanity; and his voice was re-echoed through the earth and through the ages. At its sound the despairing took heart, the dead lived, the poor heard the new gospel of glad tidings, and the slave, crushed and ignored by human society, found citizenship and liberty in the kingdom of God.

[80] “A Sequel of the Gladstone Controversy.” The Catholic World, February, March, and April.

EASTER IN ST. PETER’S, ROME, 1875.

The glorious sun of Easter morning, 1875, arose in splendor, gilding the domes and turrets of the Eternal City with burnished gold, picturing to the mind the gates of Paradise this day opened by the Sun of Righteousness. The Roman people were early astir, though no cannon sounded from Mount St. Angelo to usher in the great festival, nor papal banner flung its folds to the breeze from that old citadel this bright spring day to speak to Christians of him whom our Lord appointed to watch over his sheep.

After early Masses at the church of Sant Andrea delle Fratte, so much beloved and sought after by English and American Catholics in Rome as the place where Ratisbon the Jew received the great gift of faith, we took our way to the Basilica of St. Peter. Multitudes filled the streets, men and women in holiday attire, but not with the old-time life and exhilaration of a great festa. Loss does not sit lightly on the Roman; and everywhere there seemed to be something wanting to make this day what it should have been; no grand processions, no public solemn High Mass celebrated with august ceremonies by his Holiness, no precious benedictions from his paternal hand. A veil hung over the face of our Easter joys; for the Bride of Christ sat in sackcloth.

When we entered on the pavement of St. Peter’s, far-off sounds of joyous music came from the canon’s chapel, scarcely reaching the hallowed [Pg 256] arches without; but a wail of sadness, a chord of grief, ran through it all, for wicked men had made it impossible that our Holy Father should present himself at the altar where he alone officiates, lest his presence should excite tumult and bloodshed among his dear children. High Mass was being celebrated in the canon’s chapel, which contains one of the forty or more altars of St. Peter’s, and is shut off from the aisle by a glass partition. Crowds had pressed in among the dignitaries of the church, and far out into the nave hundreds were uniting themselves to the Holy Sacrifice there offered.

There is perhaps no place on earth where a person can be so entirely alone among a multitude as at St. Peter’s. Each one seems bent upon the particular purpose that brought him there. The church on this day contained twelve thousand people at least (we heard the number rated much higher), but no noise was heard save the constant footfall on the marble pavement and the faint echo of the voices from the choir, while of room there was no lack. Low Masses were being celebrated at many of the altars, around which gathered groups of attentive worshippers; and when the tinkling of the small bell hung at the door of the sacristy gave notice of another Mass, from every quarter persons were seen moving rapidly forward following the priest to the altar where he was to celebrate.

Many there were in that privileged place on that holy day who had come from motives of curiosity, to see what it was all like—gazers who looked upon Catholics with cool contempt as but a step removed from the heathen to whom they send missionaries; the industrious sight-seeker, the tourist, whom no solemn function can hold more than a few minutes, coming even on Easter day with their red-covered ‘Bädeker,’ and sometimes with their opera-glasses levelled at the altar where the priest was saying Mass, and walking with perfect nonchalance over and among the people kneeling in devotion. They spoke to each other in undertones (intelligible to one of their own tongue), and with visible sneers, of the subjection and superstition of “these Romanists.” A few of them were Americans, while more were English; but, it is needless to say, none of them persons of good breeding.

Long lines of students from the various colleges in Rome passed and repassed, each in their distinctive color, pausing a moment on bended knee to speak to our dear Lord in the Blessed Sacrament, then going onward toward the hundred lamps that burn continually before the tomb of the Prince of the Apostles, and passing quietly out again to visit some other temple. There were schools of boys and schools of girls in picturesque costumes, charity children and children of princes, all kneeling together before their common Lord, all seeking their share in his Easter benedictions. Streams of people flowed in from the Campagna, often rough, ragged, unkempt—the women in their harlequin holiday clothes, the men in goat-skin breeches and brilliant vests. These, like the others, had come home; for St. Peter’s is a home for all, and the poorest beggar feels that he has a right within those consecrated walls. Soldiers and officers in the varied uniform of the Italian army walked about listlessly, sometimes haughtily, only a few bending their knee as they recognized the divine [Pg 257] Presence. We pitied them greatly; to be an earnest Catholic in Victor Emanuel’s army must be a great trial to one’s faith.

The numerous confessionals, for many different languages, were the resort of wayfarers that day, while the confessors sat quietly at their posts hour after hour listening to the tale of sin and repentance. Almost every Catholic paused to touch and kiss the foot of the bronze statue of St. Peter, worn by centuries of devout kisses. The statue had this day a new attraction; for over it was hung a gorgeous drapery of scarlet and gold. We found that these rich hangings, so graceful and beautiful, were in mosaic from the famous workshop of the Vatican. A fine portrait of the Holy Father crowned the whole, wrought from the same material, and a very satisfactory likeness.

This calls to mind an incident which took place in the Vatican Basilica a short time before the Easter day of which we are writing. We had gone to St. Peter’s for Lenten rest and refreshment, and, having visited the Chapel of the Blessed Sacrament, were directing our steps to the altar of our Blessed Mother, when a sacristan politely requested us to leave the church. We were inclined to rebel for a moment, till we observed the whole assembly, priests as well as people, moving towards the entrance; we followed, of course, and the doors were closed. So surprising a movement in the middle of the day was the cause of much questioning, and it was discovered that his Holiness wished to see the decorations put over the statue of St. Peter by his orders. He could not appear before the congregation, lest the zeal of his Catholic children might get the better of their prudence, and cries of Viva il Papa! might bring upon innocent friends the indignation of the Italian government, as they had done on a former occasion.

This day we were to see no illuminations of the grand façade and the broad portico; no brilliantly-lighted cupola, visible to the furthest corner of Rome; none of the imposing ceremonies that have been so much sought after and admired by Protestants. These latter go away from the Easter celebrations dissatisfied, sometimes annoyed and angry, that they should be deprived of the fine sights “just for a whim of the Pope.” We heard them utter these words as we passed down the massive steps leading to the piazza. They seemed to forget that holy church puts not forth her beauties solely for the delectation of Protestants who come to Rome at Christmas and Easter “to see sights.” They might know that when her Head is bowed with sorrow, all true children of the church carry the same cross, the whole body suffering with the head. There was joy tempered with much sadness in our hearts as we went from the noble basilica and wandered away to the Coliseum, fit emblem of the church in the Rome of to-day. Ruthless hands—hands of those who would make Rome like any modern city—have shorn this sacred spot of half its beauties; hard hearts have stripped it of its hallowed stations and forbidden the people to pray where the martyrs shed their blood.

[Pg 258]

THE ETERNAL YEARS.

BY THE AUTHOR OF “THE DIVINE SEQUENCE.”

IV

THE CHARACTERISTICS OF GOD’S GOVERNMENT—LONGANIMITY

As a lavish and yet unwasteful abundance was the first condition and eminent characteristic of the creation, so is longanimity, or patience, the special quality which marks the dealings of God with his creatures, in the gradual and long-enduring developments of his government. It is the quality to which we are most indebted, and yet which, as regards the history of mankind, we value and understand the least. Possibly the fact of our own brevity of life, as compared with the multitude of thoughts, efforts, and emotions which the immortality of our being crowds across the narrow limit of time, leaving an impression of breathlessness and haste, may put it almost out of our power—save as all things are possible by the grace of God—to raise ourselves to any approximate appreciation of God’s long-enduring patience. And this is increased in the minds of those who are zealous for God’s glory. They chafe at the outrages committed against his law; they sicken before the long, dreary aspect of man’s incredulity and hardness of heart; and the rise of a new heresy, the advent of an antipope, or the horrors of a French Revolution lead them hastily to conclude, and impatiently to wish, that the last day may be at hand. Experience is a slow process. At fifty a man only begins to learn the great value of life and to look back with marvel at the lavish waste of his earlier years. But if to the individual the convictions resulting from experience are of slow and laborious growth, they are still more so to the multitude. Consequently, though more than eighteen hundred years have come and gone since St. John wrote to his disciples, “Little children, it is the last hour,” nevertheless the pious of all shades of opinion in all ages have not been afraid to utter random guesses that the end of the world cannot be far off because of the wickedness of men. It is indeed true, as the Holy Ghost spoke by St. John, that it is the “last hour.” But what does that “last hour” mean? Not surely a literal last hour or last day, but a last epoch. The epoch in the history of the cosmos before the coming of the Redeemer—that is, before the hypostatic union in a visible, tangible, and real human body of the second Person of the Triune Godhead—was the first hour, or the first epoch. The period since the Incarnation is the last hour, or the last epoch; because nothing mightier or greater can take place than the fact of God taking flesh in the womb of the Blessed Virgin. It is the consummation; it is the one great end of all creation. This last epoch will have its eras, evolving themselves within the bosom of the Catholic Church, just as the first epoch had its eras [Pg 259] in the diverse revelations which God made of himself to man; and which were, if we may use the term without seeming to derogate from their unspeakable importance and their divine origin, of a more desultory nature than those which are, and shall be, accorded to God’s spouse, the infallible church. What is this but to say again what we are endeavoring to express in every page, namely, that “He who sitteth on the white horse went forth conquering, that he might conquer”;[81] and that God’s work ever has been, is now, and ever will be a progressive work. “Gird thy sword upon thy thigh, O Thou most mighty. With thy comeliness and thy beauty set out, proceed prosperously and reign.”[82] When the whole of Scripture is teeming with promises of future more glorious eras of which we now only see the germ, developed here and there in some favored soul, in some special corner of God’s vast vineyard, the church (for the saints have always been men of the future, in advance of their own time), is it not a marvel to hear desponding men talking as though there were nothing better to be hoped for than the end of the world, coming, as they seem to expect it, like a terrific frost which shall nip in the bud all the, as yet, unfulfilled promises, and drown the wicked in a deluge of flame! And this we expect and almost desire, hoping we ourselves may be saved, but without a second thought for God’s beautiful earth, which he has blessed a thousand fold by his own divine footprints on its surface; and where he now makes his tabernacle in ten thousand churches, waiting, nay watching, with that ineffable patience of his, whose cycles of longanimity we are incapable of appreciating!

But it is cruel to speak harshly of a few words of discouragement falling from the lips of those who are weary with vigils waiting for new daylight. Only let us learn that the Sun of Righteousness to our perceptions, as it were, sets and rises again. We are like children who think when the glorious golden disc has sunk beneath the horizon that it is utterly gone and is perhaps extinct, while on the contrary the children of another hemisphere are playing in the warmth of its beams; so we see the dark clouds of evil hiding from us the light of grace, first in one spot, then in another, and we grow downcast and impatient. We forget that “not one jot or one tittle shall pass of the law till all be fulfilled”;[83] and that our Lord tells us he “did not come to destroy either the law or the prophets, but to fulfil them.” Bearing this in mind, let our readers take up the Psalms and the Prophets, and study, with a deliberate faith in the inspired words, the promises which concern the future of the world under the tent of the church, the place of which tent shall be enlarged that she may “pass on to the right hand and to the left; and inhabit the [now] desolate cities.”[84]

It is a want of hope—and let us ever remember that hope is a virtue, and not a mere quality or faculty of the mind—which leads us to read the stupendously sublime promises of God to the whole earth in the future of the church, as so much beautiful imagery of which a limited application manifests itself, from time to time, in the partial conversion of some thousands here and there over the vast face of the semi-civilized world, while millions [Pg 260] upon millions remain heathens, Hindoos, Jews, and Mussulmans. We read these glorious utterances of the Scriptures with the restrained admiration of one who, while admiring a poem, makes allowances for the “fine frenzy” of the poet. We take it cum grano salis, and forget that it is the trumpet voice of absolute truth; and that whether or no it point to a millennium upon earth—a question left open by the church, and so little discussed as yet by her modern theologians that we will not dwell upon it—it must mean all it says; and, after the fashion of God’s gifts, more than we can conceive. This, then, is what the patience and longanimity of God is leading us to. These glories, which have exhausted the tenderest as well as the most powerful utterance of language to depict, are the future of the church, when the spouse of Christ shall be the mistress of the world. St. Paul in the Epistle to the Hebrews, quoting the eighth Psalm on the high destinies of man, says, “Thou hast subjected all things under his feet,” and adds, “but we see not as yet all things subject to him.” Nevertheless the delay gave no place for doubt that the promise should have an ultimate and complete fulfilment; while he unfolds to us the wherefore of these sublime predictions, the only adequate reason why the human race should be crowned with glory and honor—the one, sole emphatic cause, namely, that all creation is in and for the Incarnation; that the Incarnation is the basement, and the sublime architrave and final coping-stone of the whole edifice; that the creation is for him as entirely as it is by him, and that man is the younger brother of his Redeemer, and shares in his inheritance.

We have already spoken of the indirect and adaptive government of God; of “the government which he condescends to administer in his world through the moral and physical activity with which he has endowed mankind.” We have shown that the representative law of creation is “increase and multiply.” We now come to the fact that since the fall the corollary of that law is labor and toil. The earth from henceforward brought forth thorns and thistles; in other words, on all sides obstacles and difficulties met the advancing steps of the discrowned lord of creation. Speaking according to the eternal decrees of God, and not according to their manifestation through time, we should say that the younger and fallen sons of God had to reconquer the world they were given to reign over, as the elder Son of God, he who is from all eternity, has, in consequence of the same fall, to reconquer the reign of grace in the souls of men, step by step, vanquishing the thorns and thistles with which our unbelief and iniquity tear and rend his bleeding feet! There is God’s work going on in the material world, and there is God’s work going on in the spiritual world. And what we want to do is to persuade our readers not so constantly to put the two in opposition, as though, while the progress of grace is exclusively God’s work, material progress were quite as exclusively man’s work—to say nothing of those who hold it to be the devil’s work.

When the three Persons of the ever blessed Trinity said, “Let us make man,” it was with the expressed intention that he should have dominion over the whole earth—“universæ terræ.” That constitution of man as the lord of creation was not annulled when man fell. It [Pg 261] is true that it became a dominion he had to contest with the beasts of the forest, who were originally to have been his willing slaves; with the thorns and thistles that ever since bar his passage; and with the convulsions of nature, to the secret harmonies of which he had lost the key; while the angelic guardians of the cosmos could not hold intercourse with him in his degraded state, who, although they be “ministering spirits,” are so in secret only, until the time shall come for their promised mission upon earth. Nevertheless man was a monarch still, though a fallen monarch. Or rather we should say that, as redeemed man, he is God’s viceroy; and in that character is reconquering the material world, that as the ages roll on the church, the spouse of Jesus, may “lengthen her cords and strengthen her stakes.”[85]

Materialism is no necessary consequence of material progress. Scientific discovery, whether as regards the solar system, the dynamic forces, chemical affinities, or the properties of the world’s flora, the habits of its fauna and the uses to which all these may be put, is—next to the development of theological truth, of which in a certain sense, as will one day be proved, it is the correlative—the highest gift of God. It is simply man’s fulfilment of his second and inferior mission upon earth. His first mission, or rather his vocation, is to save his soul from sin, and to live in union with his God. His second is to fill the one spot, be it wide or narrow, which God has assigned him in the creation with all the faculties of his mind and intellect. It may be a very small, a scarcely discernible spot that he occupies; but in his degree he too has to conquer his territorial inch and govern in the creation, though he do so but as a shepherd or a ploughman. We are conscious as we write this of all that may be said in detriment of material progress, of the luxury it leads to, of the rapid propagation of false opinions, evil literature, and irreligious thought; or of the increased facilities for the wholesale slaughter of mankind in modern warfare. No wonder the pure-minded shrink in dismay from much that material progress appears to be producing in the world, and that timid souls are led to believe that such progress not only is not God’s work, but (if we may make this distinction) is also not his intention. We would entreat all such to take courage from a few considerations which will lay before them their error in principle, and also give them a wider view of God’s merciful designs in his own creation.

First, it may be assumed that, as the Almighty has not abdicated his providential government of the world in favor of the powers of darkness, therefore no great and wide-spread movement takes place amongst the children of men without its having an ultimate end for good. We do not believe that evil is to win the day. We utterly refuse to give credit to those who look upon the Lord of Hosts as vanquished in the end, and upon the personal Lucifer, and the principle of evil which he embodies and represents, as going off the field with a crowd of prisoners who will far outnumber the armies of the Lord. This desponding about the triumphs of grace is the residuum of Protestantism. It is the melancholy of sectarianism. It is not in accordance with the teaching of the church; she who is forever lifting [Pg 262] up her eyes unto the hills from whence cometh her help. The church which is built on the Incarnation, which is fed with the Eucharistic Sacrifice, and which owns as her queen the woman “clothed with the sun,” “terrible as an army with banners,” does not limit her hopes to a few sheep scattered in the wilderness, but knows that the “cattle on a thousand hills” also belong to her Lord and Master.

We have no wish to palliate the evil which dogs the footsteps of modern progress. We see that, like the huge behemoth, it tears down many a sacred barrier, many a hallowed landmark, with its gigantic strides, and we mourn with our mother the church, and with all the body of the faithful, over the souls that perish in the fray. But not even for this is it possible to doubt the ultimate designs of God’s providence in making all work together for good.

Good works through evil, not as its instrument but as its vanquished enemy; and material and scientific progress is so certainly a good in itself that it arises from and forms part of the development of man’s original destination, as being lord over the creation. It is the necessary result of that; consequently it is a fulfilment of God’s will. As to its fatal, or at least deleterious, moral effects on individuals, or even for a time on the multitude, this is but the weaving of the dark woof into the web of man’s existence, which is the result of man’s estrangement from God, but which, neither in this nor in any other form, will be allowed ultimately to defraud the Almighty of his glory, by turning a relative, and much less a positive, good into positive evil. We see the beginning; we do not see the end, save by the eyes of faith, and trust in the goodness of God. We are looking out on the world through the small aperture of time, our own limited time, our own individual brief life, and thus we see all the present evil, and but little, and occasionally nothing, of the future good. But surely as Christians we are bound to believe that no waves of thought or sentiment, and no sustained and wide-spread effort of any kind, take possession of mankind without a special beneficial intention of God’s providence, and without a distinct and absolute good being their ultimate result. We bow our heads to the storm of the elements; we accept the flood and the hurricane, and even the pestilence, as coming by the permission of our heavenly Father, and as in some way working for good. And shall we behold the moral and intellectual activity of man scanning the high heavens, searching the deep bosom of the earth, snatching from nature her most hidden secrets; seeking the principles of life, and the occult laws of development and progression; shall we watch wonderingly the strange, new, and pathetic tenderness with which men are beginning to appreciate and investigate the whole world of creation inferior to themselves, but holding perchance in its silent and patient existence secrets important to us—shall we behold all this, while our hearts burn within us, and not intimately and intently believe that God is carrying on his work, while man seems only to be following his own free will in the exercise of his intellect? Let us be larger hearted and more trusting with our God; nor for a moment suppose that the reins of government have fallen from his hands, or that passing evil will not terminate in greater good. The darkest hour is ever the one before the dawn. Doubtless when the eagles [Pg 263] of Rome sped victorious over the vast and crowded plains of the Gaul and the Frank there were gentle spirits left at home who, having kept themselves pure by the undiscerned aid of the grace which our heavenly Father never refuses to men of good will, grieved that the corruption of Roman luxury should infiltrate its poison into the simple lives of the semi-barbarous and valorous nations. And yet, but for these victorious eagles what would the world be now?

God brings good out of evil; and though material progress is seldom a real advantage at its first advent, yet when the moral excitement of its early possession has subsided, when the ever living, ever penetrating spirit of God has gradually, through the poor human instruments he condescends to use, claimed all that man can know, do, or acquire, as belonging to himself in the great scheme of creation and redemption, then, by slow degrees perhaps, but by sure ones, the evil gives way to good. It rests with us to hasten the appropriation of all that men call progress, gathering into Peter’s net the large and the small fishes; for it is all ours. As children of the church, to us alone does the world belong in the ultimate and supreme sense. It is our fault if we are not more rapidly converting the raw material which is swept to our feet into increments of God’s glory. It rests with the church in her children to make what the world calls progress become a real progress.

There is no real progress without a fixed principle as its basis and starting point. And that Christianity alone can give; and chiefly Christianity in its only full and perfect form, the Catholic Church. By Christianity we mean the fear and the love of God, with all the pure moral results which flow therefrom. The moral law is the first law, and material progress is not a real gain until it is married to the moral law. The immediate consequence of material progress is to increase wealth; and the immediate result of increased wealth is a doubtful benefit. While the wealth remains in the hands of the few, the gulf between rich and poor is widened and animosities increased. When first it percolates into the lower strata of society, for the time it exercises thereon a demoralizing effect; for the tendency of a vast deal of material progress, and of its resulting modern institutions and modern customs, is to sap real happiness, and substitute a fictitious excitement based on wealth and luxury. We are thus forever eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The bitter and the sweet will grow together till God shall part them. But the evolutions of the eternal years gradually reconquer the crude materials to the cause which must ultimately triumph; and as the spirit of God moves over the face of the troubled waters the discordant social elements fall into place, and a further degree of the real, true, moral progress of mankind is found to harmonize with the material progress that man was so proud to have gained, and which when he did so was but the coarse though precious ore which waited to be purified in the crucible of the divine law.

Is there any sane man now living who really regrets the invention of printing? We have heard the project of a railroad in China deprecated by a zealous friend to truth. It will carry our merchandise; but will it not also carry our priests? We remember when men said murders would increase because London was [Pg 264] to be lit with gas! Do these sincere-hearted men really think that man is working out solely his own will, and that an evil will, in all this heavy tramp of material progress through God’s world? Is not man fulfilling his destiny of conquering the world; and when he has done his part, albeit done too often in blind and arrogant ignorance, will not the rightful owner of the vineyard come and claim the whole?

It is impossible for us to be slack in the exercise of any one virtue without the omission affecting the whole of our inner and spiritual life. If we allow our hopes to sink low it is certain to affect our faith; and if our faith, then also our love. Nor should we forget that it is “according to our faith that it shall be done unto us.” We are not seconding God’s precious intentions towards us so long as we are taking a desponding, narrow, and unaspiring view of what are likely to be his intentions as regards the future of his creation; and all despising of that creation, all holding cheap the law, the order, the beauty, and the uses of the material creation, arises from an inadequate sense of the mystery of the incarnation, of the Verbum caro factum est which is the one sole efficient reason of all we see and of all that exists. Once raise the inferior questions of nature, of science, and of art up to that level, and we shall find that it imparts a certain balance to all our thoughts, and diffuses a peaceful looking forward and a calm endurance of present ills which are morally what the even pulse and the vigorous strength are physically to the man in perfect health. He is as free from the excitability of fever as from the lassitude of debility; he is a sane man.

There is another point from which we can view the material progress of the world with hopefulness, as helping to work out the future in a sense favorable to the church; and this point comes under the head of what we have called God’s adaptive government of his creation. It is the fact that the progress of civilization develops the natural characteristics of the various races of mankind, and that the history of the church reveals how the providence of God makes use of the characteristics of race—as he does of everything else—for the building up and development of the church, and of truth by her. The life and death of our Lord having been accomplished in the chosen land, among the chosen people, the infant church was speedily transplanted from the shadow of Mount Calvary to the City on the Seven Hills. Judea was her cradle, but Rome was to witness her adolescence. The two leading characteristics of the Latin race were necessary to her growth; for the Latins were the conquerors and the lawgivers of the world, and the pioneers of the future. She was borne on the wings of the Roman eagles. She followed in the footsteps of the victorious legions, and as Rome and time went on with devouring steps, she caught the conqueror and the conquered both in her mystic net, and reigned among the Latin-Celtic races. Rome was the world’s lawgiver. The Latin genius is essentially legislative and authoritative. Subtlety, accuracy, and lucidity were the necessary human elements for the outward expression of the divine truth which the church carried in her bosom; for Catholic theology is a certain science, admitting of fuller developments as “things new and old” are brought forth from [Pg 265] her treasured store, but never making one step too far in advance of another throughout her rhythmical progress. These human elements resided essentially in the Latin mind; and in the Latin tongue, which has ever been the language of the church, and which, the church having consecrated it to her own purposes, became what we popularly call a dead language so far as concerns the shifting scenes and fluid states of man’s mortal life; she laid her hand upon it, and it sublimated beneath her touch, and was consecrated to her use, beyond all changing fashion or wavering sense. The dying Roman Empire involuntarily bequeathed it to her; and the language of the great lawgivers of the world became that of the church, and only on her lips is a living language to this hour. The Latin people were the fountain of law; their code to the present day forms the common law, or the base of the common law, of all Christian nations except where the retrogradations of the Napoleonic code have been flung in the face of humanity and the church as an insult to both. The principle of law, the love of law, lay in them as an hereditary gift. Thus were they as a race specially adapted to become the framers of the church’s canon law, of her discipline, and of her glorious ritual, each phrase of which is the crystallization of a theological truth, a fragment from the Rock of Peter, but perfect in itself and concomitant with all the rest.

Thus also she wrote in letters of red and gold her marvellous ritual, the least part of which embodies a symbolic act relating to the things that are eternal. There is not a touch that is not significative, there is not a line that does not seem caught from the traditions of the nine choirs of angelic ministers. As full of mystery as of practicality, beautiful, graceful, and complete, it runs through all the life of the church like the veins through the living body, and carries order and harmony through every low Mass in the village church, through high pontifical ceremonials and within the silent gates of cloistered orders where men and women daily and hourly enact and represent the drama of the church.

The same genus runs through all the component parts; and that genus belonged to the race to whom was consigned the laying of the church’s foundations, and the raising of the edifice. And thus there exists, besides the divine integrity of the whole, a certain human consistency which, humanly speaking, is the consequence of the work having been put into the hands of the race that was naturally adapted to effect it. Now, as the ways of God are necessarily always consequent—that is, consistent with each other, moving in harmony and working through law—it is not a vain presumption to imagine that as he has constituted different races with different characteristics, so it is his intention to make use of each and all in the fuller developments of his church.

“Other sheep I have that are not of this fold; them also must I bring.” The words were spoken in Jerusalem while the Latin race was lying in the blind pride of paganism, and the Celtic races were only recently being hewn out of the darkness of their far-off life by the swords of the conquering nation. Surely it is one of those words the fulfilment of which is not complete. There are other races waiting to bring into the vineyard the tools that their native genius [Pg 266] has put into their hands. As the church through the Latin race has formed her external, congregational, hierarchical, and authoritative condition, and has crowned the whole in the last Vatican Council by the dogma of the infallibility, laying thereby the keystone that locks the perfect arch, so now the Teutonic Saxon races, the people of individuality, of complete inner life, combined with vast exterior activity and resistless energy, will be brought forth in God’s providence to carry out the law of liberty which is the correlative of the law of individuality.

God speaks to the individual soul through his organ the church, through her sacraments, down to her least ceremony, and through her authority. Nor have we any absolute test and security that it is his voice we hear and no delusion of our own, except as we are in harmony with her authority. All may be a mistake save what is in accordance with the one infallible voice. But nevertheless it is to the individual soul that God speaks, and not to the masses as such. God leads each soul separately, and individually apart, and there is no real religion that is not the secret intercourse, the hidden communion, of the solitary soul, alone with God. Every human soul has its secret with God, a secret of love, or a secret of hatred, or of avoidance. God penetrates our souls through the sacraments of the church; but past the sacraments, and as the result of the sacraments, there must grow up the continued, sustained, and ever more and more habitual presence of God in the soul, before we arrive at that state for which the church and the sacraments are but the means to an end—though a divine means. “We will come to him and make our abode with him.”[86]

Nothing less than this is the promise of God, and should be the object of man. The church in her sacraments and ordinances is the one authorized and infallible way to bring about this blessed union. But unless that be accomplished, all the outward devotions that saints, or confraternities, that individuals or congregations, ever devised and poured into the church’s lap like handfuls of flowers, will be to those who rest in them as fading as flowers, and as sure to be swept away and burned when the fire shall try of what sort the work is. The dying to self—not as man’s restrictions can produce its outward semblance, but as God’s working in the soul joined to our good will can alone effect it—and the consequent union with him whose divine spirit rushes in wherever we make room for him to come, is the one sole object of all that the church gives us and does for us; of all the barriers she erects, of all the gardens she plants, of all her discipline and her ceremonial. It is the only living reality. It was so with the saints of all ages and nations. They valued all in proportion as by its use they killed self and put the living God instead; and they valued it no more. Low down in the soul the deep pulsation of the thought of God, ruling all our actions from the least to the greatest, this is what our dear Lord demands of us in every communion we make; this is what his church intends in all her teaching. This alone will hasten the reign of the Holy Ghost, when God “will pour his spirit on all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, [Pg 267] your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions.”[87] In other words, the gates of the supernatural world shall be thrown open, not to a rare and scanty few, but to all to whom “it is given to know the mystery of the kingdom of God.”[88]

We seem to have wandered from our subject; but it is not so. We were writing of the future development of the church through the different characteristics of different races, as instruments in God’s hands in the working of his adaptive government; and this has led us to describe the necessity of the inner life of the soul with God, because the Teutonic and Saxon races are the people with whom the tendency to a deep inner life is a natural peculiarity. They are more self-contained, self-reliant, reserved, and recollected than the versatile Latin races; and though none of these characteristics necessarily lead to a spiritual inner life of any form—that being a free grace from God—they are the apt instruments for grace to make use of in producing a certain form. They are, therefore, those to whom we may look for the next important era in the church’s history; when all the vast and complicated edifice of her hierarchy being complete she has now to expand the fuller development and deeper utterance of her inner life in individual souls; and that no longer as an occasional glorious phenomenon of grace, but as spread over a vast area, as influencing whole peoples, and as becoming the sustained life of Christianity. Law and liberty in one; the “freedom wherewith Christ hath made us free.”

We were also speaking of material progress; and these same Teutonic Saxon races are the races who are specially extending it throughout the world. We have endeavored to show that in material progress man is achieving his secondary mission of exercising dominion over the whole creation. Thus we find that, having in his wonderful providence united the two characteristics of strong individuality and vehement activity in certain races, God has prepared for the future of the church, when inner spiritual life shall be more diffused, an era when the spirit of God will take possession of all that man can know, do, or acquire as belonging to himself, “and through him to his church, in the great scheme of creation and redemption.” And thus material progress will be assimilated to the welfare of the church; and the stones will be turned into bread—not in the sense of the arch deceiver, who claims all material progress as his own region, but united with “the word that proceedeth from the mouth of God”;[89] the material sanctified by the spiritual, when all shall be “holy to the Lord.”

The inaccuracy of the popular, as distinguished equally from the Catholic and the rationalistic view of the importance of matter, and of material progress which is the march of man’s conquest over matter, arises chiefly from the imperfect manner in which we realize the universal presence of God. Many among us can look back with a distinct recollection to the time when a mother first announced to us the great truth that God is everywhere. With the unfailing practical sense of children, we probably began to individualize certain familiar objects with the query was he there—in this table, in that flower, in my living [Pg 268] hand, in the pen I hold? And the bewilderment of immensity crept over us as we tried to grasp the thought of the great universal presence.

As in later years theological questions opened upon us—the mysteries of our faith, the angelic choirs, the army of saints and martyrs, the Incarnation, and the localization of the eucharistic presence in the Blessed Sacrament—many of us have gradually dropped the more intense sense of God’s omnipresence. It probably was more accurately felt by the Old Testament saints than by any, except saints, under the new law. It is not that we have lost sight of the truth that he sees, hears, and knows each one of us, always and everywhere; but we forget that he fills all space, and that he is in all things. It is a remarkable fact that the very lowest, the least theological and dogmatic, of all heathen beliefs, where all are a jargon of error, is nevertheless the faint reflection of this truth. We allude once more to the animism of the lower savage races, which lends a spiritual presence even to inanimate and inorganic matter. To them God is everywhere and in every thing; so that to them no thing exists disconnected from a spiritual presence as abiding in it, and that not in the pantheistic form of many gods, but as all matter holding an occult spirit, which is the same spirit in each substance. But there it ends; a blind creed, which does not even go the length of acknowledging a personal deity or a divine providence. None the less is it founded on a truth which often slips out of our consciousness, while we are occupied with the more familiar articles of our faith. Let us examine how this great truth, as we hold it in its fulness and completeness, may be brought to bear on the question now before us of the value of the cosmos, of the status of matter, and of the fact that it is the indirect revelation, even as the Incarnation is the direct revelation of God—Jesus Christ the God-Man being the mediator between the creature and his creator.

First let us bear in mind that no cause can act where it is not virtually present by its power, even if not actually present by its matter. And this law has its correlative in the spiritual world. I influence you only so far as I touch you. I shall have written in vain unless these pages touch your sight. If I were speaking to you with my living voice I could only reach the hearts of those who heard me. To all the rest I am dead; and they are dead to me. This is the moral side of the question, as between man and man. As regards the material side, let us suppose I push forward a ball. It is force emanating from my touch which sets it in motion; but my force has not ceased with my direct touch. It is still my force propelling it as absolutely, though not so powerfully, as at the moment I touched it; and the ball only stops when my force is expended, or when a counter force arrests it. But whence comes my force? Solely from him in “whom we live, and move, and are.” He is our motive power; every act of ours is formed out of his force, equally whether we are acting according to his will or against it.

We have said that causes can only act where they are actually or virtually present. But it is a great fact in the material world that there is no such thing as material contact. No matter what substance or what fluid we select, the limpid air or [Pg 269] the hard iron, in all each infinitesimal molecule dwells solitary and apart, and crush them together as we may there is still a space between.

Now, theology teaches us that God is nearer to us than we are to ourselves. His divine contact with us is closer on our bodies and our souls than the molecules of our bodies are to each other. The only real contact is the presence of God; whether through ourselves or in the vast cosmos around us, the action of forces is God making himself felt. Force is the contact of God, the touch of the divine being on the material world. He is not in us, nor in the worlds around us, as he is in his own essential essence, as he is in himself; but he is there in the effects of his concurrence, and the moment he were to cease to be there (were such a thing possible) in all, or in any one part, the whole or the part would fall away into chaos, quite as certainly as the ball which I have set in motion will cease to roll the instant my force has exhausted itself and ceases to act on the ball. My force diminishes gradually; it is a limited and a borrowed force. The ball goes slower and slower; but so long as it moves, my force is upon it in a stronger or weaker degree. But the force of the divine Being is almighty, is always absolute, is always infinite, is always under his own control; and consequently it never fails, it never waxes less at any one moment, in any one direction.

In every act of our existence we are using God’s force, for him or against him. The whole universe is doing the same. His presence is the sole real contact; the contact of the Qui Est, of pure absolute being with his own creation.

And all around us we hear a vain clamor about an immutable law that governs nature, while the great primary cause has withdrawn himself from all interference.

We hear of blind forces which spring from nowhere, and hurry us on without any guide save themselves. We repeat it—Law and force are not God; but God is both law and force. There is no motion without a motive power; and there is no motive power at an actual distance from the object set in motion. And thus God, who is law and force, is upon us, within us, around us; and within all, always, and throughout space. There are mutations and diversities in the exhibitions of God’s force, according to his divine will; but there is never anywhere any cessation of it. And there never will be; for if there were, he would contradict himself, and that is impossible.

This, then, is what matter is. It is the exponent of the being of God to the angels and to us. It is not the exponent of himself to himself. That is the eternal generation of the Son in his own bosom; the second person of the Trinity, the divine Logos. And the Incarnation of the eternally-begotten Son in the womb of the ever blessed Virgin Mother is the blending of this double exponent of his being; for it is the Word made flesh; it is God clothing himself in the matter of his own creation, and dwelling amongst men.

Could matter be more beautiful than this? Can we say more in its praise? And could any reflections lead us further from the notions of materialism, or draw us nearer to God?

[81] Apocalypse vi. 2.

[82] Psalm xliv.

[83] Luke v. 18.

[84] See the whole of the 54th chapter of Isaias, as well as numerous other passages.

[85] Isaias liv. 2.

[86] John xiv. 23.

[87] Joel ii. 28.

[88] Mark iv. 11.

[89] Matt. iv. 3, 4.

[Pg 270]

SACRED EPIGRAPHY AND THE INVOCATION OF THE MARTYRS IN BEHALF OF THE DEAD.

The church is once more in the Catacombs. She has not fled thither from persecution, albeit she is suffering sorely at present; but she has gone down there to live over again the memories of the past. With the lamp of research held aloft, she paces reverently through those dark and tortuous passage-ways where erst she lived in her saints and martyrs. Many a precious relic of her primitive existence is delved out of the accumulated masses of tufa and débris, all more or less showing forth the usages of the early times, and she experiences no small consolation in beholding that what she was then, in all those usages which are founded in dogma, she is now. She has not changed. She is consistent throughout—the beautiful Spouse of Christ, yesterday, to-day, and for ever. Every new discovery in those limitless necropolises is a vindication of the maxim of St. Augustine: Ecclesia orat, ergo credit—The church prays, therefore she believes. The chapels, the altars, the rude frescos, the sarcophagi, the very inscriptions on the tombs, bear evidence to the great truth couched in the words of the inspired Doctor of Hippo. To prove, therefore, that the church prays is identical with proving that she believes; and what she believes must be true, else she is no church, not the spouse of Christ, but an unworthy and intruding handmaid. But we are not going to dogmatize. We would only show on archæological authority, that, as the church, in her liturgy, at this day commends the dead and the dying to the intercessory influence of the saints, so did she in the beginning, when not her dogmas, but her very existence, was called in question; when, had she been a human institution, she must have made a false step, for then there were no critical rationalists or fribbling logicians to take her to task. Sophists there were many, even in those days. But they had good faith enough to acknowledge that, if she were a church at all, she could not err; so they consistently confined themselves to an attack upon her existence.

Among the many important discoveries made of late in the cemetery of St. Domitilla, outside of the gate of St. Sebastian at Rome, by the illustrious Chevalier de Rossi (to whose Bulletin we are indebted for the inscriptions given below), that of the tomb of Veneranda, a Roman matron, is not the least important, since it constitutes a strong link in the chain of archæological evidence on the antiquity of intercessory prayers for the dead. The tomb lies in a chamber which branches off from one of the subterraneous galleries, entered from the apsis of the old basilica. On the wall over the sarcophagus is a fresco in a good state of preservation and of a style anterior to the Byzantine. It represents a matron in the act of praying in the garden of Paradise, which is symbolized by a flower plant springing up at her feet. She is dressed in a loose dalmatic, and veiled like other Christian matrons who are represented as praying in various cemeterial pictures of the third and fourth centuries. There is [Pg 271] none of that stiffness in the style and coloring which indicates the graceless Byzantine school, but such an ease and elegance mark the figure as have induced De Rossi to compare it with that of the “Five Saints” (St. Dionysias and her companions) in the crypt of St. Eusebius in the adjoining catacombs of St. Calixtus. Over the right arm is the inscription, VENERANDA DET. VII. IDVS IANVARIAS. On the left is the figure of a maiden, without any veil, dressed in a long double tunic and pallium. The right hand of the figure is extended as if in the act of welcoming or receiving Veneranda. She points with the left to an open box or casket full of volumes, a symbol of the salutary faith contained in the Holy Scriptures. An open volume is suspended on the wall, and on the pages are the names of the four Evangelists. Beside this figure are the words PETRONELLA MARTyr. Of the title of martyr applied to St. Petronilla we will say a few words presently. On the whole, the style of the fresco, the fashion of the dress, the form of the letters, and the ancient laconism “Petronella Martyr,” without the epithet saint, pronounce the picture to be as ancient as the middle of the fourth century. The purpose of the picture is unmistakable, being in form like many which represent some of the characters in an attitude of prayer, while others are in the act of receiving them into heaven or inviting them to go in as they draw aside the curtains. This picture, however, has the additional worth of declaring explicitly the names of the intercessor and the advocate. The prayers used by the church from time immemorial in behalf of the dying invite the saints and martyrs to come and meet the departing soul and conduct her to a “place of refreshment, light, and peace.” In the same manner the acclamations which we read in the epitaphs of the early ages call upon the spirits of the blessed to receive the soul of the departed. Here is a beautiful epitaph, discovered in one of the cemeteries of Rome towards the end of the last century:

PAVLOFILIO MERENTI IN PA

cem te svscipian omnivm ispiri

ta sanctorvm.

The acclamation reads: Paulo Filio merenti: in pacem te suscipian(t) omnium ispirita sanctorum—To the worthy son Paul: May the spirits of all the saints receive thee in peace. The strange plural form, ispirita or spirita, need not be wondered at. The Catacombs abound in similar inscriptions. Here are a few of the most noteworthy: Leopardum cum spirita sancta [that is, Cum spiritibus sanctis] acceptum—Leopard received with the blessed spirits. Another inscription, bearing the date 291, reads: Refrigera cum spirita sancta—Grant him refreshment with the blessed spirits. From what has been said a clue may be had to the understanding of many more or less laconic acclamations which the visitor meets with in the Roman Catacombs; such as, CVM SANCTIS—INTER SANCTOS. They are to be taken in the sense explained above, because they allude clearly to the soul of the departed, and not to the body, which is buried close to the tomb of the saint appealed to. The prayers and acclamations of the faithful to the saints in behalf of the dead were not simply the outpourings of tender hearts moved by a pious fancy, but the result of a strong belief, confirmed by the authority of the church speaking in her liturgies. [Pg 272] In an ancient Sacramentary of Gaul we read, in the Mass of a martyr: Tribue (Domine) tuorum intercessione sanctorum martyrum caris nostris, qui in Christo dormiunt, refrigerium in regione vivorum—Grant, O Lord! through the intercession of thy holy martyrs, to our beloved who sleep in Christ, refreshment in the land of the living; and in the Mass of SS. Cornelius and Cyprian: Beatorum martyrum, Cornili [sic] et Cypriani … nos tibi Domine commendet oratio, ut caris nostris, qui in Christo dormiunt, refrigeria æterna concedas—Let the prayer of thy blessed martyrs, Cornelius and Cyprian, commend us to thee, O Lord! that thou grant eternal refreshment to our beloved who sleep in Christ.[90] In an ancient Mass, discovered by More, express mention is made of the times of persecution—a proof that the invocation of the saints for the repose of the faithful departed was an established usage in the very earliest days of the church. Before the reading of the diptychs the priest prayed in these words: Deus, præsta, si quies adridat te colere, si temptatio ingruat, non negare—God, grant that if peace smile upon us, we may continue to worship thee; if temptation assail us, we may not deny thee. Here there is an evident allusion to the intervals of peace which the early Christians enjoyed between different persecutions. After the recitation of the diptychs the priest continued: Sanctorum tuorum nos gloriosa merita, ne in pœna(m) veniamus, excusent; defunctorum fidelium animæ, quæ beatitudinem [sic] gaudent nobis opitulentur; quæ consolatione indigent ecclesiæ precibus absolvantur—May the glorious merits of thy saints excuse us, that we may not be brought to punishment; may the souls of the faithful departed that enjoy blessedness assist us; may those [souls] that need consolation be pardoned through the prayers of the church. The distinction in this prayer between the commemoration of the living, of the blessed, and of those souls that have need of the prayers of the church could not be more evident.

The faith of the early Christians in the efficacy of the prayers of the martyrs especially, was the reason why they had such a strong desire, and regarded it as a great privilege, to be buried near the tombs of the martyrs. St. Gregory Nazianzen, in his funeral epigrams, makes frequent allusions to proximity with the tombs of the martyrs, and takes occasion thence to apostrophize them in behalf of the dead. In an epigram which he wrote on the death of his mother, Nonna, whose body was laid close to the martyrs, he says: “Receive, O martyrs! this great victim, this mortified flesh, joined to your blood.” The words “joined to your blood” have a spiritual signification. By her life of mortification and sacrifice she had assimilated herself to the martyrs; but they have also a literal meaning, and allude to the material contiguity of her tomb with that of the martyrs; for he premises with the words, “Her body we have placed near the martyrs.” The idea that the blood of the martyrs penetrated into the neighboring tombs, and its spiritual signification, that the merits of their sufferings, and their intercession, invoked by the living, would be salutary to the dead, are beautifully shown forth in the epigram of St. Ambrose on the tomb of his brother Satirus, who was buried in Milan, side by side with the martyr St. Victor:

[Pg 273]

“Hæc meriti merces ut sacri sanguinis humor

Finitimas penetrans abluat exuvias.”[91]

This distich was quoted by the Irish monk Dungal, in the eighth century, as a powerful argument in favor of intercessory prayer, against Claudius of Turin, who was opposed to the invocation of the saints in behalf of the dead. The same thought is expressed in the touching verses of Paulinus of Nola, wherein he narrates the sepulture of his little child near the last resting-place of the martyrs. And as the little innocent (he died at the age of eight days) had no short-comings of his own to atone for, the father beseeches him, and his cousin Celsus, who died at the age of eight years, that the intercession of the martyrs, near whose holy remains they slept, might be turned to the benefit of their parents.

“Innocuisque pares meritis, peccata parentum

Infantes castis vincite suffragiis.”[92]

This was in the time of St. Augustine. We find him interrogated by the same Paulinus, who had granted permission to a widow to bury her son, Cynesius, near the tomb of St. Felix of Nola: Utrum prosit cuique post mortem quod corpus ejus apud sancti alicujus memoriam sepeliatur—Whether it might benefit one after death to have his body buried near the tomb of some saint. The answer was St. Augustine’s celebrated work entitled De cura pro mortuis. The ultimate conclusion of the book is this: that being buried in proximity to the tomb of the martyrs is beneficial to the dead in this much only: that the remembrance of the place invites the living to commend them to the intercession of the martyrs whose holy remains repose near by. It is in this sense that we must understand Maximus of Turin when he writes: Fratres, veneremur eos [martyres] in sæculo, quos defensores habere possumus in futuro; et sicut eis ossibus parentum nostrorum jungimur, ita et eis fidei imitatione jungamur; … sociemur illis tam religione quam corpore—Brethren, let us venerate them [the martyrs] in this life, that we may have them as our defenders in the next; and as we are united with them through the bones of our parents, so also let us be joined to them by imitating their faith; let us be associated with them in religion as well as in the body. Nor did the archdeacon Sabinus depart from the spirit of the church and the old fathers when he censured the indiscreet desire and the material devotion of many of the faithful, in wishing to be buried near the tombs of the martyrs. He himself chose the last place, near the door, in the Church of St. Lawrence outside the walls of Rome, and on his tomb is the following inscription, written at his own dictation:

“Nil juvat, immo gravat, tumulis hærere piorum;

Sanctorum meritis optima vita prope est.

Corpore non opus est, anima tendamus ad illos,

Quæ bene salva potest corporis esse salus.”[93]

In the first part of the epitaph he alludes to the difficulty of finding a place vacant near the tombs of the martyrs, and in the end he writes that the efficacy is not in being joined to them in body, but in the soul, which, being saved, will ensure the salvation of the body. Maximus, whose words we cited above, and who was bishop of Turin after the year 412, insinuates the same when he says: Et sic ut eis ossibus parentum [Pg 274] nostrorum jungimur. Hence we conclude that the usage of burying the dead near the bodies of the martyrs was regarded as an ancient tradition even in the fifth century. It is not the fact of the material burying-place to which we would invite the reader’s attention, but to the spirit of faith in the efficacy of the martyrs’ intercession. The chamber which contains the tomb of Veneranda is filled with loculi, most of which date back as far as the year 356. A Roman epitaph of the year 382 testifies that even at that date they were very few who obtained the privilege of being buried intra limina sanctorum—within the threshold of the saints. The privilege was only granted to those whose merits during life had been eminent, and who had signalized themselves in the service of God, and especially in their charity towards the poor. Thus we read of a Roman by the name of Verus, qui post mortem meruit in Petri limina sancta jacere—who after his death merited that he should repose within the sacred threshold of Peter. We are far, however, from asserting that the formula sociatus sanctis always alludes to the proximity of a martyr’s tomb. Very often the formula refers to the soul, which is already supposed to be in Paradise. Here is a fragment of a beautiful epitaph found in the cemetery of St. Commodilla:

BIVS INFANS PER AETATEM SENE PECCA EDENS AD SANCTORVM LOCVM IN PA ESCVT

The ingenious De Rossi makes of this fragment the following inscription: (Euse)bius infans per ætatem sene (sine) pecca(to) (acc)edens ad sanctorum locum in pa(ce) (qui)escit—The infant Eusebius, going to the place [abode] of the saints without sin, because of his age, rests in peace.

To remove all doubt regarding the spirit which prompted the early Christians to desire burial near the tombs of the martyrs, we will cite a passage from one of the homilies of Maximus, Bishop of Turin: “Therefore the martyrs are to be honored most devoutly; but we must venerate those especially whose relics we possess. With these we have familiarity; … they receive us when we go out from this body.” This special devotion of familiarity with the martyrs, whose relics the faithful possessed, as it inspired the pious trust that the spirits of the martyrs would welcome them into the realms of bliss, so did it induce the faithful living to invoke the intercession of the martyrs for those who were already gone from this life. But we have yet some of the most beautiful epigraphs to cite—those touching, deprecatory appeals to the saint or martyr by name, near whose tomb the remains of the departed are placed: SANCTE LAVRENTI, SVSCEPA(m) (h)ABETO ANIMA(m) (ejus)[94]—St. Lawrence, receive his soul!

In the cemetery of St. Hippolytus Bosius read the following: REFRIGERI TIBI DOMNVS IPOLITVS refriger(et) tibi dom(i)nus Hippolytus—May the lord Hippolytus refresh thee. Here is an invocation, in a fragmentary state, of St. Basilla: SERENVS FLENS DEPRECOR [Pg 275] IPSE deum…ET BEATA(m) BASILLA(m) VT VOBIS PRO M(eritis). Another appeal to St. Basilla may be seen in an epigraph now exposed in the Lateran museum. It is that of a bereaved father and mother who commend their departed daughter to the protection of the saint: Domina Basilla, commandamus tibi Crescentinus et Micina Filia(m) nostra(m) Crescen(tiam)—St. Basilla, we, Crescentius and Micina, recommend our daughter Crescentia to thee. Side by side with this is the epitaph of Aurelius Gemelli, a child of four years of age. It was written by his mother, of whose tender affection a more moving expression cannot be found than those four words: Commando Basilla Innocentia(m) Gemelli—Basilla, I recommend [to thee] Innocence Gemelli. She calls him not only innocent, but innocence itself. Since we have mentioned the above as a specimen of the tender affection of the Romans for their dead, and how they gave expression to it in their epitaphs, it may not be out of place to mention another, to be seen to-day in the hypogeum of the Church of St. Praxedes. It is in this form: Sancti Petre, Marcelline, suscipite vostrum alumnum!—Sts. Peter and Marcellinus, receive your pupil. The Chevalier de Rossi is of the opinion that this inscription belongs to the cemetery of St. Helen, on the Labican Way. As a sort of counterpart to it he gives another, of the same tenderness of tone, which he read in Carpentras: MARTER BAVDELI S PER PASSIONIS DIE DNO DVLCEM SVVM COMMENDAT ALMVNVM—Martyr Baudelius per passionis [suæ] die(m) Domino dulcem suum commendat alumnum—The martyr Baudelius, through the day of his passion, commends his sweet pupil to the Lord. Hence we may conclude with the illustrious archæologist, whose erudition has borne us out so far, that the custom of burying the dead near the tombs of the martyrs, and of asking, as it were, their local protection for the dead, was universal in the first five or six centuries. He cites the only exception to this usage that has come within his extensive observation. It is a Greek epitaph, in which the three divine Persons, the archangels Michael and Gabriel, the prophets Jeremias and Henoch, the Blessed Virgin, and, finally, the sibyl are besought in behalf of the departed.

Thus far we have appealed almost exclusively to the testimony afforded us by inscriptions discovered in the Roman Catacombs. In conclusion we would transcribe entire two epitaphs which, though not Roman, are of the greatest importance in the matter we have been treating. One is the epitaph on the tomb of Cynesius, in the Church of St. Felix of Nola, the same of whom Paulinus wrote to St. Augustine, asking “whether it were efficacious to bury the dead near the tomb of the martyrs.” The inscription was probably dictated by Paulinus himself. We give it with the restorations:

ilium nuNC FELICIS HABET DOMVS ALMA BEATI

atque ita per loNGOS SVSCEPTVM POSSIDET ANNOS

patronus plACITO LAETATVR IN HOSPITE FELIX

sic protectVS ERIT IVVENIS SVB IVDICE CHRISTO

cum tuba terriBILIS SONITV CONCVSSERIT ORBEM

excitæque aniMAE RVRSVM IN SVA VASA REDIBVNT

Felici merito HIC SOCIABITVR ANTE TRIRVNAL [95]

[Pg 276] Here there is a thought expressed rarely to be met with in sacred epigraphy—that the martyr Felix will, on the day of general resurrection, accompany his “guest” before the tribunal of the Great Judge, and that “the youth shall be protected before the judge, Christ.” As a general rule the patronage of the martyrs is invoked for the souls of the faithful departed as they are now. We will give another epigraph in conclusion which confirms the conception we have just been speaking of. It is read upon the tombstone of a priest in Vercelli, by name Sarmata. It is metrical, and the illustrious Father Bruzzi is inclined to attribute its authorship to St. Flavian, the poet, who was bishop of Vercelli about the end of the fifth century. This is the Flavian who was styled by his contemporaries the “Damasus of Liguria.” Sarmata was buried in the loculi between the martyrs Nazarius and Victor. The chronicles speak of this privilege in the following terms: Sedes proxima sanctis martyribus concessa est ad mercedem meritis—The nearest place to the martyrs was given as a reward of his merits. Here is the epitaph:

NAZARIVS NAMQVE PARITER VICTORQVE BEATI

LATERIBVS TVTVM REDDVNT MERITISQ CORONANT

O FELIX GEMINO MERVIT QVI MARTYRE DVCI

AD DOMINVM MELIORE VIA REQVIEMQVE MERERI.[96]

Nazarius and Victor are here spoken of as the ushers of Sarmata into the presence of the Lord—ad Dominum—and to eternal rest. In the same manner St. Petronilla is represented, in the fresco of which we spoke in the beginning, as introducing the matron Veneranda into Paradise. The epigraphical, liturgical, and patristic testimonies hitherto quoted place in a clear and unmistakable light the deep religious significance and the topographical worth of the representation on the tomb of Veneranda. St. Petronilla, the patroness of the departed, and whose holy ashes reposed not far distant, familiarly (the expression of Maximus of Turin) receives her into heaven, and the painter gave expression to the holy trust of her relatives that St. Petronilla would intercede for her, while the picture itself would invite them to pray more fervently to the saint whose holy “memories” (St. Augustine) were near at hand.

Now that the signification of the picture has been fairly determined, it may not be an unfitting conclusion to our paper to inquire into the accuracy of the title of martyr applied to St. Petronilla in this fresco. In the first place, it is certain that no other saint or martyr is alluded to but the veritable St. Petronilla whose remains reposed in the hypogeum of the basilica of SS. Nereus and Achilleus. Still, it is also certain from the Acts of the two martyrs, in which mention is made of St. Petronilla, that she was not a martyr in any sense whatever. The martyrology of Ado speaks of her thus: “When Flaccus, a knight, desired to be united with her in marriage, she asked for a delay of three days, and, together with her foster-sister, Felicula, giving herself up to continual fasting and prayer, and the divine Mysteries being celebrated on the third day, as soon as she had received the Sacrament of Christ she lay down upon her bed and gave up the [Pg 277] ghost.” In other codices of her life the opening chapter is entitled, De obitu Petronillæ et passione Feliculæ—On the death of Petronilla and the martyrdom of Felicula. Hence there is a formal contradiction between her Acts and this fresco. Without entering into a critical examination of the authenticity of the Acts of Nereus and Achilleus—which, by the way, receive new confirmation from every fresh discovery in the cemetery—we will merely say that, were they apocryphal, the supposition would be that they would rather magnify her glory, by giving her the title of martyr, than diminish it. Setting aside the inscription, the appearance of the picture confirms her Acts. She is said to have been a virgin of extraordinary beauty, and that she belonged to a noble family. The picture coincides perfectly with this belief; for she is represented as being beautiful; she wears her hair in plaited tresses, wound into a knot on the top of the head, according to the custom of virgins in those days; while the make of her dress proclaims her as belonging to noble rank. For the rest, there is not a single authentic document which gives her the title of martyr, but all speak of her as Sancta Petronilla, or simply Virgo Petronilla. Hence there is no reason in the world why we should give credence to the inscription of the painter. The title of martyr accorded to her by him does not become an inexplicable mystery to us when we recall to mind the many and obvious examples of the title of martyr being given, especially by private individuals, without due regard for historical facts. For instance, St. Pudentiana, St. Cyriaca, and others have been styled martyrs, when we have positive evidence that they were not. Thus popes who lived after the persecutions—Mark, Julius, and Damasus—are called martyrs. Nay, Petronilla herself is named martyr in the Liber Pontificalis, at the life of Leo III. (816), when the history of her life, as given by Ado, was universally accepted. However, if we recall to mind what has already been said on the special confidence of the primitive Christians in the intercession of the martyrs for the dead; if we reflect that they were regarded as the principal citizens in the kingdom of God, to whom the heavens were opened, as St. Stephen said (martyribus patent cœli), and hence that to them was attributed, equally with the angels, the office of introducing departed souls into the divine Presence, it is easy to understand why the artist, in portraying Petronilla as receiving Veneranda into Paradise, either believed her a martyr or deliberately wished to make her equal to one. Pictoribus atque poetis æqua est licentia.

But in this matter we must not observe the material form as it is presented to us, accurately or inaccurately as the case may be. That is merely relative and secondary. It is the spirit of the work which we must contemplate—that great faith in the intercessory prayers of those who had fought the good fight, and whose happiness was complete in the Beatific Vision. Some of the epigraphs may be very inaccurate, even exaggerated; yet they bear, in their way, testimony to a sublime dogma of the church—the communion of saints, not only for the good of the living, but for the happy repose of the dead. In fine, they are the embodiment of the loving counsel: “It is a holy and a wholesome thought to pray for the dead, that they may be loosed from their sins.”

[90] Mabillon, Liturgia Gallicana vetus, pp. 278, 289.

[91] Such the reward of his merit that his sacred blood should penetrate and lave [spiritually] adjacent remains.

[92] And being alike in the merits of innocence, children, cover the sins of your parents by your pure Intercession.

[93] It availeth nothing, nay it oppresseth rather, to lie near the tombs of the blessed. The best life approacheth the merits of the saints. In body it is not necessary; let us cleave to them in soul, which, being saved, can be the salvation of the body.

[94] The inscription is one carried from Rome to the museum in Naples.

[95] The holy house of Blessed Felix now holds him, and so possesses him for long years. Felix his patron is glad in his happy guest; thus when the awful trumpet shall shake the world with its sound, and resuscitated souls shall return to their bodies, the youth shall be protected before Christ, the Judge; he will stand near Felix before the tribunal.

[96] For Blessed Nazarius and Victor alike protect him at their side and crown him with merits. Oh! happy he who was worthy to be led to the Lord through a happier path by the two martyrs, and to obtain repose.

[Pg 278]

SUNSHINE.

Over the glad earth, with her robe of beauty,

Glideth the Spring;

Pouring out perfume from a thousand censers

The peach-wands swing.

Down through the sunny vista of the orchard

Tender green glows,

Gnarled apple-boughs arrayed in robes of splendor

Pearl tint and rose.

Out from the dead leaves and the soft green mosses,

Like joy from pain,

Trailing arbutus, the sweet May evangel,

Bloometh again.

Who can remember, in this wealth of beauty,

How April came?

Crowned with a frost wreath on her pallid forehead,

And snow-star rain.

Yet ‘neath the shadow of the wing of winter

Nature’s heart beat,

Golden wine surging through each rugged column

Like dancing feet.

Thus, my belovèd! though upon us shadows

Coldly may fall,

God worketh slowly with the germs of beauty

Given to all.

Out from the shadow of our solemn parting

Shall sweet hope spring;

Faith, to an altar where the fire is hallowed,

Her gifts will bring.

Grace hath not left thee; it but sleeps, belovèd.

Through wintry hours,

Waiting the footsteps of the soul’s glad spring-time

To wake the flow’rs.

What though the sadness of an earthly parting

On us be laid?

In the bright sunshine of the blest hereafter

Shadows shall fade.

[Pg 279]

NEW PUBLICATIONS.

Alzog’s Universal Church History. Pabisch and Byrne. Vol. II. Cincinnati: Robert Clarke & Co. 1876. (For sale by The Catholic Publication Society.)

The time included in this second volume of the great work edited by Dr. Pabisch and Father Byrne extends from the beginning of the fourth century to the beginning of the sixteenth. We have already said all that is requisite on the excellence of the work in general in our notice of the first volume. At present we have no criticisms to make, except on a very few special points. A condensed summary of this kind is always liable to the fault of ambiguity in some of its general statements from the very fact of its extreme conciseness, and thus may give occasion to false impressions on the mind of an ordinary reader. There is a notable instance of this on page 22, where a short notice is given of the famous Ulfila. He was, as is well known, an Arian. The historian tells us that he “accepted it [viz., Christianity] with simple and earnest faith, just as he found it, putting aside all the idle and speculative questions that distracted the religious mind of the age.” We are inclined to agree with the opinion, which the author evidently intended to express, that Ulfila was not culpably in error respecting the faith, and that to his simple, untutored mind the disputes between Catholics and Arians were unintelligible. Nevertheless, the language we have quoted, taken in connection with a previous sentence in which the Gothic bishop is called a “great apostle and bishop,” and another in which it is curtly stated that the Christianity to which the Goths were converted “meant simply the Arian heresy,” is so extremely awkward and inaccurate that one would naturally understand it to imply that Catholic faith only differed from Arian heresy in respect to idle and speculative questions. A careful and instructed reader would, of course, judge that Dr. Alzog could not have intended such a grossly absurd and heterodox sense; nevertheless, his translators would have done well to add an explanatory note showing what he really did intend, but signally failed to express in a suitable way.

On page 972 the author speaks of the “pantheistic language of Tauler.” In this instance he seems to have followed closely the opinion of Dr. Stöckl, an author for whom we have a sincere respect, but whose estimate of Tauler we regard as altogether wrong. We have no fault to find with the censure pronounced upon the Theologia Germanica, and pass over what is said of the writings of Master Eckhart, since, although we incline to the opinion that his subjective sense was orthodox, the objective sense of many of his propositions is pantheistic and deserved the condemnation of the Holy See. In regard to Tauler, however, of whom the author speaks in another place in the highest terms, Dr. Alzog has made, as it seems to us, an inconsiderate statement by a blind following of Stöckl and other authors who condemn all the German mystics without discrimination. We have never observed a single expression in Tauler which has any more semblance of pantheism than the language of St. Bonaventure or any other approved mystical writer. We cannot perceive any difference between the doctrine of Tauler and that of St. John of the Cross, except that the latter states more distinctly the precise theological and philosophical sense of several important propositions.

The learned editor-in-chief of the present translation, Dr. Pabisch, sustains his reputation as a scholar who has a vast knowledge de omnibus rebus et quibusdam aliis, perhaps on a par with that of Dr. Alzog himself. With the exception of occasional infelicities of diction of not much importance, and the frequent use of italics, which gives us the sensation of jouncing on a road with many ruts in it, the style and manner of the translation, which are chiefly due to [Pg 280] the diligent care of the Rev. Mr. Byrne, are satisfactory, and the various tables at the end are extremely serviceable to the student. One more volume will complete this exceedingly valuable compendium of the history of the church.

Burning Questions. By William Molitor. London: Burns & Oates. 1876. (For sale by The Catholic Publication Society.)

Burning pretty briskly they have been, these questions, for some time past; the fire seems to be spreading, and not a very speedy prospect of putting it out! Mr. Molitor has a very agreeable and skilful way of handling this kind of fire. A gentleman once went to lecture on nitro-glycerine. Proceeding coolly and with an unembarrassed air to the platform, one of the committee who surrounded him and were pleasantly chatting on the subject of the lecture having casually asked him if he would exhibit any specimens, he replied: “Oh! certainly; my pockets are full of them.” Several gentlemen of the committee retired to the back seats on hearing this announcement, awaiting in fear and trembling the dreaded explosion in the safest place they could find. The application of Catholic principles to politics has long and widely been dreaded as explosive and incendiary. Of late politics have been brought into pretty smart collision with Catholic principles. Of course it makes no particular difference whether you throw nitro-glycerine on a rock or throw a rock on nitro-glycerine. An explosion has certainly resulted in Europe which is likely to be followed by more explosions. If any damage is done, it will not be suffered by the church. The anticipated destruction of Hell Gate by General Newton next July is a figure of what must take place in that quarter after which a certain locality in the East River was facetiously named by our Dutch ancestors. We have said that Mr. Molitor, although in a similar position with the gentleman who lectured on nitro-glycerine, handles his themes very agreeably and pleasantly. He is not only good-tempered and humorous, but he makes his somewhat abstruse topics quite intelligible and interesting. The form adopted by the author, who is a German priest of high rank in the church and of considerable note as a writer, is that of a series of conversational discussions. The interlocutors are educated men of several nationalities, one of them an American, who are passing a vacation together on the borders of Lake Como. Several little episodes and descriptions of scenery are introduced, making a pretty and enlivening mise en scène for the talkers and their very intelligent and learned talk. We have not seen the book in its original language, which is German, but the English translation reads well, and the book is a masterpiece in its way, both in respect to its matter and form. The intelligent reader will already have perceived that its subject is the relation of the church to the state. In substance it is a popular exposition of one part of ethics which is treated of scientifically in every Catholic text-book or treatise on morals—such, for instance, as Liberatore’s Philosophical Prelections. We cannot too strongly recommend its careful perusal to all those of our readers who wish to understand what Catholic principles and doctrines really are, in opposition to the popular errors condemned in the Syllabus. We are glad to see that a more extensive and formal treatise on the same topics by Hergenröther has been translated and is advertised in the English papers, although we have not yet received a copy.

Catechism for Confession and First Communion. By a Priest of the Diocese of Springfield. Springfield: Philip J. Ryan. 1876.

We never take up a new catechism without distrust. It is easy to find objections, real or imaginary, to any and every abridgment of the Christian doctrine, and consequently there is little difficulty in coming to the conclusion that a new catechism is needed; but it is rare that even tolerable success rewards the compilers of text-books of this kind. We are of the opinion that it is not so important that we should have the best possible catechism as that one which is good should be adopted throughout the whole country. Many of our wisest and most learned prelates have insisted upon this point, and in the first Plenary Council of Baltimore (1852) a catechism was approved of and recommended to the clergy of the United States; and this is still to-day, we think, the best to be found in this country.

The catechism by a priest of the Diocese [Pg 281] of Springfield, which we have carefully examined, has not changed our opinion upon this subject. It is not free from errors and inaccuracies which are of themselves sufficient to deprive it of any value as a text-book of religious instruction. In the “Act of Hope,” p. 4, we come upon the following ungrammatical sentence: “O my God! who has promised every blessing.” “What is God?” is asked at the very outset, and the answer given is: “God is a spirit.” This is no more a definition of God than it is of an angel or a soul. “What was the Garden of Paradise? Answer—A place of pleasure.” This is a poor, not to say false, rendering of the Scriptural phrase. “Who is the devil? Answer—One of the fallen angels.” Is he not the prince of fallen angels? “Who are the angels? Answer—Pure spirits without a body.” Is it, then, possible for pure spirits to have a body? Hell, we are informed, is “a place of eternal torments, where there is all evil and no good.” This is theologically inaccurate. It is impossible that a place where there is no good should exist, since existence itself is a good.

“What are the chief things we must believe? Answer—The chief things we must believe are contained in the Apostles’ Creed.” Question and answer do not agree. The one is what and the other is where.

“Why did he establish but one church? Answer—Because God being one, he could have but one church.” To affirm that God’s nature renders more than one church impossible is, we think, unwarranted.

“Can the church err? Answer—She cannot.” The catechism approved by the First Plenary Council says: “She cannot err in matters of faith.” The priest of the Diocese of Springfield fails to give the four marks of the church; and this is certainly a very grave omission. He, moreover, says not a word about the infallibility of the pope, which is equally inexcusable.

“How many kinds of sin are there? Answer—Two kinds: original sin and actual sin.” We were under the impression that the kinds of sin were very numerous.

“What sins are mortal? Answer—Grievous sins.” And what sins, then, are grievous? Mortal sins, we suppose.

“Is tale bearing a great sin? Answer—Yes; supported by a text of Scripture.” Now, we cannot think that tale-bearing is necessarily a great sin, or even that it is generally so.

“What is the Eucharist made from? Answer—From wheaten bread and the wine of the grape.” This, in our eyes, as a matter of taste, if for no other reason, is very objectionable.

We confess that much of what we have found fault with is not of great moment, but in a work of this kind we have the right to demand the strictest care and accuracy. We have no desire to be severe in our criticism, and gladly bear testimony to evidences of talent in the author, who, with greater pains, would have given us, we doubt not, a very excellent catechetical text-book.

Outlines of the Religion and Philosophy of Swedenborg. By Theophilus Parsons. Boston: Roberts Brothers. 1876.

Philosophy of Swedenborg! That is a desideratum which we have looked for in vain some twenty years or more. We have read a considerable number of volumes of the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg and much that has been written on their contents, conversed with not a few of his prominent followers, and yet we have failed to obtain from them all a clear and philosophical statement of the doctrines which he taught. Here, however, is a volume written expressly to give to the world such a statement.

But, alas! we are again doomed to disappointment; for nowhere do we find in it, in precise terms, the nature of this new revelation. The nearest we come to it is in the following passage: “If a new revelation was to be made through him, if it was to be made by his statement of spiritual truths, they should be not merely new, but so entirely distinct from all that was ever before known, so well adapted to send the mind forward on a new path and from a new beginning, so able to supply new motives and incentives to a new moral and affectional as well as intellectual progress, and new instruction to guide this progress, as to justify and authorize this large claim.”

The first pretension made in this paragraph for the new church is “new motives and incentives to a new moral and affectional progress.” Neither Swedenborg in his life nor his followers in theirs have yet made this title good. Nowhere [Pg 282] have they shown the signs of a higher spiritual life or of a greater self-sacrifice. When they shall have given us a St. Charles Borromeo, or a St. Vincent de Paul, or the heroism displayed by a Sister of Charity, then, and not till then, will there be reason to investigate their claim of a revelation which is superior to that given by Christ himself.

The next assertion in this paragraph is that this “new revelation” is a source of “new intellectual progress.” Swedenborg revolted at some of the grossest errors of Protestantism, and, in repudiating them, seems to have been entirely ignorant of Catholic theology. The author supposes Swedenborg’s opposition to the errors of Calvinism is the cause of its decline; seemingly, he is unaware of its refutation centuries before Swedenborg lived, and the statements of the truths opposed to it, by the Council of Trent. What is true in Swedenborgianism is not new, and what is new is not true.

As a specimen of “intellectual progress” we take the very first sentence of this book: “A church,” the author says, “may be defined as the collective body of those who agree together in faith and in worship.” This is the same as if he had said: “A man may be defined as the collective body of those members which agree together in physical action.” This is the play of Hamlet with Hamlet left out. Had Mr. Parsons the true conception of the church, this would have started the question of the mission of his master!—a point upon which his evidence would have proven very unsatisfactory.

Again he says “that it is of the very essence of this revelation that it is given to man’s reason” (page 22).

Is the author ignorant of the fact that Christianity from the beginning made, and has always made, appeal to man’s reason? By Christianity we mean the Catholic, the Roman Catholic, Church, outside of which Christianity never had, and has not now, a real, separate existence. Have we to tell Mr. Parsons that the Catholic Church has always upheld the value of human reason and defended its rights? Has he ever looked into any work of Catholic theology? Has he ever opened the Summa of St. Thomas, or his volume Contra Gentiles? Does the author not know that it was Martin Luther who asserted against the church that “a man becomes all the better a Christian by throttling his reason”? It seems that this new revelation, instead of being an incentive to intellectual progress, acts upon the intellectual faculties like a poison, leaving them without tone, vigor, or logical perception, rapt in a dreamy self-sufficiency.

The author says “he agrees with Professor Tyndall in saying that to yield to the religious sentiment reasonable satisfaction is the problem of problems at the present hour,” and adds: “We believe also that the system of thought and belief introduced by Swedenborg will lead to the solution of this ‘problem of problems’” (page 30). This is equivalent to saying that the Creator has made man for a destiny which he has carefully concealed from him these six thousand years or more!

The same Creator did not fail to satisfy every appetite with its proper food, except the highest of all—the thirst of the soul to know its true destiny and the means of attaining it. This he allowed to tantalize man up to the date of this new revelation! Pity poor Professor Tyndall could not be made to see it! Happy Professor Theophilus Parsons, who has found it at the feet of Emanuel Swedenborg, whose words, he tells us, “were not God’s words, but his own; full, as we believe, of truth and wisdom, but limited in their scope and liable to error” (page 31).

Swedenborgianism is a product of a mind given to the pursuit of natural sciences, ignorant of theology, and transported into the dream-world—a sublimated materialism. There runs through all the writings of the followers of Swedenborg the assumption of a superior knowledge of spiritual truths, which allies it closely to the old heresy of Gnosticism. In kind, Swedenborgianism does not differ from modern Spiritism, only it assumes an air of greater respectability.

Hymns. By Frederick William Faber, D.D. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. 1876.

The title “Faber’s Hymns” gleams in golden letters from the back of this handsome little volume, “Hymns by Frederick Wm. Faber, D.D.” (in choice mediæval characters) on either cover. “Faber’s Hymns” consequently they must be. It is impossible to doubt their authenticity, surrounded as they are by all that wealth of adornment in which our ritualistic friends delight. Here [Pg 283] are the thorns, and the hammer and nails, and a chaste border of what may be taken at will for the passion flower or forget-me-not, and over the title a gorgeous cross and beneath it I. H. S. One would be shocked not to meet with the softest-toned paper inside—paper full almost of that “dim religious light” that Milton sang. He lingers over these externals, for they are very lovely, and very characteristic; so lovely that a sentimental person would weep to find they are only the adornments of a wilful and systematic mutilation of the hymns of the gentle and saintly man whose name the volume bears.

A complete collection of Father Faber’s Hymns was published in London in 1861 with the approval of the author and under his direct supervision. He wrote a preface to it in which he complained of the liberties that had been taken with his hymns. He added that “he was only too glad that his compositions should be of any service, and he has in no instance refused either to Catholics or Protestants the free use of them: only in the case of Protestants he has made it a title to stipulate, wherever an opportunity has been given him, that, while omissions might be made, no direct alterations should be attempted. Hence he wishes to say that he is not responsible for any of the Hymns in any other form, literary or doctrinal, than that in which they appear in this edition.”

That edition bore and bears the same title as the one now under notice. The difference in size, however, between the two volumes is rather startling. This difference is accounted for by the fact that in the ritualistic version fifty-eight hymns have disappeared. There are one hundred and fifty in the original, there are ninety-two in the new, and what the editor and publishers would doubtless consider improved edition. Nor is the list of omissions complete even with these fifty-eight absent.

But, to do what justice may be done to the ritualistic editor and publishers—we should be delighted to give the editor’s name as well as the publishers’, only that a judicious modesty has concealed it from us—we quote from the preface: “This book of selections from Faber’s Hymns contains all of the Author’s latest revised edition, except the Hymns written for the use of Roman Catholics, such as those for the festivals of the Virgin Mary, St. Joseph and the Holy Family, and for the Devotions in honor of them, and the Hymns addressed to the Angels and Saints.”

In other words, it contains “all of the author’s latest revised edition” with the insignificant omission of very nearly one-half. How many hymns “of the author’s latest revised edition” were not “written for the use of Roman Catholics” were an investigation worth making, which the reader may take up at his choice. Leaving those points, however, it is to be supposed that so honest a confession amply atones for everything, especially after Father Faber’s permission to Protestants to use his hymns. But there was a solemn stipulation attached to that permission, and to inquire into how far that stipulation has been observed is the purpose of the present notice.

From the hymn entitled “God,” which is only the fourth in the volume, verses 7 and 9 are left out. Those verses have the name of Mary in them and sing of her beauty. The beauty of the angels and saints, which is sung in the same hymn, is allowed to pass, but for the queen of angels and saints of course there is no room.

In the hymn “My Father,” a few pages on, the same thing is observable. The tender conscience of the editor revolted from and consequently struck out such a verse as this:

“Mary, herself a sea of grace,

Hath all been drawn from Thine;

And thou couldst fill a thousand more

From out those depths divine.”

In the rendering of the Veni Sancte Spiritus the last verse, which prays for the seven gifts of the Holy Ghost, is struck out, the editor probably objecting to those gifts for some reason of his own. In “Christmas Night” the pretty chorus is mutilated for the purpose of throwing out the name of Mary. The original reads:

“All hail, Eternal Child!

Dear Mary’s little Flower

God hardly born an hour,

Sweet Babe of Bethlehem!

Hail Mary’s Little One,

Hail God’s Eternal Son,

Sweet Babe of Bethlehem,

Sweet Babe of Bethlehem!”

This the critical editor improves as follows:

[Pg 284]

“All hail, Eternal Child!

Sweet Babe of Bethlehem!

Hail God’s Eternal Son,

Sweet Babe of Bethlehem!”

The fine hymn “The Three Kings” is shortened by two verses—4 and 12. To be sure those two verses bear rather hardly on Protestants, but in that case, and in many others, why not leave the hymn out altogether? In the hymn immediately following it, “The Purification,” the last verse, which claims “all rightful worship” for the Mother of Christ, is thrown out—of course by Father Faber’s express desire. In “Lent,” on the very next page, verse 3, which celebrates “the feast of penance,” does not appear. Two pages on, in that most touching of plaints, “Jesus Crucified,” such verses as these are found unworthy a place:

“His mother cannot reach His face;

She stands in helplessness beside;

Her heart is martyred with her Son’s;

Jesus, our Love, is crucified!

* * * * *

“Death came, and Jesus meekly bowed;

His failing eyes He strove to guide

With mindful love to Mary’s face;

Jesus, our Love, is crucified!”

What a starved religion it must be that cannot stomach such lines as those! And what justice to Father Faber! Yet the editor allows the next hymn to open with the lines:

“Hail, Jesus! hail! who for my sake

Sweet blood from Mary’s veins didst take.”

It is to be supposed that he could not well deny the physical fact, though he would seem to have strong doubts about it, for presently we find him in “We come to thee, Sweet Saviour,” changing the last line of the chorus,

“O blood of Mary’s son,”

“O blood of God’s dear son.”

Just one-half the hymn to “Jesus Risen” is thrown out, from verses 2 to 6 inclusively. These verses treat of the sacred humanity. “The Apparition of Jesus to Our Blessed Lady,” “The Ascension,” and “Pentecost,” which immediately follow, are among those struck out, as are also the first eight verses of “The Descent of the Holy Ghost.” The reason of course is that they eulogize the Mother of God. For the same reason verses 13 and 14 are omitted. Indeed this hymn alone must have caused the pious soul of the editor much trouble; for we find in his fourth verse (the twelfth in the original) the lines:

“One moment—and the Spirit hung

O’er them with dread desire”;

“O’er her with dread desire”

is the original. Again in his sixth verse, which in the original reads:

“Those tongues still speak within the Church,

That Fire is undecayed;

Its well-spring was that Upper Room

Where Mary sat and prayed.”

Of course Mary cannot be tolerated in such company. Her name is accordingly stricken from the roll and “the disciples” substituted for it, so that the last line reads:

“Where the disciples sat and prayed.”

It is too much to look to this man for respect for the Mother of God; but at least he might have some respect for Father Faber, and at the very least for the laws of rhythm.

It is useless to multiply instances of this kind. They run through the book. A few other gross liberties taken with the text cannot pass unnoticed.

In “The Wages of Sin” the second verse of the author reads:

“We gave away all things for him,

And in truth it was much that was given—

The love of the angels and saints,

And the chance of our getting to heaven.”

The Protestant editor objects to

“The love of the angels and saints,”

for which he substitutes

“We gave away Jesus and God,”

a line that belongs to the third verse. This third verse of course disappears, because it sings of “Mary and grace” and “prayer and confession and Mass.”

Why the last verse of “Conversion” is condemned, even by so tender a conscience as that of our editor, it is impossible to conceive.

“Jesus, Mary, love, and peace”

sang Father Faber in “The Work of Grace”;

“Jesus, mercy, love, and peace”

sings his self-appointed editor.

In “Forgiveness of Injuries,” the very title of which might have caused him to pause, a happy specimen of his peculiar [Pg 285] art and animus is given. Father Faber’s first verse read

“Oh! do you hear that voice from heaven—

Forgive and you shall be forgiven?

No angel hath a voice like this;

Not even Mary’s song of bliss

From off her throne can waft to earth

A promise of such priceless worth.”

In the Protestant version only the first two lines appear; the other four are taken from the second verse; the remainder of which, with the rejected four of the first verse, are thrown away altogether.

Here an examination which might be prolonged indefinitely may as well end. The reader may judge for himself whether the word “mutilation”—a grave word to use—is misapplied in this instance. Selections, of course, may be taken from a man’s works in these days, though we should say not without permission from the author or from those empowered to grant it. But that such permission should be extended to hacking a man right and left, distorting his words, spoiling his verses, studiously making him say just what he does not say, persistently making him dishonor those whom he most honors—strange indeed must be the conscience which can interpret the widest permission thus! We need not refer to the glowing love of Father Faber for the Blessed Virgin. It was no vague aspiration after some ideal being, existing or not existing in a remote state. It was a vital reality to him. The Blessed Virgin was near him always. To her he turned with the love and confidence of a child, as to no imaginary mother, at all times. Her name was ever on his lips, as her love was in his heart. It was natural, then, that all his writings, but above all his hymns, should bubble over with the love that was ever welling upwards from the very depths of his being. Yet this man, pursued apparently by hatred of the Mother of Jesus, and thinking to honor the Son by dishonoring the Mother, follows her up and hunts her from the pages of one so devoted to her, wherever it was possible to do so. Further comment on a man who can commit so dishonest an act, in the name too of religion, is unnecessary. As for the publishers who can lend themselves to such unworthy work, we leave them to their own reflections.

We have no desire to take this as characteristic of our Protestant friends generally, particularly of the Protestant Episcopal section of them. But there is too much of such dishonest practice. The Following of Christ; the Devout Life, by St. Francis de Sales; the Memorial of a Christian Life, by Father Lewis of Granada; the Spiritual Combat, and all Father Avrillon’s works, have been tampered with in the same manner and by the same set of zealous Christians. Is it too much to detect in this the old spirit that gave us what is known as the King James version of the Bible, and that is content to let centuries of great Christian faith go by, for the purpose of claiming a fancied union with that of the earlier centuries, basing the claim on distorted extracts from the works of a few great writers?

Gertrude Mannering: A Tale of Sacrifice. By Frances Noble. London: Burns & Oates. 1875. (For sale by The Catholic Publication Society.)

One begins to grow shy of “tales of sacrifice” written by Catholic authors. They are so very like one another that the maxim Ex uno disce omnes is nowhere more applicable than to them. Given the characters and their relations one to another, and a very limited amount of experience will enable the reader to sketch out the story faithfully enough for himself without going to the trouble of reading the book. Gertrude Mannering, though bearing a strong family likeness to her sisters, and beginning in the orthodox fashion—in the convent, of course—improves upon acquaintance, and leaves the reader with the impression that the hand which fashioned her is capable of much better work. It is useless to sketch the story, which is a short one and of simple enough construction. Its defects are of the usual order, though in a less degree than ordinarily. There is too much pious “talk,” in season and out of season. When will our Catholic story-writers learn this first lesson of fiction: that a little of such talk goes a very long way? Even inquiring Protestants are not likely to be moved profoundly by the tremendous arguments of a girl of sixteen or seventeen just out of a convent, while Catholics yawn as soon as they appear, and either skip the pages that contain them or close the book. [Pg 286] Then, again, Gerty blushes a little too often, even for a convent girl. The color rises in her cheeks more or less deeply at almost every other page. One grows rather tired, too, of the frequent mention of “the pale, proud face” of the “haughty Stanley” and his “splendid intellect.” These, to be sure, are the ordinary attributes of lady novelists’ heroes, but, at least, the last quality might be judiciously omitted, unless excellent grounds are given for it. A “splendid intellect” is no doubt a very good thing to have, as is also a “pale, proud face” in its way; but when the “splendid intellect” only shows itself in rather commonplace observations, such as persons with no pretension at all to so rare a gift would use, the effect is not quite satisfactory.

One more objection we must make, and a serious one. The sacrifice around which the story turns is by no means to be commended and would have been better omitted. Young ladies, even young ladies whose love has been crossed, can easily find something far better to do with their lives than to offer them to God for the soul of some young gentleman whom they are particularly anxious to convert. Martyrdom for the faith is one thing; but the picture of a young lady, who cannot conscientiously marry a young infidel, offering her life to God for his conversion, is quite another thing. One is tempted to ask how much the “pale, proud face” and the “splendid intellect” of the “haughty Stanley” had to do with so tremendous a sacrifice in the present instance. Gerty might have done him, and herself, and her reader much more good by living than by dying for him, as did that practical patriot when the cause of his country seemed lost.

We have noticed this story at some length because the writer, whose name meets us for the first time, seems, as already hinted, to give promise of much better work. Lady Hunter is a well-drawn character. So, apart from the excessive tendency to blush and “talk pious,” is Gerty. The “haughty Stanley” is rather a conventional hero, which, perhaps, is only natural in days when so many young men lay claim to “splendid intellects.” The scene between Gerty and Stanley, where love and duty on the one side, and love and pride on the other, contend for mastery, is drawn with genuine power, while the end is indeed touching.

The School Question: Catholics and Education. 1 vol. 8vo, pp. 200. New York: The Catholic Publication Society.

The republication of the various essays on education which have from time to time appeared in The Catholic World, treating this all-important subject from widely different points of view, presenting a great variety of style and method as well as of authorship, will, we are confident, be welcomed by the reading Catholic public as especially opportune at the present moment, when the questions here discussed enter so largely into all our social, theological, and political controversies.

Though the subject of education is much talked of and written about, it is rarely carefully examined or seriously studied. We have ourselves been made to blush more than once by the ignorance on this point of even intelligent Catholics. Self-respect, one would think, should suffice to make us acquaint ourselves with the arguments upon which our dissent from the theories of education commonly received in this country is based. At the expense of very little time and labor any ordinarily intelligent Catholic might be in a position to defend himself against the attacks of the advocates of a purely secular school system. To those who feel the need of informing themselves more thoroughly on this subject we heartily commend these essays. The questions with which they deal have been discussed, not without ability and sound reason, in pamphlets and lectures; but before the publication of this volume we should have been unable to refer to any one book as giving a fair and satisfactory statement of Catholic principles on the subject of education. This collection supplies a want which many besides ourselves must have felt.

The Acolyte; or, a Christian Scholar. A story for Catholic youth. Philadelphia: Peter F. Cunningham & Son. 1876.

Stories for Catholic youth, which are at once interesting and safe, are greatly to be desired. Every honest attempt to satisfy this want is consequently to be, in a certain sense, commended. Our boys, however, fare rather badly at the hands of writers. The books written for them are, as a class, either slow and uninteresting or so goody-goody that a [Pg 287] boy yawns before he has finished half a dozen pages. The author of The Acolyte, though animated with the best intentions, has fallen into the common mistake. His book is too “good.” His hero, whom he evidently looks upon as the beau-ideal of a Catholic student, is, it must be confessed, rather a tiresome young person, having a dreadful propensity to indulge in disquisitions of classroom philosophy with his young sister and others. In fact, the atmosphere of the classroom pervades the book, and the result is not agreeable. When boys read a story, they want to be out of school. There are excellent things in this book, but such as would appear to better advantage in one of a purely spiritual character, where they would probably find more readers, even among boys, than they are likely to do in their present form. The volume is dedicated to the “Acolythical Society” of a church in Cincinnati. If such a society exist, we recommend it to change its name. “Acolythical” is a barbarism which should not be tolerated.

Literature for Little Folks. Selections from Standard Authors, and Easy Lessons in Composition. By Elizabeth Lloyd. Philadelphia: Sower, Potts & Co. 1876.

The object of this little book is to make even the “Little Folks” so familiar with good English as habitually to speak and write it correctly. They will, it is claimed by the author, thus acquire a knowledge of correct English without going through the regular but slow process of first committing the rules of syntax to memory. The object is praiseworthy, and the plan of the work seems well adapted to make it easy of accomplishment.

How to Write Letters. A Manual of Correspondence, etc. By J. Willis Westlake, A.M. 1 vol. 16mo, pp. 264. Philadelphia: Sower, Potts & Co. 1876.

This is no mere compilation in the usual style of manuals, but an elaborate and interesting little work, showing the proper structure, composition, punctuation, formalities, and uses of the various kinds of letters, notes, and cards. It also contains a considerable amount of miscellaneous information about epistolography in general, and an article on “Roman Catholic Titles and Forms,” with particular reference to this country. The appearance of such a complete work of this nature is a proof of that more careful attention now paid by Americans to the written forms and etiquette of social intercourse, which, whatever may be ranted about republicanism and democratic habits, are as necessary, or at least as desirable, in the United States as in Europe. We would say of them, as of the devices of heraldry, if used at all, they should be used correctly; and this book will show people how to use them.

Explanatio Psalmorum. Studio F. X. Schouppe, S.J. Prolegomena in S Scripturam. Auctore F. X. Schouppe, S.J. Bruxellis. 1875. Benziger Brothers, New York.

These two treatises from the pen of Father Schouppe, the learned Belgian Jesuit, who has labored so indefatigably to enrich Catholic literature, form part of the author’s “Course of Sacred Scripture,” but have been published separately in order to give them a wider circulation. In the “Explanatio Psalmorum” Father Schouppe has chosen for elucidation the psalms which are appointed to be recited in the common offices of the Roman Breviary and his commentaries are made with special reference to this official devotion of the priesthood. Each psalm is accompanied by a paraphrase; a short but satisfactory commentary follows; and, finally, the sensus liturgus is given, showing its special appropriateness to the various offices of the Breviary in which it is found.

The “Prolegomena” is a brief introduction to the study of Holy Scripture, in which the various subjects comprised under the head of hermeneutics are discussed.

Both these treatises are characterized by the solid learning and lucid style which distinguish all the works of Father Schouppe.

Les Principes de la Sagesse. Par François de Salazar, S.J. Traduits de l’Espagnol. Gand. Benziger Brothers, New York.

This work of Father Salazar, a Spanish Jesuit, was discovered in 1628 by Dom Geronimo Perez, a doctor of the University of Alcala, who, in his Summa [Pg 288] Theologiæ, speaks of it in the following terms: “I have read with attention all that the most weighty authors have written on subjects proper to effect the conversion of the soul; but I have met with no one who has treated these matters with a force equal to that which is found in a manuscript of Francis de Salazar, a religious of the Society of Jesus.”

The success of the book has more than justified this estimate of Dr. Perez. It has passed through innumerable editions in the original Spanish, and has been translated into nearly all the languages of Europe. The French translation now before us has reached a fifteenth edition.

Breviarium Romanum, cum Officiis Sanctorum Novissime per Summos Pontifices usque ad hanc diem concessis. Turonibus, 1875. Benziger Brothers, New York and Cincinnati.

This is a new and elegant edition of the Roman Breviary, to which have been added the offices of St. Boniface and St. Paul of the Cross, the recitation of which has recently been made obligatory upon all priests by a decree of the Holy Father. It is printed in large and clear type on delicately-tinted paper of a shade peculiarly grateful to the eye, strongly bound in morocco, and of convenient size. We have rarely seen a finer edition of the Breviary.

Pius IX. and his Times. By Thomas O’Dwyer, M.D., M.R.C.S. (late English Physician at Rome). London: Burns, Oates & Co. 1876.

This volume is made up of a series of entertaining sketches of travel and letters from Rome, where the author resided many years, during which he was correspondent to the London Weekly Register. His letters to that journal make up the bulk of the book. At a time when so much that is false issues from the capital of Christendom and finds a welcome place in the columns of non-Catholic journals, the letters from the same city of an observant and intelligent Catholic would possess a special value quite apart from their intrinsic literary merit.

Authority and Anarchy; or, The Bible on the Church. London: Burns & Oates. 1876.

The author of this pamphlet presents the argument for the church from the Scriptures with very considerable skill and ability.

Characteristics from the Writings of John Henry Newman. Being Selections, Personal, Historical, Philosophical, and Religious, from his Various Works. Arranged by William Samuel Lilly, of the Inner Temple, Barrister-at-Law. With the author’s approval. New York: D. & J. Sadlier & Co. 1876.

This is an American reprint of the London edition. The latter has already been noticed in The Catholic World. The praise given to the original edition cannot be accorded to the present volume. The type is too small for general use, and the book lacks what we characterized at the time as “one of the best portraits of Dr. Newman which we have seen.”

The Little Book of the Holy Child Jesus: A Prayer-Book for His Children. By Canon Warmoll. London: Burns & Oates.

This useful little book is intended for very young children. It contains short prayers, acts, meditations, and instructions for Mass, confession, communion, and daily conduct. The meditations are admirable, being just adapted to catch the attention of children. The instructions also are excellent. Only here and there are to be found passages that strike us as a little too ponderous for very young children.

PUBLICATIONS RECEIVED.

Lives of the Saints. Rev. F. X. Weninger, D.D. Part VI. P. O’Shea.

“Messenger Series.” No. 6. The Acts of the Early Martyrs. By J. A. M. Fastré, S.J. Philadelphia: Peter F. Cunningham & Son. 1876.

A Study of Freemasonry. Translated from the French of Monseigneur Dupanloup, Bishop of Orleans. New York: D. & J. Sadlier & Co.

Pax Animæ: A Short Treatise declaring how necessary the tranquillity and peace of the soul is, and how it may be obtained. By St. Peter of Alcantara. From an old English translation of 1665. Edited by Canon Vaughan. London: Burns & Oates. 1876.

Major John Andre: An Historical Drama in Five Acts. By P. Leo Haid, OSB. Baltimore: John Murphy & Co. New York: The Cathol. Publication Society. 1876.

The Martyrdom of St. Cecily: A Drama in Three Acts. By the Rev. Albany Christie, S.J. London: Burns & Oates. 1876.

Christianity the Law of the Land. A discourse delivered in the Church of the Saviour, Brooklyn, N. Y. By the Pastor. A. P. Putnam. With an Appendix; or, Voices of American History. Brooklyn, N. Y.

Report of the Xavier Union of the City of New York. 1875.

Report of the City Superintendent of Schools to the Board of Education of the City of New York, for the Year ending December 31, 1875.

Addresses at the Inauguration of Daniel C. Gilman, as President of the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, February 22, 1876.

THE

CATHOLIC WORLD.

VOL. XXIII., No. 135.—JUNE, 1876.

GERMAN JOURNALISM.[97]

The universal hymn of journalistic praise, sung throughout the civilized world with hardly a discordant note, is of itself no mean evidence of the power of the press. “Great is journalism,” says Carlyle. “Is not every able editor a ruler of the world, being a persuader of it?” From France M. Thiers declares that the liberty of the press is theoretically and practically the most necessary of all; and was it not our own Jefferson who solemnly affirmed that he would rather live in a country with newspapers and without a government than in a country with a government but without newspapers? Did not the great Napoleon himself stand in greater awe of a newspaper than of a hundred thousand bayonets? “Give me but the liberty of the press,” cried Sheridan, “and I will give to the minister a venal House of Peers; I will give him a corrupt and servile House of Commons; I will give him the full sway of the patronage of office; I will give him the whole host of ministerial influence; I will give him all the power that place can confer upon him to purchase up submission and overcome resistance; and yet, armed with the liberty of the press, I will go forth to meet him undismayed; I will attack the mighty fabric he has reared with that mightier engine; I will shake down from its height corruption and bury it amidst the ruins of the abuses it was meant to shelter.”

But we do not propose to treat our readers to a dissertation written in the style of him who declared that, were the starry heavens deficient of one constellation, the vacuum could not be better supplied than by the introduction of a printing-press. We fully recognize, however, the very great power of the press which controls public opinion, and indeed often makes it. Nothing is unimportant which throws light upon the constitution and workings of this “Fourth Estate,” [Pg 290] into whose hands the destinies of modern nations and civilization seem to have been delivered; and it is for this reason that we take pleasure in bringing to the notice of the readers of The Catholic World the work of Professor Wuttke on German Journalism and the Origin of Public Opinion.

It would be difficult to find a more curious or instructive book. For years connected with the press himself, a leader of the “great German party,” and the author of several valuable historical and philosophical works, Herr Wuttke has brought to his present task the thoroughgoing and painstaking conscientiousness of a German professor. He is wholly in earnest; neither smiles nor laughs; does not even stop to give smoothness and polish to his phrase, but without remorse or fear invades the editorial sanctum, and pours upon its most hidden mysteries the profane light; holds them up before vulgar eyes, and leaves not the suspicion of a doubt but that he is resolved to tell all he knows. His courage no one can deny. The enterprise to which he has devoted himself was full of perils, none of which were hidden from him.

German newspapers before the revolution of 1848 were chiefly of a literary character. Their columns were filled with criticisms of books, philosophical and theological discussions, æsthetic treatises, accounts of travel, entertaining stories, and theatrical notices. Scarcely any attention was paid to events of the day, and least of all to those of a political character. The explanation of this anomaly is simple. The governments of Germany exercised a rigorous censorship over the press, and allowed nothing to be published which might set people to thinking about what their rulers were doing. But the storm of 1848 blew the pen from the hand of the official censor, and opened the columns of the newspaper to all kinds of political theories and discussions. The governments were at sea, borne helpless by the popular wave which had broken them loose from their ancient moorings and was carrying them they knew not whither. Their official organs, with unlimited financial support from the state, were powerless, because people refused to read them whilst independent journals were within their reach. The revolutionary outburst was soon followed by a reaction, partly brought on by its own excesses; and with the aid of the military the former governments were restored. Restrictions were again placed upon the liberty of the press; but so universal had the political agitation been that to think of carrying through a policy of rigorous repression was manifestly out of the question. It became necessary, therefore, to devise some expedient by which the press might be controlled without being muzzled.

With this view Von Manteuffel, the Prussian minister, established in Berlin a “Central Bureau of the Press,” which stood in intimate relations with the government and received from the “Secret Fund” a yearly support of from forty to fifty thousand thalers. With this money the pens of a crowd of needy scribes were bought, who for twenty or thirty thalers a month agreed to write articles in support of the views which the director of the Bureau should inspire. The next step was to make an opening for these articles in the columns of journals in different parts of the kingdom. This was not difficult, [Pg 291] as the contributions were well written, by persons evidently thoroughly informed, and were offered at a nominal price, or even without pay. On the 9th of March, 1851, the director of the Bureau sent a circular to “those editors and publishers of the conservative party with whom he has not at present the honor of holding personal relations,” in which he promised, with special reference to his connection with the Ministry of State, to send them from time to time communications concerning the real condition of political affairs, in order to furnish them indispensable materials for the successful prosecution of their labors. This assistance was to be given free of cost, and many editors were eager to avail themselves of it without inquiring with much care into its special significance. In this way the “Central Press-Bureau” wove a network of lines of communication over the whole kingdom, which, however, was carefully hidden from public view. It also kept up constant intercourse with the representatives of Prussia at the various European courts, which enabled it to give tone to public opinion on foreign affairs as well as on matters at home. Through the influence of the government, and by spending money, the Bureau gradually succeeded in introducing its agents into the offices of many newspapers, and occasionally in getting entire control of this or that journal. By this cunning policy the Prussian government was able to lead the unsuspecting public by the nose.

Whilst confiding readers throughout the land were receiving the views of their favorite journals as the honest expression of public opinion, these newspapers were in fact only the whispering-galleries of the Berlin ministry. The editors themselves were often ignorant of the fact that the pens of their co-laborers had been bought and sold. Even foreign journals, in England and France, did not escape the meshes of the “Press-Bureau,” but were entrapped and made to do service for Prussia.

Another contrivance for working up public opinion was the “Lithographic Correspondence-Bureau,” which is a French invention. This is an agency for the manufacture of correspondence from all parts of the world, at home and abroad, which is lithographed and sent to journals that are willing to pay for it; and nearly all of them find this the cheapest and easiest method of keeping abreast of the times.

As the men who found these Bureaus are chiefly intent upon making money, and live, moreover, in salutary awe of the government, they generally find it advisable to place themselves at its disposition. The correspondence-agency of Havas-Büllier in Paris was Orleanistic under Louis Philippe, and Napoleonic under the Empire. In return it obtained the monopoly of “lithographic correspondence”; so that, during the reign of Louis Napoleon, France received its knowledge of the foreign world through the single channel of this Bureau, which was carefully supervised by the government. This was too excellent a device not to find ready acceptance in Berlin, and in the most natural way in the world the “Lithographic Correspondence-Bureau” was placed alongside the “Press-Bureau”; the journals which had already fallen under the influence of the latter yielded without resistance to the seductions of the new ally, and thus became to a still greater extent the tools of the government. [Pg 292] In this way the “eunuchs of the court and press” were in position deliberately and with malice to falsify and pervert public opinion, which soon came to mean the utterances of the herd of venal scribes in Berlin who had sold themselves, body and soul, to the “Press-Bureau.” One of the five sins which, according to Confucius, is unpardonable, is from under the mantle of truth to scatter broadcast lies which are hurtful to the people; and this is the charge which Professor Wuttke brings against the crowd of German newspaper-writers.

Telegraphy, which was first introduced into Germany in 1849, led to further improvements in the art of manipulating the press. The “Correspondence-Bureau” of Havas-Büllier became a telegraphic agency and furnished despatches free of charge to the Parisian journals, in order to prevent the starting of a rival business; and when, notwithstanding, the Agence Continentale was organized, it was suppressed by Persigny, the Minister of State, who by this means was enabled to control the publication of telegrams in all the leading journals of France. In Italy the Stefani Agency, at Turin, rendered similar services to the government of Victor Emanuel; sending out the most shameless falsehoods to the four corners of the earth, and carefully suppressing whatever the authorities wished to conceal from the public. These despatches were printed in the leading journals of Europe and America as coming from unsuspected sources, when they were in fact the “cooked” telegrams of the secret agents of Cavour and the Revolution.

In 1850 Reuter established his telegraphic Agency in Aix-la-Chapelle, but removed it in the following year to Berlin; and a few months later, when the cable between Calais and Dover was laid, he made London the central point of his operations. In Berlin a similar business was opened by Dr. Wolf, a Jew. In 1855 he sold out to a number of capitalists, who organized the Continentale Telegrafenkompagnie, and then entered into a combination with Reuter and Havas, through which they controlled the telegraphic despatches furnished to the press of all Europe. To have the latest news was a journalistic necessity; and yet to maintain special agents in the great centres, and to pay the high rates for sending special telegrams, would have been too heavy a burden. Nothing remained, therefore, but to take the despatches of the Agencies which were now in league with one another.

In Prussia nearly all the telegraphic lines, most of which were put up during the reaction after the revolution of 1848, were in the hands of the government; and this, of itself, was sufficient to place the Agencies at its disposal. And in point of fact, it is no secret that in Prussia there exists a censorship of the telegraph, and that the government decides as to the despatches which the newspapers shall receive. Whoever will take the trouble to weigh this matter will see what a terrible instrument for the perversion of public opinion is thus placed in the hands of the state. A despatch has always in its favor the force of first impressions. When, after days or weeks, explanations follow, they are passed over, new events having already preoccupied public attention. All the world reads the telegram; comparatively few pay any attention to the later-coming [Pg 293] corrections of inaccurate or false statements.

Prussia, then, through her “Central Press-Bureau,” her “Correspondence-Bureau,” and her “Telegram-Bureau,” succeeded in getting control of the leading German journals, which, while keeping up the appearance of independence and honesty, were either in her pay or under the influence of her agents. Public opinion in Germany was at her mercy; so that, after she had made the most thorough preparations for the war of 1866, she found no difficulty in having it proclaimed throughout the fatherland that Austria had been arming and was ready to fall upon her in order to rob her of Silesia. The newspapers even lent themselves, when the war had begun, to the publication of a spurious address to the army by Benedek, the Austrian leader, in which there was not one word of truth, but in which he was made to speak in a way that could not fail to arouse the indignation of the Prussian soldiers. This forged document was circulated by the press and read by the captains to their men as soon as they had entered Bohemia.

The creation of the new empire has not improved German journalism. The “Press-Bureau” has enlarged the circle of its activity, while the government has invented other means not less effective for controlling the newspapers. “We care not for public opinion,” said a high official in Berlin some months ago; “for the entire press belongs to us.” Prussia has German public opinion, in so far as it is allowed to find expression, in her keeping. After the war with Austria the annual secret fund of the “Press-Bureau” was increased to 70,000 thalers; but this is in reality a very inconsiderable portion of the money at its disposition. The incorporation of Hanover and Hesse with Prussia threw into the hands of the government very large resources. From George of Hanover King William exacted 19,000,000 thalers, and from the Prince Elector of Hesse property with an annual rental of 400,000 thalers. Both these sums were placed at the disposal of Bismarck by the Landtag, that he might use them to defeat the “intrigues” of the enemies of Prussia. It was on the occasion of this grant that Bismarck used the words which have given to the “Press-Bureau” fund a name which it can never lose. “I follow,” he said, “malignant reptiles into their very holes, in order to watch their doings.” The money which he received to carry on this dark underground business was appropriately designated by the Berlin wits the “Reptile-fund” (Reptilienfond). A vocabulary of slang has been invented to designate the hired scribes of the Bureau and their operations. Bismarck calls them “my swine-herds” (meine Sauhirten). To write for the “Press-Bureau” is to take mud-baths (Schlammbäder nehmen); and the writers themselves, who are classified as “officious,” “high-officious,” “half-officious,” and “over-officious,” are called “mud-bathers” (Schlammbäder), and they devour the “Reptile-fund.” The instructions issued by the directors for the preparation of articles for the different journals are styled “wash-tickets” (Waschzettel). The directors who are not immediately connected with the Bureau are known by the name of “Piper” (Pfeifer), which, in the jargon of Berlin, has a peculiar and by no means flattering signification.

[Pg 294] As the buzzards fly to the carcass, so gathered the hungry German scribes around the “Reptile-fund”; but their pens were cheap and the “Press-Bureau” was able to feed a whole army of them, and yet have abundant means to devote to other methods for influencing public opinion. Its machinations are, of course, conducted with the greatest secrecy. All manner of blinds are used. Its agents assume in their articles a style of great independence, deal largely in loud and captious epithets, occasionally even criticise this or that measure of the government, and ape the ways of honest and patriotic men. The “Central Press-Bureau” itself is pushed as far out of sight as possible; stalking horses and scarecrows are put forward; and the institution is made to appear as only a myth. But the Cave of Æolus is in Berlin, and the winds which are let loose there blow to and fro, hither and yon, through all Germany, starting currents in other parts of the world. In this cave the old snake-worship of so many ages and peoples still exists, and the god is the “Reptile-fund.” Out of this cavern are blown the double-leaded leaders which fall thick all over the land, and always, as if by magic, just in the right place. False reports eddy through the air; stubborn facts are pulled and bent and beaten until they get into the proper shape. The light which is permitted to fall upon them is managed as skilfully as in an art-gallery or a lady’s drawing-room. With the aid of the “Reptile-fund” the “Press-Bureau” found little difficulty in extending its business of buying up journals, paying sometimes as high as a hundred thousand thalers for a single newspaper; and where this could not be done money was freely spent to start an opposition sheet. Whenever a journal was found to be growing weak, aid was proffered on condition that it should open its columns to the “Press-Bureau”; sometimes with the understanding that one of its agents should be placed in the editorial chair. So thoroughly has this system of bribery taken possession of Prussian journalism that the court decided (October, 1873), in a suit against the Germania newspaper, that to accuse an editor of being in the pay of the “Press-Bureau” is not a criminal offence, since it does not in the public estimation tend to lower his character.

Occasionally, in spite of the greatest care, the secrets of the Bureau are betrayed. Thus in February, 1874, a circular was sent to various journals, and amongst others to the Neue Wormser-Zeitung, with the offer to furnish from the capital, first, a tri-weekly original article on the political situation; second, original political and diplomatic advice from all the departments of the government, also three times a week; third, a short but exhaustive parliamentary report; fourth, special correspondence from other capitals (written in Berlin); fifth, original accounts of foreign affairs, drawn from the special sources of the Bureau; and, sixth, a short daily, as well as a more lengthy weekly, exhibit of the Berlin Bourse. For these services nothing was demanded; but, that the thing might not appear too bald, it was stated that the editor should fix his own price. Now, it so happened that when this circular was received by the Neue Wormser-Zeitung that paper was in the hands of Herr Westerburg, a Social Democrat, who straightway took the public into his confidence.

[Pg 295] The newly-acquired provinces of Prussia were a favorite field for the operations of the Berlin Bureau. General Manteuffel, in 1866, suppressed the Schleswig-Holsteinische Zeitung, and handed the country over to the reptile-press. In Alsace and Lorraine also journals were suppressed, and others established, by the government. In these provinces the independent press has wholly disappeared, with the exception of two tame and unimportant sheets. In fact, if we except the Catholic and a few Social Democratic newspapers, there is hardly a journal of any weight in the German Empire in which the press-reptile is not found. “I know,” wrote to Professor Wuttke an author well acquainted with the circumstances—“I know few German newspapers in which there is not a mud-bather.” For even passing services the Bureau is ready to pay cash. Chaplain Miarka, the editor of the Katholik, has declared publicly that he was offered 7,500 thalers on condition of consenting to write in a milder manner during the elections.

The working up of public opinion through the press extends far beyond the boundaries of the German Empire. The proceedings of the court in the trial of Von Arnim in 1874 developed the fact that he, whilst representing Prussia at the Tuileries, had entered into relations with various journals of Paris, Vienna, and Brussels; and it is generally understood that 50,000 thalers were placed at the disposition of Herr Rudolf Lindau for the purpose of manipulating the Parisian press. Through these and similar means an opening for the articles of the “Press-Bureau” was made in English, French, and Belgian newspapers; and these articles, which had been first written in German, were translated back into German and published by the reptile-press as the expression of public opinion in foreign countries on Prussian affairs. “I could give the names,” says Professor Wuttke, “of the press-reptiles who write for the Indépendance Belge, of those who take care of the Hour, and of others whose duty it is to furnish articles to the Italian and Scandinavian newspapers.”[98] To hold the English in leading strings, Berlin had, in 1869, a North Germany Correspondence, and then, under the supervision of Aegidi, the director of the “Press-Bureau,” a Norddeutsche Correspondenz, which is still the chief source from which both English and American journals draw their information on German affairs. The attempt made from Berlin to buy Katkoff’s Journal of Moscow was defeated by the incorruptibility of the proprietor.

The reptile-press, of course, ignores and strives to hush whatever may throw light upon the dark workings and intrigues of the “Press Bureau”; and no better instance of its power in this respect can be given than the history of Professor Wuttke’s book on German journalism. Its existence was not recognized by the press-reptiles; its startling revelations were ignored or received in profound silence; and so successful was this policy that a year after the publication of the work only three hundred copies had been sold; and it is chiefly through the efforts of a Catholic newspaper—the Germania—and of Windthorst, a leader of the party of the Centrum, that it has finally been brought to public notice and has now reached a third edition. In the German [Pg 296] Parliament, on the 18th of December, 1874, Windthorst took Professor Wuttke’s book with him to the speaker’s stand, and, in a powerful address against any further grant of the “Secret Fund” (Reptilien-fond), made special reference to this work, which he characterized as “conscientious” and full of startling revelations which leave room to suspect even worse things. A year before (December 3, 1873) the same speaker declared in the Prussian Landtag that in Germany the government had nearly succeeded in getting entire control of the press; that the influence of the “Reptile-fund” was already noticeable in foreign countries, particularly in the newspapers of Vienna; and that the attempt had been made to establish a “Reptile-Bureau” in connection with the London embassy; and when this was found not to work well, a “Press-Bureau” for England, France, and Italy was organized in Berlin. These charges, made in public parliamentary debate, were allowed to pass without contradiction, although Aegidi, the director of the Central Bureau, was a member of the Assembly and present during the discussion.

Eugen Richter, the member for Hagen, brought forward other accusations of like import on the 20th of January, 1874. We have already given an example of the uses to which the Prussian government puts the reptile-press, in the instance of the forged army address attributed to Benedek, and published throughout Germany at the outbreak of the war with Austria in 1866.[99] Similar services were rendered by the “mud-bathers” at the time of the crisis with France in 1870. A false telegram, purporting to come from Ems, dated July 13, 1870, in which the French minister, Count Benedetti, was said to have grossly insulted King William, was eagerly taken up by the venal press and commented upon in a way which excited the greatest indignation in the minds of the Germans against Napoleon, who, they firmly believed, was bent upon humiliating Prussia. In this way public feeling in both countries was fanned into a heat which could be cooled only by blood. The account of the interview at Ems was a fabrication, as Benedetti has since clearly shown; but Bismarck’s “swineherds” had faithfully done their unholy work.[100]

When, just at the beginning of the war, the French army made an attack on Saarbrücken, the reptile-press spread the report that they had reduced the city to ashes; and this infamous falsehood made a deep impression throughout Germany. A similar lie had been propagated at the commencement of the Austrian war. On the 27th of June, 1866, the Prussians were driven from Trautenau by General Gablenz, and forthwith the reptile-press raised the cry that the citizens of Trautenau had poured from their houses hot water and boiling oil on the retreating soldiers; and the government lent itself to the spreading of this detestable calumny by dragging off the mayor of Trautenau, Dr. Roth, to prison, where he was detained in close confinement nearly three months.[101]

There is no subject on which the organs of the “Press-Bureau” are more united or more eloquent than the necessity of keeping up the full [Pg 297] strength of the standing army; nay, they have gone so far as to demand that the Reichstag shall consent to take from the representatives of the people the right to legislate on military affairs during the next seven years. But before taking this step, hitherto unheard of in the history of constitutional government, it was necessary to manipulate public opinion, so that the members of parliament might seem to be compelled to this decision by the will of the people themselves. With this view packed meetings were gotten up in various parts of the empire which the telegraph lyingly announced to the world as very numerously attended and unanimous in demanding the seven-year enactment; but the popular gatherings which were held to protest against this violation of constitutional rights were passed over in dead silence, and their action, consequently, did not become known outside of their own immediate neighborhood. The reptile-press acted in full harmony with the “Telegraph-Bureau.” The Spener’sche Zeitung, in Berlin, went so far as to declare that no protests had been heard, whereupon the Provinzial-korrespondenz exclaimed that the movement, which had proceeded from the depths of the nation’s heart with unexpected power, should force the Reichstag to yield to the demand of the government.

As a part of the same programme, the “Press-Bureau” just a year ago raised the cry that France was buying horses, and that in less than three months she would declare war on Germany. On the same day and at the same hour this startling announcement was made in Frankfort, in Leipzig, in Stuttgart, and other cities. The following day hundreds of newspapers throughout the fatherland took up the chorus and began to shout that the empire was threatened. Now, all the world knows that France at that time was as little thinking of making war on Germany as of tunnelling the Atlantic Ocean; but this piece of journalistic legerdemain roused the Teutonic mind to the necessity of strengthening the army and increasing the military resources of a country which was already a camp of soldiers.

No figure of rhetoric is more forcible than repetition, and we may calculate with mathematical precision just how many leading articles, all saying the same thing in fifty different localities, are required in order to fabricate a public opinion on a given subject.

Another trick of the reptile-press is employed to prevent the people from getting a knowledge of the speeches of the opposition in parliament. The arguments of these orators are either excluded from its columns or caricatured so as to appear childish or ridiculous. When, for instance, Sonnemann, the member for Frankfort, made an appeal in behalf of the Alsacians, who had themselves been reduced to dead silence, and showed from authentic documents the pitiable condition to which that province had been brought, the organs of the “Press-Bureau” declared that “to answer such utterances would be beneath the dignity of a chancellor of the empire; such want of political honor had no claim to pass as the honest views of an individual”; and when Mallinckrodt placed his hand on Lamarmora’s book to prove his charges against Bismarck, the Spener’sche Zeitung announced that “the national parties were filled with deepest disgust at the conduct of the Centrum’s faction, [Pg 298] and were not able to conceal their regret that Prince Bismarck should deign to answer these Ultramontane brawlers, since, by consenting to notice the tricks of Windthorst, Mallinckrodt, and Schorlemer, he was giving prominence to what ought to be completely ignored”; and then closed with the phrase of Frederick the Great, “Shall we play at fisticuffs with the rabble?” The Norddeutsche Allgemeine and National Zeitung indulged in similar strains, and these articles were then republished by nearly the entire German press. When an opponent is especially troublesome the press-reptiles raise the cry that he has been bought up by foreign gold; and in this they are probably sincere, since it must be difficult for them to understand how any man could refuse to sell himself for a proper consideration.

For five years now Bismarck’s venal press has poured the full tide of its wrath upon the bishops and priests of Germany. Here was a subject upon which the reptiles could distil their venom to their hearts’ content. What magnificent opportunities were here offered to the “mud-bathers” to hunt through the sewers of the centuries and to wallow in the mire of the ages; to revive Luther’s vocabulary and refurbish the rusty weapons that for hundreds of years had lain idle and hurtless! What an open field was here in which to ventilate historical calumnies, to produce startling effects by the dramatic grouping of striking figures; to bring out the light of the golden present by causing it to fall upon the dark and bloody background of the past! And what divine occasions for indignation, wrath, horror, word-painting to cause the hair to stand on end and the eyes to start! Here was place for withering scorn, patriotic thunder, lurid lightning to sear the Jesuitic head bent upon the ruin of the new empire. And with what demoniac delight the hired crew ring the changes on each popular catch-word—progress, liberty, culture, free thought; and how they foam and rage when a bishop or a priest has the “boundless impudence” to speak in defence of the church! “It has come to this,” says the Dresdener Volksbote (April 17, 1873): “Minorities must keep silence.”

“Gone,” exclaims a former German Minister of State,—“gone is the reign of noble ideas; the power of the love of country and of freedom; the worth and honor of the national character! Money alone is loved, and all means by which it is acquired seem natural and praiseworthy.” The very foundations of the moral order are attacked by this vile press. The events of 1866 and 1870 are now spoken of as “an historical phenomenon, which cannot be judged by the current notions of morality, but in accordance with which these moral principles themselves must be widened and corrected.” This is the low and degrading philosophy to which the idolatry of success fatally leads.

But, for the honor of journalism, a portion of the German press has remained closed against the insidious power of the “Reptile-fund.” No Catholic newspaper has lent itself even covertly to this conspiracy against truth and liberty; and it must be admitted, too, that the socialistic journals have refused the government bribes; their circulation, however, which is not large, is confined almost exclusively to the laboring classes, and their influence is but little felt. The [Pg 299] power of the Catholic press in Germany is of recent growth. In the early part of the present century the only periodical of any weight devoted to the defence of the interests of the church in Germany was the Theologische Quartalschrift, founded in 1819 as the organ of the Tübingen professors. Twenty years later Joseph Görres established in Munich the Historisch-politischen Blätter, which soon caused the influence of his powerful mind to be felt throughout the fatherland, and which, under the editorial management of the historian Jörg, is still to-day one of the ablest reviews in Germany. The censorship of the press which, prior to the revolution of 1848, was maintained in all the German governments, was exercised in a way that rendered Catholic journalism impossible. No sooner, however, had the Parliament of Frankfort proclaimed the liberty of the press than the Catholics hastened to take advantage of it by creating newspapers to advocate their religious interests. The bishops and priests, in obedience to the earnest exhortations of Pius IX., threw themselves into the work with a will; the people followed their example; press-unions were formed and a large number of Catholic newspapers sprang into life. Bismarck’s persecution of the church gave yet greater force to this movement and increased both the number and the circulation of Catholic journals. In the new German Empire there are to-day two hundred and thirty newspapers devoted to the interests of the church. The Augsburger Wochenblatt has a subscription list of thirty-two thousand; the Mainzer Volksblatt, one of thirty thousand. Twelve thousand copies of the Germania (in Berlin) are sold daily, and many other Catholic journals have a circulation of from five to ten thousand copies. As this powerful Catholic press could not be bought, nothing remained to be done but to silence it.

At the close of the year 1872 all Prussian journals were warned, under pain of confiscation, not to publish the Christmas Allocution of Pope Pius IX. Mallinckrodt, the vigilant Catholic leader, raised his voice in protest against this attempt upon the liberty of the press; but the Reichstag was silent, and the newspapers which had not heeded the warning were seized. The Mainzer Journal was brought into court for having presumed to print an open letter to the emperor, in which was found the following sentence: “The emperor is bound by the laws of the moral order just like the least of his subjects.” The government procurator (Schön, in Mainz, on the 19th of December, 1873) declared that the emperor is a “sanctified” person, whose majesty is “above the laws of the state,” and the bare address “to the emperor” is a punishable offence. For republishing this open letter the editors of the Kölner Volkszeitung and the Mühlheimer Anzeiger were condemned to prison for two months. Siegbert, the managing editor of the Deutscher Reichszeitung (Catholic), was called upon to give the name of the writer of a certain article which he had published; and upon his declaration that this would be a breach of honor he was thrown into prison.

On the 1st of July, 1874, a new law came into force, by which still further restrictions were placed upon the liberty of the press; and on the 15th of the same month the Minister of Justice enjoined upon the government officials to keep sharp [Pg 300] watch upon the newspapers. Within six months from this date the Germania newspaper in Berlin had been condemned thirty-nine times; and there were besides twenty-four untried charges against it in court. In January, February, March, and April, 1875—four months—one hundred and thirty-six editors were condemned either to prison or to pay a fine. The most of these were Catholics, though some of them belonged to the democratic and socialistic press. It is not necessary to say that the “press-reptiles” were not represented among them. These editors were thrust into the cells of common criminals, were refused books and writing material, and were forced to live upon “prison fare,” which many found so unpalatable that they could eat nothing but rye-bread.

The reptile-press alone is tolerated. If a man wishes to be honest, and has, notwithstanding, no desire to go to jail, the most unwise thing which he could do would be to become a journalist in the new German Empire. To refuse to eat of the “Reptile-fund” is to condemn one’s self to Bismarck’s “prison fare” of beans and cold water.

To poison the wells is not held to be lawful, even in war; but to taint the fountain-sources of knowledge, and to corrupt the channels through which alone the public receives its general information, is not thought to be unworthy of a great hero, if we may judge from the Prussian chancellor’s popularity with Englishmen and Americans, which is not diminished even by his determined efforts to crush all who refuse to sell their souls or renounce their manhood.

“The only man,” said Carlyle of Bismarck—“the only man appointed by God to be his vicegerent here on earth in these days, and knowing he was so appointed, and bent with his whole soul on doing and able to do God’s work.” And our great centennial celebration of the reign of popular government is to be desecrated by a colossal statue of the man who is its deadliest enemy.

We have not, in this country, wholly escaped the evil effects of the vast European conspiracy against truth and honor which is carried on through the agency of “Press-Bureaus,” “Telegram-Bureaus,” “Correspondence-Bureaus,” and “Reptile-funds.” One may, for instance, readily detect the “trail of the serpent” in many of the cable despatches to the Associated Press, and not less evidently in the European correspondence of some of our leading journals. Is it not worthy of remark that so few of our great newspapers should have taken up the defence of the persecuted and imprisoned German editors? The American press, which can, upon such slight compulsion, be blatant and loud-mouthed, has been most reserved in its treatment of Bismarck; has, indeed, hardly attempted to veil its sympathy with his despotic and arbitrary measures. If this approval of tyranny went merely the length of applauding his persecution of the Catholic Church, it might be explained by the desire to pander to popular Protestant prejudice. But how shall we account for it when there is question of the degradation and enslavement of the press itself; of the violation of every principle of liberty; and of the systematic consolidation of the most complete military despotism which the world has ever seen? Might it not be possible, even, to trace to the Reptilien-fond the recent attempts to [Pg 301] rekindle in the United States the flame of religious hate and fanaticism? However this may be, it is unfortunately true that money is the controlling power in American as in German journalism. Its influence is as discernible in the columns of our own “independent” press as in a genuine Berlin “mud-bather’s” double-leaded leader.

“How can we help it?” said a well-known editor of Vienna. “A newspaper office is a shop where publicity is bought and sold.” “I will be frank,” said another journalist. “I am like a woman of the town (Ich bin die Hure von Berlin): if you wish to have this and that written, pay your money.” Praise and blame, approval and condemnation, are the articles of merchandise of the press, and they are offered to the highest bidder.

“When the proprietor of a journal,” says Sacher-Mosach, a widely-known and conscientious writer, who was for some time connected with the Vienna newspaper, the Presse, and afterwards with the Neue Freie Presse—“when the proprietor of a journal has entered into lucrative relations with a bank, he is not content with placing his sheet at its disposition in whatever relates to financial matters; but if the director of the bank, as sometimes happens, is a man of fancy who patronizes an actress who has beauty but not talent, he will order his theatrical critic to praise this lady without stint; and the critic will reserve all his squibs for some old comédienne who is not protected by a bank director or by any one else. If a great publisher has all the works which appear in his house advertised in the journal, the proprietor will direct his book critic to find them all admirably written, profound, and full of the freshest and most delightful thoughts; and the author is just as certain to be praised in this sheet as he is to be torn to pieces by the newspapers in which his book has not been advertised. The first principle of journalistic industry and of the criticism at its command is to recognize merit only when and so far as it is financially profitable to do so.”[102]

It is far from our thought to wish to deny the vast power for good exercised by the press; but this is its own constant theme, and we have deemed it a more worthy, even though a less pleasant, task to point out at least some of the ways in which its power may be turned against the highest interests of truth and the dearest liberties of the people. A thoughtful and fearless work on the influence of journalism on our American civilization would be a fitting contribution to the centennial literature, and at the same time a most instructive chapter in the history of the country. The only attempt of this kind which so far has been made does not rise above the dignity of a compilation, and is without value as a philosophical discussion of the subject.

[97] Die deutsche Zeitschriften und die Entstehung der öffentlichen Meinung. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Zeitungswesens. Von Heinrich Wuttke.—The German newspapers and the origin of public opinion: a contribution to the history of journalism. Leipzig: 1875.

[98] Die deutsche Zeitschriften, p. 309.

[99] This spurious document has got into many books; e.g., into Hahn’s Geschichte des preussischen Vaterlandes.

[100] See Ma Mission en Prusse, by Benedetti, Paris, 1871, p. 372 et seq.

[101] Roth, Achtzig Tage in preussischen Gefangenschaft, p. 13.

[102] Sacher-Mosach, Ueber den Werth der Kritik, Leipzig, 1873, p. 55.

[Pg 302]

SOME FORGOTTEN CATHOLIC POETS.

“… Illacrimabiles

Urgentur, ignotique longa

Nocte carent quia vate sacro.”

When we speak of Catholic poets, three of the foremost names in English literature come up at once—Dryden, Pope, and Moore. The two latter are more eminent, perhaps, as poets than as Catholics, but of Dryden’s sincerity and steadfastness in the change of faith which “moralized his song” and gave a masterpiece to English poetry there is, happily, no doubt. Many later names are familiar to the general reader as those of Catholics whose genius has lent lustre to our own epoch. Some, like Newman, Faber, De Vere, and Adelaide Procter, claim fellowship with the most famous and are known wherever English poetry is read. Others, like Caswall, Coventry Patmore, and D. F. MacCarthy, are favorites of a narrower circle. All are known as Catholic poets to many by no means intimate with their works. Even poor Clarence Mangan has not been denied his place and his crust of praise on the doorsteps of the “Victorian Era”—he was never a very importunate suppliant: no act of Parliament could have made that minstrel a “sturdye begger”—and is scarcely yet forgotten, although he added to the (æsthetic) crime of being a Catholic and the weakness of being an Irishman the unpardonable sin of living and dying in utter poverty and wretchedness.

Our present business, however, is not with these or with any who, being dead, have friends and followers to sound their praises, or, living, whose books may still be read and admired, if only by themselves. We shall take leave to introduce the reader into an obscurer company, where he will yet, we are assured, find those who are not unworthy of his friendship and esteem. They themselves and their memories even are ghosts; but they will gladly take form and substance to receive our sympathetic greeting and unbosom themselves of their sorrows. Fate has pressed hardly on them; they have felt the “iniquity of oblivion”; forgetfulness has been for most of them their only mourner; upon their trembling little rushlight of glory that each fondly hoped was to be a beacon for eternity that sardonic jester, Time, has clapped his grim extinguisher and they are incontinently snuffed out. Posterity, their court of last appeal, is bribed to cast them, and their scanty heritage of immortality is parcelled out among a younger and greedier generation. Instead of the trophies and mausoleums they looked to so confidently, the monuments more lasting than brass, they are fain to put up with a broken urn in an antiquarian’s cabinet, a half-obliterated headstone in Sexton Allibone’s deserted graveyard.

We own to a weakness for neglected poets. The reigning favorite of that whimsical tyrant, Fame, ruffling in all the bravery of new editions and costly bindings, worldly-minded [Pg 303] critics may cringe to and flatter; we shall seek him out when he is humbled and in disgrace, very likely out at elbows and banished to the Tomos of the bookstall or the Siberia of the auction-room. We are shy indeed of those great personages who throng the council-chambers of King Apollo, and are ill at ease in their society. A bowing acquaintance with them we crave at most, to brag of among our friends, and, for the rest, are much more at home with the little poets who cool their heels in the gracious sovereign’s anteroom. These we can take to our bosoms and our firesides; but imagine having Dante every day to dinner, leaving hope at the door as he comes scowling in, or Milton for ever discoursing “man’s first disobedience” over the tea and muffins! Don Juan’s Commander were a more cheerful guest.

It is pleasant, we take it, to turn aside now and then from the crowded highway where these great folks air their splendors, and lose ourselves in the dewy woods where the lesser muses hide, tracing some slender by-path where few have strayed.—secretum iter et fallentes semita vitæ. The flowers that grow by the roadside may be more radiant or of rarer scent; but what delight to explore for ourselves the shy violet hidden from other eyes, to stumble by untrodden ways upon the freshness of secret springs, and perhaps of a sudden to emerge in the graveyard aforesaid, where the air is full of elegies more touching than Gray’s, and our good sexton is at hand to wipe the dust from this or the other sunken tombstone of some world-famous bard and help us to decipher his meagre record. The tombstone is the folio containing his immortal works; it is heavier than most tombstones, and his world-famous memory moulders quietly beneath it. Surely there is something pathetic in such a destiny; something which touches a human chord. We may pity the fate of many a forgotten poet whose poems we should not greatly care to read. With their keen self-consciousness, which is not vanity, and their sensitiveness to outward impressions, poets more than most men cling to that hollow semblance of earthly life beyond the grave, that mirage of true immortality, we call posthumous fame. More than most they dread and shrink from the callous indifference, the cynical disrespect, of the mighty sans-culotte, Death. To die is little; but to die and be forgotten, to vanish from the scene of one’s daily walks and talks and countless cheerful activities, as utterly and as silently as a snow-flake melts in the sea; to be blotted out of the book of life as carelessly as a schoolboy would sponge a cipher from his slate—this jars upon us, this makes us wince. From that fate, at least, the poet feels himself secure; he leaves behind him the Beloved Book. With that faithful henchman to guard it, the pale phantom of his fame cannot be jostled aside from the places that knew him by the hurrying, selfish crowds. It will remain, the better part of himself, “the heir of his invention,” but kinder than most heirs, to jog the world’s elbow from time to time and buy him a brief furlough from oblivion. Through that loyal interpreter he may still hold converse with his fellows, who might ill understand the speech of that remote, mysterious realm wherein he has been naturalized a citizen; he will keep up a certain shadowy correspondence with the cosey firesides, the merry gatherings, he has left that may serve to warm and cheer him [Pg 304] in the chilly company of ghosts; perhaps—who knows?—may even lend him dignity and consequence among that thin fraternity. He will not wholly have resigned his voice in mundane matters; his memory, as it were a spiritual shadow, will continue to fall across the familiar ways; he will have his portion still, a place reserved for him, in the bustling, merry world. Very likely at this stage of his reflections he will whisper to himself, Non omnis moriar; in his enthusiasm he may go further, and with gay, vain, prattling Herrick share immortality, as though it were a school-boy’s plum-cake, among his friends. Hugging this smiling illusion, he resigns himself to the grave, and the daisies have not had time to bloom thereon before the Beloved Book, the loyal interpreter, the faithful henchman, the wonder-worker of his dream, is as dead and utterly forgotten as—well, let us say as the promises our friend the new Congressman made us when he expressed such friendly anxiety about our health just previous to the late election.

So utter, even ludicrous, a bouleversement of hopes so passionate—and there is nothing a poet longs for so passionately as remembrance after death, unless it be recognition in life—may touch the sourest cynic. It may be as Milton says in his proudly conscious way: Si quid meremur, sana posteritas sciet. But what comfort is it to our undeserving to know that a sane posterity is justified in forgetting it? Good poetry, like virtue, is its own reward. But the bad poet, outcast of gods and men, and of every bookseller who owns not and publishes a popular magazine; the Pariah of Parnassus, the Ishmael of letters, with every critic’s hand against him, haunted through life by the dim, appalling spectre of his own badness, helplessly prescient in lucid intervals of the quaintly cruel doom which is to consign him after death to the paper-mill, there to be made over—heu! fides mutatosque deos!—for the base uses of other bad poets, his rivals—if to this martyr we cannot give consolation, we surely need not grudge compassion.

The discerning reader may have gathered from these remarks that the bards we are about to usher back from endless night into his worshipful presence are not all of the first order, or indeed of any uniform order, of excellence. They are not all Miltons or Shaksperes: si quid meremur would be for some of them an idle boast, and their posterity can hardly be convicted of insanity for having sedulously let them be. But neither must we argue rashly from this neglect of them that they deserved to be neglected. Neglect was for a time the portion of the greatest names in English letters. Up to the middle of the last century it was practically the common lot of all the writers who came before the Restoration. Literary gentlemen, the wits of the coffee-house, the Aristarchuses of Dick’s or Button’s, knew about them in a vague way as a set of queer old fellows who wrote uncouth verses in an outlandish dialect about the time of Shakspere and Milton. The more enterprising poets stole from them; but English literature as a living body knew them not. They were no longer members of the guild or made free of its mysteries; they were foreigners among their own people, speaking a strange tongue, shrewdly suspected of unwholesome dealings in such forbidden practices as fancy and imagination, and on the whole best excluded [Pg 305] from the commonwealth of letters. Even Shakspere and Milton were little more than names. To the patched and periwigged taste of Queen Anne’s and the Georgian era they made no appeal; the critics of the quadrille-table and the tea-gardens, the “pretty fellows” of the Wells, voted them low and insipid. Milton was a wild fanatic with heterodox notions of regicide, who wrote a dull epic which the ingenious Mr. Addison saw fit to praise in his Spectator for a novelty, of course, though his papers upon it were certainly far less amusing than those devoted to Sir Roger and his widow or the diversions of the Amorous Club; while Shakspere was a curious old playwright whom the great Mr. Pope stooped to admire with qualifications, and even to edit—with notes, and some of whose rude productions, notably King Lear, when polished and made presentable by the elegant Mr. Tate, were really not so bad, though of course not for a moment to be compared to such superlative flights of genius as The Distressed Mother or The Mourning Bride. Does anybody nowadays read the elegant Mr. Tate, King William’s laureate of pious and immortal memory? Besides his labors in civilizing King Lear and his celebrated Poems upon Tea, perhaps also upon toast, a grateful country owed to him, in conjunction with Dr. Brady, its rescue from Sternhold and Hopkins, “arch-botchers of a psalm or prayer,” of whom we read, with a subdued but mighty joy, that they

“… had great qualms

When they translated David’s Psalms,”

as well they might. Yet, despite this notable achievement, Nahum (Nahum, O Phœbus! was his name) has long since ceased to fill the speaking trump. But for his impertinences to the “poor despised” Lear he would be quite forgotten. He is a fly like many another preserved in Shakspere’s amber.

One reads with a sort of dumb rage of these essays of smirking mediocrity to “improve on” that colossal genius. It was Gulliver tricked out by the Liliputians. Tate was not the only ‘prentice hand that tried its skill at “painting the lily.” Cibber and Shadwell were industrious at it, and to this day many of us know Shakspere’s “refined gold” only as it comes to us electroplated from the Cibberian crucible. Lord Lansdowne prepared a Jew of Venice, which was acted with a prologue by Mr. Bevill Higgins—another Phœbean title which the great trumpeter has unaccountably dropped. Mr. Higgins brings forward Shakspere telling Dryden:

“These scenes in their rough native dress weremine,

But now, improved, with nobler lustre shine;

The first rude sketches Shakspere’s pencil drew,

But all the shining master-strokes are new.

This play, ye critics, shall your fury stand,

Adorn’d and rescuéd by a faultless hand.”

Here are two of the shining master-strokes:

“As who should say, I am, sir, an oracle”;

“Still quiring to the blue-eyed cherubim”!

And this was Pope’s “Granville the polite,” the “Muses’ glory and delight” of Young, who informs us, moreover—he had certainly a very pretty taste and boundless generosity in praising a person of quality—that, though long may we hope brave Talbot’s blood will run In great descendants, Shakspere has but one, And him my Lord (he begs will) permit him not to name, But in kind silence spare his rival’s shame. The generous reserve is vain, however. Each reader will defeat his useless aim, And to himself [Pg 306] great Agamemnon name. Great Agamemnon is Granville:

“Europe sheathed the sword

When this great man was first saluted lord,”

apparently that he might give his whole time to filling Shakspere with shining new master-strokes like those above.

All this sounds ridiculous enough. But even genius was bitten by the same tarantula. We all know how Johnson treated Lycidas. Dryden found the rhyme in Milton’s juvenile poems “strained and forced” (this of L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, for example!), and confessed that Shakspere’s diction was almost as difficult to him as Chaucer. How difficult Chaucer was much nearer his own time may be inferred from the leonine Latin version of the Troilus and Cresscide which Francis Kinaston, an Oxford scholar, published in 1635, with the avowed object of rescuing Chaucer “from the neglect to which his obsolete language had condemned him by rendering him generally intelligible.” And Cartwright, “the florid and seraphicall preacher,” approves his pious labor, telling him:

“‘Tis to your happy cares we owe that we

Read Chaucer now without a dictionary.”

What a commentary on the educational system of the time that in England such English as this—

“This Troilus, as he was wont to guide

His yonge knights, he lad hem up and doune

In thilke large temple, on every side

Beholding aie the ladies of the toune,”

should be less generally intelligible than such Latin as this:

“Hic Troilus pro more (ut solebat)

Juveniles equites pone se sequentes

Per fani spatia ampla perducebat

Assidue urbis dominas intuentes.”

But so it was, and so it was to be long after. In 1718 Bysshe, in his Art of Poetry, “passed by Spenser and the poets of his age, because their language has become so obsolete that most readers of our age have no ear for them, and therefore Shakspere is quoted so rarely in this collection.” And Thomas Warton says of Pope’s obligations to Milton, “It is strange that Pope, by no means of a congenial spirit, should be the first who copied Comus or Il Penseroso. But Pope was a gleaner of the old English poets; and he was here pilfering from obsolete English poetry without the least fear or danger of being detected.” Pope certainly was a proficient in his own “art of stealing wisely.” “Who now reads Cowley?” he asks, and answers his own question in the lines he borrowed from him.

What an anomalous period in our literature was this!—polished, witty, brilliant to the highest degree, displaying in its own productions incomparable taste and art, yet so incapable, seemingly, of “tasting” the great writers who had gone before it! Fancy a time when people went about—people of cultivation, too—asking who was that fellow Shakspere! To us he seems as real and as large a figure in his dim perspective as the largest and most alive that swaggers in the foreground of to-day. Do we not feel something weird and uncanny, something ghostly, on opening the Retrospective Review so late as 1825, and finding Robert Herrick gravely paraded as a new discovery? Fifty years ago that was by the dates; as we read it seems five hundred. The critic antedates by centuries his subject—like his own god Lyæus, “ever fresh and ever young”—and is infinitely older, quainter, more remote from us. Is it our turn next to be forgotten? Shall we not all be asking at our next Centennial if Tennyson ever lived, debating whether Master Farquhar [Pg 307] was really the author of the poems attributed to Browning, finding Longfellow difficult and obscure, and wondering in our antiquarian societies if Thackeray was a religious symbol or something to eat? Shall we—but if we keep on in this wise, one thing plainly we shall not do, and that is get back to our neglected Catholic poets—now twice neglected. Let us leave our future to bury its own dead, and betake ourselves once more to the poetic past.

We have seen that our Catholic poets, if forgotten, were at least forgotten in good company; in the ample recognition which came at last to the latter they did not so fully share. In that Renaissance of our early literature which marked the close of the last century, and which, pioneered by Percy, Ritson, Wright, Nichols, Warton, Brydges, and others, restored to the Elizabethan poets, with Chaucer and Milton, their “comates in exile,” a pre-eminence from which they will scarcely be dislodged, many of our particular friends came to the surface. But most of them did not long remain there, dropping quickly out of sight, either from intrinsic weight or the indifference of the literary fishers who had netted them. How far any such indifference may have been due to their faith we will not venture to say. We should be sorry to believe that the hateful spirit of religious bigotry had invaded the muse’s peaceful realm, scaring nymph and faun from the sides of Helicon with strange and hideous clamor. For our own part, we like a poet none the worse for being a Protestant, though we may like him a trifle the better for being a Catholic. We have a vague notion that all good poets ought to be Catholics, and a secret persuasion that some day they will be; that the Tennysons, the Holmeses, the Longfellows and Lowells and Brownings of the future will be gathered into the fold, and only the ——s or the ——s (the reader will kindly fill up these blank spaces with his pet poetical aversions) be left to raise the hymns of heterodoxy on the outside in melancholy and discordant chorus,

“Their lean and flashy songs

Grating on scrannel pipes of wretched straw.”

Awaiting that blissful time, however, we are content to enjoy the “music of Apollo’s lute” as it comes to us, without inspecting too curiously the fingers that touch it, so long as they be clean. And we are willing to believe that if our Catholic poets have had less than their fair share of attention, it has been their misfortune or their fault, and not because of any sectarian cabal to crowd them from the thrones which may belong to them of right among “the inheritors of unfulfilled renown.”

To tell the truth, indeed, such of them as we find prior to the time of Elizabeth have few claims on our regret. We count, of course, from the Reformation; when all poets were Catholics, there was nothing peculiarly distinctive in being a Catholic poet. The Shyp of Folys of the Worlde, translated out of Latin, Frenche and Doche into Englyshe tonge by Alexander Barclay, preste, is too well known to come fairly into our category. But the Shyp of Folys belongs, after all, at least as much to Sylvester Brandt as to Barclay, and the more original works of the good monk of Ely—his Eglogues (though these, too, were based on Mantuanus and Æneas Sylvius, afterwards pope), his Figure of our Mother [Pg 308] Holy Church oppressed by the French King—even those trenchant satires, in which he demolished Master Skelton, the heretical champion, are sufficiently forgotten to be his passport. Another of his translations, The Castle of Labour, from the French, may have suggested to Thomson his Castle of Indolence—to the latter bard a more congenial mansion.

The “mad, mery wit” which won for Heywood, the epigrammatist, the favor of Henry VIII. and his daughter Mary seems vapid enough to us. Perhaps it was like champagne, which must be drunk at once, and, being kept for a century or two, grows flat and insipid. The Play called the four P’s, being a new and merry Enterlude of a Palmer, Pardoner, Poticary, and Pedlar, would scarcely run for a hundred nights on the metropolitan stage. His Epigrams, six hundred in Number, which were thought uproariously funny by his own generation, ours finds rather dismal reading. We somehow miss the snap of even that wonderful design, his Dialogue containing in effect the number of al the Proverbes in the English tongue, which all England was shaking its sides over long after Shakspere had flung his rarest pearls at its feet. Heywood’s great work is an allegory entitled, The Spider and the Flie, “wherein,” says a polite contemporary, “he dealeth so profoundly and beyond all measure of skill that neither he himself that made it, neither any one that readeth it, can reach to the meaning thereof.” It is a sort of religious parable, the flies representing the Catholics, and the spiders the Protestants, to whom enter presently, dea ex machinâ, Queen Mary with a broom. Heywood “was inflexibly attached to the Catholic cause,” and when, the broom-wielder having gone to another sphere, the spiders got the ascendant, he betook himself to Mechlin, where he died in exile for conscience’ sake. Therein Chaucer could have done no better.

Can we enroll Sir Thomas More among our tuneful company? Brave old Sir Thomas was a Catholic certainly—a Catholic of the Catholics—and he wrote poetry, too, or what passed for such. It is one of the many heinous charges brought against him by worthy Master Skelton in his Pithie, Pleasaunt and Profitable Workes—his going about

“With his poetry

And his sophistry

To mock and make a lie.”

But if poetry were a crime, and no other had been laid to his charge, the good chancellor might have stood his trial freely on such evidence as is found in his works. His Mery Jest, how a Sergeant would learn to play the Freere, is thought by Ellis to have furnished the hint for Cowper’s John Gilpin. A Rufull Lamentation on the death of Queen Elizabeth, Henry VIII.’s mother, has touches of pathos. The dying queen soliloquizes:

“Where are our castels now, where are our towers?

Godely Rychemonde, sone art thou gone from me!

At Westminster that costly worke of yours,[103]

Myne owne dere Lorde, now shall I never see!

Almighty God vouchsafe to grant that ye

For you and your children well may edify;

My palace byldyd is, and lo! now here I ly.”

These, however, were the pastimes of his early youth, and even so were greatly, and doubtless justly, esteemed in his own time for their purity and elegance of style. For this reason also they are freely quoted by Dr. Johnson in the preface to his dictionary. More’s fame does not rest on these achievements, [Pg 309] but on the greatness of mind which baffled the tyrant, and “the erudition which overthrew the fabric of false learning and civilized his country.” If not a poet, he was better than a poet, a great and good man, and his memory not Catholics only, but all good men, must ever hold in affectionate reverence.

Surrey, the gallant and the ill-fated, exactly reverses our doubt about Sir Thomas. A poet beyond question, is he to be reckoned a Catholic? His father was, and his son would have been had he had the courage of his opinions. The former, imprisoned at the same time with Surrey, “though a strong Papist,” says Lord Herbert, “pretended to ask for Sabellicus as the most vehement detecter of the usurpations of the Bishop of Rome.” And Surrey’s sister, the Duchess of Richmond, who swore away his life, “inclined to the Protestants,” says Walpole, “and hated her brother.” We need not dwell upon the doubt, however, since Surrey is otherwise ruled out of our small society. A poet included in all the regular collections, called by his admirers the first of English classics, and by Pope accorded the final glory of being “the Granville (!) of a former age,” can scarcely be held one of the neglected to whom alone our suffrages are due. There, too, is Nicholas Grimoald, also of dubious orthodoxy, though undoubted genius. Nicholas was Ridley’s chaplain and suspected of being tainted with his patron’s heresy, but cleared himself by a formal recantation. Let us trust it was sincere. Grimoald’s verses are often of remarkable elegance, and to the “strange metre” or blank verse, which he adopted from Lord Surrey, he lent renewed grace and vigor.

“Right over stood in snow-white armour brave

The Memphite Zoroas, a cunning clerk,

To whom the heavens lay open as his book,

And in celestial bodies he could tell

The moving, meeting, light, aspect, eclipse,

And influence and constellations all.”

The eighteenth century might own these lines, the product of the first half of the sixteenth.

Edward Parker, Lord Morley, was a “rigid Catholic” and a prodigious author. He lived to be near a hundred, and left at least as many volumes as he had years. Besides translations of countless Latin and Greek authors from Plutarch and Seneca to St. Thomas Aquinas and Erasmus, he wrote “several tragedies and comedies the very titles of which are lost,” and “certain rhimes,” says Bale with a sniff of disdain. All alike are “dark oblivion’s prey,” but history has preserved the important fact that “this lord having a quarrel for precedence with the Lord Dacre of Gillesland, he had his pretensions confirmed by Parliament.” What a sermon on human ambition! Genius toils incessantly for a century or so, turning off tragedies and comedies, rhymes and commentaries, without number, to be its monument through all time, and presently along comes that uncivil master of ceremonies, that insufferable flunky, Fame, kicks these immortal works without ceremony into the dust-heap, and introduces Genius to posterity as the person who “had the quarrel for precedence with my Lord Dacre of Gillesland.” No distinction here, you see; not even a decent observance of those pretensions which Parliament confirmed. Lord Dacre, who never wrote, perhaps never knew how to write, a line, has his name bawled as loudly to the company as the author of all these tragedies and comedies and rhymes. Poor Lord Morley! may he rest as [Pg 310] soundly as his books! His pretensions to oblivion, at least, no one is likely to dispute.

Another poet and scholar not less scurvily treated, and to whom we have somehow taken a wonderful fancy, was George Etheridge, a fellow of Oxford and Regius Professor of Greek there under Mary. Persecuted for Popery by Queen Elizabeth, he lost his university preferments, but “established a private seminary at Oxford for the instruction of Catholic youth in the classics, music, and logic.” He also “practised physic with much reputation,” greatly, no doubt, to the joy of his pupils. A friend of Leland, the antiquarian, his accomplishments were varied and his learning profound. “He was an able mathematician,” says a contemporary, “and one of the most excellent vocal and instrumental musicians in England, but he chiefly delighted in the lute and lyre; a most elegant poet, and a most exact composer of English, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew verses, which he used to set to the harp with the greatest skill.” Of all these elegant productions one only survives—a Greek encomium, we are sorry to say, on that royal reprobate, Henry VIII.; and the memory of this pious scholar of the sixteenth century has suffered the slight of being confounded with the graceless dramatist of the seventeenth.

A cockle-shell weathers the storm that wrecks a frigate, and a nursery rhyme has outlived Etheridge’s poetry and Morley’s erudition. If widespread renown be a test of merit, The Merry Tales of the Madman of Gotham must be a work of genius. “Scholars and gentlemen” temp. Henry VIII. “accounted it a book full of wit and mirth,” and the scholars and babies of three centuries later approve that judgment. The author of this famous poem was Dr. Andrew Borde, or Andreas Perforatus, as he preferred to call himself, “esteemed in his time a noted poet, a witty and ingenious person, and an excellent physician,” serving in the latter capacity, it is said, to Henry VIII. He was the original of the stage Merry-andrew, “going to fairs and the like, where he would gather a crowd, to whom he prescribed by humorous speeches couched in such language as caused mirth and wonderfully propagated his fame.” He wrote, besides the Merry Tales, The Mylner of Abington, a satire called the Introduction of Knowledge, and various medical works giving curious details of the domestic life of the time.

Many others we might catalogue who were better churchmen than poets—William Forrest, Queen Mary’s chaplain, whose gorgeously-illuminated MSS. show that he, at least, had a due appreciation of his Saincted Griseilde and his Blessed Joseph; or Richard Stonyhurst, who, like Heywood, died in exile for his faith, and who merits immortality for having written probably the worst translation of Virgil ever achieved by mortal man. It was in the amazing hexameter of the time, that “foul, lumbering, boisterous, wallowing measure,” as Nashe calls it, which represented to Sir Philip Sidney and his coterie the grace and melody of Virgil’s line. The wits laughed it to death, and we read its epitaph in Hall’s parody:

“Manhood and Garboiles shall he chaunt with changed feet.”

On names like these, however, we have not space to dwell. Not even neglect can sanctify them. We are at the dawning of that glorious outburst of creative genius which made [Pg 311] the Elizabethan era a splendor to all times and lands, and worthier subjects await us.

At the outset we must prepare for something like a disappointment in the scanty list of Catholic poets which even this prolific period could furnish. Looking back on it, all England seems to have been furiously bent on making poetry enough to last it for all years to come. Englishmen, we know, in those days did other things—circumnavigated the globe once or twice, and conquered a continent or so—in the intervals of rhyming; but the wonder is how they found leisure for such trifles from the absorbing business of the hour. Poetry, in that electric century of song, appears to have been the Englishman’s birthright; Apollo possessed the nation. The judge scribbled odes upon the bench; the soldier turned a sonnet and a battery together; the sailor made a song as he brought his ship into action; the bishop preached indifferently in sermons and satires—it was hard at times to tell which; the office-seeker preferred his claims in rhyme, and his complaints were “married to immortal verse”—it is lucky our own age is more given to office-seeking than to poetry; the bricklayer dropped his trowel and was a mighty dramatist; the condemned, like André Chénier at a later day—“the ruling passion strong in death”—strung couplets on the very steps of the scaffold. Even princes were smitten with the general madness, and, catching something of the general inspiration, made verses which were no worse than a prince’s verses ought to be, and were often better than their laws. Were we poet-haters like Carlyle, we should have ample food for disgust in exploring that fiddling age. At every step in the most unlikely corners we stumble upon the inevitable rhymer.

In the Mermaid, where we drop in for a quiet cup of canary, and perhaps a glimpse of that rising dramatist, William Shakspere, we find him bawling madrigals over his sack; we overhear him muttering of “hearts” and “darts” as we take our constitutional in Powle’s Walk; the very boatman who wherries us across the Thames is a Water-Poet, as though poets were classified like rats, and will importune us before we land to buy one of his four-score volumes; like black care, Rhyme sits behind the horseman and climbs the brazen galley. We fly from him to the camp; and there is that terrible fellow, Walter Devereux, Earl of Essex, whom we heard of anon slaughtering “vulgar Irishry,” men, women, and children, like so many rabbits—there is that martial hero, fresh from his last battue of unarmed peasants, simpering over the composition of “godly and virtuous hymns.” We ship with Drake for a trip to the Azores “to do God’s work,” and incidentally to fill our pockets, perhaps, as somehow or other “God’s work” usually did for that pious and lucky mariner. Scandit æratas vitiosa naves—the rogue Apollo is there before us. We have scarce got over our sea-sickness before our ingenuous skipper will be asking our opinion of the commendatory verses which “he hath writ,” he explains—a fine blush mantling under his bronze—“for his very good friend, Sir Gervase Peckham’s Report of the Late Discoveries.” We peep over my Lord of Pembroke’s shoulder as he sits writing in his cabinet—it is a liberty that by virtue of his privilege a well-bred chronicler may take. By his knit brows and preoccupied air it is some weighty state [Pg 312] paper he is drafting—a minute, perhaps, of her majesty’s revenues from fines of popish recusants, and how the same may be increased.

“Dry those fair, those crystal eyes,”

the state paper begins, and it is a minute of the perfections of the Lady Christiana Bruce.

Even the queen’s majesty, between hangings of priests and virginal coquettings with princely wooers, finds time for the making of royal “ditties passing sweet and harmonicall.” When next we seek her beauteous presence, worthy Master Puttenham will buttonhole us in the ante-chamber and launch out into loyal praises of her “learned, delicate, and noble muse.” “Of any in our time that I know of,” he asseverates, “she is the most excellent poet, easily surmounting all the rest that have written, before or since, for sense, sweetness, or subtilltie, be it in Ode, Elegie, Epigram, or any other kinde of Poeme, Heroick or Lyrick.” Master Puttenham is known to be writing a book on the Arte of Poesie. We think as we listen to him of another Royal Poet singing yonder at Fotheringay behind prison-bars, whose strains sound sweeter to us, though we shall do well to hide our preference here—sweeter, but infinitely sad:

“O Domine Deus, speravi in te!

O care mi Jesu, nunc libera me!

In dura catena, in misera pœna, desidero te!

Languendo, gemendo, et genuflectendo,

Adoro, imploro, ut liberes me!”

Liberty is the burden of this captive’s song, and her royal sister lends a gracious ear to her prayer. The headsman is already sharpening his axe to break her fetters. And still another princely genius up there in Edinburgh is so busy with his Divine Sonnets, and his Rules and Cautelis for the fashioning of the same, he has no time to observe that his mother is being led to death. But what is a mother’s life to those imperishable works?

“How, best of poets, dost thou laurel wear!”

roars lusty Ben Jonson, brimful of sack and loyalty.

“Thou best of poets more than man dost prove,”

echoes the faithful Stirling. Yet, strange as it may seem, we can never read these superhuman productions with any comfort. The Divine Sonnets fade, and instead we see the gloomy stage at Fotheringay, the hapless but heroic victim, the frowning earls, the gleaming axe, the fair head dabbled with gore. Let us turn to merely human geniuses.

In this time of inspiration, with all England, from prince to peasant, bursting into song and three-fourths Catholic, we find from Spenser to Cowley a scant dozen, or, counting Shakspere, at most a baker’s dozen, of Catholic poets worth naming. And Shakspere, in spite of Charles Butler’s ingenious theory and its spirited revival by Mr. George Wilkes, we can scarcely claim. That great poet’s religious creed, like other important features of his life, must no doubt remain always matter of conjecture. If he was a Catholic, his creed was probably no more than a tradition, strong enough to keep his pages free from the pictures of dissolute monks and nuns in which most of his contemporary playwrights delighted, but far from the fervor which sent Southwell to the scaffold, or the sincerity which, in a milder age, made Sherburne welcome poverty and disgrace. Omitting Shakspere, then, our muster-roll is but short. For this there were many reasons. In [Pg 313] those days there was other work for Catholics than verse-making; the church needed martyrs, not minstrels, and the blood-stained record of the English mission tells how intrepidly the need was met. Southwell and Campian are only two of a brilliant band almost equally gifted, equally heroic. The life they led promised little for polite letters. Hunted like wild beasts, in hourly danger of the most cruel and ignominious death; sleeping, when they slept, in hayricks or the open fields; studying, when they caught a breathing-spell for study, in caves and thickets—many of these noble youths have left behind them proofs of a genius which, under happier auspices, would have borne abundant fruit. Southwell’s poems, composed in the intervals of thirteen rackings, reveal a spirit of uncommon force and beauty. Campian is known to have written at least one tragedy, Nectar and Ambrosia, performed at Vienna before the Emperor Rodolph. It must be remembered, too, that both of these dauntless missionaries were cut off in the very flower of their age, Southwell being thirty-two and Campian forty when executed. Francis Beaumont, cousin and namesake of the dramatist, was a Jesuit and a poet. So was Jasper Heywood, son of the epigrammatist. He translated several tragedies of Seneca, and is said by some to have been one of the one hundred and twenty-eight priests executed by the clement Elizabeth. He is one of Cibber’s Poets. Ellis Heywood, his brother, also a Jesuit, though he left behind him a prose work in Italian, is not known to have written in verse. Of Crashaw, whose fortune it was to live at a time when the storm of persecution had spent its fiercest fury, when Catholics were subject no longer to be murdered, but only to be robbed—of Crashaw, whose “power and opulence of invention” Coleridge has remarked, another critic has said that, with more taste and judgment,” he would have outstripped most of his contemporaries, even Cowley.”

These were all priests. But outside of the priesthood Catholics found work in other directions which left little leisure for literary pursuits. Chidiock Titchbourne, whose talents and unhappy fate the elder Disraeli has feelingly commemorated, was one of “an association in London of young Catholic gentlemen of family who met at the house of Mr. Gilbert, in Fetter Lane, and took care of Jesuits.” Thomas Habington, an associate of Titchbourne in this enterprise, and who, if not a poet himself, was at least the father of a poet, narrowly escaped hanging for concealing in his house the Jesuits Garnett and Oldcome, accused of complicity in the Gunpowder Plot. Dymoke, the champion of England, apparently the same who translated Il Pastor Fido, won the title to a more glorious championship by dying (1610) in the Tower, where he had been imprisoned for his resolute refusal to conform. Dr. Lodge, a most charming poet as well as an eminent physician, we find in “the list of popish recusants indicted at the sessions holden for London and Middlesex, February 15, 1604.” It is of interest to note en passant that with Dr. Lodge was indicted for the same cause “Ambrose Rookwood, of the army.” Twenty months later Ambrose Rookwood, of the army, expressed his opinion of this treatment by engaging in the Gunpowder Treason. At a later period we have Sir Edward [Pg 314] Sherburne, a scholar and poet of no mean pretensions, resigning offices of large emolument rather than betray his faith. Certainly, under the last of the Tudors and the first of the Stuarts a Catholic poet may be said to have cultivated his art under difficulties.

The obstacles in the way of Catholics, then and long after, not only for obtaining culture but the rudiments of learning, were indeed enormous. Classed by legislative enactment with “forgers, perjurers, and outlaws,” they were denied education for themselves or their children, except at the cost of conscience or of ruinous penalties. Their liberty they held at twenty days’ notice; their lives at a moment’s purchase. At any hour of the day or night their houses were open to the invasion of ruffianly pursuivants, searching ostensibly for “Mass-books” and other “popish mummeries,” but prone to confound recusant jewels or broad gold pieces with the relics of superstition; and for such robberies they had absolutely no redress. In the courts of justice they found not only no protection, but renewed oppression. To use a phrase often misused, they had really no rights which a conforming subject was bound to respect, and their freedom, their fortunes, nay, their lives, were at the mercy of the rapacity or the malice of their Protestant neighbors. Much of their time they spent in going to and from prison; they crowded the common jails in such multitudes that many new ones had to be opened for the sole accommodation of these hardened malefactors; and their estates were impoverished to pay for the privilege, not of going to their own church—that was denied them in any event—but of staying away from one they could not conscientiously enter. Men so occupied doubtless found ample employment for their leisure without making acrostics to Elizabeth Regina or panegyrics on the “best of poets.”

Yet even this untoward time and chilling air yielded blossoms of Catholic poetry which we need not disdain to gather. Some of the daintiest of them have been culled by careful gleaners like Headley and Ellis and Southey, and a stray flower here and there salutes us in the more tasteful modern collections, such as Mr. De Vere’s Selections, Mr. Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, or Mr. Stoddard’s Melodies and Madrigals, the latter a gem among its kind. But the bulk of the Catholic poetry of this period is practically unknown. Massinger, luckier than any of his great rivals (for Shakspere was above rivalry), still keeps the stage with a single comedy, A New Way to pay Old Debts. But Shirley, little his inferior in dramatic ability, is, in spite of Dyce’s elegant edition, utterly neglected. He may be said to owe his rescue from oblivion to that one noble song in The Contention of Achilles and Agamemnon, “The Glories of our Blood and State”—a song which alone is worth a library of modern ballads, and which might be called truly Horatian but for a moral elevation which Horace never reached. And even this song, almost his sole slender hold on immortality, Shirley came near losing; for in a spurious compilation of Butler’s posthumous works it is given to the author of Hudibras, and there entitled A Thought upon Death upon hearing of the Murder of Charles I., though anything further from Butler’s style can scarcely be imagined. Ben Jonson—if, in virtue [Pg 315] of his twelve years spent in the church and the period of his best work, he may be considered as a Catholic poet at all—“rare old Ben,” in spite of his weighty thought, his pungent humor, his fertile fancy, remains among the authors who are widely talked of and little read. Lodge again, who may dispute with Bishop Hall the honor of being the earliest English satirist, and who, “though subject to a critic’s marginal,” gives evidence of a glow and richness of imagination not common even in that opulent time—Lodge has no literary existence except as one of the wistful shades that flit through the Hades of the cyclopædias. Sir William Davenant has from Southey the distinguished compliment that, avoiding equally the opposite faults of too artificial and too careless a style, he wrote in numbers which, for precision and clearness and felicity and strength, have never been surpassed. Yet who now reads Gondibert, or its notable preface, which inspired Dryden with the germ of dramatic criticism? Sir Edward Sherburne, whom Mr. Dyce calls “an accomplished versifier,” whose translations may even now be read with pleasure, and whose learning was above the average of his learned time, is equally forgotten. Crashaw is remembered less for himself than as the friend of Cowley, whose monody on his death, in Johnson’s opinion, has “beauties which common authors may justly think not only above their attainments, but above their ambition.” Southwell we think of as the martyr rather than as the poet. The verses of Sir Aston Cokayn and his friend Sir Kenelm Digby are not, perhaps, of the sort which the world does not willingly let die; yet the plays of the former are not without merit, especially Frappolin creduto principe, an adaptation of the same Italian original whence Shakspere took the hint for his prologue to the Taming of the Shrew. His minor poems, too, if they have no other merit, throw some curious side lights on the literary history of the time. The life of Sir Kenelm Digby, “of whose acquaintance,” says Dryden, “all his contemporaries seem to have been proud,” was itself a poem, and certainly one more worthy of being told than that of many of the gentlemen whom Johnson’s vigorous pen has thrust into uneasy and unnatural immortality.

“Sweet Constable, who takes the wond’ring ear

And lays it up in willing prisonment,”

who was rated as the first sonneteer of his time, is as little known as the pure and pensive Habington, the only love-poet of the reign of Charles I. whose pages are without stain. The two last-named writers, however, we may expect to see more noticed, both having been lately reprinted—Constable’s Diana by Pickering, and Habington’s Castara being included in the admirable and wonderfully cheap series of English reprints edited by Mr. Edward Arber.

We had thought to give a few specimens of at least the more obscure of the writers last mentioned. But we have already overstepped our limits and must bring this ramble to an end. The reader who may be tempted for himself to loiter in these unfamiliar ways will meet with much to reward him. “Old-fashioned poetry, but choicely good” he will find in abundance:

“… rich in fit epithets,

Blest in the lovely marriage of pure words.”

[103] Henry VII.’s chapel.

[Pg 316]

ARE YOU MY WIFE?

BY THE AUTHOR OF “PARIS BEFORE THE WAR,” “NUMBER THIRTEEN,” “PIUS VI.,” ETC.

CHAPTER XVII.

THE END.

The admiral telegraphed at once to Sir Simon, informing him of what had happened. It was no surprise, therefore, when, on the morning of the funeral, the baronet walked into Clide’s room. The meeting was affectionate but sad. Clide had no heart to give a joyous welcome to his old friend. Even Franceline for the time was forgotten. The shock of the tragic death he had just witnessed had shattered his airy castles to pieces. He was, as yet, too much under the solemn spell of that event to turn his mind to the brightness that it might have made an opening for in the future.

Mrs. de Winton had come up from Wales, and was for taking Clide with her to a more suitable residence than his dingy lodgings; but he refused to stir until all was over, and she knew, as did all who knew Clide, that when he made up his mind to do or not to do a thing, he was immovable as fate. When the little band who had followed Isabel to the grave returned, they went by appointment to see the medical man under whose care she had spent the last months of her life. Mr. Percival, who, strangely enough, had not been at the funeral, was to be there to meet them. He was in the room when they entered. Sir Simon Harness started on perceiving him. “Mr. Plover! I hardly expected to meet you here.”

“Plover!” echoed Clide and Mr. Simpson. “The same, at your service,” replied the other with cool effrontery. Then, turning to Clide, he said:

“Can I see you alone? What we have got to say had better be said privately.”

Clide made a gesture of assent, and the doctor showed them into an adjoining room.

The outline of Mr. Prendergast’s confession is already known; it is only necessary to fill it up with a few details of interest. Isabel was not his own niece, but the step-niece of his wife by her first husband, an Italian singer, from whom the girl inherited her gift of song. She was thrown on the care of Mr. Prendergast when quite a child. He was a needy adventurer, and determined to make her voice useful; for this end he cultivated it to the highest degree. But there was madness in her family. Just as her musical education was complete, and she was preparing to come out on a provincial stage in Italy, her mind became deranged, and he was obliged to place her in an obscure lunatic asylum near Milan. Meanwhile, he travelled as agent to a large London firm, and saw a great deal of life, chiefly in the West Indies. On his return he found Isabel recovered and in splendid voice. Complete change and travelling were advised as the best means of strengthening her against the danger of a relapse. He took her to America; then followed her marriage and her flight. Whether [Pg 317] the fraud that she had practised on Clide was entirely a deliberate falsehood, prompted by that strange cunning which is one of the characteristics of madness, or whether it was the delusion of a disordered brain, it signified little now to him; it was certain that she had become fully alive to the fact that she had grossly deceived her husband, and that discovery would ruin her. Rather than face it, she fled and threw herself on her uncle for pity and protection. Then followed the checkered life: now the glare of the footlights, now the obscurity of a lunatic asylum. It had been her own passionate desire to go on the stage—so Mr. Prendergast said—and he had only yielded to it because he saw there was no other course open to her. Her terror of her husband’s anger was so great that the idea of being discovered by him threw her into a state of despair which threatened to unsettle her brain beyond all chance of recovery. She had caught a glimpse of him from her window at Dieppe, and insisted on her uncle’s carrying her off that very night, or else she would commit suicide. The excitement of the stage soon brought on a return of madness. Prendergast locked her up and went abroad again on a commission; fell in with Russian Jews on the borders of China, bought valuable stones from them, and returned to fulfil the dream of his life: to buy a country place and live “like a gentleman.” He found Isabel again recovered, and with her voice in greater power than ever. The offer of a fabulous sum for one season from a manager who had long had his eye on the beautiful young soprano tempted her uncle; he accepted an engagement for her at St. Petersburg. A London milliner who knew her slightly and had business of her own there accompanied them as a sort of chaperon for Isabel. Stanton had recognized her at the hotel, and she him. The rest of the story was already known to Clide. Mr. Prendergast was very emphatic, however, in declaring that he never intended to keep the poor child on the stage; this one season was so magnificently paid for that the sum, added to his own means, would make them both wealthy for the remainder of their lives.

“And now I have made a clean breast of it; you know everything,” he said, bringing his narrative to a close.

“No, not everything,” replied Mr. de Winton, fixing a searching look on him. “You have not explained the motives of your own conduct throughout. You changed your name twice; you persistently avoided me; you had recourse to unworthy subterfuges to escape detection. Admitting that my poor wife was, as you say, too frightened to trust me or to let me know what she was doing, it was your duty to communicate with me, and to give me at least the option of providing for her, instead of compelling her to foster the disease that was destroying her by adopting the career of an actress. What motive had you for not doing this? I give you the choice of telling the truth yourself; if you refuse, I must take other means of finding it out.”

Mr. Prendergast hesitated. There was evidently something yet to be told which he shrank from avowing; but, as Clide intimated, he must either confess it of his own accord or be driven to do so.

“You are right,” he said. “I had a motive in avoiding you; in keeping out of the way, not only of you, but of everybody. You may have [Pg 318] heard of a great speculation started ten years ago in Canada, called the Ramason Company?”

“I remember hearing of it; it was a disreputable affair. My uncle, Admiral de Winton, took shares in it and lost heavily by the transaction.”

“I was the man who started that company, and I ruined many by inducing them to take shares in it. I was obliged to keep out of the way for several years, lest I should be seized and made amenable for felony. About a year ago the one man who swore to bring me to the hulks for it died. I don’t think there is any one now who would be at the trouble of prosecuting me; but I am in your power. You can hand me over to the law, if you choose; vengeance is sweet and it is within your grasp. Only remember,” he cried, with a sudden change from dogged indifference to a more appealing tone—“remember that as we judge we shall be judged; remember that we are standing both of us by a new-made grave, and that, if I have sinned, I have already eaten the bitter fruit of my misdoing. I was a poor man, struggling to live; fighting for the bread I ate. If I had been born to estates and a fortune, I should have been no worse than others who have done no evil because they have never been tempted. Think of this, Mr. de Winton, and for the sake of her who bore your name, and who, in the midst of her poor mad wanderings, brought no dishonor on it, be merciful!”

There was nothing abject in the way the wretched man thus threw himself on Clide’s clemency. He did not cringe or whine; he threw down his arms and appealed to the generosity of his conqueror. Clide was generous, and a generous nature is easily moved to pardon.

“What mercy is it that you ask of me?” he answered. “The mercy that you need most it is in no man’s power to give or to withhold. You have lent yourself for years to a course of cruelty and falsehood—cruelty to the unhappy child whose friendlessness and terrible misfortune should have claimed your pity and protecting care; falsehood to me, whom you well-nigh led into committing a great crime and involuntarily causing the shame and ruin of another. But I will take no vengeance on you. Go and ask for mercy where you have most sinned.”

* * * * *

Sir Simon had started without an hour’s delay on receiving the admiral’s telegram announcing Isabel’s death. If he had waited for the first post, it would have brought him a line from Ponsonby Anwyll to say that he was setting off the next day, and hoped to be at the Villa des Olives nearly as soon as his letter. Roxham would join him at Marseilles, and thence they would go on together.

So while Simon was rushing to London Ponsonby was rushing out of it; he presented himself with Lord Roxham at the villa the day after his host’s departure. Their surprise was very great when they were informed that Sir Simon was not there, and that M. de la Bourbonais and his daughter were the only occupants of the house. They asked to see them, and were very cordially received, but it was quite clear they were not expected. All the explanation Raymond could give of Sir Simon’s extraordinary conduct was that he had received a telegram the day before which obliged him to set out for London immediately; he had not entered [Pg 319] into any explanation, but the intelligence was apparently rather exciting than painful, for he had gone away in very good spirits. The travellers looked at each other in perplexity. What were they to do? To come and install themselves at the villa was impossible, not so much on account of the host’s absence as because of Franceline’s presence. Raymond was discussing the same difficulty in his own mind, and was sorely puzzled as to what he was expected to do. Lord Roxham came to his assistance:

“The fact is, we have been too precipitate; we ought to have waited for another letter from Harness. However, it really does not much matter as far as the journey is concerned. I was on my way to these parts, and Anwyll is very lucky in getting a month’s leave and the chance of exploring this pretty place with a cicerone like myself. We shall have no difficulty, I dare say, in getting some tolerably comfortable quarters at a hotel in the town. You, count, will perhaps kindly put us in the way of that. What is the best hotel here?”

Giacomo, the odd man and general out-door factotum, runner-of-errands, and finder-out-of-everything, was called and despatched to the hotel with the gentlemen’s luggage and proper instructions about their requirements. This essential point once settled, all restraint was at an end. M. de la Bourbonais felt free to allow his courtesy full play and to offer all the hospitality that he wished to the two Englishmen. He insisted on their remaining to dinner; they had just half an hour to refresh themselves before it would be ready. Franceline joined her father so graciously in urging the request that they yielded a not unwilling assent.

Raymond had never met with Lord Roxham or Ponsonby since that memorable dinner at the Court, but he had received letters from both immediately on Sir Simon’s return and discovery of the ring. These letters were written in a frank, manly tone that it would have been difficult to resist if Raymond had been far more deeply incensed against the writers than he was. Both assured him of their unshaken esteem and their conviction all along that the mistake—for mistake they felt certain it was—would sooner or later be cleared up; if they had given any pain by not sooner expressing this opinion to M. de la Bourbonais himself, they sincerely regretted and apologized for it. Raymond had replied graciously to both, and so the old kind feeling was restored. He retained a grateful recollection, too, of Ponsonby’s prompt though formal salutation when Mr. Charlton had passed on, cutting him dead.

The evening passed pleasantly as the party sat chatting away on the terrace, with the young May moon shining down on the blue waves that beat against the pebbly beach with a murmurous plash. Franceline had all sorts of questions to ask about Dullerton after nearly three months’ absence—a long time at her age. She seemed astonished that there was nothing remarkable to tell about the place and the people during that interval, and I am afraid that Sir Ponsonby Anwyll drew on his imagination now and then, rather than acknowledge the humiliating fact that he knew nothing concerning the thing he was catechised about. He talked of probable plans and contemplated movements of the various persons, as if plans and movements entered into the [Pg 320] lives of the homespun natives of Dullerton at all.

It was late when the two young men took leave, with the promise to return early next morning for a drive by the sea. Sir Simon had contrived a wonderful nondescript vehicle, a cross between a char-à-banc and a wagonette, with an awning supported by iron rods, so as to obviate the necessity for umbrellas or parasols. Franceline was to do the honors of this and show them the beauties of the coast.

They were punctual to their appointment, and everybody enjoyed the drive exceedingly. They dined at the Villa des Olives again that day, and there was more sitting out on the terrace and endless conversations.

* * * * *

Clide, meantime, was waking up as from a bad dream. As soon as the cloud of those few hurried days was dispelled, he seemed suddenly to cast off the chill of awe that had fallen on him by his wife’s dying-bed, and clung to him until the grave had closed on her and shut out that chapter of his life for ever. Then youth vindicated itself, the elastic spring rebounded, and the future that yesterday was out of sight began to dawn brightly on him once more. The yearning to see Franceline, to claim her for his own, asserted itself with a force that was only the greater for being so long repressed. But now that all obstacles were removed on his side, it remained to be seen whether she was still free—free at heart, and willing to be his; it was possible—nay, did not his better sense add probable—that the seed of love he had sown in her heart had perished there before this, chilled by his neglect, crushed to death by his seeming faithlessness and desertion.

He must know first from Sir Simon how matters stood between her and Anwyll. Sir Simon told him the truth. He had left Franceline heart-whole, as far as he knew; but here was the irrepressible Ponsonby as good as installed under the same roof with her, walking, riding, making parties by sunrise and conversations by moonlight; passionately in love with her, and Raymond most anxious for the success of his suit. Sir Simon had sounded him before he invited Anwyll to Nice. Was Franceline made of different stuff from every other woman in every other country that she could remain proof to all this, and not ignite at the contact of this faithful flame, not yield to this unyielding perseverance? Sir Simon thought not. Clide thought differently; but the wish, with him, might too easily engender the belief.

Strange to say, neither he nor Sir Simon felt the least alarm concerning Lord Roxham. Yet there could be no doubt as to which would be pronounced the more dangerous rival of the two by any competent jury of young ladies. He was far better-looking than Ponsonby Anwyll, more intelligent and agreeable, and he was the son of a peer to boot. This last attraction would no doubt constitute a much less dangerous man a formidable rival in the eyes of most English young ladies. But Franceline de la Bourbonais was not English, nor endowed with that fine native faculty which enables a woman to look at a man through the crystallizing medium of a peerage and discern its magically beautifying power. Still, considering that she did not love Ponsonby Anwyll when he presented himself at the Villa des Olives, there is no denying that Lord Roxham was a rival of whom [Pg 321] the young squire of Rydal might justly have been afraid. Sir Simon had no deeply-laid plot or counterplot in his mind when he asked him; he did not mean to play him off against Ponsonby, as he had once played him off against Clide; he merely thought it would make it pleasanter to have him. It would throw Franceline more off her guard, too, perhaps. He was roving about the Pyrenees, and he might just as well come on and spend a little while with them at Nice.

Clide said very little while Sir Simon ran on about the contents of Franceline’s letter, and proceeded to expound his views on the possible state of affairs at the villa since he had left.

“Yes; I see the danger,” he said at length: “Anwyll has had the field so far to himself with all odds on his side; her father, who could make her do almost anything short of a sin to please him, is backing him up. Well, à la grâce de Dieu! I will start with you for Nice by this night’s mail.”

* * * * *

It was an hour after sunrise—the sweetest hour of the day. Franceline was an early riser, and seldom missed the enjoyment of a short walk by the sea in the freshness of the early morning. To-day, however, she was not walking; she was sitting on the beach at the foot of the garden that sloped down to the water’s edge, sitting with her milk-white hands in her lap, without book or work, gazing vacantly at the advancing tide and at the sunlight dancing on the waves. She was tired; she had slept badly—hardly slept at all, indeed—and she wanted the fresh sea-breeze to revive her, and the solitude of the silent beach to help her to come to a decision that she had spent the night vainly trying to arrive at. After a while she drew a letter from her pocket, opened it, and spread it on her knee. She had read it so often already that she might have repeated it word for word by heart; but she read it again, as if expecting to find some new light in it now. Things look different sometimes by daylight, just as faces do, and she had only read this letter by the light of her bedroom candle. But the sunbeams did not alter one line or modify the force of one word in the four pages covered with a large, straggling, but bold, legible handwriting. The letter was from Ponsonby Anwyll, asking her to be his wife. Her father had put it into her hand last evening when he kissed her and bade her good-night.

“My child, here is a message that I have been charged with for thee; thou wilt read it alone and give me thy answer to-morrow.”

He did not add one word as to what he hoped the answer might be, but the sigh, the close embrace with which he held her to him, told Franceline plainly enough what his longing desire was. She returned his embrace in silence and carried the letter to her room. She had thought over it all night; but the night had brought her no counsel. She was still hesitating, undecided. Yet she must make up her mind one way or the other within a very short time—oh! how short a time. Why could she not yield? Her father desired this marriage ardently, and there was everything to recommend it. Ponsonby loved her so sincerely, with such a humble, honest, manly love. It was no light thing to fling away such a gift as this. A faithful heart is not an offering to be cast aside as if it were a “common thing with more [Pg 322] behind,” to be picked up at any moment. It was in all probability the turning point of her life that she was now called upon to decide; if she let the tide go by, it might never flow towards her again. Franceline would have made small account of this if she had had only herself to consider. She was happy as she was, and would gladly have renounced all hope or chance of changing her present lot; she had no ambition, and she did not realize the future keenly enough to forecast probabilities and take precautions against them. She knew her father was an old man, but she never let her mind dwell on the consequences of that fact. If he were taken away first, it seemed as if life must come to an end for her; she did not want to look beyond so remote and dreaded a possibility. But she knew that he looked beyond it, during his illness especially he had said things occasionally that showed he was painfully preoccupied about her future, about what was to become of her if he went and left her alone in the world with no one to love her or take care of her. She knew that nothing could sweeten his remaining years more than to see her happily married; that, in fact, such an event would, humanly speaking, be very likely to prolong his life. This it was that kept her trembling on the verge of surrender and pleaded loudly in favor of Ponsonby’s suit. Why was it so hard to yield? There was nothing to hinder her now. If she had cared for any one else.… A bright crimson suffused her cheeks; she covered her face with her hands with an involuntary movement, as if to hide that blush of exquisite shame from the roses that were its only witnesses.

But this emotion passed away and sober reflections presented themselves. The idea, once so firmly rejected as a presumptuous temptation, that she might convert Ponsonby by marrying him, appealed to her suddenly with a force altogether new. It would be no doubt a glorious thing to sacrifice her own personal feelings and wishes for such an object, and it seemed to Franceline, as she contemplated it for the first time calmly, that the generosity of the motive must ensure the reward of the sacrifice. If she could but consult Father Henwick! But that was impossible. The distance was too great. In those days railroads were few and far between. It took four days for a letter to reach Dullerton, and as many for the answer to return; and it was imperative that she should make up her mind at once. She drew from her pocket a little book in which she had written down some striking passages from various authors, and some words of advice that Father Henwick had given her from time to time. The words that had sounded so sustaining when uttered spoke to her now with even a more pointed significance: “Be sure of one thing: so long as we are sincerely seeking to do what is right God will guide us to it.… The danger is that sometimes we are all the time hankering after our own will when we say, and even fancy, that we are seeking the will of God.” Then later, in answer to some question about the mode of discerning between these two wills, the writer said: “Things that are not of our seeking or wishing are mostly of his ordering.… Obedience and circumstances are our safest guides.” Here Franceline closed the little book, murmuring to herself: “It is quite certain that this marriage is not of my seeking—nor [Pg 323] of my inclination; if that be a sign, I am safe in doing God’s will in consenting to it.” Then she remembered how she had read somewhere that God would send an angel from heaven rather than let a faithful soul go astray when striving to do his will. No angel had come to forbid her yielding, and the time pressed for her decision. Franceline buried her face in her hands, and for the next few minutes a fierce struggle went on within her. She trembled from head to foot, her pulses beat fast, a sharp pang shot through her whole being and seemed to tear it asunder for one moment, then gradually recoiled upon her will, stimulating it to a firm, irrevocable impulse. All that she had hitherto known of energy or courage was as nothing compared to what she was feeling now. She looked up and pushed back her hair, as if to see a vision more clearly. A light had gathered in her eye, a high resolve shone upon her brow. The vision was vanishing, but she saw it still: angels were beckoning. The spirit of Renunciation pointed with golden palm-branch to that hour when every sacrifice receives its crown, when every selfish denial is avenged. She stood by her father’s death-bed; life was fading away like a dream; the hour of real awakening was at hand. Conscience spoke out: “Prove thy love,” said the clear, stern voice, “accept the reality which the kind will of Heaven has appointed for you, and cast from your heart once and for ever the vain dream that it has cherished too long. Make your father happy; become the wife of this good and faithful man who loves you. Go forth, immolate yourself, and lead him to the light of truth.” When Franceline rose to her feet, Ponsonby’s cause was won. She folded his letter, and went in and sat down at once and answered it. Her hand did not falter; there was no trace of reluctance or hesitation visible in her countenance. As soon as the letter was finished she went down-stairs to meet her father, and handed it to him open.

“Am I to read it?”

“Yes, father; it is you who have written it,” she said, kissing him.

Before M. de la Bourbonais could reply, Angélique and the major-domo came in with the breakfast, and kept fussing in and out of the room while it lasted; so it was some little time before he was able to go out on the terrace and read the letter alone.

Franceline did not wait to see its effect upon him. She escaped to her room, and sat there until he should call for her; but instead of this Raymond took up his straw hat and went straight out of the house. She saw him walk with a quick, buoyant step down the garden and disappear into the road. He was gone with her answer to Ponsonby, guessing rightly that until he received it the young man would not venture to return to the villa, and that her father was impatient to make the lover happy. Franceline saw him go forth bearing the fiat that decided her destiny, that placed a stranger henceforth between them, dividing with another the duty and the life that had hitherto been all his own. Oh! if she had but loved the other as it was in her to love the man who was to be her husband. A cry that was almost a shriek escaped from her, and she threw herself upon the ground in a paroxysm of tears. But this weakness was soon over; she arose and hurried out of the house, so as to [Pg 324] avoid meeting Angélique or any of the servants, and went down to the beach.

The tide was in; she seated herself in the crevice of a rock—a favorite seat, where she was sheltered from the sun and surrounded by the beautiful blue sea on every side. She had taken a book with her, dutifully opened it where the marker was, and then leaned her head against the side of the rock and began to dream. How pleasant it would be if she could drift away in one of those white fishing-boats, herself and her father, to some “fair isle of the blest” where there is no marrying or giving in marriage, where no winged angels come with cruel messages of duty to weak, reluctant hearts! Was that steamer whose smoke was curling like a dark snake in the pure blue atmosphere bound for one of these happy isles? Oh! would that she were on it and making for that haven of rest. She must have sat a long time dreaming her dreams, for the steamer was a long while out of sight and the water had risen almost to her feet, when she heard Angélique’s voice calling her up and down the garden. She did not move. It was Ponsonby come back with her father, no doubt, to salute her as his bride. Let him wait; there was time enough. Angélique went on calling for some minutes, and then ceased. Franceline thought she had given it up, and was congratulating herself on the reprieve, when she heard the sound of footsteps falling heavily on the pebbles close behind the rock. There was no use resisting; she must go to this impatient lover at once, it seemed. She rose with a weary, resigned sigh, and was stepping over the ledge of the rock to gain the terrace, when, looking up, she beheld, not Angélique, but Clide de Winton. Franceline screamed as if a sword had been driven through her heart, fell forward, and was caught in Clide’s arms.

“Franceline! my darling! my own!” he murmured, straining her passionately to him.

She had not fainted; she was only stunned. Rallying in an instant, she struggled to free herself, and looking at him with a frightened, bewildered glance, “How is this? What do you mean? Are you free?” she exclaimed.

“Should I dare to come to you, to speak to you thus, to clasp you to my heart, if I were not free? O Franceline, Franceline! have you known me so little all this time?”

Her head drooped upon his shoulder, and she struggled no more; he gathered her to his heart, and she did not draw away her face from the warm kisses that he pressed on it.

Angélique’s voice breaking in upon this moment of rapture roused her to the remembrance of other things: her father’s errand, the letter, she had written engaging herself as Ponsonby Anwyll’s wife.

“O Clide, Clide!” she cried, putting her hand to her forehead with a look of agonized distress.

“My darling! what is it?”

But Angélique was down on them now, and began to scold the young girl for letting her shout herself hoarse calling to her this hour past without an answer, until she thought Mam’selle must have fallen asleep and dropped into the sea; that’s what would happen some of these days, and then her body would be carried off by the tide to the north pole, and M. le Comte would die of grief, and [Pg 325] the only thing for Angélique to do would be to drown herself. Clide tried to divert the vials of the old woman’s wrath towards him, and so cut her short in this dismal horoscopic view of the family history. M. de la Bourbonais, meanwhile, was hastening to meet them; the sight of his smiling countenance sent a dagger through Franceline. She embraced Sir Simon, hurriedly, and then ran to her father.

“You went with that letter?” she whispered.

“Yes, my little one; I went straight off with it.”

“Ha! Then he knows already? You have given it to him?”

“No; unluckily, he was not at home. They had just gone out when I got to the hotel.”

“O father! thank God! Then give it to me quick!” She flung her arms round his neck, and kissed him with an energy that nearly sent his spectacles flying into the Mediterranean.

“Eh, eh? What is the matter? What is this?” said Raymond, rescuing the precious lunettes and refixing them on his nose.

“Father, I will not marry him. I am engaged to Clide de Winton!”

* * * * *

The sun was not long risen—for the dew was still glistening on the deep-bladed grass, and the birds were babbling in their nests as they do in the fresh dawn before men are astir to drown the delicious concert—when three figures might be seen wending towards the little gray church, where Father Henwick was awaiting them. They found the door open and the candles lighted on the altar, although there was not a soul in the church but themselves.

I dare say you recognize the three at a glance, though it may surprise you to see Clide de Winton there and at so unwonted an hour.

The church was beautifully arrayed in flowers and evergreens and banners of every hue. For this is to be Franceline’s wedding-day, and she has come with her fiancé and her father to ask a blessing on it.

There was something peculiarly sweet and thrilling in the sound of the bell through the almost empty church, and the voice of the priest reverberating in the solemn silence, tender and tremulous as a throb that broke from his inmost heart.

The walk home was silent; only, when they entered the park, M. de la Bourbonais stood a moment and, looking down on the little cottage where he and his child had suffered so much and known so many happy days, he said with an emotion which he made no effort to conceal: “My children, God has been very good to us; to me especially—for I have deserved it least. I shall not live long to prove that I am grateful; but you who are young—you will both of you love him and thank him for me all your lives.”

Clide’s only answer was a silent pressure of the hand, while Franceline fell upon her father’s breast and wept a few sweet tears.

* * * * *

Yes, the wedding-day had arrived; the sun shone brightly, everything was bright, everybody seemed happy. Miss Merrywig sported a splendid new gown for the occasion—pale blue silk, with rosebuds and forget-me-nots on a broad, white satin stripe, most appropriate for a wedding; and such a bargain! She was entreating Lady Anwyll to make a guess—just one guess—at what it had cost; but Lady Anwyll fought off, declaring it would only make her envious if she knew, and, besides, [Pg 326] she wanted Miss Merrywig to keep her bargain as fresh as possible for another episode like the present which would be taking place soon, she hoped, in the neighborhood. She would not say more; it was rash to speak of these matters until everything was quite settled; but it had long been suspected by the whole county that that sweet little Lady Lucy B—— and Ponce were planning some mischief together. Then followed whisperings and squeezing of hands between the two old ladies, which were presently interrupted by a loud, premonitory buzz through the great Gothic hall where the guests were fast assembling from the adjoining rooms. Sir Simon appeared, marshalling the twelve pink and white bridemaids into ranks on the broad landing at the top of the stairs. Down they came gliding as softly as a sunset cloud, and stood below awaiting the bride. Everybody whose acquaintance you have made ever so slightly at Dullerton is present, I think—everybody except Sir Ponsonby Anwyll, who sent his good wishes and regrets by his mother, explaining that he had not been able to get home just at present.

And now a murmur, deep and prolonged, runs through the gay crowd. The bride is coming; stately she steps down the grand oak stairs, leaning on her father’s arm. To my mind, she is the sweetest, loveliest bride that ever “the sun shone on.” But then, to be sure, I may be prejudiced. I wish I could describe her dress to you; but it would be very much like trying to describe the texture of a moonbeam. I can only certify that it was white, diaphanous, and fleecy as a cloud, and that, in some mysterious way, eucharista lilies floated here and there over the soft, snowy foam. The graceful head, too, bowed modestly under its golden weight of hair, was crowned by the same lovely flowers, and a cloud-like veil of gossamer tissue encircled her like a morning mist.

M. de la Bourbonais looked very happy as he passed through the sympathetic groups with his clair-de-lune on his arm; there was subdued joy on his venerable face that smoothed away all painful traces of his late illness, and almost obliterated the lines of age and the deeper furrows of care on his thoughtful brow.

As to Clide de Winton, everybody declared that he bore himself admirably on this most trying occasion, presenting a model of what a bridegroom ought to be—manly, dignified, and simple; he made a speech at the wedding breakfast, and it was pronounced capital. I don’t think the effort proved such a very severe trial to him, either, as he had once expected, for when Mrs. de Winton, who had expanded like a sunflower in cordiality that day, asked him with an arch smile whether he found the ordeal very dreadful, Clide answered frankly that it was not so trying as he had anticipated, and that, even when the worst was said, a wedding ceremony, with all its fuss, was not an unmitigated evil.

[Pg 327]

THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY.[104]

There is some evidence of the undue conceit which the present age has of its learning and culture in the fact that the works of the great writers of the middle ages indefinitely surpass our best literary productions in intellectual acumen and in the depth and width of real philosophical science. St. Thomas commences his Summa Theologica by telling us that it is to be an elementary work for the use of beginners in the study of sacred doctrine, according as the apostle says, Tam parvulis in Christo, lac vobis potum dedi, non escam. This book for junior students, this “milk for babes” of the mediæval times, is nowadays somewhat strong for the mental digestion of full-grown men, not excepting those whose minds have been carefully trained under the tuition of judicious preceptors. It was no doubt the modesty of the saint which prompted him to speak in this manner of that most wonderful work. Had he lived in such days as ours, so remarkable for feebleness of intellect, so conspicuous for contemptuousness, for self-confidence and self-sufficiency, such language would not have been possible with him; for he could only have used it in the bitterest sarcasm, which is utterly foreign to his meek and gentle character.

Since the days of the Angelic Doctor, it has become necessary to dispose the minds of those who would drink of this source of science by previous instruction in the first elements of his philosophy. Of all the elementary philosophies of the strictly Thomistic school, the most universally esteemed has been that of Father Goudin, who gave lectures in the Dominican College of Paris towards the end of the seventeenth century. The great aim of this faithful professor of Thomism is to be true to his master in every point, not only in the higher principles of philosophy, but even in the details of physics. He wrote at a time when a great revolution was taking place in men’s minds with regard to science, and he saw with concern that the new doctrines would prove in their results subversive of all that was Christian. He therefore set about opposing the doctrinal novelties of Descartes and his school by an uncompromising reassertion of the teaching of St. Thomas. In the judgment of posterity Goudin has erred somewhat, but not so much, certainly, as the school which he opposed; for the Cartesian doctrines have proved the source of many subsequent errors, as scepticism, rationalism, pantheism, atheism. The mistakes of Goudin simply regard some of the details of physical science which, whether correctly or erroneously explained, tend little to the benefit of our fellow-beings, although interesting enough to the minds of the well educated.

[Pg 328] We are assured that the strictest Thomists are not bound to adhere to the details of the physics of their master. The Angelic Doctor, in matters of this kind (which, we submit, concern little the theologian, or the metaphysician, or the moralist), adopted the prevailing opinions of the time. We do not read that he ever showed much enthusiasm for natural or experimental science, and in this respect he differed from his friend and quondam preceptor, Albertus Magnus. But in those fundamental questions of philosophy which are intimately connected with our moral conduct and with natural or positive religion, and indeed in all questions where St. Thomas is bound to think for himself, we do not find that he simply endorses the teaching of another. When it is objected by knowing people that Aquinas teaches doctrines which are exploded or puerile—as, for instance, that the earth is stationary, or that the east is the right hand of the heavens—it would be well for them to reflect that these are rather the doctrines of the universally-admired Aristotle than of his Christian disciple.[105]

Father Gonzales (since created Bishop of Cordova) has given to the church an excellent manual of Thomistic doctrine. At the outset, he seeks to determine the sense of the word philosophy. This is no easy matter, as the definitions given by different authors are many and various. Cousin declares it to be—reflection completely emancipated and freed from the trammels of authority, so that reason depends solely upon itself for the acquisition of truth. By the subjectivists of Germany it is defined—the Ego as it places and offers itself by thesis and antithesis. According to Kant, it is the necessary science of the laws and causes of spontaneous reason. Cicero says that philosophy is rerum divinarum et humanarum causarumque, quibus hæ res continentur, scientia; and this is, perhaps, the popular notion of the word, so that all scientific studies are included in the general term of philosophy. Thus we speak of the philosophy of history, the philosophy of language, the philosophy of manufactures, of laws, and so forth. A writer of the name of Mr. Robert Hooke tries to impress upon his readers the vast extent of philosophy in the following curious dissertation:

“The history of potters, tobacco-pipe makers, glass-grinders, looking-glass makers or foilers, spectacle-makers and optic-glass makers, makers of counterfeit pearl and precious stones, bugle-makers, lamp-blowers, color-makers, color-grinders, glass-painters, enamellers, varnishers, color-sellers, painters, limners, picture-drawers, makers of babies’ heads, of little bowling stones or marbles, fustian-makers, music-masters, tinsey makers and taggers; the history of school-masters, writing-masters, printers, bookbinders, stage-players, dancing masters and vaulters, apothecaries, chirurgeons, seamsters, butchers, barbers, laundresses, and cosmetics, etc., etc. (the true nature of each of which being exactly determined), will hugely facilitate our inquiries in philosophy.”

By most scholastics philosophy is defined as a cognitio certa et evidens. These are the words of Goudin, and we observe that they are adopted by Father Lepidi in the first volume of his new work. Gonzales, however, demurs to assent to this, for the reason that in philosophy many questions are discussed of which we have neither evidence nor certainty. The objection is inserted and responded to in Father [Pg 329] Lepidi’s book, and also in the works of Goudin. The proper and primary object of philosophy is certain and evident; it treats of questions that are obscure only secondarily and consequenter. Nevertheless, Gonzales prefers to define philosophy as cognitio scientifica et rationalis Dei, mundi et hominis, quo viribus naturalibus per altiores causas seu principia habetur. In the latter words of the definition he is in conformity with the rest of his school, but in the first part—that is, in the genus of the definition—he differs from them.

The essence of philosophy being determined, at least in the sense in which the author is going to treat of it, we are next invited to decide upon a suitable division. The older scholastics had divided it into four parts: logic; physics, whose object was ens mobile, or all changeable nature; metaphysics, which treated of being in the abstract, and all concrete objects which transcend the powers of the senses; and ethics. Some added a fifth part—namely, mathematics. Goudin’s definition of philosophy seems capable of embracing this science also; however, he disposes of it, whether consistently or not we need not stop to inquire.

Later Christian writers, who have adhered in the main to the doctrines of the scholastics, have somewhat varied their division. Physics in its details is excluded from philosophy strictly so called, while in its more universal relations it is considered as belonging to metaphysics. Thus the science of the laws of the world is called cosmology, and the science of the soul, its essence, its faculties, and its operations, is called psychology. Cosmology and psychology, together with theodicy or natural theology, are the subdivisions of special metaphysics, while the science of being is called ontology or general metaphysics.

However, Gonzales refuses to grant that psychology belongs properly to metaphysics, because, although the soul of which it treats is beyond the ken of the senses, yet the operations of the soul depend upon them and are recognized by them. He determines, therefore, that this science belongs as much to ethics and to logic as to metaphysics: to metaphysics, inasmuch as it treats of the essence of the soul; to logic, as it regards the faculties of cognition; to ethics, as far as it concerns the moral power. Later on, when Gonzales comes to treat of psychology ex professo, he suggests that it should be either reduced again to physics or made a distinct and special portion of philosophy. Such is the unsatisfactory consideration of the question by men eminent for their science. We see in the newly-issued volume of Father Lepidi’s philosophy that in his division he leaves out altogether the words physics and metaphysics, and proposes the following heads: logic, general ontology, cosmology, anthropology, natural theology, and ethics. This mode of division seems to us, with all due deference to Bishop Gonzales and other writers, the most satisfactory. Moreover, it is explained by Father Lepidi in a most logical manner, based as it is upon two incontrovertible philosophical maxims. Before we leave this subject of the division, we will mention that proposed by the late Canon Sanseverino in his great work, which, unfortunately, was never completed. He considers philosophy under a twofold aspect, subjective and objective. Subjective philosophy is divided into four branches—logica, dynamilogia, idealogia, [Pg 330] and criteriologia. Objective philosophy has also four parts—naturalis theologia, cosmologia, anthropologia, ethica. We observe that he is one with Father Lepidi in discarding the use of those vague terms of which we have spoken.

Father Gonzales has published his work in three volumes, the first of which comprises the tractates of Logic and Psychology. In the Logic we have noticed nothing particular to be mentioned, excepting its completeness and the exceeding clearness with which the subjects are treated. The treatise of Psychology, however, has greatly interested us, and is the best we have seen. It is divided into two parts, empiric and rational. Psychologia empirica treats of the powers of the soul, and we notice in a few instances a deviation from the explicit doctrine of Goudin. For instance, those species or representations of objects which are received in the cognitive senses, are stated by Gonzales to be immaterial and spiritual, while Goudin has said that they are material. It might, perhaps, be suggested that these species may be called immateriales negative. This epithet is allowed by the author to be applied to the anima of brutes; and as the species we speak of belong to animal life, they must be of the same nature. Cognition is a vital act, and all vitality is above the condition of that which is merely material. A very recent writer has implied that St. Thomas distinguishes immaterial and spiritual existences. We do not remember to have noticed such a distinction in his works. Perhaps the writer makes allusion to the doctrine that some operations of material beings transcend the qualities of matter—v.g., sensitive cognition. Yet these operations are not called immaterial by St. Thomas, at least not usually. This subject of cognition is well treated of by Gonzales. In another part of this treatise he endeavors to prove the necessity of an intellectus agens as distinguished from the intellectus possibilis, the passive intellect, the faculty of understanding.

In the second part of Psychology, the simplicity of the soul, its spirituality and immateriality, are clearly demonstrated. Its unity also is stoutly maintained, and the opposite errors, both ancient and modern, are stated with admirable terseness and pertinence, and then put aside as wanting in scientific consistency. With the hypothesis of one soul, all vital operations can be accounted for; with that of more than one principle of life, various phenomena could not be explained; therefore the doctrine of one principle is to be admitted.

Appended to the tractate of Psychology is a special chapter on Ideology. The various systems of Democritus, Plato, Aristotle, Locke, Leibnitz, Bonald, Malebranche, Gioberti, Kant, Schelling, Fichte, and Cousin are set aside one after another as insufficient or absurd. Then we have an exposition of the subject according to the principles of the Angelic Doctor; and this portion of the work is of unusual originality, specially interesting and instructive to many readers. The reality of ideas, as distinct intellectual representations of objects, it first established in opposition to the doctrines of those philosophers who maintain that the understanding perceives objects without the intervention of ideas or the need of an intellectus agens. The doctrine of impressed ideas as distinct from those that are expressed is insisted upon.

[Pg 331] The origin of our ideas is thus explained: There are four kinds of ideas, ideæ primariæ abstractionis, ideæ pure intelligibiles, ideæ pure spirituales, and idea entis, and this division is applicable to both impressed and expressed ideas. We must ask pardon for our attempt to Anglicize the scholastic terms. Now, as to expressed ideas, all these have their origin from the passive intellect. The difficulty, therefore, of explaining the origin of ideas regards only those which we call ideæ impressæ, and of these only we have now to speak.

Ideas of primary abstraction, which refer to corporeal or sensible objects—as, for instance, a man, a horse, the sun—come from the active intellect, which draws them out of the species contained in the imagination. Ideas purely intellectual—as those of substance, cause, effect, good, evil—have their origin from both the active and the passive intellect: from the former, because in the ideas of primary abstraction it discovers other more universal relations, as those of good, bad, etc.; from the latter, as far as it works out and develops those germs of higher knowledge imperfectly manifested by the active intellect. As to purely spiritual ideas—those of God, of the angels, of our own souls—these have not all the same origin. If the idea of God is obtained by reasoning from that which is contingent to the conclusion that a necessary being must exist, such an idea is the product of the passive intellect, which has worked it out of impressions previously received. But if the idea of God be conceived as of the first cause of all things, then it is acquired in the same way as the ideas of causes in general, and belongs in reality to that class of ideas which are called purely intellectual. The idea of an angel is acquired from the analogy of our own soul; hence the idea expressa of our soul may become the idea impressa of an angel. As to our own soul, there is no impressed idea of it, but its operations are sufficient for the acquisition of an expressed idea of it, without any need of an abstraction of the active intellect. As to the idea of being, it is an abstraction of the active intellect, but natural and spontaneous; indeed, it is its first perception, as the expressed idea of being is the first conception of the passive intellect. And the reason of this is, that our intellectual faculties are reflections of the mind of God.

Father Gonzales next proceeds to explain in what sense scholastics understand the axiom of the Stagirite, Nihil est in intellectu, quin prius fuerit in sensu. All ideas depend upon the senses so far forth that sensible cognition must always precede that which is intellectual, and because all intellectual cognition requires an accompanying exercise of the imagination. Ideas of primary abstraction depend upon sensible representations directly and immediately; ideas purely intellectual, remotely and inadequately; ideas purely spiritual, especially of angels and of our own souls, depend upon the senses only indirectly and occasionaliter. Hence the senses are never the efficient causes of our intellectual ideas; the most that can be said is, that they are the material causes of some of them. In this sense only can we accept the maxim of the great pagan philosopher without becoming implicated in the sensism of Locke and Condillac. Gonzales next warns his students not to consider ideas as the object of intellectual knowledge; an idea is not id QUOD cognoscitur, [Pg 332] but id QUO cognoscitur. These are the words of St. Thomas, and it is of the greatest importance to realize the doctrine, if we would avoid the Charybdis of idealism as well as the Scylla of sensism.

In the second volume we have the tractates of Ontology, Cosmology, and Natural Theology. In ontology the real distinction of essence and existence is affirmed and ably advocated, as, indeed, it usually is in works emanating from the Dominican Order. We have known personally more than one professor of that order who have differed from Gonzales and Goudin in this point, and who have taught their doctrines in the lecture rooms without scruple as the veritable teaching of St. Thomas. Our province is not to attempt to decide the question, either on its own independent merits or according to the authority of the Angelic Doctor. There are difficulties in the subject which seem to increase on examination. Father Liberatore, in the later editions of his Institutiones Philosophicæ, has passed from the ranks of those who deny the real distinction to join those who teach it, and he gives weighty reasons for doing so. We do not just now remember a conversion so conspicuous in the reverse direction; but we know of one or two such conversions, which, however, have attracted little notice.

In the treatise of Ontology there is an interesting dissertation on the principles of æsthetics. We are afraid to attempt a synopsis of it, as it would not be appreciated. Gonzales’ definition of beauty is worthy of a disciple of St. Thomas: Splendor harmonicus veri et infiniti.

The doctrine of St. Thomas, according to which he explains the mystery of the unchanged appearance of the elements of the Eucharist after consecration, is well sustained. Gonzales argues that substance and accidents are really distinct in essence, consequently the idea of their real separation involves no contradiction of terms; and the Protestant philosopher Leibnitz is quoted in support of this doctrine. Accordingly, after the words of consecration, when the substance of bread and wine is converted into the substance of the body and blood of Christ, all the accidents remain unchanged, both in appearance and in reality, except that extension subsists of itself after the manner of a substance. Cartesians, on the contrary, deny that the accidents of the elements really remain, and consider that the appearances of bread and wine are only phenomenal. Many modern philosophers who are scholastic in most points agree with the Cartesians in this; among others, Father Tongiorgi, S.J. This subject is worthy of the attentive study of all who believe in the doctrine of transubstantiation.

In the tractate of Cosmology the different systems of pantheism are explained and disposed of, and the doctrine of the creation of the world by a Being supreme, independent, and free is demonstrated. Then follows a discourse upon that interesting subject, the principles of bodies. Gonzales, as a staunch Thomist, upholds the doctrine of matter and form, and insists that it is the only system which is capable of satisfying the mind. Modern philosophers generally reject this system, and some of them in very contemptuous language. Cudworth, for instance, calls it genus quoddam metaphysicæ stultitiæ. Father Tongiorgi does not accept this doctrine, and seems to be persuaded that his [Pg 333] arguments in favor of chemical atomism are unanswerable and destructive of the ancient theory. Gonzales discusses successively the systems of the atomists and the dynamists, and those go-betweens whom he calls atomistico-dynamists; and they are successively dismissed as incomplete or erroneous. Then the old scholastic or Aristotelian system is clearly and beautifully represented. There are changes going on in nature which are observed by all. Substances are corrupted and substances are generated; the corruption of one is the generation of another. These changes are called substantial mutations. And yet, in spite of all these changes, something remains ever the same. When wood is turned into fire, fire into ashes, these into earth, earth into vegetable or mineral substances, there is always something that remains unaltered in its essence. What is this thing? It is primary matter (materia prima). What is it that makes the change when wood becomes fire, or earth, or a stone? It is the new substantial form which succeeds the one that has departed by corruption. In scholastic language, the matter has changed its form.

As matter is something not knowable of itself, and could not exist, even by a miracle, without being actuated or perfected by substantial forms, it follows that its essence can be but vaguely understood. For the same reason, a scientific definition of it is not possible. Hence Aristotle thought it profitable to give a negative definition of it: Nec quid, nec quale, nec quantum, nec aliquid eorum per quæ ens determinatur. We have known this definition to excite the irrepressible merriment of several. Some people have the faculty of being able to laugh at will, even when they understand nothing of the subject that tickles them; and such a faculty is sometimes of great convenience. Gonzales defines primary matter as—realitas substantialis et incompleta, nullum actum aut formam ex se habens, sed quæ capacitatem et potentiam habet ad universas formas substantiales. He defines substantial form. Realitas substantialis et incompleta, materiam primo actuans ac determinans ad constituendam simul cum ipsa substantiam complete subsistentem. Matter is the subject of the form; form is the perfection or actuality of matter. It is worth while to observe that Father Liberatore is a firm supporter of this theory.

To the principal objections, so cleverly put by Father Tongiorgi, against the Peripatetic system, Gonzales has always a suitable rejoinder. After a categoric respondeo to each one severally, he makes some general reflections upon them all which we will try to do into English:

“Although no answer were forthcoming to the famous objections of Tongiorgi, the scholastic system would continue to hold its own in respect of the first principles of bodies. Our system regards chiefly bodies which are simple, and bodies endowed with life. Now, none of the arguments of the Italian philosopher have any reference to either of these kinds of bodies. Consequently, they not only do not overturn the Peripatetic system of matter and form and of substantial generation, but they do not even touch the question. The most that can be inferred from his arguments is, that substantial generation does not take place in respect of inanimate bodies which are compound. Now, these compound bodies can be considered merely as bodies which are imperfect in unity of nature and substance, and as such they belong to that class of bodies which were styled by the old scholastics mixta imperfecta.”

The rest of the treatise of Ontology is well handled, especially [Pg 334] that which regards the principle and manifestations of life. It is here that we observed a distinction we have before mentioned. The anima of the brute creation is immaterial negative and similitudinarie, for its operations transcend the conditions of matter; it is material positive, because it exists and acts only in dependence on matter.

The tractate of Theodicy is good, and contains in a short compass all that is necessary for the course of the young philosopher. As was to be expected of a Dominican author, the questions which have come to be regarded as distinctive of the schools of the order—v.g., præmotio physica and predestination ante prævisa merita—are taught and defended with the most able of available arguments.

In the third volume we have first of all a treatise of Ethics, which is interesting and contains much that is of importance for our own days. The duty of regulating our conduct according to the law of reason and of God, by the commands of the church, of our civil rulers, of society, is well set forth, and the superiority of Christian morality to all others is proved. We only regret that the treatise is not longer.

The latter part of the third volume gives an excellent epitome of the history of philosophy. This history is divided into two periods. The first starts with the beginnings of philosophy and continues to the time of Christ, in quo instaurata sunt omnia. It is subdivided into three epochs: the first from the beginning of philosophy to its introduction into Greece; the second, from that time to the days of Socrates; the third, from Socrates to Christ. The second period is from the time of Christ to our days, and has likewise three epochs: the first, from the early ages of Christianity to the time of Charlemagne; the second, from Charlemagne to the Renaissance of the fifteenth century; the third, from thence to our own time. For a literary student this short history is very valuable. All the systems of philosophy that can be thought of are sketched in their principal characters, with a short notice of their originators and champions. Father Gonzales does not weary his readers with a special refutation of each particular system; this is unnecessary after having taught his principles so well in the didactic essays. About fifty systems of the period before Christ are briefly stated, and above a hundred and fifty of those which have appeared since. This short history is evidently the result of very extensive reading.

As a student’s manual, we know of nothing more complete than the Philosophia Elementaria of Bishop Gonzales. It is an excellent course, both for the young cleric who is preparing for the study of the scholastics, and for the secular youth about to take his place in the world. The style of writing is simple, but by no means devoid of elegance. Spanish writers who have been trained in the schools of Melchior Cano have never been at a loss to express their thoughts in a becoming form.

We have heard many regrets that there was no modern text-book of philosophy of the school of Goudin. This want is now fully supplied by Gonzales, and it will be doubly satisfied when the rest of the volumes of Lepidi’s Elementa Philosophiæ Christianæ have appeared. We do not say that Goudin will become unnecessary; the serious student will still continue to consult him. But there can be no doubt that Gonzales’ work is more adapted to [Pg 335] the times. It is also more terse, more interesting, more suitable to captivate the minds of youthful students. We hope that what we have said may help to make Bishop Gonzales more known among us. He has published a remarkable work in his own mother tongue, Estudios sobre la Filosofia de Santo Tomas, which would be productive of good if it were translated into English.

[104] Philosophia Elementaria ad usum Academicæ ac præsertim Ecclesiasticæ Juventutis. Opera et studio R. P. Fr. Zephyrini Gonzales, Ordinis Prædicatorum. Matriti apud Polycarpum Lopez, Cava-Baja, 19. MDCCCLXVIII.

Philosophia juxta inconcussa tutissimaque D. Thomæ Dogmata. Auctore P. F. Antonio Goudin, Ordinis Prædicatorum. Editio novissima. Urbevetere: Prælis speraindeo pompei. 1859.

[105] The writer was talking recently with a clergyman of the Anglican Establishment, who gave it as his opinion that the Summa Theologica was not worth studying, “because it was based on the false decretals of Isidore.”

THE DEVOUT CHAPEL OF NOTRE DAME DE BÉTHARRAM.

“Tu mihi, Virgo parens, in carmine suggere vires

Audacesque animos et grandibus annue coeptis.”

—Pierre de la Bastide.

La dévote chapelle de Notre Dame de Bétharram, about ten miles from Lourdes on the way to Pau, has been for eight hundred years the most renowned sanctuary in Béarn, and, to quote St. Vincent of Paul, “the second, or at least the third, most frequented in the kingdom.” Founded by the Crusaders, endowed by kings and nobles, favored by supernatural graces, the favorite resort of the poor and afflicted, sung by poets, and its history written by learned men, it has every claim on the interest of the pious heart.

We left Lourdes one pleasant morning in September in advance of a large pilgrimage from Marseilles, that we might have an opportunity of examining the church of Bétharram at our leisure. The railway runs along the valley of the Gave, leaving at the left the sacred grotto of Massabielle and the fair church of the Immaculate Conception, which stand in full view on the further shore. We passed the forest of Lourdes at the right, and in fifteen minutes came to the little village of St. Pé—Sanctus Petrus de Generoso, as the old chronicles call it—on a bend of the river, shut in by the mountains. Keeping along in sight of the clear, green current of the Gave, everywhere the most wayward, the most picturesque, and most fascinating of rivers, we came, in ten minutes after leaving the narrow gorge of St. Pé, to the station of Montaut-Bétharram, where, away to the left, we could see the cross on the Calvary, and the domes of the white oratories of the Passion gleaming among the trees on its sides. The Devout Chapel of Notre Dame de Bétharram is at the foot of the mount, on the further bank of the Gave, and wholly shut out of sight. A straight road leads to it from the station, which is about half a mile distant. The bridge that spans the river with a bold arch is extremely picturesque, the sides of the arch being completely covered with ivy, which trails to the very water and lines the steep banks. Nothing could be more romantic. Trees lean pensively over the limpid stream, and flowers bloom along the shore. The Gave, as the poet of Bétharram remarks, after rushing through the broad valley with impetuous haste, threatening to overflow the meadows with its swelling current, suddenly slackens its speed as it approaches the [Pg 336] chapel of the Virgin, and flows gently by with a murmur of softest homage. Opposite the bridge is a long range of monastic-looking buildings with narrow windows and thick walls, the asylum of meditation and prayer. Connected therewith is the church, which stands with its side to the river, facing the west. The front, of Pyrenean marble, is adorned with white marble statues of the Evangelists with their emblems—two each side of the mild-eyed Virgin who stands above the open door treading the serpent beneath her feet.

It being early in the afternoon, we found the church delightfully quiet. There were only a few persons at prayer, and, having paid our vows at the altar of Our Lady, we proceeded to examine the building and recall its varied history. The interior of the church consists of a nave and two aisles. The latter are literally lined with confessionals. The clerestory walls are covered with paintings supported by gigantic caryatides amid a profusion of gilding and ornament somewhat Spanish in character. The whole effect is imposing, and there is an impressive air of antiquity and gloom about the church, though it was rebuilt only two centuries ago. The Madonna, a modern production, by Renoir, a pupil of Pradier, is over the high altar in the centre of a reredos, rich with gilding and carving, which extends to the very arches. At the end of the right aisle is the chapel of the Pastoure, so called from the bas-relief depicting the legend of the shepherds who discovered the Virgin of Bétharram.

The devotion to Notre Dame de Bétharram, so popular all through the Pyrenees, is supposed to have arisen in the eleventh century—an age of simple faith, when God loved to manifest the wonders of his grace. The church is fondly believed by many to have been founded by the Crusaders, who perhaps gave it its pleasing Oriental name. Gaston IV., a prince of the Merovingian race, noted for his devotion to the Blessed Virgin, then reigned in Béarn. One of the bravest warriors who went to the rescue of the Holy Sepulchre, he directed the construction of the war-machines before the walls of Jerusalem, and was one of the first to commence the assault at the side of Godfrey of Bouillon.

We are chiefly dependent on the ancient traditions of the province for the early history of Bétharram, as the old church was burned down by the Huguenots. One of the legends attributes the name of Bétharram to a miraculous occurrence. A young girl, who was one day gathering flowers on the banks of the Gave, accidentally fell into the stream and was carried away by the current. She instinctively cried to the Virgin for assistance, who instantly appeared, holding out a leafy branch, by which she was drawn to the shore. The girl gratefully offered her celestial protectress a beautiful branch—or, to use the language of Béarn, a beth arram—of gold.

“‘Youb’ offri dounc ma bère arrame;

Qué l’ab’ dépalisi sùs l’aüta;

Y-mey que hey bot en moun ame

Qu’aci daban bous, Nouste Dame,

Gnaüt beth arram que lusira.”

That is to say, literally:

“I offer you, then, my golden bough,

Which I lay on the altar divine;

Furthermore, in my inmost soul I vow,

In this blest place, O Mother of Grace!

For ever a beautiful branch shall shine.”

La Bastide, the poet-priest of Bétharram in the time of the Fronde, is the first writer to mention this derivation, which furnishes him [Pg 337] with a comparison to illustrate the mysterious effects of divine grace: “This name signifies, in the language of the country, a beau rameau—a beautiful branch—planted on the shore of the Gave by the august Virgin, yielding fruit of a delicious savor that serves for the nourishment of souls.”[106]

The old legends say a girl of the neighboring village of Lestelle, named Raymonde, predicted the erection of a church on this spot in honor of Nouste Dame, but her prophecy was scoffed at, even by her own parents. Not long after, some children, who were amusing themselves at the foot of the hill of Bétharram while tending their flocks, saw a bright flame among the sharp rocks on the banks of the river, in the very place where now stands the high altar of the Devout Chapel. Like the mysterious bush on Mount Horeb, it burned intensely without consuming the thicket around. After a moment of stupefaction the little shepherds timidly approached, and what was their astonishment to behold in the midst of the flames a beautiful statue of the Virgin and Child! They fell down before it in pious reverence, and then hurried away to Lestelle to relate the wonderful event. The inhabitants ran in crowds to the place, followed by the priest in his white surplice, who fell on his knees amid the prostrate throng and bent his face to the ground before the marvellous image.

As the place was rocky and apparently unsuitable for a chapel, the people proceeded to construct a small niche at the further end of the bridge, to which the priest carried the statue amid the joyous shouts of the people. But it was not there that Mary chose to be honored, and the following day the niche was discovered to be vacant, and the miraculous Virgin standing on the rocks where she originally appeared. She was taken back, but, mysteriously returning again and again, the people of Lestelle concluded to transport her to their village church, which they did with great pomp, and carefully fastened her in, that they might ascertain whether she had been moved by human agency or some higher power. In spite of this precaution, the statue was again found at dawn on the rocks of Bétharram. Then Raymonde took courage once more, and declared this was the spot the Reyne deü Ceü had chosen for her sanctuary. Again the people began to laugh at her revelations, but she now spoke with authority, and, moved by divine inspiration, threatened them with a terrible chastisement if they refused to obey the command. And, as if to give force to her words, while they stood hesitating a sudden cloud appeared in the sky, from which fell a torrent of hailstones. The people cried to heaven for pardon and mercy, and immediately vowed to erect the chapel.

The learned Abbé Menjoulet of Bayonne thinks the church of Bétharram was built in the eleventh or early in the twelfth century, from the style of the portions still to be found here and there in the modern building. It certainly existed long before the ascendancy of the Huguenot party in Béarn, and had been for ages regarded as the holiest spot in the land. Pierre de Marca says its remote origin is lost in obscurity. The distinguished [Pg 338] Jesuit, Père Poiré, in his Triple Couronne de la Mère de Dieu, thinks it of a later date, but he had never visited it in person. His account was derived from a magistrate of Pau. He says the ancient pilgrims, as soon as they came in sight of the Devout Chapel, fell on their knees, and completed their pilgrimage in this way with a lighted torch in their hands. Cures without number were wrought, the divine anger stayed, and whole armies put to flight at the intercession of the Boune Bierge of Bétharram. The walls were hung with the crutches of the paralytic, the chains of liberated prisoners, and the wax limbs given by those who had been healed, many of which offerings resisted the flames, and were found after the destruction of the church by the emissaries of Jeanne d’Albret.

This princess cherished a lively resentment against the Holy See on account of the alliance of Julius II. with Ferdinand the Catholic, which she thought led to the conquest of Navarre, to the injury of the house of Albret. After dissimulating her sentiments for some time, she threw off the mask and subjected the Catholics of Béarn to a violent persecution. Montgomery was the agent of her vengeance, and he was well fitted for the work. It was in 1569 that, on his destructive round through the country, he came to the sanctuary of Bétharram, which he laid waste. The miraculous Virgin, however, was saved, and, after being hidden for some time at Lestelle, was carried to Spain, where it became an object of veneration under the name of Nuestra Señora la Gasconne.

During this sad time, in which Mary’s altar lay desolate, there were marked instances of divine manifestation. By night the ruins were often seen lit up with a wonderful light, as of many torches, and the sound of angelic music was heard. The crumbling walls preserved their miraculous virtues, and unhappy mothers came with their sick children in the night-watches to pray among the ruins, and returned joyfully in the morning bearing the evidence of their answered petitions with them.

As soon as it was safe to do so, the inhabitants of Lestelle, in spite of their poverty, hastened to restore the church of their Bonne Vierge, who, for more than half a century, had preserved them from the contagion of heresy. Not a person in the place had joined the Huguenots, and it was the only village in Béarn where Catholic services had been maintained.

Leonard de Trappes was at this time archbishop of Auch, the metropolitan see. He was one of the most distinguished prelates of France, and honored with the confidence of Henry IV. A man of ardent piety, and solicitous for the spiritual welfare of his flock, he founded a congregation of missionaries for the wants of his diocese, and established them at Notre Dame de Garaison under the charge of Pierre Geoffroy, who devoted his whole fortune to the work. Louis XIII. having granted permission for rebuilding the church of Bétharram, Geoffroy resolved to celebrate the event by a grand pilgrimage to this ancient shrine. He had trained a choir of mountaineers, whose superb voices greatly added to the solemnities of Garaison. Taking these men with him, Geoffroy set out with six priests for Béarn, in those days a fatiguing journey. Every one represented to him the danger [Pg 339] of venturing into a country still in a state of agitation, but, in spite of some insults and threats on the part of the Calvinists, he pressed on, joined here and there by a band of Catholics, who at last numbered several thousand. Among them were the Baron and Baroness de Miossens from the Château de Coarraze, and many nobles.

It was a fine spring morning when this grand procession appeared on the banks of the Gave. The valley resounded with the glad hymns of the mountaineers of Garaison, in which the vast multitude joined with the utmost enthusiasm. The hill of Bétharram was literally covered with people from the neighboring towns, who, when they caught sight of the immense procession coming to reopen the church of their beloved Virgin, burst into tears and acclamations of joy. Geoffroy celebrated Mass in the church, and afterwards preached to five thousand people on the public square of Lestelle. This was forty-six years after the destruction of the sanctuary.

The niche of the Virgin was still empty. Mgr. de Trappes resolved to supply the deficiency, and had a new statue carved out of wood in the style of the old one, which he took to Bétharram himself. It was in July, 1616, he set out from Garaison with a numerous escort of priests. Passing through Lourdes, he stopped at St. Pé, whence he continued on foot, followed by all the monks, a vast number of priests from Bigorre and Béarn, all the nobility of the country, and an innumerable crowd of people with crosses and banners, carrying the new statue of the Virgin and filling the air with their hymns in her honor. Among them was Pierre de Marca.

The archbishop set up the votive Madonna over the high altar, and celebrated Mass in the presence of six thousand persons.[107] He remained several days at Bétharram, administered the sacrament of confirmation, received several Huguenots into the fold, and erected an immense wooden cross on the summit of the mount, as if he had a foresight of its future consecration to the divine Passion. He always cherished a delightful recollection of his pilgrimage, and when he died he bequeathed to the church a silver lamp, with a fund to supply it with oil to burn continually before the Virgin he had given to Bétharram.

Pierre de Marca, whom we find here with the Archbishop of Auch, was the learned author of the Antiquities of Béarn. He was made counsellor of state under Richelieu, and conceived so great a devotion to Notre Dame de Bétharram that he became the historian of the chapel. He studied its past traditions, and recorded a vast number of miracles that occurred here, with the names, dates, and other particulars, often taken from the lips of the persons themselves, many of whom belonged to the nobility of Béarn, Guienne, and Languedoc, and sworn to by reliable witnesses in the presence of the chaplains and magistrates. He relates that not long after the visit of Mgr. de Trappes, five villagers of Montaut, while eating their noontide meal on a little hillock in the valley, struck by a noise, as of a furious wind, looked towards the Mount of Bétharram, and saw the cross planted on its summit suddenly wrenched [Pg 340] from its place and thrown on the ground, and then, as if by its own might, rise again to its former position, crowned with a mysterious light.[108]

This miraculous occurrence merits the more particular attention because it led to the construction of the famous Calvary, which continues to attract pilgrims to this day. It happened about the time Louis XIII. re-established the Catholic religion in Béarn, and was, says Marca, one of the causes that determined him to go in person to Pau, from which time he cherished a special affection for Bétharram and became one of its benefactors.

A month after the facts of the case were established, the town of Lestelle gave the hill of Bétharram to the church. The bishop of the diocese now induced Hubert Charpentier to take charge of the Devout Chapel. He was a licentiate of the Sorbonne, for some time a professor of philosophy at Bordeaux, then a missionary at Notre Dame de Garaison, where he distinguished himself by his zeal and eloquence in the pulpit, and afterwards, devoted to charitable works, director of the city hospital at Bordeaux. He was appointed grand chaplain of Bétharram in 1621, and had six minor chaplains given him to aid in the work. The first sight of the holy sanctuary and the mountain above made a particular impression on his mind. Studying the traditions and features of the place, he was struck with the miracle of the Cross and the general resemblance of the neighborhood to the environs of Jerusalem. The mountain of Bétharram was higher than that of Olives; the valley at the foot more extensive than that of Josaphat; and the Gave a more abundant stream than the Cedron. He conceived the idea of building a succession of oratories along the side of the hill, in which should be depicted the principal scenes of the Passion, and crowning the summit with three crosses and a chapel of the Holy Sepulchre. To every one the project seemed like a divine inspiration, which he afterwards modestly confessed was the fact. About this time an abbess of St. Clare related to him that, when she first entered the convent at Mont-de-Marsan, she found an old nun of eighty years of age, a native of the vicinity of Bétharram, who was fond of describing the glories of the miraculous chapel before the rise of heresy in Béarn, and said the place was called the Holy Land.

Charpentier’s proposition was received with so much enthusiasm that, on Good Friday, 1623, a Christ on the Cross was solemnly set up, between the two thieves, on the summit of the mount, and the oratories of the Passion were at once begun. Louis XIII. built the Chapel of St. Louis, with two cells and a gallery looking off over the beautiful valley to the gorge of St. Pé. To ensure the quiet solitude of Bétharram, he forbade the building of [Pg 341] any inn or public-house in the neighborhood, and at his death bequeathed three thousand livres to the church.

Marie de Medicis and Anne of Austria also became its benefactors, as well as Louis XIV., who took pleasure in his youth in reading Marca’s Traité des Merveilles opérées en la Chapelle Notre Dame du Calvaire de Bétharram. Charpentier himself gave all he possessed. Madame de Gramont, Madame de Lauzun, and the Countess de Brienne also brought their offerings. La Bastide writes: “I have seen the great ones of the earth rivalling each other in the magnificence of their offerings to this august sanctuary.”

It is time we should speak of the poet of Bétharram—Pierre de La Bastide, a native of the diocese of Auch, who now became associated with the labors of Charpentier. His poems are in Latin. He is a graceful writer, with a pleasing cadence in his lines. His poem on Notre Dame de Bétharram is at once historic and descriptive. It is divided into four parts, giving the history of the foundation, a description of the Calvary and surrounding region, a résumé of the miracles in the Devout Chapel, and a picture of the life of the chaplains. The poem is at once brilliant, pleasing, and picturesque, and of great value to all who would study the history and spirit of the place.

It was at Bétharram La Bastide translated into Latin verse the French poem of Arnauld d’Andilly on the life of Christ, which was such an event in the literary world when it first appeared in 1634. At that time the graver part of society thought nothing serious could be expressed in the form of French poetry, and the religious held it in horror. D’Andilly broke loose from this prejudice, and, as he says in his preface, “abandoned the illusory praises of profane love to use the charms of poesy in depicting the life of Christ, in order to attract pious hearts by placing before their eyes a picture of the wonderful things wrought for our redemption.”[109]

La Bastide is not the only poet to sing the praises of Our Lady of the Beautiful Branch. M. Bataille, a few years since, received from the Archæological Society of Béarn a silver bough for his charming poetical version of the legend in the Béarnais language, which he hung up over the altar of the Virgin.

The Calvary of Bétharram became dear to all who loved to retrace the overwhelming mysteries of the Redemption. The sorrowful way up the mount’s steep sides seemed to them

“A road where aiding angels came.”

Every station was marked by some memory of God’s special grace. It was in the dim, shadowy oratory of the Garden of Olives a merchant from Grenade-sur-Adour was delivered from the adversary of souls. Further on, where Christ was represented blindfolded, a poor woman recovered her sight after seven years’ blindness. At the Holy [Pg 342] Tomb where lay the sacred Body embalmed

“In spices from the golden shore,”

the sick obtained renewed life and the grace to give out henceforth the sweet odor of piety and good works. And so on. The very shadow of Christ Suffering seemed to have power. Fifteen thousand pilgrims often came here in a year—a great number for a remote mountain chapel, less accessible in former days. Marca relates that M. de Gassion, a zealous Calvinist of Pau, came to Bétharram to behold the superstitions he supposed practised on the mount, but he was so touched by the devotion he witnessed that he was impelled to pray at every station, and thank God he had inspired his ministers with so pious and praiseworthy a project.

The chaplains established a confraternity of the Holy Cross, composed of laymen animated with a special love for our crucified Lord, which became so numerous that Pope Urban VIII. accorded many indulgences to all who belonged to it. Several of its members retired wholly from secular pursuits to the solemn gloom of this Mount of the Passion as to “a holy tower against the world,” that, by self-chastening rod, vigil, and fast, they might subdue the baser instincts of their nature and put on Christ and him crucified. What ineffable nights they must have spent beneath the oaks of Bétharram watching with tearful eyes the Divine Sufferer in the Garden or treading with bleeding feet the rough Way of the Cross!

There were many of these hermits’ cells on the shaggy sides of the mount. First, there was St. Bernard’s cell, built by the Baron de Poyane, a brave soldier who was governor of Navarrenx under Louis XIII., who had the holy life of the Abbot of Clairvaux painted on its walls. A little higher was St. Cyprian’s cell, the favorite retreat of La Bastide, with a little terrace and stone steps leading down to the church. Then came the cell of St. Francis de Paul, for persons of rank who wished to pass a limited time in solitude on the mount. It stood below the chapel of St. Louis and commanded a lovely view of the plain of Montaut. Its foundations are still to be seen supporting a pretty hanging garden. St. Anthony’s cell was encrusted among the sharp rocks that served as a foundation to the chapel of Louis XIII.—a formidable cliff, bare in winter, but in summer covered with vines that surpassed the most beautiful tapestry. On its top was suspended the royal chapel among the verdant trees. Behind the church was St. Joseph’s hermitage, for a long time the only dwelling of the chaplains, where also were lodged the infirm who came for succor to the Virgin of Bétharram. Near the oratory of the Garden of Olives were the cells of St. Stephen, St. Anne, and St. Francis. A little above was the votive cell of St. Roch, built by the citizens of Mont-de-Marsan at the time of a great plague. Here was a little spring which still supplies the pretty fount of St. Roch near the entrance of the church. On the summit of the mountain was a small cell, beside the chapel of the Holy Sepulchre, where for more than two hundred years lived a succession of hermits who, buried with their Lord, gave themselves up to a life of contemplation. The last one died in 1857.

Louis XIII., in authorizing the Calvary of Bétharram, wished there were many others like it in his [Pg 343] kingdom, and requested Charpentier to establish one on Mount Valerian, near Paris. This holy priest, whose soul was devoured with longing to extend the devotion to the sufferings of Christ, was struck with the grand idea of setting up the cross over the splendors of the capital and displaying the emblems of the Passion in sight of the gay city, as a constant reproach to its pleasure-loving people. Charpentier tore himself away from his beloved Bétharram. At Paris he was hospitably welcomed to the house of the pious Countess de Brienne, who took pleasure in conversing with him on the things of eternity, and said she had no greater enjoyment than this holy intercourse.

The devotion to Calvary took root in Paris. Richelieu favored the work. Cardinal de la Rochefoucauld lent his aid. Louis XIV. authorized the consecration of the mount; and the Archbishop of Paris approved of the congregation of the Prêtres du Calvaire, similar to that in Béarn.

As soon as Charpentier arrived at Paris, in 1633, he became the object of the most flattering attentions on the part of the Port-Royalists, then under the direction of a priest from Bayonne—the famous Abbé St. Cyran, a man of an ardent, austere nature, who at that time seemed devoted to the revival of Christian and ecclesiastical discipline. Nothing must be inferred against the orthodoxy of Charpentier or La Bastide on account of their innocent relations with Port Royal. Not the least suspicion ever rested on their orthodoxy. Charpentier was occupied in good works rather than controversy. He died on Mount Valerian, with a reputation for extraordinary sanctity, December 10, 1650, three years before the Augustinus was condemned by the Holy See. His body was found, without any trace of corruption, in 1802. His heart, at his own request, was sent to the church of Notre Dame de Bétharram, where it is enclosed in the wall on the epistle side of the chancel. The place is marked by a tablet of black marble, on which is the inscription: “Ici est le cœur de Hubert Charpentier, fondateur du Calvaire.”

The most distinguished chaplain of Bétharram in the eighteenth century was the Abbé Cassiet, for several years connected with the Canadian mission. It seemed strange in this distant mountain chapel of Béarn to come upon the traces of an old American missionary, and a natural curiosity was felt to know something of his history. We cannot forbear the pleasure of giving it pretty nearly as related by M. l’Abbé Sébie, the curé of Montaut, from details given by the nephews of M. Cassiet, now living at an advanced age in that place.

M. Pierre Cassiet was born at Montaut, in the Landes, in 1727. He made his preparatory studies at the seminary of Agen, and, feeling a strong desire to devote himself to the work of foreign missions, entered the Séminaire des Missions Etrangères at Paris, the superior of which was also from the diocese of Aire. He was at first destined for the mission of Cochin China, but a few days before the time fixed for his departure a missionary intended for Canada falling ill, it was proposed that the Abbé Cassiet should take his place. He consented and went to Canada, where he remained nine years, till the country was ceded to the English by the treaty of Versailles, February, 1763. At the time of his arrival [Pg 344] the see of Quebec was vacant, and the diocese was governed by M. de Lalanne, likewise a native of Montaut, who, after sixteen years of useful labor, returned to France and died superior of the seminary at Dax, about the year 1775, beloved and honored by every one.[110]

In Canada M. Cassiet had charge of the parish of St. Louis, where the festivals of the church were celebrated with as much splendor as in Europe. He was successful in winning the confidence of his parishioners. He mingled among them, interested himself in their pursuits, taught the natives the culture of many useful vegetables and the raising of domestic animals. As there was regular commercial intercourse with Bordeaux and Bayonne, he was able to procure many serviceable things from his native land.

When the English took possession of Canada they called together all the French priests in the country, wishing, they said, to regulate their relations with the new authorities. Several of them had a presentiment of evil, among whom was Abbé Cassiet, who buried the sacred vessels in the ground, packed his trunk, and took a faithful servant with him. The treaty of Versailles stipulated the maintenance and protection of the Catholic religion, that the French priests should receive an annual salary from the English government, and be allowed to continue the exercise of their ministry under the direction of the bishop of Quebec. This treaty, according to the French accounts, was kept with Punic faith, though the English deny, or at least greatly extenuate, the atrocious coup de main so contrary to the law of nations, to say nothing of humanity and religion. One hundred and sixty-six French priests assembled at Quebec, according to orders. They were surrounded by troops, seized, and put on board a ship, which was instantly ordered to set sail for Europe. Nothing could exceed the inhumanity with which these martyr-priests were treated during the voyage by the brutal and fanatic Englishmen who had charge of them. Anchoring at Plymouth, England, they kept their prisoners on board for three months. They did not massacre them, but, with the most refined barbarism, subjected them to all the tortures of hunger and thirst. Their rations were reduced to an insufficient quantity to sustain life, and the distribution of water was delayed every day, till they were extenuated by the privation. Thirst killed more than hunger, and, when the ship at last touched at Morlaix in Brittany, of the one hundred and sixty-six priests who left Canada, only five remained, and these were barely alive. M. Cassiet was of the number. He had the sorrow of losing his faithful Canadian on the way, and was himself so low that he lost his senses and was speechless. He was taken charge of by a lady at Morlaix, who, for some days, only sustained his life under horrible sufferings by infusing a few drops of honey from time to time into his mouth.

His health re-established in a measure, he proceeded to Paris to report himself at the Missions Etrangères, where his condition excited general sympathy. The government, though too weak to demand satisfaction from the English, promised him a pension of six hundred livres a year. Thence he went to [Pg 345] Rome, where he was received with the respect due to his sufferings for the faith.

After his return to Montaut, finding his pension not forthcoming, he resolved to go to Paris again to claim it. Accordingly he bought one of the small horses of the Landes for twenty crowns, and proceeded by short stages to the capital. He put up at the Missions Etrangères as usual, but was disappointed to find the court at Versailles, as well as the Abbé de Jarente, who had the portfolio of benefices and pensions, and formed part of the king’s household. M. Cassiet, undiscouraged, set out again the next morning on his way for Versailles. He little suspected the dramatic manner in which he was to present himself at the palace. Crossing a bridge, his horse, frightened at meeting a carriage, took the bit between his teeth and sprang forward like lightning. Our cavalier lost his hat, calotte, whip, and everything not secured to his person. In short, it was a repetition of the famous race of John Gilpin. In this way he was borne full tilt up to the palace gates. M. l’Abbé de Jarente, by some singular coincidence, happened to be there, and at once conceived a lively interest in the ecclesiastic who arrived at court in so queer a plight. M. Cassiet, as soon as his natural excitement was somewhat over, explained the cause of his unclerical appearance, and made known his object in coming. His pension was assured; and the Abbé de Jarente was so taken with such a feat of horsemanship that he offered a hundred crowns for the spirited steed. M. Cassiet, courteous and generous by nature, at once presented him to the minister, refusing any return.

Our Abbé was afterwards given a small benefice near Montaut, called Las Prabendes, but he resigned it in favor of a young priest who subsequently became a Carthusian at Bordeaux. He was then appointed canon of St. Girons de Hagetmau, but he found the life too calm and monotonous after so varied a career, and about the year 1772 he offered his services to the community of the Prêtres du Calvaire at Bétharram. Here he so distinguished himself by his piety, zeal, and ability that he was soon appointed superior. The house became very prosperous under his rule. He put to account the practical knowledge of agriculture he had gained in Canada, laid out gardens, orchards, and vineyards on the banks of the Gave, and in the course of a few years increased the revenues five-fold. At the same time he infused a missionary spirit among the chaplains, and much of his own zeal in winning souls to Christ.

About this time the Abbé de Jarente, afterwards Bishop of Orléans, coming to the Pyrenees to breathe the mountain air and try the mineral waters, visited the Devout Chapel of Bétharram. He was delighted to find here the Abbé Cassiet, whom it was impossible to forget. No doubt the story of the horse came up, and the comical way in which he presented himself at Versailles. M. de Jarente offered M. Cassiet a benefice of six thousand livres a year without any obligation of residence or service. It was declined, though M. Cassiet no longer received his pension; but he was finally prevailed upon to accept a small benefice of one hundred and sixty livres a year in the Vicomté of Orthez. He was glad, he said, to have wherewith to shoe and clothe himself without being at any expense to his congregation. His [Pg 346] brother presented Bétharram with ten thousand livres, on condition that the chaplains should give a mission every ten years at Montaut.

The Revolution brought mourning to this peaceful mountain chapel, and M. Cassiet, after trying in vain to propitiate the authorities, became for the second time a confessor of the faith and sought refuge in Spain. Somewhere in Biscay he met the Abbé St. Marc, a young curé from Grenade-sur-l’Adour, also in exile, and persuaded him to go to the Canadian mission, where he remained several years, but finally died in 1845, at the age of ninety-one, at Mont-de-Marsan, where his memory is still honored.

When the Catholic religion was re-established in France, the Abbé Cassiet returned to his homestead at Montaut, being then too old and infirm to undertake the restoration of Bétharram. Of the twelve priests of Calvary in 1793, only two were living, and they were advanced in years.

M. Cassiet’s last days were quietly spent in his native place. The bishop of Bayonne allowed him to say Mass in his own apartments, on account of his infirmities. He died in 1809, aged eighty-two years, surrounded with the love and veneration of all, and was buried at the foot of the cross in the public cemetery of Montaut.

The church of Notre Dame de Bétharram was saved from destruction at the time of the Revolution by the efforts of the mayor of the faithful town of Lestelle; but he was obliged to abandon the Calvary to its fury. The oratories were demolished, the statues broken to pieces, the paintings torn up, and the holy Way of the Cross rendered a Via Dolorosa indeed. When the sacred image of Christ on the Cross was overthrown, a swarm of bees issued from the opening in the side, and one of hornets from that of the impenitent thief. An unhappy individual who had the audacity to knock off the head of the Virgin at the chapel of the Holy Sepulchre became from that moment the object of divine malediction, and some time after was beheaded.

The sacraments of the church were administered at Lestelle during this sad period by Père Joseph, a Franciscan friar, who sought in anything but “Franciscan weeds to pass disguised.” His various escapes from danger have become almost legendary. Wherever there was a person in danger of death or a child to be baptized, he suddenly made his appearance, and then as mysteriously disappeared—concealed, no doubt, by the good people of the village. Nine of the citizens purchased the hill of Bétharram, and some others the church. They were redeemed by the ecclesiastical authorities as soon as better days arrived, and a Petit Séminaire was established in the residence and hospice. Here was educated Bertrand Lawrence, the restorer of Notre Dame de Garaison, afterwards bishop of Tarbes. The devout chapel was now reopened for public devotion; the oratories on the mount were hastily restored and once more frequented, in spite of the rude scenes of the Passion painted by the Père Joseph.

In 1823 the Duchess of Angoulême, accompanied by the bishop of the diocese and a numerous procession of clergy, came here to make the Way of the Cross and pray for a blessing on the royal army under the duke in Spain. The duchess presented the church with a monstrance of rich workmanship. Four years after her sister-in-law, the [Pg 347] Duchess of Berry, also came to Bétharram, and was received with the same demonstrations of joy.

The most noted chaplain of Bétharram in this century was a holy Basque priest of great austerity—the Abbé Garicoïts, a genuine Cantabrian, to whom his fellow-priests loved to apply the words of Sidonius Apollinaris:

“Cantaber ante omnes hiemisque, ætusque, famisque,

Invictus.…”

He founded the Prêtres du Sacré Cœur, who continue to serve the church. He restored the Calvary to its ancient beauty, and repeopled its cells. While he was superior of the house the sanctuary was visited by the Abbé de Salinis, a distinguished Béarnais priest, who had inherited a special devotion to Notre Dame de Bétharram. He afterwards received the pallium, as archbishop of Auch, at her feet, and thenceforth came here regularly to make his annual retreat. It was he who sent Alexander Renoir, a Christian artist imbued with the love and spirit of the middle ages, to design the bas-reliefs that now adorn the Stations of the Cross. This sculptor spent five years at the work, after passing whole days on the sacred mount looking down on the enchanting valley of the Gave and meditating on the scenes he has so ably depicted in the first eight oratories. His figures are dignified, the faces full of character, and the draperies graceful. The Saviour has everywhere the same superhuman expression. In the Garden of Olives he is supported by an angel whose outspread wings surround him like a glory. It is evidently by his own will he suffers himself to be sustained. In the Flagellation his face wears a wonderful expression of patience; in the Crowning with Thorns, of inexpressible suffering and divine submission. He stands in all the majesty of innocence and sorrow before Pilate, whose thoughtful, anxious face as he looks at him reveals the struggle within. Perhaps the most touching scene is when Christ meets his Blessed Mother. The Virgin is kneeling with arms yearningly stretched up towards him, with a look of ineffable tenderness and pity, and he for an instant seems to forget the weight of the overwhelming cross in the sense of his filial love. The Crucifixion is terribly real. The sacred Body visibly palpitates with suffering; the feet and hands quiver with agony; the face is filled with a divine woe. Mary, at the foot of the cross, is sustained by a form of enchanting youth and beauty.

The fourteen oratories of the Via Crucis are of various styles of architecture, and built, with an artistic eye to effect, on admirable points of view. Visible at a great distance, they seem to sanctify the whole valley. Some of them are surmounted with a dome, others with turrets. The royal chapel of St. Louis, built between two cells, has three Oriental domes that swell out on the tops of slender, minaret-like towers and are extremely striking from the railway. Twenty-eight stone steps—a Scala Santa—lead up to the sixth oratory, that of the Ecce Homo. The seventh looks like a castle with its crenellated towers. The eighth has a hexagonal tower flanked by four turrets. The ninth is of the Roman style.

The three crosses on the summit of the mount were cast at Paris and exhibited with success at the Exposition Universelle of 1867. In the Doric chapel beyond is a fine painting of the Descent from the Cross, [Pg 348] saved from the revolutionists of ’93. It is intensely realistic. The Pietà of Carrara marble opposite is the work of M. Dumontet, of Bourges—an ex voto from the Marquis d’Angosse and his wife. Our Saviour’s form is of marvellous beauty. The fourteenth oratory is of the Doric style. There is a touching grief in the faces of the disciples bearing the dead body of Christ to the tomb. Mary stands in speechless sorrow. Magdalen is a prey to violent grief.

The top of the hill is a long plateau. The Crucifixion is at the east end, so that the Christ, according to ancient tradition, may face the west. At the left is the chapel of the Holy Sepulchre, where lies the holy Abbé Garicoïts, who died on the Festival of the Ascension, 1863.

At the west end of the esplanade, facing the Crucifixion, is the most imposing of all the chapels—that of the Resurrection. Two fine towers rise on each side of the gable on which stands the rapt form of our Saviour ascending to heaven, the work of M. Fabisch, the sculptor who executed the Virgin in the grotto at Lourdes.

Since the admirable restoration of the hill new devotion has sprung up among the people. Pilgrims to the grotto of Marie Immaculée, in the cliff of Massabielle, come to end their pilgrimage by weeping with Marie désolée on the solemn heights of Bétharram. On great festivals crowds may be seen coming from all the neighboring villages in festive array, with a joyful air, singing psalms on the way. They carry their shoes in their hands, but put them on on their arrival at church. The women carefully lift their dresses with characteristic eye to economy. During Holy Week thousands often ascend the mount, group after group, chanting old Béarnais hymns of the Passion, the men wrapped in their mountain cloaks, and the women veiled in their long black capuchons, looking like Maries at the Sepulchre.

On the 21st of October, 1870, his Holiness Pius IX. granted the Calvary of Bétharram all the indulgences attached to the Holy Places at Jerusalem, as well as special ones to all who visit the devout chapel. Pope Gregory XVI.. also paid his tribute of homage to Our Lady of Bétharram.

The royal family of France seems to consider devotion to this venerable shrine as hereditary. In 1843 the Countess of Chambord presented her wedding-dress and veil to the Virgin of Bétharram; and the Duchess of Angoulême, in memory of her pilgrimage here in 1823, sent the communion-veil of her mother, the unfortunate Marie Antoinette.

The statue of Mary by Renoir, over the high altar of the church, represents her seated, looking at the divine Child on her knee, who leans forward to point out the beth arram—the beautiful branch—of gold at her feet. It is a statue full of grace. We were once more praying at this favored altar when we heard the sound of a chant, and, going to the door of the church, saw the long procession of six hundred pilgrims from Marseilles coming with silver crosses glittering in the sun and gay banners wrought with many a holy device. The priests wore their surplices and stoles. The pilgrims were evidently people of very respectable condition, and the utmost order and decorum prevailed. They were singing the litany of the Virgin, and seemed impressed with the religious nature of the act they were performing. As they entered the church the organ, given by Napoleon III. and Eugénie at their visit in [Pg 349] 1859, solemnly joined in their salutation to Mary, and, after a short exercise of devotion, they began the ascent of the Calvary. We followed them up the winding path to the top of the mount, stopping at every turn before the beautiful chapels. Nothing could be more solemn, more affecting, and at the same time more fatiguing than climbing this steep, rough Way of the Cross in the hot sun and amid the dense crowd of pilgrims. We went from one oratory to another, chanting the Stabat Mater, and at each station a curé from Marseilles, with a powerful voice, made a short meditation on the sufferings of Christ, every word of which could be heard far down the hill where wound the long train. He identified these sufferings with the actual crucifixion of the church: “To-day also there are Pilates—sovereigns of Europe who wash their hands of the woes they might have prevented. Herod has set a guard at the very door of the Vatican. Rulers and learned men scoff at the church and give perfidious counsel to its members; and Christ is again raised on the cross in the person of his Vicar, whose heart is bleeding for the iniquities of the world. But faithful disciples rally around him. Devoted women pray. Yes, a sinner clings to the foot of the cross—France, the poor Magdalen of nations, wrapped in immeasurable woe, her head buried in her hands, bewailing her guilt, and destined to become the invincible heroine of the church!”

Nothing could be more impressive than this long file of pilgrims slowly winding up the sad way; the chants in the open air, the mournful plaint of the Virgin, which always goes to the heart, the stirring appeal of the priest calling on us to mourn over the divine Sufferer. The woods were odorous, the ground purple with heather, lovely ferns nodded, and harebells and herb-Robert bloomed by the wayside, giving out sweet inspirations to those who know how to find God in everything he has made. Clouds had gathered in the west by the time we reached the top of this Mount of Sorrows, and the sight of the immense cross with its pale Christ against the wild, stormy sky was something never to be forgotten, reminding us of Guido Reni’s Crucifixion in the church of San Lorenzo-in-Lucina at Rome. No one could behold it without being startled. It seemed to strike terror into the soul, and we gathered around it with tearful eyes and, let us trust, with contrite hearts.

We could hardly give a glance at the superb view unrolled before us—the immense plain with the beautiful Gave winding through it, the Pyrenees lost in the clouds, white villages scattered on every side, and Pau on a distant height.

O sacred hill of Bétharram! which has so often seen the cross overthrown and set up again in the land; mountain of perfumes, which so many generations have ascended on their knees with streaming eyes; predestined land, so beloved of Mary that on the shore of the same river, in the side of the same range of hills, she has opened two marvellous sanctuaries, how good it is to pray, to meditate, to hope, on thy heights!

[106] Others think it one of the numerous names left in the country by the Moors, the Arabic word Beit Haram signifying the Sacred Abode. But the old chroniclers of Béarn, who attribute the foundation of the church to Gaston IV., believe the name brought from the Holy Land, the Hebrew words Beth Aram meaning the House of the Most High.

[107] The statue remained in its niche until 1841, when it was replaced by the more beautiful one of Renoir. The gilt Virgin of Mgr. de Trappes is still to be seen on the wall of the left aisle near the chapel of the Pastoure.

[108] Marca enters into a long dissertation to establish the truth of this wonderful event, which may be thus summed up: There were five persons to witness it, four of whom were still alive when he wrote. They were cultivators of the soil—an innocent occupation that has often led divine Providence to make choice of those who pursue it to publish the wonders of his grace, as when shepherds were chosen to announce the Nativity. They were natives of Béarn, where the people are free from any undue credulousness, and where the Catholic religion had been proscribed for more than forty years, so that of course they had not been brought up with the care that would have rendered them particularly susceptible of religious impressions. Moreover, they knew a statement of this kind would be sifted to the bottom by Protestants as well as Catholics. They could have no interest in the matter, as Bétharram belonged to Lestelle, with which Montaut was often at rivalry. The chaplains were absent, and wholly ignorant of the affair. And these five men were people of probity, who swore to the truth of their statements on the Holy Gospels before the magistrates of Lestelle and Montaut.

[109] Arnauld d’Andilly was the eldest son of the Antoine Arnauld who, under Henry IV., pleaded for the University against the Jesuits, and whose twentieth and youngest child was the second Antoine Arnauld—the oracle of Jansenism. D’Andilly is looked upon as belonging to the first generation of Jansenists, though he had nothing of the austerity and repulsiveness of that sect. He scarcely broaches polemics. He celebrates in elegant verse the praises of the Blessed Virgin and the prerogatives of St. Peter, and after translating all that is grandest and sweetest in Christian literature—such as the works of St. Augustine, St. John Climacus, St. Teresa, etc.—reposed from his labors by tending the espaliers of Port Royal, of which the beautiful and pious Anne of Austria always had the first fruits.

[110] M. de Beyries, a nephew of the Abbé de Lalanne, and a prominent citizen of Montaut, has many precious memorials of his uncle.

[Pg 350]

SIR THOMAS MORE.

A HISTORICAL ROMANCE.

FROM THE FRENCH OF THE PRINCESSE DE CRAON.

VIII.

Meanwhile, a great agitation prevailed in the heart of the kingdom, at the court, and in every mind. The new favor of the new favorite; the discontent, ever growing but more and more repressed, of the queen’s partisans; the restless and shifting humor of those who in secret held fast to the new religious opinions; the uncertainty of events, new fears, new hopes, seemed to have communicated to the intriguing and ambitious of every degree a boldness and activity hitherto unknown. Delivered from the yoke imposed on him for so long a time by a man at once adroit and yielding, Henry VIII. had at last encountered a vile and abject creature who would gradually encourage him to display all the natural ferocity of his character. Already he was no longer able to separate himself from Cromwell, who, artfully flattering each one of his passions, constantly said to him: “To please you, to obey you—that is the sole end toward which all should aim, or they should fall!”

Every day, in consequence of their determined efforts, new complaints against the clergy were reported to the House of Commons. The time had come, they said, to distribute among the truly poor the treasures accumulated by the priests, and to destroy the abuses they had made of their power. These accusations, together with calumnies of a blacker character, emanating from sources always scrupulously concealed, were artfully disseminated among the people, circulated from mouth to mouth, and served wonderfully to irritate the stupid and ignorant masses; while in the House of Lords nothing was left undone to secure the influence and suffrages of the most influential members of that body.

Confident of success in all their designs, Henry VIII. and his favorite decided that it was time to strike the first blow; and while the attorney-general was in receipt of the order to carry to the King’s Bench an accusation which included the entire clergy of the kingdom as having become amenable to the penalties attached to the Præmunire statutes, a measure and petition were presented to Parliament to prohibit every bishop from paying dues to the see of Rome; secondly, that for the future their body should neither promulgate nor execute any of its laws without the co-operation of the royal authority; and, finally, that all those laws which had been in force until that time should be re-examined by a committee whose members would be named and chosen by the king, in order that he might abolish them if he deemed expedient.

These measures at first excited universal murmurs of dissatisfaction; but people were not slow to perceive that such expressions could [Pg 351] not be indulged in without danger, for it was no longer a matter of doubt that Parliament would yield to the slightest wish of the king. The fear inspired by this prince, together with his incessant threats and menaces, secured him the submission of those even whom avarice had not been able to corrupt.

Henry triumphantly congratulated himself on his success. The courageous firmness of one single man, however, sufficed to embitter all his pleasure; for, since the king had openly and boldly announced his intention of compelling the divorce to be granted, no matter by what means, More had scrupulously held himself aloof, no longer appearing at court, except when summoned by the king or when the duties of his office obliged him to be formally present. This was a source of deep chagrin and displeasure to Henry VIII., and the cold and reserved manner of the lord chancellor kept him, when in his presence, in a state of painful restraint.

“What!” he said to himself, “everything goes according to my wishes, and yet the silent reproaches of this man alone annoy me unceasingly. It would be better for him to yield,” he cried in his frenzy, “or I shall be compelled to force him into submission!”

But when More again appeared before him, he listened to the report of affairs which he had to submit, no longer knowing what to say to him, and he dared not even pronounce the name of Anne Boleyn in his presence. This day, however, he had summoned Cromwell at a very early hour, and appeared to be in an exceedingly joyful mood; he laughed aloud, then, suddenly resuming a serious expression, he exclaimed, slapping the head of a superb greyhound that held his black nose extended across his knees:

“You will see, Cromwell, what a good effect this will produce on the people; because it is useless to conceal that More is a man of such exalted character and brilliant worth that all the eyes of my kingdom are fixed upon his conduct.”

“Ah!” said Cromwell, whom this very just opinion of the king displeased mightily,” I do not believe it will be thus when your majesty has spoken.”

“Yes, yes,” replied the king; “and that is why I congratulate myself on the expedient which suggested itself last night. How can you imagine, after he has read in open Parliament the decisions of the universities in my favor, that the people will believe he does not favor the divorce? And it is most necessary to counteract by this means the effect produced by the promulgation of the papal bull.”

“Bah! that bull,” said Cromwell, “is no more than a scrap of waste paper. The pope forbids any of the clergy from celebrating your marriage before the queen’s suit is decided. Now, marry Lady Anne to-morrow!”

“To-morrow!” exclaimed the king.

At that moment the curtain of scarlet silk which hung in heavy folds before the entrance of the royal apartment was drawn aside, and Sir Thomas More appeared.

The king paused surprised; his fingers were entwined among the links of the gold chain suspended around the neck of Cromwell, and he was familiarly patting the breast of that base-born creature, now seated close beside him.

“Ah! it is you, Sir Thomas,” said Henry, affecting an air of unconcern; [Pg 352] “you are always most welcome here. I believe this is one of your friends,” he added, pointing to Cromwell.

More made no reply; he simply inclined his head in response to the king’s salutation.

“Yes, yes, you understand each other very well,” continued the king, without appearing to remark that More made no reply. “Is it not so, Cromwell?”

“I hope so,” replied Cromwell, casting a furtive glance around him. For he was not able to encounter the penetrating gaze of More, whom he secretly feared and detested; and from the time he believed that More could no longer be of use to him he had ceased to overwhelm him with visits and continual solicitations, as he had formerly been in the habit of doing.

“Well, good Sir Thomas,” continued Henry, always indulging in badinage, “what would you have with us?”

“I would speak with your majesty alone for a few moments,” replied More.

“A reasonable request,” answered the king; “and you know we always grant anything you ask.”

He made a sign to Cromwell, who immediately withdrew, his heart fired with rage at the welcome always extended by the king to More.

“If ever I come into power,” murmured he in his heart, “More, thou shalt know me!”

“What, then, is it, More?” asked the king, and he regarded him with an impatient expression.

“Your majesty,” replied More, “this morning sent me an order to present myself in the House of Commons, and carry thither the decisions of the universities. Up to this time I have been loath to speak; but to-day, at the moment of giving such authenticity to these documents, I consider it my duty to make known to your majesty that they have been extorted by force and are far from being regular; a great many of the signatures are wanting, while others are counterfeit.”

“Counterfeit!” exclaimed the king angrily.” Who has told you that?”

“I am sure of it,” replied Sir Thomas quietly and in the calmest of tones; “and I have thought it my duty to inform the king of the fact before asking his permission to retire.”

“You retire!” cried Henry VIII.

“I had already requested the Duke of Norfolk,” continued More, “to express to your majesty how painful it was to me to quit your service and to find myself obliged to cease from fulfilling the office with which you have honored me; but my health is so feeble as not to permit me to hold it longer.” And he was silent.

The king sat stupefied. But surprise very soon changed into extreme displeasure; for he saw perfectly well why More retired, and felt that he had nothing to hope from a man so firm and as inaccessible to fear as to self-interest. It was for this he dissembled and evinced none of the vexation he felt.

“I am sorry,” he said coldly, “that you should leave me; because you were that one of my servants whom I have most esteemed and loved. But, nevertheless, since you wish it, I will not oppose your going. I shall always remember the services you have rendered me, and be assured that any request you may make shall certainly be granted.”

More made no reply, but the [Pg 353] tears came into his eyes; he loved the king sincerely, and would have made any sacrifice to have saved him from the unhappy passion that had enchained him.

“You weep, More,” said the king. “If it gives you pain, why do you leave me?”

“Because I cannot do otherwise.”

“As you please,” replied the king curtly. “I force nobody to remain in my service. You will one day, perhaps, repent this step. You are rich now, I suppose?”

“Your majesty knows very well to the contrary,” replied More. “In losing the salary of the office I now resign, I am not sure that I shall have sufficient means remaining to provide becomingly for the wants of my many children. During the time I filled a lucrative employment at the bar, I saved enough to purchase a small tract of land which I now own; but when your majesty called me into your service, I was naturally obliged to abandon my profession, and since then I have saved nothing.”

“What!” said the king, “you have nothing remaining from the income of your office?”

“Not so much as one hundred gold crowns,” replied Sir Thomas.

“More,” said the king thoughtfully, “you are an honest man.”

“I endeavor to be so, sire.”

“It grieves me that you leave me. Why approve not of my marriage?”

“Because, sire, you may not have two wives at once.”

“Begone!” said Henry VIII.…

And Cromwell found the king in a state of excitement impossible to describe.

“I regret it! I regret it!” he exclaimed. “This will work me evil! A man of such integrity, such worth! No one can doubt it. I have done wrong in sending him to the Parliament; it was plain that he would refuse me.”

“What says he?” thought Cromwell to himself, surprised and anxious.

“Cromwell,” said the king, “he leaves me!”

“Who?”

“More.”

“More!” cried Cromwell, scarcely able to conceal his delight. “Well, is it only that that troubles you? It is a happiness rather. The hypocrite unmasks himself at last; it has been long since the happiness of his sovereign was that for which he cared the least.”

“You are mistaken, Cromwell; he loved me sincerely.”

“Ah!” cried Cromwell, “this is the way in which your majesty’s goodness of heart unceasingly opposes itself to your own interests. Sir Thomas More has never lost an occasion of sustaining the ridiculous pretensions of Queen Catherine. I heard him myself exclaim aloud in the presence of the legates assembled to try her: “May the queen triumph over all her enemies!” Would he have done this had he not presumed (if I may dare to say it) upon your majesty’s weakness? This is the opinion expressed to me by the illustrious Machiavelli: ‘It is always safer for a prince to inspire his subjects with fear than with love’; love holds men by that very feeble link called gratitude, while the bond of fear it is almost impossible to sunder.”

“And where has the fuller’s son known Machiavelli?” asked Henry VIII. disdainfully. “Truly,” he continued, with that ironical smile which was habitual with him, and that haughty and scornful tone with which he often chose to crush those who believed they stood high in his favor, “I was not aware that you [Pg 354] had studied politics under Machiavelli.”

“I knew him in Italy,” replied Cromwell, profoundly humiliated. The recollection of the lowliness of his origin was a continual torment to the soul of this parvenu; nevertheless, without permitting the slightest emotion to appear in his countenance, he continued the conversation. “We often,” he said, “walked together in the gardens of the Oricellari Palace, which Machiavelli was in the habit of frequenting, and where multitudes of young men of the most distinguished families of the city eagerly came to listen to the words of this celebrated man. He had the kindness to notice me among them all, and received me with particular affection. He sometimes spoke successively of all the princes of Europe; but in mentioning the name of your majesty he could not conceal his admiration. ‘I do not know,’ he said, ‘any prince of our day who can be compared to him, either for courage or exalted ability.’”

“I feel flattered,” replied the king; “for he was a man of great discernment and superior judgment.”

And Henry’s gratified vanity brought to his features an expression of pleasure that did not escape the notice of the adroit liar. There was no truth in the statement he had made to Henry VIII. of having met the Florentine secretary, at least in his own society, as he wished to insinuate to the king, but in a public drinking-house where Machiavelli (whose tastes were not always the most elevated or refined) went to enjoy the amusements of the common people, in order to be relieved of the ennui that devoured him when at his country seat and not absorbed in business.

“These gardens of the Oricellari Palace have a great reputation,” said Henry VIII. carelessly, after a considerable silence.

“Very great and very justly,” replied Cromwell with enthusiasm, “since they have been embellished by the famous Alberti—he who introduced again into Europe a taste for the pure and beautiful Grecian architecture. The celebrated Bernard Rucellai, to whom they belong, has collected there besides a great quantity of the precious fragments of antiquity—”

Cromwell paused—he thought the king was going to speak; but, finding he said nothing, he continued:

“Your majesty has seen, in the beginning of Machiavelli’s book on the art of war, the portrait he has drawn and his eulogies on the young Count Rucellai, the same to whom he has dedicated his discourse on Livy.”

“Possibly,” said Henry VIII. He turned his head and slightly yawned.

Cromwell was silent immediately and racked his brain for another subject of conversation, regretting that the one he had already introduced had been so speedily exhausted.

* * * * *

After leaving the king Sir Thomas More returned to the bank of the Thames, wishing, as soon as possible, to reach his home at Chelsea. In going down to his barge, which awaited him above Westminster bridge, he saw a crowd collected on the quay inspecting the boat, which, glittering gorgeously in the rays of the sun, seemed in every respect worthy of the exalted rank of her illustrious owner. Eight rowers dressed in uniform managed her with great dexterity; a large pavilion of purple silk protected the [Pg 355] interior against injury from light and air; the bottom was covered with a heavy tapestry carpet; and the spacious seats, capable of accommodating a large number of persons, were supplied with rich crimson velvet cushions. The exterior was not less rich, and the ivory and little bands of gold with which the stern was encrusted gave it the appearance of being enveloped in a delicate network, each mesh of which seemed to sparkle with gems and gold. The heavens were serene and cloudless, and a multitude of small boats, painted green, darted rapidly over the river, propelled by their light sails of gleaming white. It was a festival day, and they were filled with citizens enjoying the revivifying country air, and resting from their labors to refresh themselves on the verdant and flowery lawns of Richmond, Twickenham, or Greenwich. Arrayed in their most elegant robes of worsted and silk, the women waved their handkerchiefs or sang to amuse their children, while groups of sailors in varied costumes representing different nations were engaged in playing boisterous games, or, gathering around one of their older companions, listened eagerly to the stories he told of expeditions he had joined or shipwrecks he had escaped.

“To-day these people are happy!” thought More, saddened by the contrast presented by their joy and the interior oppression he himself experienced. “Let me return to a life of peaceful obscurity like theirs, find again my plain wooden boat, take my seat on the straw matting which covers the bottom, and row in my turn without a fear of to-morrow; always sure of seeing my Margaret and my other children coming along the bank to give me a joyous reception, and hear them exclaim, ‘Here is our father!’ But why all these apprehensions?” he continued, passing his hand across his brow, as if to dispel some sad and painful reflection. “God reigns in heaven; and have I not this day experienced his divine protection? The king has given me a kinder reception than I had hoped to receive; he has, at least, not permitted his wrath to break forth in all its violence. Perhaps in the end it will only be more terrible; but never mind, the will of the Lord be done! Nothing can happen on the earth without his permission. I abandon myself to him; and when man, his creature, casts himself into his arms, he will not withdraw nor permit him to fall.”

In the meantime the tide began to rise, and the waves of the sea, flowing into the great bed of the river, very soon extended it to the surrounding banks. Carried along by the waves, More’s barge no longer required other care than the slight attention necessary to guide it. The tired sailors rested on their oars, while their eyes wandered over the charming borders of the Thames.

“My lord,” said one of the sailors, turning towards Sir Thomas, “here we are in front of Seat-House Gardens. We are passing the village of Nine Elms.”

But More heard them not; he seemed entirely absorbed in his own reflections.

The men were astonished, because ordinarily he conversed with them when he was alone in the boat, and questioned them about such subjects as interested them. Sir Thomas More thought it was his duty as a master and a Christian to take especial care not only of the bodies but also of the souls of his servants, in enlightening their [Pg 356] minds by good advice and wise exhortations. Consequently, they were astonished at his silence, and, loving him as a father, they were fearful some misfortune had befallen him of which they were not apprised.

“There is the little point of Chelsea spire,” said the pilot, observing him with an anxious eye.

“My lord, here is Chelsea,” they exclaimed all together.

“Well, my children,” he replied, “land me at the foot of the crossroad.”

Sir Thomas thought, as it was the hour for evening devotion, his family would surely be at the parish church, and he would take his children back in the boat with him. He landed, therefore, and, ordering the sailors to wait, slowly ascended the beach by a rugged road, beyond which he encountered a worthy old peasant woman driving a number of cows to the river. On perceiving Sir Thomas an expression of satisfaction overspread her features, tanned and furrowed by age and hard labor. She stopped to salute him as usual.

“My good lord,” she exclaimed, “I am very glad to see you. We every day pray to the Lord to preserve you. Since you have been in this country everything has prospered with us. We have not lost a single calf nor had a bad crop since you rebuilt our barn, which was burnt at the same time as your own; and the other day we were talking among ourselves, and we said that you must be very rich to be able to make so many around you happy.”

“The barn is a strong and substantial one, at least,” said More, who could not avoid smiling at the idea of his reputed wealth.

“Oh! as to that, yes,” replied the simple woman; “it is of good stone, and very much stronger and better than it was before. It will outlast us all a long time.”

Having said this, she passed on, as she saw Sir Thomas wished to be detained no longer, and the cows had wandered from the road to graze on the surrounding pasture.

“Here comes the good lord chancellor,” said the village children in a suppressed tone. The crowd kneeling without on the pavement of the church, too small to accommodate the entire congregation on festival days, opened respectfully, and Sir Thomas proceeded down the aisle of the church to his pew, where he found all his family seated.

He remained standing near, as the service was almost over, and he did not wish to make any disturbance by opening the door of the pew; but Margaret soon discovered the presence of her father, and heard his voice mingling with those of the other faithful who sang the praises of God. Her heart throbbed with joy, and she looked around to try and get sight of him.

“William,” she said immediately to young Roper, “my father is here; give him your seat.”

But Sir Thomas motioned him to sit still; and when the devotion was ended, and the priests had left the altar, he approached, and, opening the door of the pew where Lady More was seated, presented his hand to lead her out, and said:

“Madam, my lord is gone.”

This woman, as disagreeable as she was coarse, raised her dull eyes to her husband’s face.

“What do you mean?” she asked sharply.

She always received in this ungracious manner the pleasantries [Pg 357] More was so fond of indulging in, and it was customary for one of her husband’s retinue to open the pew door in his absence and say: “Madam, my lord is gone.”

“Come with me, nevertheless,” replied More, with imperturbable gentleness; “I will explain to you now my lord is gone.”

Lady More followed him, still, however, murmuring between her teeth because of this unusual mode of departure; and when they had passed through the crowd, and More had returned the salutations with which all greeted him, he called Margaret to his side.

“Listen, my child,” he said. “Your mother here cannot understand how my lord can be absent. Explain to her that I have conducted him this morning to London, where I have left him for ever; in a word, that I am no longer lord chancellor, having resigned my office into the hands of the king. Do you understand now, my good Alice?” he added, turning toward his wife.

Margaret, on hearing this explanation, looked at her father in dismay. She immediately understood there was something behind that she did not know, and her penetrating mind was filled with alarm; but Lady More flew into an ungovernable passion.

“What is this you say?” she cried,” and what have you done? More of your scruples, I warrant me. That tender conscience of yours will land us all in the ashes yet. Is it not better to rule than to be ruled? We are ten times worse off now than we have ever been before, and here are you about to strip us of everything.”

“Dear heart,” said Sir Thomas, without being moved in the least, “it would be impossible, I think, for me to strip you of your possessions; because, when I married you, you brought me no other dowry than your virtues and the qualities of your heart. Of this dowry I hope, indeed, never to see you deprived by any means in the world, much less by myself.”

“At least,” cried Lady More between her sobs and tears, “I was beautiful and young, and certain it is I might have easily found a husband more interested in his own affairs, and who would have profited more by his learning and the favor of the king.”

On hearing her express herself in this manner Margaret was unable to restrain a gesture of indignation; she idolized her father, and could not tolerate the coarse manners and selfish motives of her step-mother. This woman, narrow of mind and filled with vanity, had succeeded, singularly enough, by manœuvring and flattery, in winning the esteem of More at a time when, having had the misfortune to lose his wife, he saw with great sorrow his daughters deprived of the good example and tender care of a mother. It then seemed to him he could not better replace her than by selecting a widow lady of mature age whose beauty, if it had ever existed, was more than faded, and could no longer be (so, at least, he supposed) a subject of pretension or distraction. But, unfortunately, Lady More, he found, was one of those indifferent, selfish beings who only feel what touches themselves, who consider nothing but their own interests, and fear nothing but what may deprive them of the high social position to which they have been fortunate enough to attain. She could not endure, therefore, the thought of being deprived of the honor she was accustomed to receive as the wife [Pg 358] of the lord chancellor. She never for an instant reflected on the possible difficulties experienced by her husband, or the reasons that might have determined him to resign his office. She at once divined, from the knowledge she possessed of his extreme scrupulousness, that his conscience had been the first cause of this step, and the thought only served to irritate her more, because she insisted that such a difficulty ought to have been avoided.

She continued to utter the most piercing cries, refusing to listen to anything More could say. At length, despairing of bringing her to reason, he began to ridicule her on her absurd conduct.

“My daughters,” he said, calling Elizabeth and Cecilia, “see to your mother’s dress; something has probably stung her under her garments, causing her to cry out in this manner.”

When the silly woman found her husband assume this tone of raillery, she immediately became silent; but, full of anger and spite, she seated herself in a corner of the boat and took no notice of anything around her.

Margaret then took her place beside her father; she drew close to him, and, seizing his hand, pressed it to her lips, without being able to utter a word; her heart was full, and her soul alone silently interrogated that of her father.

Endowed with an extraordinary superabundance of feeling and sentiment, Margaret was enthusiastic in doing good, and repelled evil, when she encountered it, with a degree of inflexibility amounting to severity. Beautiful beyond all expression, her beauty was never for a moment made the subject of her thoughts. Possessed by nature of a very strong mind, she felt unceasingly, and endured with restless impatience, and almost without being able to submit, the disadvantages which weakness and conventionalities imposed upon her sex. She possessed all the great qualities of her father, but none of his bright cheerfulness and admirable resignation—fruits of the long-continued exercise of the most exemplary virtue. The poor were always sure of finding in her an earnest and faithful friend; the afflicted, a comforter full of eloquence and sympathy; the vain and presumptuous man, a frigid scorn and piquant irony which concealed from him entirely the knowledge of her true character, replete with integrity, frankness, and simplicity. Scarcely emerged from childhood, Margaret felt she had arrived at mature age. The accuracy and loftiness of her judgment, united to that delicacy and exquisite tact which belong naturally to some women, rendered her worthy of becoming the most intimate and reliable friend of her father, whose entire joy and happiness centred in her alone. Educated by him with extreme care, she was familiar with all the sciences, and several works written by her in Greek and Latin of great purity have come down to us from that period.

“My daughter,” said More, “why distress yourself about me, since I am to remain with you?”

“Father,” answered Margaret, fixing her beautiful dark eyes on his face, “there is something behind all this that you have not told. Why conceal it from me?”

“No, dear daughter, nothing. Your father is old; he desires to leave you no more, to see you always, until the Lord shall call him to himself.”

Seeing Margaret’s eyes fill with tears, Sir Thomas repented immediately [Pg 359] of what he had said, fearing to excite in her the nervous sensibility he had always vainly attempted to moderate.

“Father,” she answered, “let it be as you wish; I ask nothing more.”

“On the contrary, you shall know everything, dear child. God has blessed us; be assured of that. And see how green and fresh our garden looks from here.”

They were coming in view of their house at Chelsea, and soon found themselves opposite the small green gate opening, at the end of the garden, upon a path descending to the river. One of the men, taking a large silver whistle from his belt, blew several shrill notes as a signal to those in the house to come and open the gate for their master. Nobody appeared, however, and the family began to feel surprised, when at length they perceived some short and deformed creature advancing with irregular bounds, breaking the bushes and overturning the pots of flowers that he encountered in his passage.

“Ah!” exclaimed Sir Thomas, “there is my poor jester playing his pranks and spoiling all my garden.”

“Henry Pattison!” cried the children, laughing.

“Himself,” said Sir Thomas.

At that moment the little fool, dressed in a scarlet coat all covered with gold lace, opened the gate, and, putting out his great, flat head, made a thousand grimaces, accompanied by roars of laughter and savage cries, which he endeavored to render agreeable, in order to express the gratification he felt at the return of his master.

“Ah! well, what news do you bring us?” said More, looking at him.

“Master,” replied the fool, opening a mouth so wide that it might have better fitted a giant than a dwarf, “father is sick.”

“What! my father sick?” cried More, greatly alarmed.

“Yes, my lord,” replied the jester.

But Sir Thomas, without awaiting his response, rushed into the house and disappeared.

* * * * *

On learning the accusation brought against them in the court of king’s bench, the members of the convocation were seized with consternation, for they understood by the very mention of Præmunire that the king had resolved to make them feel the weight of his authority, and to avenge himself for the opposition he had encountered in the affair of the divorce. They assembled, therefore, in all haste, and from the hour of prime [111] remained deliberating in one of the upper chambers of Westminster Abbey. After a lengthy discussion, they had sent, with unanimous accord, to offer the king the sum of one hundred thousand pounds in return for the pardon they solicited, never having doubted, they said in their petition, that Cardinal Wolsey had received the necessary letters-patent for exercising the authority of legate in the kingdom.

Hours passed away, and no response arrived from the king. Many became alarmed, and the greatest excitement prevailed in that venerable assembly, composed of all the archbishops, bishops, and abbots of the monasteries, who formed, by right of their ecclesiastical rank, part of the House of Lords or, by election, of the Commons.

[Pg 360] Conspicuous in the midst of them was the learned and celebrated Warham, Archbishop of Canterbury, Primate of England. His head, entirely bald, was bowed on his breast. He seemed to take no part or interest in the numerous discussions which were carried on around him, and no one knew whether a gloomy sadness had overshadowed his soul, or if his advanced age had weakened the faculties of his mind together with those of the body. The Bishop of Lincoln, the king’s confessor, who sat beside him, vainly endeavored to attract his attention. Further on, arranged around him, were the Bishops of Durham, Worcester, Norwich, Salisbury, St. David’s, Hereford, Carlisle, Bath, Bangor, and others; the Archbishop of Armagh, near whom was observed the mild and noble physiognomy of the Dean of Exeter, young Reginald Pole, born of the royal blood of the house of York, and descended by Margaret, his mother, from the illustrious family of Plantagenets. The king, his relative, had tried in every way to bring him to approve of the divorce; but neither supplications nor reproaches, nor the fear inspired by Henry VIII., could induce him to act contrary to the voice of his conscience. Later on Henry VIII. taught him, by making the two brothers and the aged mother of Reginald Pole mount the scaffold, how far the excess of his revenge could carry him.

Already had the young Dean of Exeter fallen into disfavor with the king, who closed the door of his palace against him, at the same time that he was forced by the manifest respect of Pole, and the proofs he gave of his devotion, to acknowledge secretly the integrity of his heart and the rectitude of his intentions. At this moment he was talking to a man whose character was precisely the opposite of his own—the Abbot of Westminster, intriguing, active, and ambitious, well known to Henry VIII., whose spy he was, and to whose will he was entirely submissive.

With them also conversed Roland, chaplain to his majesty, and the poor secretary, Gardiner, whose simplicity and small aptitude for business had been alone sufficient to make his selfish master regret the indefatigable perseverance and the strong mind of Cardinal Wolsey. At this moment he wearied his colleagues with a lengthy recital of all the apprehensions which the violence of the king’s character caused him.

And now a sudden commotion made itself felt throughout the hall. They stood up, they leaned forward; the folding doors were thrown open. “In the name of the king!” cried the usher who guarded the entrance.

Cromwell stood on the threshold. He paused to salute the assembly.

They scarcely dared breathe!

“My lords,” he said in a loud voice, looking slowly around him, and endeavoring to give his sardonic features an expression of benignant persuasion, “the king, our master, always full of clemency and benevolence toward his unworthy subjects, deigns to accept your gift. He makes but one, and that a very slight, condition; which is, that you acknowledge him, in the act of donation, as the supreme and only head of the church and clergy of England.”

He paused to observe, with a malignant joy, similar to that of the demon when he dragged the first man into sin, the effect of these words on the assembly. But a [Pg 361] gloomy silence was the only response they gave him. He again looked slowly around him, and proceeded in a lower tone:

“My lords, let not this either trouble or alarm you; the church, our mother, has not a child more faithful or submissive than our most gracious sovereign. Does he not prove himself such each day by the care he takes to choke up the seeds of heresy which the malice of the devil is trying to sow among us? You also know very well, and even better than I, that he devotes his nights to writing in defence of our holy faith, and nothing could ever induce him to deviate from it. Why should you feel any scruples about honoring a prince so virtuous by placing him at your head as your defender and most firm supporter? Remember, moreover, honored lords, that he who should refuse this title to the king will be regarded by him as a traitor and disloyal subject.”

He then seated himself in their midst, in order to take in the words of the first who should dare raise his voice in opposition to the will of the king.

All the bishops sat in silent consternation. Several wished to speak, but the presence of Cromwell seemed to freeze them with terror; for they were beginning to understand the base manœuvres of this man, and each one felt as though he was on the point of being seized by that wicked wretch, ready to spring upon the first unhappy victim who might present himself.

They looked from one to another, while a profound silence reigned among them.

Archbishop Warham seemed to be seized with a lively grief, but his voice was no more audible, and his pale lips remained silent and motionless.

Cromwell felt his heart thrill with malicious delight; beneath the frigid expression of a profound and calculating indifference this obscure intriguer exulted in seeing these men, the most learned and honored in all England, trembling and recoiling before him as before the genius of evil.

But suddenly a man whom nothing could intimidate, a saintly man, whose heart knew no fear except the fear of God, arose in the midst of them. An involuntary shudder ran through the assembly. All eyes were directed alternately toward Cromwell and him, as though to defend the one from the malice of the other. It was the Bishop of Rochester, the friend of Thomas More, who was about to speak; and all knew that no cowardly consideration of prudence could stop him.

“My lords,” he cried, as he stood up in their midst, “what impious voice is this that is raised in your presence to propose to us a thing which has never been heard of since the foundation of human society? What is it they wish to exact from us at this moment, if it be not to raise ourselves to the level of God himself by conferring the supremacy of his church on a temporal prince, a man who can have no possible right thereto? Shall we, then, say to-day, as our Lord Jesus Christ said to St. Peter: ‘I give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; and whatsoever you shall bind on earth shall be bound in heaven; and whatsoever you shall loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven’? And if we should have the pride and audacity to say it, where would be our power to execute it? Listen,” continued the holy bishop, inflamed [Pg 362] with zeal, and turning toward Cromwell. “Go, and say to the king, our master, that he has been led into error; that he should remember the words of the Holy Scriptures: ‘As my Father hath sent me, so I send you,’ and ask him if he has been ordained one of the pastors of the church; if he has chosen her for his only spouse; if he is an apostle, if he is a doctor, or if he can build up with us the body of Christ; and say to him, moreover, that even though he should possess all these qualifications, yet, before he could be appointed supreme head of the Catholic Church, it would be necessary for her to acknowledge him as such, and that we cannot—we, a feeble fraction of the Christian world—impose a chief on the universe! Go, and let not the king’s majesty be compromised; for he has suggested a desire that cannot be accomplished.”

Cromwell, subdued by the power of this exhortation, arose and immediately withdrew. The Bishop of Rochester, turning toward the assembled prelates, continued:

“My lords, let not the fear of men blind us. Let us reflect well on what they demand of us to-day; for we are not only called on to renounce Clement VII., but also to cast ourselves out of Peter’s bark, only to be submerged in the waves of these countless divisions, sects, schisms, and heresies which it has pleased the mind of man to invent. Yes, I hesitate not to say to you that, in order to give the king the title he demands, it would be necessary to abandon all laws, canonical and ecclesiastical, the authority of the holy councils, the unity of the world and of Christian princes, the traditions of the church, by which we would at the same time acknowledge that we have never yet received the true faith or the veritable Gospel of Christ, since we openly revolt against the immutable doctrine which it teaches, and turn aside voluntarily and for ever from the one and only true way of salvation which it has marked out for us. During the fifteen hundred and thirty years that the Gospel has been preached throughout the world, have we seen a single prince make such a pretension? And when, in the fourth century, Constantine the Great assembled in his own palace, in the city of Nice, and for the first time since the apostles, the entire body of the universal Church, did he establish himself in the midst of them as their head and sovereign—he who wished, in spite of their deference and their request, to remain, without guards and without the pomp befitting his rank, in the meanest place of the hall wherein they were assembled? ‘No,’ said he, ‘I will not sit in judgment where I have no authority either to absolve or to condemn.’ … And who, my lords, were the men composing that illustrious assembly, if not the flower of all the saintly and learned who flourished among the nations of the earth? The patriarchs of Constantinople, of Antioch, of Alexandria, of Jerusalem, and of Carthage; the bishops of Africa, of Spain, of the Gauls, of the land of the Scythians and Persians—in a word, of the East and West—who gathered there in crowds, almost all had confessed the faith before tyrants, and bore on their mutilated bodies the glorious marks of the cruel tortures they had endured rather than renounce it. Well, you behold these holy pontiffs place at their head Vincent and Vitus, two simple priests, because they recognized them as the representatives [Pg 363] of their chief, the Bishop of Rome, whose advanced age prevented him from being among them. And this regulation has been invariably followed through all ages even until the present day, and through all the storms and heresies which would have been sufficient to annihilate the church had she not been born of God himself. Far from us, then, be this culpable cowardice! To renounce his laws is to renounce Jesus Christ. We renounce his laws? No, my lords, we cannot! Nay, we will not.… Again, what would become of this sublime doctrine, if a temporal prince had power to make it yield to the whim of his vices and passions? To-day it is, to-morrow it is not; it changes with him, with his creeds, his opinions, and his wishes. His caprices would become our only laws, and vice and virtue be no longer but words which he would be at liberty to change at will. No, again and again no! If we love our king, we will never concede what he demands; because it is for us to enlighten him with regard to his duties, and, on the contrary, we should only be dragging him down with us in our unhappy fall.”

A murmur of applause rose from all parts of the hall, drowning the voice of the speaker. The Abbot of Westminster alone maintained a silence of disapproval. Many, however, while they acknowledged the truth of what the Bishop of Rochester had proclaimed, could not but reflect with dread on the terrible consequences of the king’s displeasure if they openly resisted him; while others, with less foresight and sound judgment, thought Fisher’s zeal carried him too far, and that it would be possible, without at all compromising their consciences, to grant their prince something which would be sufficient to satisfy him. Among this number was the Bishop of Bath, who immediately arose. After rendering public testimony to the esteem and deference due the Bishop of Rochester, he added that it appeared to him impossible that the king could think seriously of having himself acknowledged as the one and only head of the church “And, as for me, I believe,” he said, at the conclusion of his discourse, “this is only a snare that has been set in order to afford a pretext for punishing and despoiling us of all we possess. The king is always in need of money; his confidants have suggested this means for him to procure it, and make him distribute the greater part of it among themselves.”

“I agree with my lord of Bath,” cried the Bishop of Bangor, “the more especially as the king knows how absurd the accusation is of offence against the Præmunire, since he has compromised himself by appearing before the legate in the eyes of the whole kingdom. It was impossible to have acknowledged the legate’s authority by an act more authentic, and which surpassed in importance all the letters-patent that could have been demanded.”

“That is just and true,” exclaimed several voices: “and yet, although we may be able to prove it, if the king presses the accusation, we shall be most unjustly though most certainly condemned.”

“Oh! yes, most certainly,” said Gardiner in a low voice. He was cruelly frightened, being aware of the measures the king had taken, in conjunction with Cromwell, to secure for himself the influence of the judges of the court of king’s bench.

“Well, my lords,” said the Abbot of Westminster, who had used every effort to induce them to yield [Pg 364] to the king, “consider also if our most gracious sovereign is wrong in making this demand, he will be responsible before God, and I do not see in what manner we could be considered guilty. In reality this title will be illusory, since he cannot ordain the humblest priest. When the Roman emperors had themselves declared gods, think you it ever entered the minds of the people that they were such? Just the same in this case: no one will ever consider the king as head of the church.”

“That is most sure,” exclaimed several other ecclesiastics, struck by this reasoning, and to whom this pretension began to appear more ridiculous than criminal.

“I assure you positively,” replied the Abbot of Westminster, “that this is an absurd humor which will fall through of itself.”

“You deceive yourselves, my lords; you deceive yourselves,” cried the Bishop of Rochester. “When the king shall have received from us the title he demands, it will be confirmed by Parliament, and afterwards he will believe himself invested with the right of deciding everything and making any innovation. Will there then be time left us to repent of our pusillanimous submission? Will you then command this supreme head to be so no longer, and to obey after having been invested with supreme authority?”

New tokens of assent were breaking out, when they were suddenly interrupted by the entrance of Cromwell, who returned, accompanied by Viscount Rochford and Thomas Audley.

With an air of the coolest effrontery he advanced to the centre of the hall and stood in the midst of the bishops. He then said in a loud and arrogant tone, pointing to the two men who followed him:

“My lords, here are the king’s commissioners; they come to hear your reply. But the personal devotion I feel for the interest of our holy mother church and the safety of your reverend lordships induces me to warn you that the king has resolved to punish with all the severity of the statutes of Præmunire those among you who shall not have signed by to-morrow the act acknowledging him as supreme head of the church.”

On hearing these last words all grew pale and consternation seized on all hearts.

Meanwhile, the Archbishop of Canterbury seemed to be making a desperate effort; a convulsive movement contracted the furrowed brow of the old man. He fixed his eyes on Cromwell, and, rising, stood before him.

“Knave!” he exclaimed.

The advanced age of Warham, and still more his learning and the high reputation he enjoyed, surrounded him with respect and strength; but a secret sorrow was gnawing at his heart, and hastening the destruction of a life that time had respected. He arose fiercely, although tottering, to his feet. “My brethren,” he cried, “my brethren!—no, I am not worthy to be seated in the midst of you, and yet you have accorded me the first place. I know not if the weight of years may not have partially unsettled my reason; but I have to reproach myself with having inclined to favor the king’s divorce. To-day I foresee all the evils that will fall upon my country because of the discord and heresies that will spring up and multiply among us. How far, then, have I been from anticipating the fatal consequences of the opinion I [Pg 365] expressed in good faith! Meanwhile, I trust that God, before whom I must very soon appear, will pardon me for what I have done. My dear brethren, number me no more among you; for the anguish I feel oppresses me to such a degree that I can no longer endure it! Alas! why is it a man must feel his life extinguished before death has entirely benumbed his enfeebled members? I vainly seek within my soul the life and strength that have abandoned it; that energy I would wish to recover, if but for a single moment, to use it in opposing the ruin of religion, and repairing in an open and fearless manner the scandal I have given. But the time for action has passed for me. It is to your hands, young prelates, that the care of the flock is committed. Be firm; die rather than let it be decimated! The most violent persecution is about to burst upon the English Church; yes, but you will resist it, even unto death! Death is glorious when we suffer it for God! But, O my brethren! it is not death I fear for you; it is falsehood and treachery, the silent and hidden influence which undermines in the dark; far more dangerous than tortures or imprisonment, it destroys all, even the last germ of good which might expand in the soul! No, it is not death that kills, but sinful deeds. My brethren, pardon me all and pray for me!”

The aged prelate, as if exhausted by the last effort he had made, fell back in his chair, entirely deprived of consciousness. He was immediately carried out, but the anxiety and excitement redoubled in the assembly.

“We are all lost!”… cried the Abbot of Westminster. “My lords, let us obey the king, if we would not see all our goods confiscated!”

“What!” cried the Bishop of Rochester, with an indignation he was unable to restrain, “is that the only argument you pretend to bring forward? What benefit will it be to keep our houses, our cloisters and convents—in a word, to preserve our entire possessions—if we must sacrifice our consciences? What will it profit a man to gain the whole world, if he lose his own soul? Yes, it is but too true: we are all under the rod of the king, we have all need of his clemency, but he refuses it to us! Well, then, let him strike; we shall be able to endure it!”

Electrified by these words, and still more by the wisdom and commanding presence of him who uttered them, the assembly arose and unanimously exclaimed:

“No, we will not sign it. Let the king do as he will. Go, Cromwell, say to his majesty that we are all devoted to him, but we cannot do what he asks.”

A wrathful light gleamed in Cromwell’s eyes, the while an ironical smile played upon his lips. Two ideas prevailed in the mind of this man; the one encouraged and supported the other.

“My lords,” he replied in a loud voice, “just as you please. The king, your lord and master, convokes you to-morrow at the same hour, and you will consider the subject in a new conference.”

He then turned on his heel and hastily withdrew.

TO BE CONTINUED.

[111] Eight o’clock in the morning.

[Pg 366]

DR. BROWNSON.

Some three or four years ago a little daughter of one of Dr. Brownson’s intimate friends, who was visiting his family, after gazing intently at him for some minutes, exclaimed: “Is he not just like a great lion”! Nothing could be more graphic or accurate than this sudden and happy stroke of a child’s wit. We never saw Dr. Brownson or read one of his great articles without thinking of the mien or the roar of a majestic lion; we have never seen a remarkably fine old lion without thinking of Dr. Brownson. His physique was entirely correspondent to his intellectual and moral power, and his great head, crowning like a dome his massive figure, and surrounded in old age with a mass of white hair and beard like a snowy Alp, made him a grand and reverend object to look at, such as we might picture to ourselves Zoroaster or Plato, St. Jerome or St. Bruno. The marks of infirmity which time had imprinted upon him, with the expression of loneliness and childlike longing for sympathy, added a touch of the pathetic to the picture, fitted to awaken a sentiment of compassion, tempering to a more gentle mood the awe and admiration excited by his venerable appearance. Mr. Healey has painted a remarkably good portrait of him as he was at about the age of sixty, in which his full maturity of strength is alone represented. The most perfect one, however, is a mere photograph, taken in haste and by accident by Mr. Wallace, an artist of great promise, who died at a very early age, leaving unfinished a marble bust of Dr. Brownson which he had commenced. The young artist met the doctor by chance in the studio of a photographer, who happened at the moment to be absent. Asking him to sit down, he placed him in position for a profile and took the photograph, one of the most successful specimens of this kind of art we have ever seen, and much superior to any other photographic likeness of Dr. Brownson—indeed, as we have said, the best likeness which exists, and the one above all others from which an engraver should copy.

The lion is dead; his thunderous voice is for ever hushed. The farewell utterance which closed his career as an editor with so much dignity and pathos was his valedictory to life and to the world. It is pleasant to think that, before he died, a response full of veneration and affection came back to him from the organs of Catholic opinion and feeling in America and Europe, and that he has gone to his grave in honor and peace, where his works will be his monument, and his repose be asked for by countless prayers offered up throughout all parts of the Catholic Church, in whose battles he had been a tried warrior and valiant leader for thirty years.

It is not an easy task to give a perfectly just and impartial estimate of such a man and such a career. The intimate relations between Dr. [Pg 367] Brownson and those who have been the chief conductors of this magazine, together with the very active and extensive share which he had in their efforts to establish it and raise it to its present position, impose an obligation of personal friendship and gratitude somewhat like that which affects the relatives and family friends of a great man in the memorials which they prepare for the honor and fame of one whom they regard with a veneration and affection precluding the free exercise of critical judgment. On the other hand, the difference of opinion which afterwards severed the connection between Dr. Brownson and The Catholic World, and the controversy we have had with him on some important theological and philosophical questions, may give to the expression of anything like a discriminating judgment the appearance of an adverse plea against an opposing advocate in favor of our own cause. Nevertheless, as the motive of our friendship was chiefly sympathy in the great common cause of the Catholic Church, which was not essentially altered by a disagreement that produced no bitterness or animosity, we trust that our mood of mind is not influenced by any partial and personal bias, so as to produce either exaggeration or diminution of the just claims the great deceased publicist possesses on the admiration of his fellow-men. We may fail from want of capability, but we cannot avoid making the attempt to satisfy in part the desire which all Catholics everywhere must feel to know what those who have been near to Dr. Brownson during his public life have seen, and what they think, of his character and his career, more especially since his conversion.

Dr. Brownson has told the world a great deal about his own history in the book which he published in 1857, entitled The Convert. The salient facts of his life are generally known to the public, and have been summarily stated in the obituary notices of the leading newspapers, so that we have no need to take up much of our limited space in recounting them. The principal interest they possess is in their relation to the formation of his mind, his character, his faith, and his opinions. He was not baptized in his infancy, but was nevertheless brought up strictly and religiously according to the old-fashioned Puritan method, in their simple, humble cottage at Royalton, Vermont, by an elderly couple, distant relatives of his family, who adopted the fatherless boy when he was six years old.[112] A wonderful child he must have been, and we can see in his brief narrative of his early years, as in the instances of St. Thomas of Aquin and Chateaubriand, though under circumstances as different as possible from theirs, a most interesting example of Wordsworth’s aphorism, “The child is father of the man.” From the dawn of reason he was a philosopher, never a child, thinking, dreaming in an ideal world, reading the few books he could find—especially King James’ English Bible, which he almost learned by heart—never playing with other children, and enjoying very scanty advantages of schooling. After his fourteenth year he lived near Saratoga, in New York State, and worked hard for his own maintenance. At nineteen we find him at an academy in the town of Ballston—a privilege which we believe he purchased with the [Pg 368] hard earnings of his industry. At this time, from an impulse of religious sentiment, he sought for baptism and admission into the Presbyterian church, which he very soon found an uncongenial home and exchanged for another sect at the opposite pole of Protestantism, that of the Universalists, among whom he became a preacher at the age of twenty-one. The subsequent period of his life until he had passed somewhat beyond his fortieth year—that is, until 1844—was marked by various phases of rationalism, and filled with active labors in preaching, lecturing, writing, and editing various periodicals, all carried on with restless energy and untiring industry. He was married early in life to an amiable and intelligent lady who was a perfect wife and mother, and after her conversion a perfect Christian; and the six children who lived to grow up, five of whom were sons, all received an excellent education. The eldest son, his namesake, has passed his life as a teacher and farmer in a remote State, living the life of a good Catholic with the spirit of a recluse, altogether uninterested in the great affairs of the world. Two others were lawyers and died young. The fourth, after passing some years with the Jesuits, entered the army of the United States at the breaking out of the war as a captain of artillery, was severely wounded, and after the close of the war was admitted to the bar, married, and began the practice of law at Detroit. He is known to the literary world as the translator of Balmes’ Fundamental Philosophy. The youngest son also served gallantly as an officer of the army of the republic during the civil war, and died on the field of battle in the flower of his youth. The only daughter, who is the wife of a most worthy and respectable gentleman, before her marriage published several works, and particularly the Life of Prince Gallitzin, a biography of very considerable merit. All the fruits of the intellectual labors of Dr. Brownson were absorbed in the support and education of his family and some dependent female relatives, and beyond these simple means of keeping up his plain and unostentatious household, the great and patriarchal philosopher received no pecuniary recompense from his long and severe labors in the field of literature. His true profession was that of an editor and reviewer. The exercise of the functions of the Protestant ministry was not to his taste, and five years before his conversion to the Catholic Church, which took place in 1844, he founded a Review at Boston, which was, with a change of title, continued during his residence in that city, then transferred to New York and sustained until 1864, revived once more by a kind of dying effort in 1873, and finally closed a few months before the end of Dr. Brownson’s mortal career. An active part in politics was taken by Dr. Brownson during several years of his earlier public career, but his restless, impetuous, independent spirit made it impossible for him to remain long within the ranks of any political party. Until his conversion he was an agitator, a reformer, associating by turns with Fanny Wright, Robert Dale Owen, the leaders of the working-men’s party, Channing, Parker, and the Boston clique of world-reformers, captivated by the theories of Leroux and St. Simon, and even fancying himself the providential precursor of a new Messias who was to do away with all old things [Pg 369] and renovate the world. At last he became convinced that Jesus Christ founded the Catholic Church as the perpetual teacher, guide, and ruler of men and nations, and settled himself in his only true vocation as an exponent and advocate of her doctrines and order by the means of his written works. It was only as a Catholic publicist that he became a truly great man, and achieved a great work for which he deserves to be held in lasting remembrance. To this work the last thirty years of his life were devoted with a gigantic energy, which diminished toward the end under the influence of advancing age and enfeebled health, but never wholly flagged until the approach of death gradually quenched and at last extinguished the vital flame of his physical existence. During the last seventeen years of his life his residence was at Elizabeth, New Jersey, with the exception of a few months which he passed with his son, Henry F. Brownson, Esq., of Detroit, in whose house he died, and from which he was carried to his last resting-place in the Catholic cemetery of that town. His last years were filled with sufferings from severe physical infirmities, the sudden deaths of several of his children, above all from the death of his tenderly-loved and devoted wife, and from the desolation and loneliness which is usually the cloud in which the setting sun of genius goes down, especially when one survives the period of his great activity, and finds himself, as it were, walking among the graves of friends and past works, drawing always nearer to his own sepulchral resting-place. His death occurred on the morning of Easter Monday, April 17, 1876, when he was in the middle of his seventy-third year, and his obsequies were celebrated on the following Wednesday. From the time of his conversion he was not only a loyal but a pious and practical Catholic, constantly receiving the sacraments, and making his own salvation the chief object to be attained in life. There can be no doubt that he lived and died a just and good man, full of merit, and sure of a high place in heaven, as well as on the scroll of honor where the names of the great men of the age are inscribed by the verdict of their fellows.

If we were allowed to stop here, our task would not have any of that difficulty or delicacy which we said at the outset must necessarily belong to an effort at estimating Dr. Brownson’s character and career as a Catholic publicist. That he built on the true foundation as a wise master-builder, with gold, silver, and precious stones, much solid and fine work able to stand the fire and deserving a reward both on earth and in heaven, we can affirm with conscientious fidelity to our own conviction, and without fear of contradiction. That there was no wood, hay, or stubble in the great mass of materials which he used in his many and extensive works we dare not assert. The difficulty lies in discrimination, and in the relative estimate of a man certainly great and good, in comparison with other great champions of the Catholic faith, and with the standard of perfection. It must be remembered that Dr. Brownson was a self-made man, and, until he was past thirty, was in circumstances most unfavorable to his intellectual culture. He received in his youth only the rudiments of an education, was associated during his early manhood with vulgar sectaries and demagogues, engaged in a rude, turbulent [Pg 370] struggle for a living and a position as a religious and political leader, as well as in a perpetual search after truth, without adequate means of satisfying the cravings of his restless intellect and passionate heart. He came into contact with intellectual and cultivated men for the first time in Boston after he joined the Unitarians. His efforts to educate himself were certainly strenuous. He acquired the Latin, French, German, and Italian languages sufficiently well to read books written in all those languages, and his knowledge of English authors was, of course, very wide and extensive. Nevertheless, the want of a systematic education in his early youth, and of regular, symmetrical intellectual training, was always a great disadvantage, as it necessarily must be to every self-made man. Moreover, the necessity of perpetually speaking and writing on the most important subjects as a teacher and guide of others, before he had thoroughly learned what he had to teach, made him liable to hasty and crude statements, to inaccuracies and errors, to changes and modifications in his views and opinions, and to a certain tentative, erratic course of thought. He was like a great ship making its way by waring and tacking, often changing its course, and frequently stopping for soundings, but on the whole making steady headway towards one definite point, escaping many dangers, and at last arriving on open sailing ground by the genius of its pilot, notwithstanding insufficient charts and an unknown coast. In certain favorite branches of study—as, for instance, in history, the history of philosophy, political ethics, and English philology—his knowledge was not only extensive, but extremely accurate. Of scholastic metaphysics and theology he had a considerable but by no means a minutely precise and complete knowledge; and with the physical sciences he was still less acquainted. In the belles-lettres he was extremely well versed, and of works of fiction he was an omnivorous reader. For a number of years before his death he was prevented by the weakness of his eyes from reading very much, and was therefore, in the last series of his Review, thrown back on his old resources. On the whole, the mass of knowledge acquired by study which is displayed in his written works is more like a grand, complex structure, imposing in magnitude of outline, sublimity of design, variety of details, yet irregular in plan and incomplete in many of its parts, than like a finished, scientifically-constructed, and elaborately-completed edifice.

In his calibre of mind we think Dr. Brownson may be classed with those men whose capacity is only exceeded by a very small number of minds of the highest order of genius. Intellect, reason, imagination, and memory were alike powerful faculties of his mind, and his great weight of brain, with a corresponding nervous and muscular strength, made him capable of the most concentrated, vigorous, and sustained intellectual labor. Within the scope of his genius there was no work, however colossal, which he was not naturally capable of accomplishing. His gift of language, and ability of giving expression to his thoughts and sentiments, whether original or borrowed, was even greater than his power of abstraction and conception; and his style has a magnificent, Doric beauty seldom surpassed, rarely even equalled. Although Dr. Brownson was not an orator, [Pg 371] and Mr. Webster was not a philosopher, there is, nevertheless, a striking similarity in the style of the two men, who mutually admired each other’s productions with the sympathy of cognate minds. In argument, but especially in controversial argument and philippics, Dr. Brownson wielded the hammer of Thor. His defect was in subtlety of thought, fineness of discrimination, completeness of induction, and minute, accurate analysis. In the capacity of grasping a first principle and following it out on the synthetic method lay his great power. Whenever he had these great first principles and fundamental ideas, either from reason or faith, he was unrivalled in the grand and mighty exposition of the truth, irresistible in the demolition of sophistical, inconsequent, and false theories and their advocates, many of whom he laid low with the ease and force of the blow of Richard Cœur de Lion on the cheek of the unlucky clerk of Companhurst. Humor, wit, and sarcasm were also at his command, as well as serious argument; nor were they always sparingly used, although generally with the good-humor of a giant conscious of his strength.

When we consider the absolute and permanent value of Dr. Brownson’s writings as a contribution to Catholic literature, not merely in respect to their quality as the productions of a great mind, but as to their substance; and estimate the effective worth of his efforts as a publicist in the promotion of Catholic truth and law, we cannot avoid taking into view the moral characteristics of the man and of his career. He was a man of great passions as well as of great intellect. He lacked a wholesome, sound moral and religious discipline during more than half his life, and was under the influence of ideas, associates, circumstances, most dangerous and injurious, but especially hostile to the fundamental virtues of humility, reverence for authority, intellectual and moral self-control, submission to a fixed, unvarying rule of conscientious obligation. After a stormy and turbulent life, he submitted himself to the authority of the Catholic Church over his mind and conscience, when he was more than forty years of age. He was always true in his allegiance, and in many respects morally heroic in the practice of the Christian virtues. His previous life was not wanting in nobility, and in his subsequent life as a Catholic there is a magnanimity, a generosity, a superiority to petty, selfish motives and considerations, such as wealth and popularity; a patient endurance of toil, privation, and suffering; a steady loyalty to the Holy See; a royal scorn of baseness and wrong, and sympathy with the things which are good, just, true, and honorable, worthy of a Catholic of the best mediæval type. He remained, however, as many of the old, heroic Christians who were converted from heathenism did, more or less, the lion of the forest, with many of the idiosyncrasies and other characteristics, the product of his past history, but partially subdued and modified. He was sui generis, and his works are like himself. To describe him we ought to borrow, if we may hint at such an impossible supposition, the pen with which Carlyle has described his heroes. The pen being unattainable, we decline the attempt. A few things we must say, in order to prepare the way for the estimate we are striving to make of his career and works.

[Pg 372] Dr. Brownson was liable to be fascinated by some great writer, and for a time to surrender his mind almost completely to his influence with an impetuous enthusiasm which hindered calm deliberation. When this first fervor had passed, he would reconsider the matter, and sometimes end by a severe castigation of his late master. Like St. Christopher, he went in search of the strongest man to serve, whereas those whom he successively tried and abandoned were really weaker than himself. Cousin, Leroux, and last of all Gioberti were those to whom he was most specially devoted, and the influence of the last-named author was so strong over him that he never wholly freed himself from its detrimental effects. In many other ways the judgment of Dr. Brownson was liable to bias from prejudice, passion, and moods of feeling. In his judgment of men, and also of books, he was hasty, partial, capricious, swayed by accidental influences, and variable. It was the same in regard to theories, opinions, and doctrines which he regarded as open questions. Where his faith, his conscience, or his matured, deliberate reason were firmly settled he was steady and immovable. If he was thoroughly convinced that he had made a mistake or fallen into error, he would retract. But his old habit of roving all over the world of thought, and the lack of the regular, consistent intellectual and moral discipline of a systematic Catholic culture and education, made him restless of keeping steadily in one course of thought, fond of novelty, and ready to adopt or abandon ideas without due deliberation. This variability and want of steady balance in his intellectual operations detracted very much from his influence as a writer, and counteracted to a great extent the effect which his solid and weighty arguments might have otherwise produced. He has himself made a frank though not a contrite acknowledgment of his one great moral fault in The Convert: “I am no saint, never was, and never shall be a saint. I am not and never shall be a great man; but I always had, and I trust I always shall have, the honor of being regarded by my friends and associates as impolitic, as rash, imprudent, and impracticable. I was and am in my natural disposition frank, truthful, straightforward, and earnest, and therefore have had, and I doubt not shall carry to the grave with me, the reputation of being reckless, ultra, a well-meaning man, perhaps an able man, but so fond of paradoxes and extremes that he cannot be relied on, and is more likely to injure than serve the cause he espouses.”[113] To the last statement we must, to a great extent, demur. It is so far true, however, that it was extremely difficult to act in concert with Dr. Brownson, and impossible to count with security upon his movements. Like the lions described so vividly by Jules Gérard, who would be heard by him roaring in the night at distant points within a circuit of twenty miles, you could not foresee from what quarter the thunder of his voice would be next heard, or calculate his range. Many Catholics were alarmed at one time, lest he should stray beyond the boundaries of the faith. He had even so far lost the confidence of the hierarchy and the Catholic public, in the year 1864, that he was unable to keep up his Review. Complaints were [Pg 373] lodged against him before one of the Roman tribunals, and the celebrated theologian Cardinal Franzelin, then professor in the Roman College, was deputed to examine his writings. The result was that they were not found worthy of censure, and the case was dismissed with a kind admonition to be guarded in his language on one or two points, conveyed through a well-known priest and Roman doctor of New York, who was at the same time directed to console him in his afflictions and encourage him to persevere in his labors. Like Montalembert, Lacordaire, De Broglie, and many other illustrious Catholic priests as well as laymen, and even a few bishops, Dr. Brownson was for a time dazzled by the specious phantom of liberalism; but he soon freed himself from this illusion, and no one has more thoroughly and heartily defended the decisions of the Council of the Vatican, and of the Encyclical and Syllabus of 1864, than he has done, especially in the last series of his Review. He wavered for a time respecting the necessity of an uncompromising defence and maintenance of the temporal princedom of the Sovereign Pontiff, and an unfortunate expression to that effect even slipped into The Catholic World from his pen through an oversight of the editor. But in this and every other respect in which he had been led astray for a time, he never failed in a right intention; and for all errors into which he was misled he made full and ample amends, even far beyond what could justly have been expected.

In regard to some points of Catholic doctrine he was rigoristic and exaggerated, sometimes censuring the most orthodox theologians as lax in their interpretation of dogmas. A satisfactory and systematic exposition of the complete theology of the Catholic Church cannot, therefore, be said to have been accomplished by Dr. Brownson. Nor, indeed, can we award to him the meed of success in constructing a system of metaphysics. That he made valuable contributions both to theology and metaphysics we are very glad to admit; and, moreover, we ascribe his imperfect achievement, not to the want of intellectual ability, but to other causes which we have sufficiently explained already. In point of fact, the great scheme always before his mind of the synthetic exposition of faith and science, reason and revelation, dogma and philosophy, was too vast even for his capacious mind and gigantic powers, without a preparation and a possession of materials which he did not and could not have at command. In our opinion, some parts of this great work have been much better done in our own time by other men than by Dr. Brownson. Whether any man will arise who will accomplish the complete work and produce another Summa Theologiæ, we cannot say; but such a man, if he appears, will be a second Angelic Doctor. On this head Dr. Ward, in the Dublin Review, has already written so well that we need not add anything more. He has also, in the number for January, 1876, while paying a most cordial and generous tribute to the genius and virtue of Dr. Brownson, pointed out in very clear, explicit terms the great defect in his method of metaphysical reasoning. This defect is traceable to the influence of Kant, and found expression in his perpetual criticism of the analytic method of the schoolmen, and insistance for the substitution of a synthetic process beginning from an à priori [Pg 374] synthetic judgment. Dr. Brownson’s great mistake lay in his attempting to reconstruct philosophy and theology from the foundation, instead of applying himself to learn both from the traditional scholastic system, which needs to be reconstructed and completed only where certain portions have been proved by real scientific discoveries to be weak or have been left unfinished. But we will not weary our readers with any further remarks on such abstruse topics. We have said enough to indicate to those who are familiar with them the grounds of our judgment on certain portions of Dr. Brownson’s writings, and for others the requisite explanation would occupy far more space than we are at liberty to appropriate.

While a considerable part of these writings belonging to domestic controversy will, in our opinion, be forgotten except as literary curiosities, there are others which deserve to remain as a portion of our standard Catholic literature, and to be studied while the English language itself endures. We are disposed to consider the various essays on subjects belonging to the department of political ethics as the most consummate productions of the great publicist. His work entitled The Great Republic is the most extensive and complete of these essays, but there are numerous other single pieces, making together a great collection, to be found in various parts of his own Review and of this magazine. The articles on the controversy with Protestants and various kinds of free-thinkers, those on transcendentalism, the autobiography entitled The Convert, and the whole series of articles contributed to The Catholic World, with the exception of a few of minor importance, may be placed in the same category of excellence and permanent value. The quantity of literary labor accomplished by Dr. Brownson was literally astounding, especially for our day. A great part of that which he published during his fifty years of active life was necessarily ephemeral. But there might be selected from his extant publications as a Catholic reviewer a mass considerable enough to fill several volumes of the best quality of matter in the most excellent, admirable, and enduring form. Such competent judges as Lord Brougham, Cardinal Wiseman, Mr. Webster, Mr. Ripley, and the editors of the principal reviews in England, France, and Germany, have pronounced the highest eulogiums upon the masterpieces of Dr. Brownson’s pen, either in respect to the power of thought and beauty of style which are their characteristics, or the intrinsic value of their argument as an exposition or defence of great truths and principles. The terse logic of Tertullian, the polemic crash of St. Jerome, the sublime eloquence of Bossuet, are all to be found there in combination or alternation, with many sweet strains of tenderness and playful flashes of humor. There are numerous passages in his writings not to be surpassed by the finest portions of the works of the great masters of thought and style, whether in the English or any other language, in the present or in any past age. They render certain and immortal the just and hard-earned fame of their author, who labored not, however, at least not principally, for fame and honor, but for the love of truth, the welfare of mankind, and the approbation of heaven.

Dr. Brownson is the most remarkable of all the converts to the Catholic Church in the United States, and among the most remarkable [Pg 375] in the group of illustrious men who have paid homage to her authority in the present age. His conversion was a great event and made an epoch. What the amount of good which has been and will be effected by his works may be, it is utterly impossible to estimate; for such things have no statistics, no criterion of measurement, no data for calculation. The weight of his testimony and the conclusiveness of his arguments have been slightingly treated, and represented as not worthy to be considered, on the plea that he was capricious, changeable, and possessed of a kind of marvellous art, a sort of intellectual magic, by which he could persuade himself, and make a plausible show of proving to others, that any theory, doctrine, or scheme which took his fancy was solid truth; somewhat as Kant attributes an illusory power to nature, by which all sorts of paralogisms are made to seem equally true and real to reason, whereas they are only phenomenal forms. To a great number of persons Dr. Brownson was an intellectual phenomenon, a sort of philosophical comet of the most eccentric orbit, a prestidigitator with magical formulas, a Prospero having a magic wand, a being such as the popular superstition of old represented Albertus Magnus. That a mind which is searching for the truth which it does not possess, and after a supreme good which it knows not except as an object of vague longing, should wander, is not strange. It is the principle of Protestantism, and of the rationalistic, sceptical philosophy which it has produced, to be always doubting, questioning; “ever seeking and never coming to the knowledge of the truth,” unless by the substitution of another, higher principle. That there was a law in his mental aberrations, a progressive movement in his eccentric orbit, a “method in his madness,” even in its utmost extravagance, a careful perusal of his autobiography will show. It requires intelligence and patience, however, to read that book. His intellect was one always quærens causas altissimas. When he became once convinced of the truth of the Catholic religion, and surrendered his mind to the supernatural light of faith, although his faith was fides quærens intellectum, he never changed or wavered in his belief of the grand dogmas of Catholic Christianity. That such a mind and disposition as his could be firmly held under the dominion of authority with the full assent of the understanding and the joyful submission of the will, is no weak proof that the authority is divine which subdued so restive a spirit. Pegasus in the yoke with his wings tied was an unruly, troublesome steed; but when Apollo mounted on his back and cut his cords, he was docile to his rein, while with all the joy of liberty he flew through the air, proud to obey such a master.

Dr. Brownson’s demonstration of the divine institution and authority of the church is unanswered and unanswerable. It is childish trifling, unworthy of rational men, to ignore his arguments and escape from his logic by petty criticisms on his person. Reason is objective and real; the subjective qualities of the reasoner have nothing to do with its authority. Several years before Dr. Brownson’s conversion, the writer heard several of the professors of Princeton express their opinion that he was the ablest and most dangerous antagonist of Christianity in this country. Like Saul of Tarsus, he was changed from an enemy to a champion of the cause of Christ [Pg 376] and his church. Though somewhat sudden, his conversion was from rational conviction and the purest motives. It is impossible to deprive it of its significance or deny its importance. It is one of many instances proving that now, as ever, the Catholic Church has power to win and master the strongest and most fearless minds, the most generous and disinterested hearts. Dr. Brownson was generous and disinterested. He obeyed his conscience, devoted himself to truth and justice, served God and his fellow-men, without price, in poverty, and with a total neglect of popularity and worldly honor, comfort, enjoyment, and every sort of earthly pomp and ostentation. In a merely natural point of view he was like the simple old men of the Greek and Roman heroic age, and the early fathers of our degenerate commonwealth. His austere figure is an example and a reproach to a frivolous, luxurious, sceptical, perfidious generation. What a contrast between his incorruptible integrity and unpurchasable allegiance to truth and right, to virtue and honesty, to order and liberty, and the venal trafficking of our so-called statesmen, who swindle soldiers and artisans, rob the country and the poor, barter and trade in votes and offices, renounce their faith for political preferment, bid for honors by appeals to sectarian animosity, sell the most sacred rights and interests for their own selfish advantage, flaunt in a vulgar magnificence which is maintained by theft, and abscond to escape the punishment due to their felonies! Amid this mean crowd he stands out like Aristides among the demagogues of Athens; and compared with that other brood which has settled down on the domain of the press and the lecture-hall, the professors of atheistic materialism, he is like Socrates among the sophists. Detected swindlers, defaulters and robbers are despised and denounced, disgraced and punished, if it is money and material goods which they administer fraudulently or appropriate unjustly. They are the small cattle-thieves of Waverley, but the great lifters escape unpunished and are honored. Tyrants who rob their subjects of their rights or neighboring states of their possessions; defaulters to faith, conscience, and God, who abuse their gifts and power to debauch and degrade the minds of their fellow-men; swindlers in the priceless goods of the soul and eternity; the prophets of falsehood and licentiousness; are enriched and applauded. Neglect, aversion, martyrdom, are the portion of the genuine heroes, sages, patriots, lovers and benefactors of the race; and whatever homage they receive is extorted, reluctant, scanty in proportion to their worth and merit. Even when they are admired and praised, their teaching is not heeded or their example followed by the fickle, frivolous crowd. Morally, when not literally, exile and the cup of hemlock are their portion. Those who literally encounter death and receive the palm of martrydom are the happiest and most favored among them. But these are the men who redeem the race, and are the only lasting glory of the age in which their task of labor and suffering is fulfilled. Among these crusaders Dr. Brownson enlisted when he abandoned the camp of infidelity and revolution to receive the cross. The corps d’élite of Catholic laymen distinguished by their eminent superiority and illustrious services to [Pg 377] the church, in this century, is a confraternity even more chivalrous and honorable than the Order of the Temple in its purest, brightest days. Görres, O’Connell, De Gerlache, Rossi, Lamoricière, Montalembert, Veuillot, Dechamps, Marshall, Ward, Garcia Moreno, Mallinkrodt—these are names which represent a great battalion of more or less renowned warriors in the sacred cause of Christ, of his Vicar, of true religion, science, civilization, and man’s eternal welfare. The unshaken, loyal fidelity of Abdiel among the innumerable hosts of revolted angels shines forth, not with solitary lustre, but like the splendor of the cohort seen in the vision recorded in the Machabees: Peraera equites discurrentes, auratas stolas habentes, et aureorum splendorem armorum. The Catholic laity of the United States have furnished one illustrious champion to this band. He loved the church first of all, and next his country. He deserved well of both, for Christian and civic virtues, sacrifices on the altar of God and the battle-field of the republic, wise and eloquent pleadings for Catholic law in the Christian commonwealth, and constitutional right, freedom, and order in the American state. We trust that his instructions and example will always be a light and an encouragement, a glory and a model, to the Catholic laymen of the United States, and especially to the young men of education who aspire to intellectual culture and feel the impulse to act valiantly and usefully their part as citizens of this republic and Christian gentlemen.

[112] It is but a few years since the death of Dr. Brownson’s mother, and his twin-sister still survives.

[113] The Convert, p. 96

THE ASCENSION.

“Thou art gone up on high.”—Ps. lxvii. 18.

Gone up! But whither? To a star?

Some orb that seems a point of light?

Or one too infinitely far

For our fond gaze beneath the night?

Some fairer world, to which our own,

With all its vastness, is a grain?

Is’t there the God-Man sets His throne—

Fit centre of a boundless reign?

[Pg 378]

Let science coldly sweep away

A fancied Eden here and there

From out the starry space, and say

‘Tis all brute matter—crude and bare

Or stern philosophy demand.

May not yon myriad orbs we ken

Be but a pinch of golden sand,

To stretch the narrow minds of men?

Yet Faith makes answer, meekly bold

Narrow to me your widest lore—

Without the blessed truth I hold

That God is man for evermore.

He came to wed our life to His:

As man was born, and died, and rose:

And in His victor Flesh it is

Our hopes of Paradise repose.

He wore it through the sweet delay

That kept him with His dear ones yet;

Nor put it from Him on the day

He passed from topmost Olivet.

Then still He wears it in the skies—

Matter in place. And when the cloud

Received Him from the gazers’ eyes—

Before their brimming hearts allowed

That they had lost Him—swift as thought,

He reached the bright Elysian home

His own primeval word had wrought—

New Eden for the race to come.

[Pg 379]

THE WILD ROSE OF ST. REGIS.

An earnest consideration of the “Indian question” must impress every lover of our country with the most serious conviction of its importance and the fearful accounting which awaits us before the solemn tribunal of the future, if we follow the policy which has unhappily been hitherto adopted in relation to it.

Leaving out all thought of the principles of eternal justice, and consulting only the promotion of our temporal interests, the course we have pursued could not have been more fatal if projected for the sole purpose of defeat and ruin.

How much more wisely did France deal with the aborigines from the start than England! With what untiring patience did her colonial governments meet each successive savage outbreak, subduing the ferocious foe with weapons of Christian forbearance and clemency! They waged no war of retaliation and extermination against these “children of larger growth,” whom they found roaming through the forests of New France. They made no treaties with them, as we have done from the first, with the sole purpose, as it would seem, of breaking them. In their traffic with the Indians they forced no worthless rubbish upon them at prices far exceeding the value of the very best, and in exchange for their wares at a rate much below the half of their real worth. The dealings of traders with them were not only jealously watched and guarded by every possible check to the greed for gain, but a breach of justice and equity in those dealings was sure to meet its provided penalty.

France bequeathed to England with the cession of her Canadian provinces, in 1763, the wisest system—wisest because based upon an immutable foundation of Christian equity—which could have been adopted in regard to her Indian tribes; and England, though not always so scrupulously watchful of the transactions of her traders, was sagacious enough to perceive its wisdom and to uphold and continue it, in all its leading features, throughout her American dependencies.

Herein, as we apprehend, lies the secret of her success in this matter, which contrasts so strikingly with our miserable failure—herein, and not, as has been asserted, in any essential difference between these aboriginal races; for the savage is, after all, much the same through all his nations and tribes, and has a vast amount of human nature in his unsubdued bosom, which is as easily melted by kindness as exasperated by cruelty and oppression.

Circumstances recently brought to our notice have served to confirm and illustrate convictions we had long entertained on this subject, and we have thought the relation of them might not prove inappropriate or without interest at this time.

In the autumn of 1874 we went with a party of friends to the railroad depot at St. Albans, Vermont, to take leave of a portion of our [Pg 380] number who were about to depart for Florida to pass the winter. While we were awaiting the arrival of the train from the north our notice was attracted by a group of Indian children who passed among the crowd assembled there, in quest of purchasers for their toilet articles and Indian knick-knacks.

An old lady of our party—whose father left Vermont with his family early in this century, when she was very young, to settle in northwestern New York, and who was now visiting the home and friends of her childhood for the first time—seemed to take a particular interest in these children. Calling a little girl to her, she asked what place they were from. “From St. Regis,” was the reply. “And did you ever hear of Margaret La Lune?” she asked. “She is our grandmother,” they answered, “and is in this village now.”

At that moment a very old squaw, dressed in a remarkably neat Indian costume, with a blanket of snowy whiteness thrown loosely around her aged form, entered the room. To our astonishment, our friend no sooner saw her than she ran to her with open arms, embraced her, and kissed each of her wrinkled and swarthy cheeks!

This sudden demonstration was evidently no surprise to the Indian woman; for when, after a moment of silence, our friend asked, “Why, Margaret! how does it happen that you remember me after so many years?” she simply replied: “My daughter should know that our people never forget!” finishing the sentence with some expressions in her own language which fell upon our ears more like vibrations produced by the wind passing over the chords of some musical instrument, than like any articulate utterance. Our amazement was not diminished when we heard our friend reply in the same tone and language.

Before we could express our surprise the train arrived. The bustle of departure and last words were hardly over when we found that the Indian party had also gone on to Burlington in the same train.

Upon our return home we beset our visitor with questions as to this singular interview and the warm affection which seemed to exist between her and the old squaw.

“I became acquainted with her, for a brief space, long ago, when I was a little child,” she replied, “and, though I have never seen her since, incidents occurred some years later which revived my recollections of her and fixed them in my memory.”

When we insisted upon hearing all about it, she related the following story of

THE WILD ROSE OF ST. REGIS.

When my father removed in 1815 to the new settlement at Rossie, on the western confines of St. Lawrence County, N. Y., the forests covering the territory lying on Black Lake, and the borders of the Indian River—which empties into that lake a few miles below Rossie—had scarcely yet been disturbed by the axe of the settler. Hordes of wild beasts held almost undisputed sway over regions now occupied by cultivated farms and smiling villages.

A place of more weird and savage aspect than Rossie presented, situated on both sides of that dark stream, can hardly be conceived. Rich beds of iron ore of a superior quality abounding among its rugged hills, and extensive lead-mines, furnished material for the operation of numerous furnaces, which, with the necessary habitations for their [Pg 381] operatives, formed the little village. The largest Indian encampment in the county was also pitched upon its border, a short distance down the river.

The young squaws of the encampment mingled with the little girls of the settlement, and often became strongly attached to them. I was fascinated from the first with the manner of life in a wigwam, and soon became a special favorite with the Indian women. They frequently persuaded my mother to let me pass day after day in their wigwams, where I was carefully guarded and taught many of the simple arts in which they excel, and, as an unusual mark of their high regard, instructed in some of the secrets of those arts—such as the process for dyeing the quills of the porcupine with brilliant, unfading colors of every hue, in which they are so skilful; the mode of embroidering with them; the use of the moose-hair in such embroidery, and the manner of preparing it. I entered upon these pursuits with enthusiastic ardor and diligence, acquiring also—as a necessary consequence of this intercourse and training—with the facility of a youthful tongue, a sufficient knowledge of their language to communicate readily with them on all ordinary matters.

My mother was so fully engrossed with cares attendant upon the management of a large household, required in my father’s extensive business, that she had little time to devote to me beyond assuring herself of my safety. I recall with vivid distinctness, after the lapse of so many years, the startled surprise, not to say horror, with which she met my triumphant exhibition of a superb pair of moccasins for herself, lined with the soft, snow-white fur of the weasel, the work of my own hands. I had dressed and dyed the skins of which they were made, colored the brilliant quills and moose-hair profusely wrought into them, and finally cut, stitched, and embroidered them, under the direction of a pious old squaw who always watched over me during my visits to the wigwams.

My mother examined them in great surprise, her countenance expressing mingled pride and pity as she exclaimed: “Poor child! we must send you away somewhere to school; for I am afraid you will become a thorough little squaw if we keep you in this wild place among such savage companions.”

I felt deeply wounded by the want of respect for my dear friends which her remarks implied, and insisted warmly that the squaws were better, more gentle, and a great deal more pious than the civilized women of the place; that they were never guilty of backbiting or quarrelling among themselves; never raised their voices above the soft tones of their ordinary conversation, but lived in peace and harmony, saying their prayers devoutly morning and night, and requiring their children to do the same. I enumerated eagerly all the good qualities for which I admired them, to which she cordially assented, but insisted, nevertheless, that, as I was destined to live among civilized people, it was not desirable for me to acquire the habits and tastes of these children of the wilderness.

One morning not long after this occurrence, as I was playing with the Indian children near an untenanted house on the bank of the river, they told me in their own language that we must not make much noise; “for there was a fading flower in that house, and the medicine-women feared it had been chilled [Pg 382] by the breath of the destroyer.” I understood their meaning and asked one of them to go in with me to see the young invalid.

When we entered, an elderly squaw, the fine texture and snowy whiteness of whose blanket marked her as one of the best of her race, was bending over the slight form of a beautiful young girl who was lying on a bed of hemlock boughs which had been prepared in one corner of the room, and wrapping a blanket around her, while she lavished upon her those tender epithets and pet names with which the Indian dialects abound. As she turned and saw me, she said: “See, here is the little pale-face of whom Loiska told us, come to see my Rose of the woods! Will not the sweet flower lift its head to the sunshine of the pale-face?”

The maiden smiled and extended her wasted hand to take mine. I shuddered at its clammy coldness.

“See, dear mother,” she said plaintively, “the White Lily shrinks from the touch of the dews that lie upon your Rose! You must not be false to yourself or to me; for it is an angel who whispers to the little one that these are the dews of death. Your best skill cannot stay them, and they will cease only at the call of the great messenger, who will remove your flower to the garden of that ‘Mystical Rose’ whose fragrance we love so well.”

“Oh! let not my blossom say so. The journey was long and the bed was hard. The rays of the sun upon the water were too strong for our tender bud, and it wilted, but will soon revive in these pleasant shades. The pale-face will procure from her mother, who is passing kind to our people, strengthening food and refreshment for the Wild Rose!”

“Yes! yes!” I cried, “she will and we will not let it droop. I will go directly to my mother, and I know she will help you!”

I was thrilled by their look of grateful surprise when they found I could understand their language, and their softly-ejaculated benedictions followed me as I bounded away in quest of my mother. I found her busily engaged in household matters, and, seizing her with irresistible energy, literally dragged her into the presence of my new friends, telling her what I knew of them by the way.

When we arrived she inquired tenderly as to the symptoms of the lovely invalid. Finding they had come from St. Regis by water, and had brought her on a bed of boughs in their canoe to Ogdensburg, thence up the Oswegatchie to Black Lake, and thus far up the Indian River, she also was of the opinion that the frail child was exhausted by fatigue, and that rest would revive her.

They had undertaken the journey in the hope that a change would be a benefit to her health. Her father came with them and was at the camp, but the mother preferred a place where her charge could be better sheltered than in a wigwam.

My mother went home, and, gathering comfortable furniture for their room, despatched a man with it; then, preparing some hot wine negus with toasted crackers, she sent them by me to refresh the sufferer while some nourishing broth could be made ready.

From that time I forsook the wigwams and devoted myself to my Wild Rose; who became so fond of me that she could scarcely consent to my leaving her for the nights. Each morning found me at her bedside before sunrise, with my own breakfast as well as hers, that we might partake of it together, [Pg 383] and with a profusion of fresh flowers from the abundance of my mother’s flower-garden wherewith to adorn her room. The Indian children had helped me to festoon it with wreaths of ground pine and boughs, until it was an evergreen bower in which we took great satisfaction.

My mother gathered from her her little history. She had been betrothed to a young son of their chief, and they were to have been married the previous fall. The time for the nuptials had been appointed and her bridal dress prepared. The young man was sent by his father on some business to Montreal a few days before the time thus appointed. On the way his canoe was drawn suddenly into a whirlpool in the rapids, dashed to fragments upon the rocks, and he perished. The shock of this terrible calamity was fatal to her health, which had never been robust. From that moment she drooped, and, though quite calm, even cheerful, had been gradually wasting and sinking. They improved the first mild days of spring to try the effect of a change of air and scene, after she had received the last sacraments from their priest in preparation for the worst.

For a few weeks she seemed to revive, and even walked with me once as far as my own home. Her appetite improved, and she relished all that my mother’s care provided for her food.

As I remember her at this distant day, I know she must have been a being of superior beauty and loveliness; but there was nothing about her which so fascinated and impressed my young heart as the spirit of piety that governed all her words and actions, and seemed to flow from the depths of her pure soul like transparent waters from a fountain, refreshing every one who came within their influence.

One warm evening in the early summer we sat together for a long time in silence and alone, watching a beautiful sunset over the wild “Rossie Hills,” when her soft voice breathed in her own musical language expressions which subsequent events fixed indelibly in my memory.

“My sweet Lily,” she said, “will often uplift her pale face to the smiles of the glorious sunset when the Rose, who loved to bask with her in their golden gleam, will be blooming in gardens which need them not; for the ‘Sun of Righteousness’ will be their light, and will fill them with glories unknown to earthly bowers, and his Blessed Virgin Mother will smile upon them. But the incense of prayer, like the breath of its own perfume, will ever float from the Rose to the throne of the Eternal that her Lily may be transplanted at last to a place by her side in that happy home where sighing, and parting, and sorrow shall cease for ever! Oh! will she not strive for admittance to the garden of our Lord here, that she may rejoice in the light of his countenance hereafter?”

In a voice broken by my sobs I promised all she asked, and I doubt not her prayers helped me long afterwards in obtaining the grace to fulfil the promise.

The next morning I found her much exhausted, and that she had passed a restless night. Her mother raised her in her arms while she took the broth I brought for her breakfast, of which she was very fond. She seemed weary, and, as her mother lowered her gently to the pillow, she suddenly lifted her eyes to heaven, while a smile of celestial [Pg 384] rapture stole over her beautiful face, and exclaimed, “Pray for me, my own mother; for, behold! the bright angel is spreading his wings to bear your Rose to the presence of her Redeemer!”—and was gone. The Indian mother and myself were alone with the lifeless form of our beloved one.

The change, the shock, was so sudden and unlooked for that I stood horror-struck and paralyzed, for the first time, before the dread messenger who had stolen the breath of my sweet Rose. The whole scene was so incomprehensible to me that I could not believe the tones of her dear voice were hushed for ever, but persuaded myself that she had only fallen asleep.

Amazed, I watched the poor mother as she calmly recited the prayers for the departing spirit over her child for some time, the only outward sign of her anguish being the tears which flowed in torrents down her cheeks, while every line of her wan features expressed unquestioning resignation to the will of Him who had given and taken her treasure.

The prayers concluded, she tenderly closed the dear eyes, adjusted the slender form, folded the delicate hands over a crucifix on her breast, and entwined the beads, which had so seldom been laid aside by them in life, closely around them in death. When she sat down at length, and, opening her blanket, extended her arms towards me, the first glimpse of the dread reality burst upon me in a flood of crushing agony, and, springing to the open arms which drew me in a close embrace to her bosom, I wept aloud in a paroxysm of frantic, uncontrollable grief. She fondly soothed and caressed me, bestowing upon me those expressions of tender affection which she had been wont to pour into the ears now closed for ever, and uttering fervent prayers to heaven that its choicest dews might descend upon the Lily which had cheered the last hours of her sweet Rose.

I was inconsolable, and told her vehemently that, since Heaven had taken the Rose, the Lily would go too, and that it would never lift up its head again; and, indeed, my grief was so violent as to injure my health, and I was soon sent away to new scenes.

My mother assisted in preparing the frail form of the Indian maiden for the grave. Her mother had brought with her the bridal dress of her child, and in that they arrayed the beautiful departed for the bridal of death. Then, enfolding her in a linen sheet, they wrapped her blanket about her and gently laid her down upon the bed of boughs her father had prepared in the canoe for her removal to the graves of their kindred at St. Regis. Then followed the sad leave-taking and the departure.

The dismal forests which clothed each margin of the Indian River seemed to bend over that sombre stream in reverential sympathy as the Indian father and mother, with their faded Rose, floated silently down its dark waters and out of our sight for ever!

* * * * *

Some years had elapsed since this event, and during the interval misfortunes had overwhelmed our family. At the very time of severe reverses in his business my father was taken with a malignant fever and died. My mother, my young brother, and myself were thus left in desolate affliction to battle with adversity as best we might. Our pleasant home was surrendered to [Pg 385] creditors, and we sought the forests of Upper Canada, whither a family who had long been tenants on our farm had gone several years before. They had taken up a tract of land under a government grant to settlers, and, when they heard of our great calamity, wrote, urging us to do the same, as they could render great assistance to us if we were near them.

The land we took was covered with very valuable timber, and the first object was to get a portion of it to the Quebec market, that its avails might pay for clearing the land and preparing our new home.

My brother—hitherto the pet of the family, and in danger of being the spoiled child of fortune—set about the task with an energy that surprised every one. He was greatly beloved by the Indian hunters, who knew my father and had received many favors from him in the days of our prosperity. They assisted us in our removal, and remained to help and encourage my brother in the lumbering business, so new to him, under the direction of “Captain Tom,” an old Indian who was very skilful in such operations. We removed late in the fall, taking with us a supply of provisions more than sufficient for the winter, and but little else of worldly gear.

When the spring opened, thanks to our kind neighbors with their oxen, and the good Indians, a quantity of lumber of various kinds had been drawn to the river bank, and as soon as the ice went out they put it into rafts for transportation. These were constructed in separate sections, each with its rude little caboose to shelter the two men who went with it. The sections were then firmly united in one long raft by means of strong withes, in such a manner that they could be readily detached by cutting the withes, if necessary, in making the dangerous descent of the rapids above Montreal.

A few days before they set out a vicious, drunken Indian called “Malfait,” who had been loitering around all winter, quarrelling with the men and giving no assistance, applied to Captain Tom for whiskey and for permission to go down on the rafts, both which requests were refused. He went away muttering threats, and the old Indian feared he was meditating mischief.

My brother wished to go with Captain Tom on the forward section, as was the custom for the one who conducted the navigation. We gave a very reluctant consent, and our parting with him was saddened by many misgivings.

They proceeded prosperously on their voyage as far as the “Long Sault,” so called, the first dangerous rapid, the chief difficulty in passing which, for experienced navigators, was to avoid being drawn, by an almost irresistible current at one point, into a furious maelstrom called the “Lost Channel,” from which few had ever escaped who once entered it.

They reached the head of the Long Sault late in the afternoon, and anchored there for the night, with the roar of the tumbling waters in their ears. The moon was shining brightly, and they betook themselves to rest early, that they might start betimes in the morning. Very late in the night my brother was awakened from a sound sleep by the old Indian, who laid his hand heavily upon him and told him to keep very calm and not to struggle or make the least effort to shield himself. “For,” said he, “we are entering the Lost Channel; our [Pg 386] part of the raft has been cut loose. I have bound you firmly to the same stick of timber to which I am now binding myself. We can only leave ourselves in the hands of the Great Spirit; for no other arm can help us.”

My brother was paralyzed with terror as the maddened waters seized the raft as if it had been a child’s plaything, tore the heavy timbers apart, and bent and shivered many of them like saplings. The one to which he and the Indian were attached was often uplifted, by the force of the raging torrent, its full length, to be thrown violently down and swallowed in the depths of the foaming flood. The shock of these concussions soon benumbed his faculties, and his last conscious act was to recommend his soul to the mercy of God, before whose awful tribunal he supposed he was about to appear.

When he began to recover his senses, it was like waking from some frightful dream. He was too much bewildered to realize for some time that he was in a comfortable Indian lodge, with a kind old squaw in attendance upon him. She would not allow him to ask any questions or agitate himself, assuring him that all was well, and he should know the whole at a proper time. As soon as he was able to hear it she gave him the history.

On the day before their arrival at the Long Sault her son, with a party of Indian hunters who had been up the St. Lawrence and were returning to St. Regis, had fallen in with Malfait, and, from inquiries made by him, suspected that he was watching, with no good purpose, for rafts that he expected would come down the river. He suddenly disappeared, and they did not know in what direction. When her son told her the circumstance and their suspicions—for the bad character of Malfait was well known, and they had heard that Captain Tom was coming down with rafts-she set out at once with men and canoes up Lake St. Louis to the foot of the rapids, to give aid if it should be needed.

They discovered the timber to which my brother and his faithful friend were lashed, and, releasing them, brought their insensible forms as speedily as possible to her lodge on the shore of that lake, with very little hope that they would ever revive. The old Indian, however, soon began to show signs of life, and, when he was able, recounted what had happened. He had no doubt that Malfait came in the night, detached the raft, and steered it into the rapids to satisfy his malice against him.

As soon as he was strong enough to go, her son went with him down the river to look after the remainder of the raft, leaving his young friend in good hands, though still unconscious of the tender care he was receiving.

They found the rafts in Lake St. Peter below Montreal, and her son returned. She then sent him with some others to gather the timber of the wrecked raft. They collected all that could be found on the shore of the lake, to be taken when the rafts should come down next year.

“And now, my son,” she continued, when she had brought the narrative to this point, “I am known here as Margaret La Lune, but to your mother and sister as the mother of the Wild Rose of St. Regis. You may have heard them speak of her, though you were too young at the time of their acquaintance [Pg 387] to know about it yourself. It was to her care the Great Spirit committed you in your extremity, that she might be allowed to make some return for their kindness to her and her sweet child, which she has never forgotten, and has ever since endeavored to repay by giving all the help in her power to navigators on these perilous waters. It was in one of these attempts that my husband lost his life some years ago. Great was my joy when I learned from your Indian friend that I had rescued one so dear to them from a grave in the rushing flood.”

My brother remained with her until the return of Captain Tom. He delivered the lumber to the merchant in Quebec to whom it was consigned—who had long known the sterling qualities of the faithful old Indian—and informed him of the situation in which he left his young employer. The merchant advanced money to him to pay off the men and to bear his own and my brother’s expenses home, sending by him a statement of the balance left and subject to my brother’s order. The money for their expenses was all that Captain Tom or his Indians could ever be persuaded to accept for their valuable services at that time and in after-years. Their only reply to my brother’s persuasions was, “We remember your father. He good to his Indian brothers.”

You may well imagine our surprise and gratitude when we heard from my brother’s own lips the story of all that had befallen him, and of the devotion of our excellent Margaret. She was absent when he went down the next year for the last time, and he did not see her.

Our affairs prospered beyond our expectation. We brought willing hands and courageous hearts to the strife with adverse fortunes, and, by the blessing of God upon our efforts, did not fail in time to retrieve them. My mother died a few years after my marriage with a son of our former tenant, whose sister my brother afterwards married. She divided her time between the two homes, tenderly beloved and cared for by her children and grandchildren, and honored by all who knew her.

You now understand the reason for my great surprise and affectionate meeting with Margaret at the depot, which must have seemed strange indeed to the witnesses. In our short chat I promised to go to pass some time with her upon my return home, and am not without hope that I shall persuade her to go with me to see the children and grandchildren who have often heard of her and of the fidelity with which her people treasure up the memory of kind acts.

[Pg 388]

HAMMOND ON THE NERVOUS SYSTEM.[114]

The wonderful relativity of psychology to the purely somatic phenomena comprised under the term physiology, while not having altogether escaped the observation of earlier thinkers, did not assume the significance it now possesses till modern science compelled mere psychicists to recognize the invaluable services this new handmaiden bestowed on their favorite pursuit. It had been too much the vogue to frown down attempts at chemical explanations of vital processes as verging towards materialism, and thus materialism was in reality strengthened, since the opponents of modern physiology had shut their eyes to facts as stubborn and undeniable as the soul itself whose cause they were championing. This antagonism was unfortunate; for, though of short duration, it gave rise to the impression in the popular mind that the old science dreaded the new light, and that recent discoveries tended rapidly to overthrow the time-honored belief in the distinct substantiality of the soul. To this same arrogant rejection by pedantic orthodoxists of facts that seemingly conflicted with accepted views, may be ascribed the sneering and triumphant manner of many scientists who fail to take account of the slowness with which men reconcile themselves to truths not hitherto suspected. Had, however, the data of modern science been at first fully considered, it would have become evident that theories and assumptions alone ran counter to the doctrine of a spiritual soul, and that scientific facts, startling and numerous as they were, did not, when viewed by the light of a just interpretation, conflict with any prior truth. The hasty and groundless character of the assumptions which tend to materialism may be inferred from the claim not long since put forward in the Ecole de Médecine at Paris, to the effect that the science of physiology demands in advance the rejection of any principle of activity in man not amenable to its methods and instruments of research, on the ground that man in his totality is the true objective point of this science, and the admission of aught in him which it cannot determine is equivalent to stating that man is more than he is. According to this authority, therefore, the notion of a soul, viewed as a spiritual substance, distinct and different from the body, hampers science and circumscribes the field of its inquiry. But if the vast strides made by physiology within the last decade have been the occasion of some pernicious speculation, and have seemed to give countenance to materialism, this has been the case only when the science transcended its own data and soared into the region of conjecture. Its legitimate fruits are manifest in the flood of light it has thrown on the most intricate questions of psychology, [Pg 389] and the elucidation of points which, but for it, would have remained for ever in obscurity. Indeed, it may be said to have created a new branch of psychical science, and to have brushed away many cobwebs that clouded the psychology of the schools. The volume before us represents the latest expression of the physiology and pathology of the nervous system, and is characterized by unusual closeness of observation and accuracy of expression, while evincing a proneness to theorize on points concerning which the author is least at home. Dr. Hammond has been a close student at the bedside and an indefatigable worker with those instruments of research which have almost built up his science, but for all an indifferent thinker, as we shall shortly endeavor to prove. It is true that no authority is more frequently invoked, and with good reason, to determine questions relative to mental aberration and unusual conditions of the nervous system; but when he abandons the ophthalmoscope, the cephalohœmometer, the œsthesiometer, and assumes the abolla of the philosopher, he evidently misses his rôle. He is undoubtedly a physiologist of the first rank and a respectable authority on minute nervous histology, but as a theorist he is a failure. Accustomed to dogmatize on facts coming within the scope of the senses, he applies the same procrustean rule of reasoning to purely intellectual processes, and speedily flounders in a quagmire. His mind has tipped the balance in the direction of material things, and has not been able to regain its equilibrium.

As a repertory of interesting facts, gleaned in the course of a long and varied experience, his book is invaluable. It bristles with information and is replete with comments which prove Dr. Hammond to be an accurate, close, and painstaking observer, as well as an accomplished anatomist. His chapter on Aphasia is intensely interesting, and constitutes a valuable contribution to the theory of localized function. Aphasia is that inability to use language which proceeds, not from paralysis of the labial muscles, nor from hysteria, nor from injury of the vocal chords (aphonia), but from a lesion of that portion of the brain which presides over the memory of words and the co-ordination of speech. Many instances are adduced in proof that this inability results from the impairment of a given portion of the cerebral substance; and from the constant recurrence of the same effects from the same lesion the inference is drawn that a very restricted portion of the brain is concerned in connecting thoughts with words, co-ordinating these, and arranging them in articulate sounds. Authorities, indeed, are not agreed as to what special brain lobe this faculty is to be ascribed, but the fact is borne out by unquestionable evidence that some portion of the anterior convolutions controls and regulates the power of speech. The point of interest is that the function is localized and depends on the minute physical texture of the nerve substance through which it is carried on. Dr. Hammond justly claims the credit of having first observed that the form of aphasia called amnesic (forgetfulness of words) depends on some lesion of the vesicular or gray matter of the brain, since it is unaccompanied by paralysis, while the form called ataxic (inability to co-ordinate articulate sounds) is connected with the corpus striatum which presides over motion, [Pg 390] and so we find this latter form always associated with paralysis.

No summary of this chapter can do it justice, so pregnant is it with facts and abounding with varied suggestion. We would remark, however, that Dr. Hammond has failed to call attention to the remarkable confirmation which the condition of amnesic aphasia offers in support of the inseparable connection between thought and some symbol of expression—a circumstance which Trousseau, in his learned work on Clinical Medicine, has noted at length. Trousseau says: “A great thinker as well as a great mathematician cannot devote himself to transcendental speculations unless he uses formulæ and a thousand material accessories which aid his mind, relieve his memory, and impart greater strength to thought by giving it greater precision. Now, an aphasic individual suffers from verbal amnesia so that he has lost the formulæ of thought.” This fact of aphasia curiously coincides with Vicomte de Bonald’s theory of the divine origin of language, which is based on the supposed impossibility of having a purely intellectual conception without an accompanying formula or word to circumscribe and differentiate it, and that accordingly language, in such relation, must have been communicated.

It is likewise corroborative of the view taken by Max Müller, who says (Science of Language, 79): “Without speech, no reason; without reason, no speech.” And again: “I therefore declare my conviction, whether right or wrong, as explicitly as possible, that thought, in one sense of the word—i.e., in the sense of reasoning—is impossible without language.”

The latest disclosure of science, therefore, so far from conflicting on this important point with the philosophy of the Scholastics, endorses and sustains it, and is opposed rather to the rationalist view of the question.

It is in the chapter on Insanity that Dr. Hammond first betrays the crudeness and shallowness of his philosophy. On page 310 he says: “By mind we understand a force developed by nervous action, and especially the action of the brain.” And again: “The brain is the chief organ from which the force called mind is evolved.”

In this definition the author is guilty of having used a term more obscure and ambiguous than the definiendium itself; for no two scientific men agree in their view of force. Dr. Mayer, of Heilbronn, says: “The term force conveys the idea of something unknown and hypothetical.” “Forces are indestructible, convertible, and imponderable objects.” Dr. Bray, in his Anthropology, says: “Force is everything; it is a noumenal integer phenomenally differentiated into the glittering universe of things.” Faraday says: “What I mean by the term force is the cause of a physical action,” and elsewhere, “Matter is force.” Dr. Bastian, on Force and Matter, declares force to be “a mode of motion.” Herbert Spencer says of it: “Force, as we know it, can be regarded only as a conditioned effect of the unconditioned cause, as the relative reality, indicating to us an absolute reality by which it is immediately produced.” Another writer (Grove) calls forces the “affections of matter.” Now, the word mind conveys, even to the most illiterate, a precise and definite notion. Every one knows that it is the principle within him which thinks and underlies all intellectual processes; but when Dr. Hammond [Pg 391] informs him that it is a “force,” and he finds that a bewildering confusion of opinions, expressed in the obscurest terms, prevails concerning the nature and essence of “force,” he finds that he has derived “Fumum ex fulgore.” Even the term “evolves” is unfortunate; for the word occurs in a great variety of connections. If force is an entity, it cannot be evolved; it is produced. Of thought, indeed, it might be said that it is evolved from the mind, since it represents the latter in a state of active operation, and has no separate entity of its own; but mind, being known to us as something in all respects distinct and diverse from matter, cannot, except by a lapse into the grossest materialism, be said to be evolved from the brain. Had Dr. Hammond present to his mind a definite idea when he penned the word, he might have easily found a clearer substitute. Carl Vogt knew well what meaning he intended to convey when he said: “Just as the liver secretes bile, so the brain secretes thought.” There is candor, at least, in this statement, and none of that shuffling timorousness which shame-facedly glozes materialism in the formula: “Mind is a force evolved from the brain.”

Having satisfied himself that there can be no question as to the accuracy of this definition, our author places mind in contrast with “forces in general” by designating it a compound force. What he means by “forces in general” it is hard to say; for if mind is a force, it possesses the generic properties which ally it with other forces, and must therefore be one of the “forces in general,” since that is a veritable condition of its being a force at all. But this is a minor error. The expression “compound force,” used as Dr. Hammond uses it, implies a far graver mistake, and all but stultifies its author. Either mind is a force (and be it remembered the author has not enlightened us as to the sense in which we ought to understand the term), having a special function to perform, from which, and from its mode of performance, its character is inferred, in which case it is a simple force, no matter how great may be the number and variety of the objects on which it is expended; or, it is a combination of forces, each proceeding from its proper source or principium, and each directed to its proper object-term or class of object-terms, in which case it is not one force merely, however much Dr. Hammond may insist upon calling it compound, but a series of forces, each possessed of a distinct entity and an individual identity. The doctor evidently did not study the scope and import of the word when he thus loosely employed it, else he would have perceived that whatever is compound is some one and the same thing made up of parts, and not a collection of individuals.

We will now see in what manner he distributes and assigns to duty the sub-forces comprised under the general term “compound force.” For aught we know, Dr. Hammond may have once been familiar with the researches of Stewart, Reid, Brown, and Hamilton, not to mention Locke, Descartes, Leibnitz, and Malebranche; but he certainly labored under some form of amnesia when he devised the following scheme of psychology: He declares that the sub-forces into which the compound force called mind is divisible are fourfold, viz.: perception, intellect, emotion, and will. He defines perception to be “that part of the mind whose office [Pg 392] it is to place the individual in relation with external objects.” This definition supposes that the whole mind is not concerned in the act of perception, but that, while one part of it is quiescent, another may be engaged in perceiving. This view of perception has the questionable merit of originality, differing as it does from the definition given by every author from Aristotle to Mill, who all regard perception as an act of the mind, and the faculty of perceiving nothing else than the mind itself viewed with reference to its perceptive ability. Further on he says: “For the evolution of this force [viz., part of the mind] the brain is in intimate relation with certain special organs, which serve the purpose of receiving impressions of objects. Thus an image is formed upon the retina, and the optic nerve transmits the excitation to its ganglion or part of the brain. This at once functionates [Anglice, acts.—C. W.], the force called perception is evolved, and the image is perceived.”

We have quoted this passage at some length, not only for the purpose of exhibiting Dr. Hammond’s theory of perception, but to show how admirably the argot of science serves to hide all meaning and to leave the reader dazed and disappointed. No one yet, till Dr. Hammond’s appearance on the psychological stage, ventured to call a mere impression on an organ of sense perception; indeed, the whole difficulty consists in explaining how the mind is placed in relation with this image. It was with a view to elucidate this much-vexed matter that the peripatetics invented their system concerning the origin of ideas. It is all plain sailing till the image or phantasm in the sensitive faculty is reached; so that at the point where the Scholastics commenced their subtle and elaborate system Dr. Hammond complacently dismisses the question by saying: “And the image is perceived.” What need we trouble ourselves about general concepts, reflex universal ideas, intelligible species, the acting and the possible intellect, when there is so easy a mode of emergence from the difficulty as Dr. Hammond suggests? No doubt he would, like hundreds of others who do not understand Suarez or St. Thomas, regard the writings of these doctors on this subject as a tissue of jargon, overloading and obscuring a question which is so plain that it needs but to be enunciated in order to be understood. Then the long and warm conflicts which have torn the camp of philosophy, and separated her votaries into opposite schools, would all be happily ended; it would suffice to say: “Gentlemen, your toilsome webwork of thought is no better than the product of Penelope’s distaff; the whole affair may be summed up in these words: A ganglion functionates, the force called perception is evolved, and the image is perceived.” Mirabile dictu! It is not, therefore, necessary to discuss the question of ideal intuition to find out whether the idea is a representative and subjective form or objective and absolute; whether we are to agree with Reid and the school of experimental psychologists, or do battle under the colors of Gioberti and Rosmini, or the learned and lamented Brownson? All these things are no doubt beneath the consideration of the materialist’s psychology.

But we have still more to learn concerning perception at the feet of this new Gamaliel. He says (page 312): “Perception may be exercised without any superior intellectual [Pg 393] act, without any ideation whatever. Thus if the cerebrum of a pigeon be removed, the animal is still capable of seeing and of hearing, but it obtains no idea from those senses. The mind, with the exception of perception, is lost!” Perception is not, therefore, connected with consciousness; for, according to Dr. Hammond, we may hear and see without knowing it. We do not deny that impressions may be made on the organs of sense without eliciting an act of consciousness, for which reason, indeed, ordinary language has reserved the use of words designating the function of organs for those cases where consciousness is elicited; for no one would dream of saying that he feels the prick of a pin or hears another speak without knowing it. A cadaver can perceive as well as a living subject, if we are to accept Dr. Hammond’s view; for we know that an image may be formed and retained by the retina after death, and this is all that is needed for perception. To explain all intercurrent difficulties, we have but to fall back on ganglia and evolution. At each step of the intellectual process a convenient ganglion exists which evolves just the sort of force requisite to produce the desired result, and thus we have a perfect system of psychology. Of the intellect he says: “In the normal condition of the brain the excitation of a sense, and the consequent perception, do not stop at the special ganglion of that sense, but are transmitted to a more complex part of the brain, where the perception is resolved into an idea.” Thus is the brain made the sole organ of thought. We have but to say, “A perception is resolved into an idea,” and in so many words we bound over difficulties which made Plato, after much deep pondering, invent a theory of thought, yet regarded as a matchless monument of subtlety and sublimity, which taxed the subtle intellects of St. Augustine, St. Thomas, Leibnitz, and Kant, and which will, in all probability, continue to be an object of curious research to the end of time. If a child, beholding the changeful images of a kaleidoscope, should, prompted by the curiosity of youthful age, inquire the reason of this beautiful play of colors, surely no one would cynically answer him that one figure is resolved into another. Dr. Hammond slurs over the difficulty; for the vexing question is, How does the mind form an idea?—not, whether a ganglion is excited and evolves force, but how, on the occasion of such excitation, an idea, which is something altogether different from the excitation, is produced in the mind.

This question he not only fails to answer, but exhibits a woful depreciation of its scope and gravity. He continues: “Thus the image impressed upon the retina, the perception of which has been formed by a sensory ganglion, ultimately causes the evolution of another force by which all its attributes capable of being represented upon the retina are more or less perfectly appreciated according to the structural qualities of the ideational centre.” This sentence furnishes the keynote to the whole theory of material psychics, and leads us to inquire into its growth and history. When Bichat in France and Sir Charles Bell in England simultaneously discovered that a separate function was assignable to the anterior and posterior nerve-fibres projected from each intervertebral foramen; that the anterior possess the power of causing muscular contraction, the [Pg 394] posterior that of giving rise to sensation, they laid the foundation of the wonderful and beautiful though much-perverted doctrine of the localization of function. The experiments of Flourens, Claude Bernard, Beaumont, Virchow, and Kolliker multiplied similar discoveries and enlarged the significance of Bell’s and Bichat’s conclusions. To every ganglion its separate function is now sought to be assigned, and we have already alluded to the interesting facts which ataxic and amnesic aphasia have lately developed. The intimate relation thus manifested between particular portions of the brain-substance and the corresponding mental function, aroused and quickened curiosity to find out the nature and reason of this dependence. The materialist perceived in this doctrine of the localization of function a new weapon for attacking the spirituality of the soul, and was not slow to bring it into requisition. It was assumed that a reason for the difference of function in the different portions of the nervous structure would be found in the intimate texture of the nerve-tissues themselves; and the assumption, in so far as it is logical to suppose, that a difference in organization can alone account for a difference in the manifestation of power, was fair and plausible. All efforts were now directed towards such discoveries in the minute histology of the nervous system as would point to a connection between special ganglia and the functions performed by them. The microscope, indeed, brought to light many wonderful differences, but none sufficient to justify what is, therefore, but a mere assumption—the conclusion that the peculiar organization of certain portions of the nervous system is as much the efficient cause of the functions with which they are connected as the sun is the cause of heat and light, and the summer breeze of the ripple on the harvest field. It was deemed unnecessary to look for an explanation of intellection and volition beyond the known or knowable properties of those portions of the nervous substance with which the processes in question are connected. If, it was argued, certain varying states of the inner coat of minute blood-vessels fitted them to select, some arterial blood, and others venous blood, and no one thought to invoke any other agency in determining the cause of the difference or of the function, why should we admit the existence of a distinct substance in accounting for mental phenomena, when structural differences just as palpable and obvious are at hand to explain them? In a word, not only difference of function was attributed to difference of structure, but this latter difference was held to be the sole cause and chief origin of the function itself. Dazzled by the brilliancy of their discoveries, and misled by a false analogy, many physiologists confounded condition with cause, and, having perceived that the manifestations of the mind are profoundly modified by the character of the medium through which they are transmitted, inferred that the medium generated the function. This confusion of condition with cause was further aided by the current false notion of cause. Following Hume and Brown, most modern men of science behold nothing else in the relation of cause to effect than a mere invariable antecedence and subsequence of events, which, of course, nullifies the distinction proper between indispensable condition and cause. With them that is cause on the occurrence [Pg 395] of which something else invariably follows; nor need we look for any other relation between the two. This doctrine, applied to the phenomena of the mind, could not but lead the discoverers of localized functions to downright materialism. They perceived that certain phenomena invariably proceeded in the same manner from certain portions of the nervous organism, and that any disturbance of the latter was attended by a marked change in the character of the phenomena with which it was connected. This invariability of antecedence and fluctuating difference of effect pointed unerringly, they thought, to structural differences in the nervous system as the efficient cause of all its functions. Applying this doctrine of causation to the process of intellection, we find how logically it sustains Dr. Hammond’s assertion that mind is an evolution of force from a special ganglion, since an excitation of the same ganglion is always followed by the same result—viz., a mental apprehension.

The invariability of sequence is all that is needed to establish ganglion in the category of causes, and ideation in that of effects.

We will now apply the same method of reasoning to a case in which the obvious distinction between cause and condition cannot fail to strike the most inattentive, and make manifest the sophistry of materialistic physiology. Should we stray into a minster filled with a grand religious light, and find chancel, nave, and pillar all radiant with purple and violet, soft amber and regal red, we would naturally look to the stained-glass window to discover the source of those warm tints and brilliant hues, and would seek to determine what in those party-colored panes gives rise to the effects we admire. We first discover in each colored glass a peculiarity of structure which especially adapts it to the emission of its proper ray, and then note that the difference in the color of the rays depends on this same peculiarity of structure. The problem is solved. Since a structural peculiarity in the violet pane, for instance, fits it for the emission of its own ray, and so on with respect to red, yellow, and purple, why need we look for any other source of those colors? As we discover in each party-colored pane the cause of the difference in the color of the ray, we mistake the cause of the difference for the cause of the ray, and assume not only the difference of the ray to depend on the color of the transmitting medium, but deem that medium to be itself the sole source of the light. In like manner the speculative and transcendental physiologist finds in the adaptation of certain portions of the nerve-tissue to the production of specific functions a reason for referring the highest order of mental phenomena to the nervous system as their cause, forgetting that the adaptation in question may be but a mere condition modifying the manifesting power of the substance which is the true source of the phenomena. The observer who regards colored glass as the source of light, because he has been able to trace a connection and establish a relation between the color of the ray and the minute structure of the glass, differs in naught from theorists of Dr. Hammond’s stripe, who make nervous ganglia centres or sources of ideation because of the invariable production of the latter on the occasion of some excitation in the former. In both instances is committed the error of confounding condition with [Pg 396] cause, of mistaking the cause of a difference between two occurrences for the cause of the occurrences themselves.

We have dwelt at this length on Dr. Hammond’s theory of the Intellect, as it embodies an error so pernicious that the callow mind of the medical student, awed by the authority of a name, is likely, on reading this chapter, to imbibe principles which, slowly elaborated, will lead him in process of time to the chilling tenets of materialism.

The third sub-force enumerated by Dr. Hammond is Emotion, which, like perception and intellect, is a force evolved on the occasion of an excitation in some other portion of the brain. Thus the emotions of joy, sorrow, hope, and love can be excited by making an impression on this portion of the nervous substance, just as we elicit different sounds from a piano by striking different keys in succession. “‘Sblood! do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe?” Yet Dr. Hammond would of man make a Hamlet’s pipe, with its ventages and stops, to be sounded from the lowest note to the top of the compass at the pleasure of a skilled performer. The physiological signs of emotion he has truthfully described, such as blushing, palpitation, increase of the salivary secretion, and other bodily changes, the connection of which with the emotions themselves will, we fear, so far as there is any hope of a satisfactory explanation from physiology, remain a dead secret for ever. The fourth and last of the sub-forces evolved by the brain is Will, with respect to which the doctor has not much to say, though it is easy to understand that it owes its origin, according to him, to the same ganglionic changes as the three preceding. He has not even defined this force, but merely says that by volition acts are performed. The ordinary idea of will exhibits it as a power which the soul exercises at discretion, even at times in the absence of any motive, except caprice, and often against a strong excitement of passion, so that it can be connected with no organic changes which are necessary and subject to law. This idea Dr. Hammond’s doctrine entirely overthrows; for if will be the result of ganglionic excitation, it must surely follow the latter, and can consequently be in no manner connected with its causation. Whatever cause, then, may have produced the excitation, it must have been necessary—i.e., have necessarily produced volition. Volition, therefore, being the result of changes necessarily produced, must itself be necessary, and we then have the anomaly of necessary will, which is a sheer contradiction. There is no such thing, therefore, as volition, in the true and accepted sense of the word, and what we deem to be the free acts of the soul are brought about as necessarily as pain or pleasure when the exciting agents of those emotions are in operation. It is not difficult to estimate the practical consequences of this doctrine. Man, thus made to act by organic changes and the necessary determination of his nature, not being answerable for these, cannot be made answerable for their consequences; so that the good and evil he performs resemble, the former the changes which the bodily system undergoes in a state of health, the latter the morbid changes of disease. The good he does is as much the necessary outcome of his nature as the golden fruit is of the tree, while his bad actions are as [Pg 397] the tempest that wrecks or the breath of a pestilence.

This is the self-same doctrine of Broussais dressed in the garb which the latest researches in neurological science have prepared for it, and much more covertly and insidiously presented.

Broussais says: “L’ivrogne et le gourmand sont ceux dont le cerveau obéit aux irradiations des appareils digestifs; les hommes sobres doivent leur vertu à un encéphale dont les stimulations propres sont supérieures à celles de ces appareils” (Irritation et Folie, p. 823).—“The drunkard and the glutton are those whose brain obeys the summons issued by the digestive organs; sober men owe their virtue to the possession of a brain which rises superior to such orders.” Surely in this, as in countless other instances, history continues to repeat itself.

The definition of Insanity given by Dr. Hammond surpasses in clearness and comprehensiveness all those which he has collected from other sources, and is such, we consider, as will with difficulty be improved upon in the respects mentioned. He calls it “a manifestation of disease of the brain, characterized by a general or partial derangement of one or more faculties of the mind, and in which, while consciousness is not abolished, mental freedom is perverted, weakened, or destroyed.” This definition more closely applies to all occurring cases of insanity than any hitherto given, though it is a pity the doctor has robbed its latter portion of all meaning by having virtually denied mental freedom in his foregoing theory of volition. The remainder of the chapter on insanity is exceedingly instructive and interesting. The author has clearly exhibited the difference between illusion, hallucination, and delusion, nor has he permitted himself once, in his application of the terms to individual cases, to interchange or confound them. Indeed, it is a matter of regret that so acute an observer and so diligent a collector of facts was ever tempted to betake himself beyond their legitimate domain, and to launch himself on the troubled sea of speculation. But it has been ever thus:

“Laudet diversa sequentes.”

The great bulk of the work—and it is a volume of nearly nine hundred pages—is taken up with the discussion of those nervous diseases which, for the most part obscure in their origin and of infrequent occurrence, have been brought to light for the first time in this monograph, so that the medical profession owes a deep debt of gratitude to the laborious researches of Dr. Hammond in a very partially explored field. To the general reader the chapter on Hydrophobia cannot fail to prove interesting, presenting as it does a graphic description of the symptoms which usher in this terrible disease, and suggesting remedies which are within the reach of every one, and are calculated to avert the awful consequences of a bite by a rabid dog, provided they be employed without delay. The interval between the reception of the wound and the outbreak of the symptoms is very variable, but the majority of cases occur within seven months. This interval is called the period of incubation, and is usually not characterized by any other signs than a certain amount of mental depression, often the result of a nervous apprehension of consequences. The sleep especially is apt to be [Pg 398] disturbed by such forebodings, so that the animal which inflicted the wound is frequently dreamt of. The prognosis of the disease is most discouraging, since our author says: “There is no authentic instance on record of a cure of hydrophobia.” The post-mortem signs of disease are shrouded in obscurity; for, though Dr. Hammond details at great length certain altered conditions of the brain and spinal cord, as well as of the arteries supplying them, those changes are by no means pathognomonic—i.e., peculiar to the disease in question. The point of greatest practical interest to those who have so far escaped the death-dealing fang of Blanche, Tray, or Sweetheart is that, should so sad an occurrence befall them, they must hasten at once to a surgeon, and see that, after having tightly bound the limb above the injury, he use the knife with an un-sparing hand, till every part with which the teeth of the animal may have come in contact has been entirely removed. Cauterization, either by fire, or nitrate of silver, or some of the mineral acids, is preferred by some physicians, and has proved quite as successful as excision. A Mr. Youatt employed cauterization four hundred times on persons who had been bitten by rabid animals, and every time with success. Dr. Hammond employed cauterization seven times—four with nitrate of silver and three with the actual cautery—and always with success. This proceeding should be adopted, even though several weeks, or even months, may have elapsed since the infliction of the wound; in which case, however, excision is deemed preferable to cauterization. The importance of this knowledge to persons residing in a city overrun with mongrels is very great; and while we hope our readers may never have occasion to put it into practice, we would recommend them to treasure it up for an emergency which, however sad, is always possible.

Following the chapter on hydrophobia are some very interesting statements concerning Epilepsy—a disease which, in a light form, prevails more extensively than most people imagine. The most remarkable precursory symptom to an attack of epilepsy is what is called an aura, or breeze. This usually begins in some lower part of the body and shoots towards the head. It resembles at times an electric shock, and again a sharp stab or blow. The strangest auræ are hallucinations of vision which lead the patient to believe he sees a rapid succession of colors. The experiments of Dr. Hughlings Jackson with regard to those colored auræ are full of interest.

He finds that a vision of red ushers in the phenomenon, and that the whole prism is exhibited to the sight till the violet end of the spectrum is reached. The approach of the aura is often felt, and gives admonition to the patient of the speedy approach of a seizure, so that he is thereby enabled to seek a place of security and retirement before the actual advent of an attack. Many interesting cases, exhibiting the freaks and peculiarities of this strange disease, are recorded by Dr. Hammond. Convulsion, tremor, chorea or St. Vitus’ dance, and hysteria are next treated of in succession, and much valuable information might be derived from a perusal of these chapters.

Catalepsy, one of the strangest of nervous disorders, receives a due share of attention, though much [Pg 399] that is authoritative cannot be affirmed concerning it, since the data of the disease are neither numerous nor reliable. When the cataleptic seizure is at its height, there is complete suspension of consciousness, and a muscular rigidity supervenes, which causes the limbs to retain for a long time any position, no matter how awkward or irksome, in which they may be placed.

This condition so closely simulates death that in former times mistakes were frequently made which were not discovered till life had really become extinct in the grave. Another strange feature of this disease is the magnetic influence a female subject exercises over her unattainted sisters during a paroxysm. It has been observed that, if one female in a ward fall into a cataleptic fit, those immediately around her are seized in the same manner, the attack lasting for a period of variable duration. The description of these nervous maladies gradually leads to Dr. Hammond’s views on Ecstasy, which are all the more interesting as the chapter is chiefly taken up with the discussion of the wonderful and perplexing case of Louise Lateau. The chapter should have followed the one on hydrophobia, and been entitled Thaumatophobia rather than Ecstasy, since the doctor exhibits a most contemptuous estimate of the intelligence of those who hold that there can be anything not explicable by the known laws of physiology in the most wonderful cases of ecstasia. He ranks among ecstatics of a former period St. Francis of Assisi, St. Catherine of Sienna, St. Teresa, Joan of Arc, and Madame Guyon, all of whom, he says, “exhibited manifestations of this disorder.” With respect to those celebrated personages there is no sort of medical testimony giving evidence of the existence of disease, or in any way furnishing an adequate scientific explanation of the facts revealed by their historians. It is as illogical and presumptuous for Dr. Hammond to qualify their cases in the manner he does as it would be for a believer in the supernatural to assert the miraculous character of a mere feat of legerdemain. The only difference is that Dr. Hammond’s disregard for the rules of evidence is applauded by the world as indicating a vigorous and healthy intelligence, whilst the equally illogical assertor of the supernatural character of what is not proven to be such would be at once, and with justice indeed, put down as an imbecile and a slave to superstition. The burden of proof is ever thrust on other shoulders by our author, and never borne by his own. Let but Dr. Warlomont devise a pathophysiological explanation of Louise Lateau’s stigmata, not only gratuitous from beginning to end, but even at variance with the facts of science, and Dr. Hammond gives in a blind adhesion to his conclusions without a single inquiry into the weight of proof on the other side. Even Dr. Warlomont acknowledged the difficulties with which Dr. Lefebvre’s work bristles in the way of a physiological explanation, and it is evident, from the intensely-labored character of his report, that he entered into the controversy as an ex parte disputant. We do not intend to reopen the discussion of this famous case, since enough concerning it has already appeared in these pages.[115] It is sufficient that we note the recusant spirit of some modern scientists whenever there is question of the [Pg 400] supernatural. They will not believe, no matter how overwhelming the evidence, lest they be suspected of weakness, or of bartering their intellectual freedom for the formulæ of an effete authority. These gentlemen consult their prejudices rather than truth, and, provided they tickle the ears of radicals and non-believers, they consider themselves lifted into the proud position of supreme arbiters between reason and authority. Dr. Hammond says ecstasy was “formerly quite common among the inmates of convents.” We would inform him that its frequency was never greater than now, and the widespread attention which one or two cases have attracted is proof how rare is that frequency. Indeed, it has been the invariable policy of the church to discourage tendencies in this direction, and spiritual advisers often remind their penitents that an unbidden and unwelcome guest not rarely presents himself in the garb of an angel of light. It is related of St. Francis of Sales that a nun having declared to him that the Blessed Virgin had appeared to her, he inquired how much vin ordinaire she had taken that day; and, upon her answering, “One glass,” he told her to drink two the following day, and she might have two apparitions. In view of this disinclination of ecclesiastics to encourage ecstasia, especially among women, whose nervous system is so impressionable, it ill becomes Dr. Hammond, having the mass of testimony at his command in support of the genuineness of the two cases to which reference is made, to use the following language: “But the effort was in vain, just as is the attempt now to convince the credulous and ignorant of the real nature of the seizures of Louise Lateau, Bernadette Soubirous—who evoked Our Lady of Lourdes—and of the hundreds of mediums, ecstatics, and hysterics who pervade the world.” The frankness with which the church authorities demanded the closest and most searching scientific investigation of the case of Louise Lateau, and their expressed determination to accept its legitimate results, should be to all reasonable men a guarantee of their good faith and of their abhorrence of impostures. It is consoling to think that the intelligence of some scientific men is still unfettered, and that, though in the absence of a prominent member—Dr. Lefebvre—the friends and abettors of Dr. Warlomont endeavored to spring on the Belgian Royal Academy of Medicine a resolution declaring the case of Louise Lateau fully explored and closed, the Academy refused to adopt it, thereby admitting that so far science has failed to account for the marvellous phenomena of which this girl is the subject. The inherent defect of Dr. Hammond’s reasoning is that it identifies cases which are merely analogous. It is true that the majority of pseudo-ecstasies resembling the inspired ecstasy of holy personages are dependent on a disordered condition of the nervous system, but this resemblance does not necessarily tend to classify the latter under the same head. Yet this is what Dr. Hammond and his school do. They seize general traits of resemblance, shut their eyes to essential differences, and, finding that the greater number of cases obey throughout certain known definite laws, they conclude that all cases do likewise. History abounds with instances of disordered imagination depending on a morbid condition of the nervous system, but in all the impartial observer can discern well-marked differences, separating them essentially [Pg 401] from authentic cases of true ecstasy. Baron von Feuchtersleben [116] relates many extraordinary cases of this sort. Herodotus (ix. 33) speaks of the Argive women who, under a morbid inspiration, rushed into the woods and murdered their own children. Plutarch relates the story of a monomania among the Milesian girls to hang themselves. We have all read of the convulsionnaires at the tomb of Mathieu of Paris. Dr. Maffei describes a similar epidemic, which received the name of “Pöschlianism” from a religious, fixed delusion which originated with one Pöschl. These cases were usually accompanied by convulsions and terminated in suicide. Besides the disorders alluded to, we read of sycanthropy among the natives of Arcadia, a somewhat similar aberration among the aborigines of Brazil, and the delusion of the Scythians that they were women. Dr. Hammond relates a case as wonderful as any of these—viz., that of the noted Ler, an inmate of the Salpêtrière, whose contortions and antics resemble the hysteria of the “Jerkers” in Methodist camp-meetings. The attempt to identify all occurring cases with these is a flagrant violation of the inductive method by which scientific men, above all others, claim that they are guided. If observation and experience are to be our guides in determining the truth, then let us admit nothing but what these criteria verify. This is precisely what these gentlemen do not do; and because they perceive a general resemblance between a group of facts, they identify all possessing this resemblance, and predicate thereon a general law. We cannot hope for a discontinuance of this baneful and short-sighted procedure until men who profess to be votaries of science shall become truly rational, instead of making an empty and futile boast of being rationalists.

[114] A Treatise on the Diseases of the Nervous System. By William A. Hammond, M.D., Professor of Diseases of the Mind and Nervous System in the Medical Department of the University of the City of New York, etc. New York: D. Appleton & Co. 1876.

[115] Vide The Catholic World, November, 1875 - March, 1876.

[116] The Principles of Medical Psychology. By Baron Ernst von Feuchtersleben, M.D., Sydenham Society, p. 252.

[Pg 402]

THE ETERNAL YEARS.

BY THE AUTHOR OF “THE DIVINE SEQUENCE.”

THE CHARACTERISTICS OF GOD’S GOVERNMENT—PROGRESSION.

If the preceding considerations have at all succeeded in imparting to our minds a right view of the importance of matter, not solely in its own nature, but in the spiritual world, and in the developments which the spiritual world only arrives at through the medium of matter, we shall find we hold the key to many mysteries, and are walking at liberty in a world of marvels.

So far as we are able to judge, and aided by all that science can discover, we have every reason to believe that the act of creation is complete, and that no more material is needed to work out the ultimate intentions of the divine Being. Certain races of animals have become extinct, and all races are modified more or less by external influences of climate and food. Probably many have all but changed their nature since they first sprang into being; as they will do once more when the lion and the lamb shall lie down together. But whether or no this be so, it would be rash to imagine that new creations of hitherto unexisting fauna or flora are ever to be given to the great cosmos. There is nothing to prove that such is the case; and there is a vast amount of facts pointing to the opposite conclusion. Moreover, the completeness of creation is the grander idea of the two, and the most like the ways of God, especially when we consider that the existence of matter is only as a means to an end; and that end accomplished, why should there be any further increase of what makes up the material world? We will therefore put aside all idea of its being subject to either increase or decrease, while we dwell upon the fact that it is subject to mutations of the most diverse and subtle nature. It is true we are told there shall be new heavens and a new earth. But everything, even the preliminary fact that the “elements will melt with heat” and all things be dissolved, points to renewal, but not to extinction; for we know practically that dissolution, whether by heat or any other force, is not extinction in any case, but only change of form. The new earth is to be one in which “justice dwelleth.”[117] But even on this earth we have evidences of the sanctification of matter by its contact with spiritual things.

We have it first in the relics of the saints, to which not only a sacred memory is attached, but actual supernatural gifts emanate from them, because they have become holy to the Lord; because they had, while still in life, so frequently, or rather so effectively, come in direct contact with the Eucharistic Sacrifice, with the Body and Blood of Him who, in taking flesh and feeding us thereon, brought God to us [Pg 403] and dwelt within us. But the saints are rare; and the example, therefore, derived from their relics is an exceptional one. There are other examples of the way in which the living influence of the faith has changed mankind, through the ages of history, by hereditary transmission.

It has been remarked that while Rome still remained pagan there nevertheless existed other sentiments, and as it were another atmosphere, caught from the presence of Christianity, even while Christianity was ignored or persecuted. The pagan spirit was essentially worldly. How could it be otherwise? Poverty made a man ridiculous; and ridicule is the beginning of contempt. Christian charity and compassion had no pagan counterpart until Christian example gave rise to the notion that it was a wise and good thing to feed the hungry and care for the orphan. Long before the reign of the first Christian emperor the pagan Roman heart, catching some warmth from the celestial fire which burnt unseen in the largely-extended Christian population, began to form institutions which faintly reproduced Christian charity; but this was the influence of mind over mind.

What is a far more remarkable fact is the gradually-developed influence of generations of Christian ancestors over the mere natural instincts of humanity. How much do we not owe to the fact that we descend from a mainly Christian stock! What sweet domestic ties, what calm, heaven-reflecting pools of life, do we not enjoy—not owing to our own personal graces, but because grace, in a greater or less degree, has, though may be with grave exceptions, presided over the rise and growth for centuries of those who have preceded us.

When St. Jerome wrote to the youthful daughter of his beloved penitent Paola, as the former was about to dedicate herself to God in a virgin and secluded life, a very large and most emphatic portion of his instructions is taken up with exposing to her the difficulties she will meet with in preserving an essential virtue, and the extreme measures she, a maiden of seventeen, must resort to as a guarantee against temptation. To what, save to the blessed effects of centuries of a more or less Christian ancestry, do we owe the blessed fact that, whereas to any young girl now entering religion her Christian parents and her priestly adviser would fill hours with counsels about holy poverty, obedience, and the conquest of her own will, hardly one word would be breathed about any imminent peril to a virtue which she only thinks of in its highest religious sense, because she has never even dreamt that it could practically be in danger? The very flesh has been purified and chastened by centuries of grace. The human instincts have been almost unconsciously raised to a higher level; and, evil as the world may yet be, we habitually entertain angels unawares. Thus does the longanimity of God wait with ever-slackening step through the long ages of time, while grace permeates slowly the few but ever-increasing willing hearts, sanctifying soul and body equally and together; for “the Lord dealeth patiently for your sake, not willing that any should perish.” He deals patiently with the world for the sake of the church, patiently with the wicked for the sake of the good, and because the good are not good for themselves alone; they yield a perfume of which they are not conscious, but which attracts others to [Pg 404] them; and if but the ten righteous men can be found, the city will be spared!

* * * * *

We often hear allusions made to the destructive work of time, to the ruin of nations, and the obliteration of vast and crowded cities; and writers of the day indulge in sensational reflections upon the future fate of the peoples and homes of modern days. We are all acquainted with the New Zealander who is to sit amid the ruins of London. But those who speak and write in this sense have in their minds the fate of heathen nations and pagan cities in the first hour or epoch of the world’s existence, before the accomplishment of the mystery of the Incarnation—that is, before God dwelt upon earth to reconquer by his precious blood and sweat of agony his kingdom among men. But as Christians we cannot believe that Christian nations, however imperfect in their Christian practice, will ever be cast out, root and branch, and the ploughshare pass over their hearths and His altars as over Ninive and Troy, as over the Etruscan cities and the pleasure-loving Roman towns of southern Italy. The ten righteous are never wanting in any city where the altars of Jesus are erected, and where the Mother of fair love is named with tender and reverent confidence. The surging tide of evil may threaten us, as in guilty Paris and brutalized London; but though heavy chastisements may pour down on these examples of modern vice, yet never, never will the dear Conqueror who has deigned to plant his foot on the teeming city streets as his priests carry the Blessed Sacrament to the dying, and who has his tabernacles of love here and there through our crowded thoroughfares, relinquish his recovered inheritance. Never, never will the lands where he has dwelt be desolate like the godless lands of old.

Believe it, O ye loving hearts! who are burning in silent anguish over the erring and the ignorant, who are pouring sad tears on the cruel wickedness of high places, and on the degradation and depravity of the neglected and the forgotten.

Heavy and sharp and terrible may be the punishment of our iniquities; but even hell itself is less hell than it would be but for the shedding of the precious Blood; and no nation where his name is invoked, no people among whom he has his part—albeit not, alas! the larger part—can ever perish out of sight, out of mind, as the huge heathen nations have gone down in utter darkness in the lapse of ages, and hardly left a stone to proclaim, “I am Babylon.”

Sweet patience of Jesus! sweet pity of Mary! we wrong you both when we forget that where you have once entered, there you will abide; because the few are the salvation of the many; because, though not every door-post and lintel bears the red cross, yet those that do bear it plead for the rest, and the angel of destruction stays his steps at the first and drops his avenging sword; for his Lord and Master has passed that way!

* * * * *

We have spoken of the creation as being complete. We have concluded that, while we are incapable of measuring its extent, and can only vainly guess at unknown worlds beyond our own system, it will never receive one atom, one molecule, in addition to those of which it now consists. Our reason for this belief lies deep down in the very roots of theology, which we find a better [Pg 405] reason than any with which mere human science can furnish us, because the end of the latter is contained within the end of the former, as the greater contains the less. We have already stated our reason—namely, that the ultimate object of the creation was the Incarnation, and, that object accomplished, there can apparently be no need of further creation. In saying this we are not presuming to limit the power of God or to interpret his unrevealed will. We are, with all diffidence, formulating a supposition which approves itself to our reason. The creation was the expression of the goodness of God, uttered outside himself by the Logos, God the Son. But the creation, merely as such, merely as existence, and man, the lord of creation, merely in his natural state, were incapable of union with God. Therefore, from the first, man was constituted in a state of grace. Thus the second mission, which is that of the Holy Ghost, and which is the second in the eternal decrees, the nunc stans of eternity, is the first in the nunc fluens of time. For the grace of God, which is the Holy Ghost, was given to man in measure and degree from the first moment of his being, four thousand years before the first mission, that of God the Son, took place in time. Both are continuous, and both are progressive. The mission of God the Son did not cease when he ascended into heaven; for it is continued at the Consecration in every Mass, and in every tabernacle where the Blessed Sacrament dwells. At each Mass he comes and comes again! In the Blessed Sacrament he remains. Therefore his actual presence is progressive, in proportion to the increase of his altars where the bloodless sacrifice is offered, and where the Bread of Life is reserved. We are ourselves entirely persuaded (and this opinion is in harmony with that of many modern theologians) that the Incarnation would equally have taken place had man never fallen. It was the object of the creation. Man’s fall called for his redemption by the death and Passion of our Lord, and, as a loving consequence, also for the sacrifice of the Mass. But it does not follow that, had the Redemption not come after the Incarnation, because man had not fallen, there would have been no Blessed Sacramental Presence. The church having nowhere defined to the contrary, it is permitted to those whose devotion to the Blessed Sacrament makes the whole creation a blind mystery, and even the Incarnation appear incomplete without it, to believe that the Blessed Sacrament would always have been, and a sinless Adam, with his sinless offspring, have held communion with the incarnate God through and by this divine nourishment, even as his redeemed children do now, only in that case without the sacrifice of the Mass; for where there is no sin there is no sacrifice.[118]

This may be but a pious thought, and we have no wish to press it upon our readers. We leave it to their devotion to follow it out or not as they will. All we want to prove is that, though our Blessed [Pg 406] Lord came once only, conceived of the Holy Ghost, born of the Blessed Virgin; and once only was crucified, dead, and buried, and rose the third day, and ascended into heaven, nevertheless his sacramental presence is a perpetual carrying on and carrying out of this his first mission to us, and that thus his mission bears a progressive character. He is the conqueror “proceeding to conquer.” He is still sending his messengers before his face to prepare his way. His priests are still going forth to all nations to preach the remission of sins, by planting his altar, which is his earthly throne, in divers parts, till the earth be filled with the knowledge of the Lord as the covering waters of the sea.[119] We are looking forward to the fulfilment of that prophecy in all its plenitude; for surely no one can allege either that this time has already come, or that because some, it may be several, missionary priests have had a certain success among the heathen, anything faintly resembling such a grand, lavish promise as that, has received even an approximate fulfilment. Still less will any one assert that such promises are vain; and if not so, then let us look forward, and ever more and more forward, to the progression of our dear Lord’s kingdom upon earth; himself present amongst us in the Blessed Sacrament, coming in that meek guise to take possession of his territories, and all but silently planting his standard first here, then there, as new altars are raised to him, and as other souls are brought beneath the sacraments—the oaths of allegiance to their new Master.

We cannot disguise from ourselves that we have fallen upon evil times, and that faith has grown dim. Nevertheless, we maintain it would be difficult for any thoughtful and unprejudiced mind to deny the ever-increasing evidence that the leaven is leavening the whole mass; still less can it be affirmed that anything has ever done this in highly-civilized countries except Christianity.

The wealth and learning of the Romans, their vast literature, their high art, had no effect in producing either morality or mercy. There were noble examples among them of men and women who, we may believe, responded to the light vouchsafed them, whose names have come down to us; and doubtless there were many, utterly unknown to history, who obeyed the dictates of their conscience, enlightened by the divine Spirit of whom they had never so much as heard. We do not believe that anywhere, in any age, in any city, however given up to iniquity, there was nothing but eternal death reigning over poor, fallen, suffering humanity, and leaving the beneficent Creator, the dear Redeemer, without a soul to love and serve him, albeit in a blind way. We believe such a condition of things to be simply impossible; but however that may be, whether more or less than we have dared to hope, Christianity was not there, and in its absence nothing availed to produce generally even the appreciation of purity or real charity.

As we have said, the Romans were a grand law-giving nation. Civil rights were understood, upheld, and protected better than by the modern Napoleonic code, and far more in harmony with Christianity, which ultimately profited by, and copied so largely, the Roman law. But the law did not touch the heart or enlighten the conscience; and [Pg 407] while the public life of Rome had much moral grandeur, the private existence of man and woman alike was infamous; and it was so in proportion to their advance in wealth and luxury.

We have said that only Christianity can moralize civilized nations, and we did so advisedly; for a certain inoffensiveness, and the practice of many natural virtues, exist among nations that have not come within the range of so-called civilization. Where the intellectual and reasoning powers of men are undeveloped, they retain something like the innocence of children. But when man without Christianity is raised to intellectual height, cultivated in mind, refined in manner, surrounded by art, and with advanced knowledge of physical science—when he has thus developed all his powers, without having a corresponding force given him against the inclinations of natural concupiscence, he is then no longer in the infancy of humanity. It is mature, and the ripe fruit tends to rottenness. Civilization and knowledge must go forward pari passu with divine grace to be a real benefit to mankind; for there is no good apart from a high moral standard, whether we consider the individual or the nation, and no moral standard will long support itself without the concomitance of grace. We are told that the great question of the day is the modus vivendi between the church and modern progress. If this be so, the church alone can discover and develop it; because the church is the organ of the Holy Ghost, and when our Lord was about to leave this earth he promised the Paraclete, who would “teach us all things.” Therefore the church is the ultimate dispenser of all science, no matter of what nature; and as the reign of the Holy Ghost shall be more and more established in the now perfectly-defined status of her infallibility, so will she increasingly take up unto herself, within her own arena, all the gifts of knowledge and science which are her essential prerogatives. Once more she will become the queen of nations, the guide and pioneer of the world.

Hers has been a long history of struggle, and frequently of apparent defeat; but out of it she has ever risen victorious, though her victories are different in character from the triumphs of the world, because they are so silent and so peaceful that they are only known by their results. The first of these results is more liberty, a widening of the cords of her tent; for as the church defines her own nature with increased accuracy, so by this accuracy she leaves more freedom to her children. Definition is also limitation; and both exclude doubt. Doubt is slavery, while certainty is liberty. When our Lord began to teach of the coming kingdom of God, he did so by parables, and to his own immediate disciples alone was an explanation vouchsafed: “To you it is given to know the mystery of the kingdom of God; but to the rest in parables.” He spoke of himself as “straitened” until his work should be accomplished.

The whole history of the church has been on the same principle. Until certain things have been accomplished her path is hemmed in, and the accomplishment is ever effected by the means of her enemies, even as our salvation was by the hands of those who crucified Jesus. The rise of each heresy has produced the definition of doctrine, and each definition has widened the [Pg 408] horizon of our faith and flooded our life with light. The war with evil has had no other result than to impart spiritual strength to the spouse of Christ. And now everything points to a great crisis, a culminating term, a springtide of the waters of grace; for the long war with Protestantism has led up to the dogma of the Papal Infallibility. The coping-stone is laid, and a new era is beginning, which will be the fuller development of the individual life of the soul in the beauty of holiness and in the indwelling of the Holy Ghost. The external edifice is complete; the interior decoration will hasten towards completion. Already we see the signs of those better times approaching. We see them alike in the preternatural as in the supernatural world. The spirits of evil are guessing at the future, and, as is their wont, are anticipating the coming events by parodying the divine future action. The sleepless intelligence and never-wearying enmity of Satan pursues with relentless accuracy every development of God’s truth in the history of the church. With the fragments, in his fallen state, of his former untold science, combined with his thousands of years of cumulative experience, his one desire is to be beforehand with God. In advance of the great divine act of the Incarnation, he instituted the horrors of possession, and practised them in the pagan world on a scale he is but seldom allowed to repeat where the name of Jesus is uttered. With each phase of God’s divine action on the world, and of concomitant human necessities, he changes his tactics. There are but few among us who remember or realize the fact that every incident of our lives is lived in connection with three worlds—the tangible, visible, material world, the world of grace, and the world of the prince of the powers of the air. The masses live (consciously) in the first alone; the good and pious remember the second; but few even of these attempt to realize the last in anything like a just proportion with its immensity, its subtlety, and its ubiquity. Nor is it our object to press the subject on their attention. It is not every mind that can bear to meet the thought, beyond the limits of the universal prayer, “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”

But those who can bear it and can follow it out should be doubly on watch and guard in the interests of the multitudes who, it is true, believe in their guardian angel, but forget their left-hand diabolic attendant. It was not so in earlier times when faith was young, among the primitive writers and the great ascetics. One of the holiest of the past generation said that the cleverest work the devil had ever accomplished was the getting men to disbelieve in his existence. Having, as a rule (except among Catholics), established his non-existence in their minds, the sphere of his occult action is necessarily vastly extended. We do not look out for what we firmly believe is not there. He is among us, and we see him not. He has studied the Scriptures, and he knows there will be a time when our maidens shall dream dreams and our young men see visions. He guesses at the outpouring of the Holy Ghost, in a more determinate and wider reign of grace, in the future of the church; and above all he has not forgotten, though many of us have, that there is the promise of yet another mission that will alter the whole face of the world, that will follow on the ever-growing and extending [Pg 409] reign of the Holy Ghost, and that will culminate the glories of their Queen—the mission of the angels. They will come, the bright, swift-winged messengers, and “they shall gather out of his kingdom all scandals, and those that work iniquity, and shall cast them into the furnace of fire. Then shall the just shine as the sun in the kingdom of their Father,”[120] and “the angels shall go out, and shall separate the wicked from among the just.” We read these sacred words constantly, but how far do we realize their meaning? How far have we amplified the thought in our mind, and given it form and consistency? We read of the day of judgment; but do we suppose that it will be an affair of four-and-twenty hours—the angels in the morning, the judgment about noon, and all the past, present, and future of humanity in heaven or hell by twilight?

It is true we are told that the awful time will come as a thief in the night, and we are apt to explain that into being sudden; whereas it may more properly describe the fact that the time will steal upon us, silently and hiddenly. We shall find our bright brethren, the angels, around us, among us, before we have altogether realized their approach; just as, gradually and by degrees, we shall find the Spirit illuminating the minds and hearts of the innocent and the zealous, the “youths and the maidens,” with divine inspirations, first as the dawning of new light, then as the blaze of noontide. All God’s dealings with his poor creatures have been gradual. They are hidden, but they are never sudden. He always sends his angels before his face to prepare the way. Noe was more than a hundred years engaged in building the ark, and there it lay, a sign to all men, the black timber ribs against the gray dawn and the flaming evening sky, scanning the heavens like a musical score on which were written the notes of the awful anthem of God’s wrath, while the hammers of the artisans beat time through a century of vain appeal to a God-forgetting world. The suddenness must be laid to their own door, and in no way resulted from God’s dealings with them. The Deluge itself took forty days to exhaust the downpouring floods of rushing waters from the opened gates of heaven. The dawn is ever gradual; the light steals upon us, though at last the sun’s broad disc springs sudden and refulgent above the gray horizon. Many of us, though less guilty in our indifference, are like Gallio, who “cared for none of those things.” The round of our daily life suffices us, and we neither give the time nor the trouble to come to conclusions or to arrive at definite notions even respecting the signs of the times, which our Lord rebuked his disciples for not discerning. Catholics will often talk among themselves and with those outside the church in a casual way about the spiritist manifestations which are so rife in our day, as if it were quite an open question, and that it were unnecessary to have any fixed opinion on the subject. Not only have they never realized that the church has spoken again and again, but also they have never used their common reasoning powers to arrive at the conclusion that either spiritist manifestations, as they are now presented to us, form part of God’s mode of governing his creatures, [Pg 410] and therefore are most precious to each of us, and not to be treated as a trifle; or, as they are in fact, the devil’s guess at some of God’s secrets, and his anticipation of something belonging to the future destiny of man. We have no intention of polluting our pages by allusion to the jejune trifling of spiritist appearances. We would only ask every one solemnly and reverently to think of God’s ways in our world, and then, as before him, to declare whether or no the half-ludicrous, partially ghastly, and altogether jerky, will-o’-the-wisp performances of spiritists have anything in consonance with the dignity, the uniformity, the plain good sense (if this term sound not irreverent) of God’s dealings with his children. They talk of undiscovered natural laws! When did any grand, God-implanted natural law begin to reveal itself by tricks and antics? What are natural laws but revelations of God’s action and divine being? Every one of them shows us God, and leads us to God by simple and lucid gradation. It is the travesty of his laws in which the devil delights; and as within ourselves there are undeveloped laws which have been overlaid by original sin, and lie within us as the butterfly lies in the chrysalis, therefore the enemy of mankind, who, with far-seeing cunning, predicates the glorious future of mankind before the final consummation of all things, is using his knowledge to practise upon these laws to the detriment of those who lend themselves ignorantly as his instruments.

The fallen angels know far more accurately the secrets of our nature than we know them ourselves, and through this knowledge they deceive the unwary. Still more easily they have their way with those whose reprehensible curiosity induces them to resort to dangerous experiments. It is distressing to hear good, practical Catholics talking loosely on these matters, as though they had little or no data on which to form a solid, reasonable opinion, and were unable to distinguish between natural though occult laws, as they are brought out by divine, supernatural influence on the saints, and the miserable and contemptible practices of the spiritists, the “lo here, lo there” of those who prophesy false Christs.

It is an old proverb that the devil can quote Scripture, and so, also, can he base his evil designs on his knowledge of Catholic truth. We believe in the possibility, by a special permission from God, of the reappearance of the departed amongst us, and of the holy souls coming to ask for prayers, as we read constantly in the lives of the saints; and probably many of us have ourselves known of such incidents on creditable evidence. The devil acts upon this faith as he acts upon his own knowledge of occult laws; and blending a theoretic truth with practical error, he weaves a mesh to catch souls, all the while foreboding the time when the more developed mission of the Holy Ghost, and the elaborating in countless hearts of that hidden holiness by which the church is “all glorious within,” shall bring about that greater familiarity with the supernatural which is foretold as a characteristic of the latter times.

The early teaching of the church laid more stress on the mission of the angels than it became her habit to do in later days. Not that the church, as the organ of the Holy Ghost, ever gives an uncertain sound or calls back any of her divine utterances; but, like a watchful [Pg 411] mother, she holds in her own keeping such of the treasures, new or old, which are not adapted to the present wants of her children. There came a time, as Christianity grew more diffused, when the early Christians, not entirely weaned from the heathen practices of their forefathers, were in danger of attempting to define the occupation and attributes of the angels beyond the limits of the church’s authority. They affected to have learnt the names of many, and to decide on their position and purpose in the angelic hosts. Out of that arose a kind of worship and invocation of the angels which bordered on superstition and savored of the worship offered to the demons among the heathens. This fell under the reprobation of the church, and by a natural reaction left devotion to the angels at a lower ebb than what is warranted by sound doctrine.

Then came the German heretics and the dawn of modern Protestantism; and one of the first of their efforts was to banish all belief in the interposition and ministry of the angelic host. They took advantage of the errors and follies of individuals to write against the whole doctrine of angelic action; and though among Catholics the faith in their guardianship and aid is constant, yet it is not now practically (of course virtually it is the same) what it was in earlier times. But here also we have another instance of how the church brings forth from her divine armory the weapon most needed to defeat the machinations of the arch-enemy; for it has been reserved for our day to see devotion to the angels taking a fuller extension and a more definite form than it ever before held in the history of the church’s inner life. In all her definitions and in all her practices there resides the spirit of prophecy. They have not only reference to the present time; they are far-seeing and far-stretching. And as the definition of the Immaculate Conception of Mary in our own time has led to the extension of her reign in the hearts of men, and is preparing the way every hour for her sweet sovereignty to “take root in an honorable people,” so does the increasing devotion to the angels who form her court harmonize therewith, and prepare for that mission of the angels which, however remote, is as certain as the day of judgment. Oh! what enlarged hearts do we need to take in, however inadequately, all that lies before us in the history of God’s creation. Far distant though it be, still is it ours, just as the past is ours, and the present; for all are united in Jesus. He is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. Nothing shall be lost to us. No treasure of the past but has tended to brighten our own brief day, no promise of the future but what we shall reap; for we have all things in Him who contains all in himself, and who gives his whole self to us.

Let us in thought go back to Paradise, to our great progenitor before his fall. For Adam knew Jesus. Not, indeed, as we know him—the rainless skies of the garden God had planted had formed no background to the beloved sign of our redemption; for as the Redeemer Adam knew him not. We have already given our reasons for believing that besides knowing Him, by the graces of infused science, as the second Person of the Trinity, the Logos, he knew of the intended Incarnation through and by which Jesus was to unite Himself to us. We have also dared to [Pg 412] imagine that he foresaw the Real Presence as the carrying out and completion of the Incarnation. But in those days Adam knew of no shedding of blood, of no sacrifice of suffering. The whole of that pathetic and terrible chapter, written in red characters, was a sealed one to our once sinless forefather. But in addition to the first beautiful and tender history of the future Incarnation there was a glorious page redolent with light and full of joy; for Adam looked out beyond Jesus as the Creator, and Jesus as the elder Brother of man in the Incarnation, to Jesus as the Glorificator. Adam knew that the green glades and fruit-laden forests of Paradise were not to constitute his ultimate home. He aspired after the time when the God-Man would reward his fidelity at the close of a longer or shorter probation, and admit him from the infancy of innocence into the resplendent manhood of accomplished and final grace. Then would he be like Jesus; for he would see him as he is!

Thus did Adam dwell in the contemplation of two futures—the one tender and familiar, the other glorious and triumphant—until his own act had made the rift between the two, and the blood-stained cross crowned the heights of Calvary. O felix culpa! We dare to say it, because our mother the church has said it. And as Adam sees that past now, pardoned, ransomed, and glorified [121] with his glorified Lord, he beholds his children, with each stroke of eternity’s golden moments, thronging through the gates of heaven by the Sacrifice of the cross. What must not his love in heaven be! Next to that of Our Lady surely his must be the greatest of all the multitude who have washed their robes in the blood of the Lamb.

But the glory of the saints now in heaven cannot be compared with that which will follow after the second mission of our Lord at the consummation of all things; for that mission is a mission of glory, even as his first was a mission of humiliation. He came to us in the womb of Mary, in the manger at Bethlehem, hidden and unknown, poor and despised; but when the time shall be ripe for that second mission, he will come in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.[122] He will come as the glorificator of His own creation, of which Mary is the first in rank, a hierarchy in herself, a sealed fountain, a garden enclosed, a second paradise, but where no sin has entered; and in that second mission his saints, as also his angels, will take part.

Thus we look back upon the first mission accomplished—that of the Incarnation and Redemption; the second mission being accomplished—that of the Holy Ghost gradually developing into the reign of the Holy Ghost; and we look forward to two other missions—that of his angels, and, finally, that of His own second coming. “Behold, he cometh with clouds, and every eye shall see him.”[123] “For the Lord himself shall come down from heaven with commandment, and with the voice of an archangel, and with the trumpet of God: and the dead, who are in Christ, shall rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, shall be taken up together with them in the clouds, to meet Christ, and so shall we be always with the Lord. Wherefore comfort ye one another with these words.[124]

[117] 2 Peter ii. 10-13.]

[118] The redemption was an ordinance of God consequent upon man’s fall. Had Adam never sinned, Jesus had never been crucified. But it would seem more consonant with the boundless love of God for his creation to believe that the Blessed Sacrament formed part of his antecedent will; and that a sinless race would have received spiritual and divine food, and would have been thereby sanctified, and ultimately glorified through participation in the Body and Blood of the God-Man. It would have been, as it is now, the Bread of Life; bloodless as it is now, but also unbroken as it is not now—that is, divested of its propitiatory character in so far as propitiation involves the idea of offence.]

[119] Isaias xi. 9.

[120] Matt. xiii. 41, 42, 43, 49.

[121] It is generally believed that Adam was amongst the souls released from Limbo when our Lord descended thither, and who entered heaven with him.

[122] Mark viii. 38.

[123] Apocalypse i. 7.

[124] 1 Thess. iv. 15-17.

[Pg 413]

HOBBIES AND THEIR RIDERS.

Under the general head of hobbies we class a thousand peculiarities distinguishing men which, if strictly viewed according to that accurate balance of mind known as sanity, would almost justify us in calling nine out of every ten men insane on some point, however infinitesimal. Every enthusiasm, from the most exalted moral self-forgetfulness to the most ludicrous extravagance, has been in turn called folly and ridiculed as a hobby. There is in the world a tradition, or rather a prescription, against anything which is not decent and well-behaved moderation. Even Christianity is not to be too obtrusive; even moral reform is to wear a velvet glove. No one sin, be it ever so monstrous and preponderant over other offences in your particular time or neighborhood, is to be singled out and fought against more than any other; decorous generalities and pious conventionalities are by no means to be departed from; and if your heart burns within you, you must put a seal upon your lips and carefully prevent the zeal from infecting your weaker brethren who might thuswise be led astray.

A man’s character is better revealed in his hobby than in anything else belonging to him. Oftentimes the possession of one shows him in a more lovable, human light. He must have both heart and imagination to have one. The man who is wholly incapable of fostering one would be a very unpleasant, not to say dangerous, neighbor. It is said that to have no enemies argues also that you have no friends, and that to have no prejudices implies that you are too cold-blooded to feel enthusiasm. Without taking either of these sayings literally, it is yet evident that they are built upon truth. The only person who has no individual likings, no bias, no tastes to which he is passionately attached, is either the heartless, calculating, selfish man who moves through life rather as an automaton than as a being of flesh and blood, and generally ends by ruling his fellow-beings by fear and by wealth, as many statesmen we read of in history, and pettier rulers we hear of now and then in the world of business; or the poor, nerveless being whose mind remains all his life a blank, and who sinks unnoticed into an obscure grave.

Some of our friends, especially elderly people, are often the dearer to us for their little eccentricities, which give a touch of piquancy to their character, and most often reveal some amiable trait. Hobbies do not sit so well on the young; for one always has an involuntary suspicion of their genuineness, and, even if they are genuine, youth ought to repress any attempt at thrusting itself forward and claiming undue attention. Besides, young people have yet to earn the right to occupy the attention of others otherwise than in the usual way of guidance and education, and a peculiar turn of mind may be cherished without manifesting itself [Pg 414] by any outward sign. Sterne has a delightful consciousness of the value of a hobby as an indication of character when he shows us Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim in the back-garden at Planchy, following step by step the course of the army of the Allies by the help of a spade and some turf, placed so as to represent bastions and fortifications. This process the old soldiers went through over and over again, always with renewed zest. It was a hobby something like this—but too much mixed with vain-glory and the bad taste which nature has at last succeeded in hiding—that prompted the planting of Blenheim Park, near Oxford, in such a way as to represent the positions of the regiments at the battle of Blenheim. The trees have had time to grow out of this likeness, yet they stand in ranks and platoons which one can imagine to have looked hideous when the oaks and beeches were young saplings.

Hobbies and collections are somehow related; at least the mind is used to coupling them together. One can hardly be a collector of anything without becoming absorbed in the collection and in the knowledge required for adding to and classifying it. Even if the collection have been begun with some object of instruction or benevolence, or as a distraction from grief, it soon grows to be a great interest of life, and toil in its behalf becomes pleasure and relaxation. But oftener still the hobby precedes the collection, and many people who are taken for sober, humdrum individuals, the mere padding of society, would in reality be fast and furious riders of hobby-horses if their means allowed them to give outward expression to their tastes.

A very familiar type is the collector of pictures; and the fewer he has, the more set he is on his hobby. He gets some fine specimen of an old master “for an old song” (for such miraculous bargains are half the charm, just as for many women the delight of contriving and piecing and otherwise skilfully eking out old material to look “as good as new” is much greater than to possess a new dress made of a roll of cloth just from the store); and if he is cheated, he probably never finds it out. He often is, and woe to him who, thinking to do him a good turn, undeceives him. But whether the picture be genuine or not, it is the source of unending delight to its owner. He will discuss its points by the hour—the lights and shades, the material of the colors, the style of the painter; he will “get up” the artist’s life and history, buy books on the subject, pin you to your chair while he recounts how he found it, who “restored” it, how it once got injured by a fire; and, lastly, he will put you into corners, or behind cupboards and curtains, that you may be sure to see it in the best light.

The hobby of the rich collector who can dignify his gathering of pictures with the name of gallery has a different way of showing itself; it crops out in a sort of innocent ostentation, or again an assumed indifference. There are men whose hobby it is to conceal their hobby, to ape humility and pretend to a nonchalance very far from their real feelings. Among collectors, none are more voracious, more steady-going, and generally more happy than bibliopolists. They are of all ranks and degrees, but perhaps clergymen and college professors predominate. In England the country squire is often an eager book-hunter. Books of genealogy [Pg 415] and heraldry are favorite tidbits with him, while clergymen often have a special mania for county histories. The collectors of minor curiosities, miscellaneous objects from all parts of the world, are generally old maiden ladies, who have, as a class, the most amiable and touching weaknesses, such as that of the benevolent little fairy, Miss Farebrother, in George Eliot’s Middlemarch, who drops her lumps of sugar in a little basket on her lap, that she may have them to bestow upon her friends, the street-boys. Then there are collectors innumerable of stuffed beasts, of shells, of minerals, of old china, laces, and jewelry, of heathen idols, of all kinds of coins, of autographs, of postage-stamps, etc. The autograph-hunter is a very restless and persistent individual. The American who sent a cheese to Queen Victoria must have been of this species, and the queen did not fail to reward him with a letter written with her own hand.

A hobby that used to be rather prevalent, but has somewhat gone out of fashion now, was that of collecting walking-sticks, canes, snuff-boxes, and pipes. Apropos to this, a story is told of an old man whose special mania was snuff as well as snuff-boxes. He was a man of some standing in English society towards the latter end of the last century. His sitting-room was fitted up with shelves like a shop, and on these stood canisters of various kinds of snuff, their names on labels, and the locks and keys of fantastic and rather ingenious shape. This sanctum was his delight, and the shelves, which ran all round the room, were being constantly replenished with new specimens of the weed. He used snuff to an enormous extent, and willingly gave it away to his friends; but storing it was his chief pleasure, and he looked forward to the last variety in snuff—which his tobacconist had a standing order to send him as soon as it touched English soil—with the same glee with which a naturalist expects the newest kind of living ape just imported from Africa.

We have never heard but of one person who made a spécialité of collecting pieces of wedding-cake; she was an old nurse who had been in the service of a lady employed about the court of William IV. She had pieces of the wedding-cakes of all the princesses of the royal family, including Queen Victoria and some of her daughters, besides remains of the cakes of her mistress’s family, a large and ramified one, and of those of any person of title or distinction of whom, through her connections, she could possibly beg these mementoes.

The horticultural mania, emphatically a hobby for the rich, is one of the most charming and desirable of hobbies; a healthy one, too, as it keeps one out in the open air to a great extent, and supplies the place of such feverish excitements as arise from an interest in politics or in the state of the funds. It even takes away the possibility of interest in petty gossip; for how is it possible to think of the success of Mrs. So-and-so’s coming tea-party when your mind is anxiously engaged on the chance of a late frost ruining your camellias, or the probable time when your Victoria Regia will bloom?

A hobby rather prevalent among women is a constant attendance at auctions. They cannot resist buying little things they do not want, because they are cheap; and, besides, there is a fascination about the atmosphere of a salesroom which is not reducible to mere words. It is [Pg 416] milk-and-water gambling, as are many other innocent-looking devices used by very worthy people to increase their stock of pretty possessions without paying full value for them. Very opposite to this is the hobby of petty economies, such as untying a knot instead of cutting it, secreting tiny bits of pencil, keeping a strict watch over matches and candle-ends, etc. It may be a mere habit of mind, but it often degenerates into a foolish hobby, such as is that of keeping every scrap of cloth, silk, or flannel, and carrying about this rubbish from place to place, for the chance of its “coming in usefully” at some future time. Of course we know how many a gorgeous quilt has been evolved from these savings of years, and how mats have been made of the coarser refuse, and the rest sometimes thriftily sold to the paper-mill; but these are often exceptions, for time and deftness are wanting to many who have the instinct of saving, and such small economies are apt to have in themselves a tendency to narrow the mind. Besides, what is thrift in one case is parsimony in another; and while one family may be praise-worthy in its attempts to “take care of the pence,” such care would be despicable in another of easier means.

Shall we call it a hobby to “have one’s finger in every pie”? Some people are not happy unless they are giving their neighbors gratuitous advice, and telling them at every turn how they would act “if I were you.” But of this kind of interference none is so dangerous and none so fascinating as the well-meant contrivances of the born match-maker. This individual is invariably a woman, and generally a most amiable and kind creature. Sometimes a young matron is bitten with the mania, and clumsily enough she sets to work extolling the delights of the honeymoon to her girl friends; sometimes a middle-aged woman who has had experience, and is more wary in her method, quietly sets her snares and unluckily succeeds once in five times—unluckily, we say; for her one success blinds her to her four failures, and she continues in the slippery path which, in the end, is almost sure to bring ruin on some special pet of hers. Even unmarried women are match-makers; they will plan, and speculate, and contrive; and it is lucky indeed if they are nothing more than indiscreet, for they are handling edged tools. You never find a man to be a match-maker; and yet women will have it that men are so much more benefited by matrimony than themselves!

Among special hobbies, one is said to have been the property of a rich old Englishman of the olden time, who altered a house on purpose to suit it. He could not bear the sight of a female servant, and so angry was he at meeting one on the stairs that he sent for a mason to contrive hiding-places here and there in which an unlucky maid, if she chanced to meet the master, might take refuge out of his sight. The whole house was full of such cunningly-placed holes, and in this odd, honey-combed state it passed to his next heir.

One or two members of a family often take upon themselves the guardianship of the family honor, and bore every relation they have, to the sixth and seventh degree, about the genealogy, intermarriages, quarterings, etc., of their collective fetich. They are learned in family “trees,” know every date, [Pg 417] from the first mention of the name in the annals of the country to the number of goods and chattels they brought over with them in the Mayflower; how many shares they bought in the cow of the first settlement; when this and that portrait was painted, and so on. ‘Tis not the knowledge that is irksome, but the inappropriateness and universality of its mention in the conversation of these good people, and the unconsciousness of the narrators that they have ever spoken to you of the subject before.

Have you ever known any one whose “best parlor” was their hobby—a scrupulous, Dutch-like reverence for immaculate cleanliness and order? Scarcely any hobby is more terrible to the stranger or casual visitor. Akin to it is the excess of punctuality by which some people make their guests wretched. Both grow to be a punishment to the person himself; for he, or oftener she, suffers torture every time a guest comes in with snow on his boots, or any one puts a cup of coffee on a marble table, or leans his head on the back of an easychair. Half the day is employed in dusting and cleaning the sacred precincts, and the other half in resting from the exertions thereby incurred.

The hobbies of writers furnish some amusing stories. The historian of the queens of England—Miss Agnes Strickland, as worthy and affectionate a woman as ever breathed—had, it is well known, constituted herself the champion of Mary, Queen of Scots. So thoroughly had she succeeded in realizing the doings of the times of Elizabeth that she spoke on this subject as you would of an injustice that had been done your dearest friend, and that quite recently. It was as fresh in her mind as some wrong committed last week on a defenceless woman, and she grew excited and eloquent over it, forgetting who, with whom, and where she was. This was very unpractical and somewhat ludicrous, some may be inclined to say, but it was a peculiarity that certainly made her happy, and it was no annoyance to her listeners. How much more dignified, too, than the too common fuming over the impertinence of the servant that was discharged last week, or the chafing over the troublesome man who claims a “right of way” and threatens to bring a suit about it next month!

Political hobbies also abound. These are generally the property of old people, the traditions of whose youth have remained proof against the enlightenment of the present. There are people who boast they have never been on a railroad, and never will be—they are common in Europe, at least—and people who would scorn to be photographed; people who laugh at you if you tell them that the sun really does not go round the earth, and rise and set morning and evening, and who obstinately believe that dogs only go mad during the dog-days. But there are those who, with a better education and more opportunities, are just as unprogressive. Such will buttonhole you and argue seriously that the Pope is going to involve Europe in another Thirty-Years’ War. They seriously believe it and live in dread of it. They would not hurt a fly; but they firmly believe that, if they got hold of a Jesuit, they would remorselessly run him through, and think they had rid the country of a tiger or an alligator. Dr. Newman’s Apologia gives an amusing account of the awe and terror inspired by the dark house in [Pg 418] a by-street where “it was said a Roman Catholic lady lived all alone with her servant.” In England the Jesuits and “Bony” long divided the honors of bugbear-in-chief to the British public. To this day some amiable old Welsh lady will assure you in a whisper that the whole country has underground (and it is to be supposed submarine) connection with Rome, and that she never goes to bed without looking underneath to see that there is no Jesuit in disguise concealed there! Then there is the man who, under the Napoleonic régime, whether of the first or third emperor, would tell you in an awestruck manner of the impossibility of putting off the evil hour any longer, and the inevitable certainty of a French invasion and annexation of England to France; the landing always to take place exactly within a few miles of his own house, if he lived by the seaside. If his house were further inland, he would tell you he knew his village would be the first and most convenient place to halt at and plunder.

At one time there was in London a great mania for Turkish baths. A person of some note as a writer and, we believe, an M.P. took up the subject vigorously, and had a Turkish bath built adjoining his own house. Here he passed the greater part of his time, combining his reading and writing with the delights of his new hobby. But he had an old hobby as well, which was the evil agency of Russia in the politics of Europe. Like the philosopher who asked but one question on the occasion of any disturbance—“Who is she?”—this man acknowledged but one possible element of discord at the bottom of any diplomatic imbroglio—i.e., Russia. A friend of his called on him one day about midday, and, being ushered into the hall, heard his voice shouting from behind the door leading to the bath: “Come in, S——, and we’ll sit here a while. Stay to luncheon, won’t you? It is only two hours to wait.” The friend was so amused that he took off his clothes and submitted to the novel invitation of spending the time of a morning call in a Turkish bath. Of course the conversation soon fell on Russia and its demoniacal secret agency in all the troubles of the world. The man was exceptionally clever, and these oddities of mind and behavior only made his society more charming to his friends and more piquant to his acquaintances.

Among fixed ideas which may almost be called hobbies are certain preferences which blind us to the good done without the special adjuncts which we individually consider nearly indispensable. For instance, it is recorded—with how much truth we cannot tell—of the great architect, Pugin the elder, that one day, being in Rome, he went to Benediction in a church where it is customary to say prayers in the vernacular for the conversion of England. This was done after the service proper was over, and Pugin, not recognizing the extra prayers at the end of the familiar Benediction service, asked a neighbor what they meant. On being told he turned to a friend who was with him and said: “The idea of praying for the conversion of England in such a cope as that!” A clever and well-known writer for one of our leading Catholic magazines, who is confessedly somewhat eccentric, is said to have been discovered one morning by a friend in a state of violent agitation, walking up and down the breakfast-room with quick and nervous [Pg 419] strides, and looking like a man in passionate, personal grief. On being gently asked the cause of this emotion, he answered vehemently: “I was thinking of how many souls are being eternally damned at this very moment. Is it not frightful to think of? Every minute souls are going there, to be tormented for all eternity!” Here was a fixed idea with which it was difficult to deal. It was true, and a thought which would do many good if they would realize it as he did—the innocent, large-hearted man, who did not need the idea for his own discipline—but it was decidedly an inconvenient disturbance of the domestic balance of things, and not a pleasant appetizer for the good breakfast that was before him.

Bores, pure and simple, are of a remote kindred with the riders of hobbies, and they are of as many kinds. There is the croaker, who cherishes some pet grievance and favors every one with it; the singer who is offended if he is not asked to perform, and is not applauded at the end like the leading tenor of the hour; the critic who thinks he would lose his reputation if he condescended to praise anything, or to admire and be pleased like a common mortal; the man (or woman) who sets himself up on a pedestal and assumes, subtly but unmistakably, that he is entirely above his neighbors or whatever people he may be with; the man who has quarrelled with somebody, and insists on reading you the whole correspondence; the man who is sure always to come to see you at inopportune times, and, worse still, never knows when to go away; the amateur—a terrible species—who imagines he can paint, or play the pianoforte or the flute, etc., or write poetry, or draw plans, or, in short, do anything which it requires a life-time to learn—for the greatest always think themselves still at the bottom of the ladder of knowledge; the man who tells stories to satiety, and expects them to be laughed at; the man who interrupts a tête-à-tête, or who is so full of some interest of his own that he insists on you sharing it when you show no inclination to listen to him; the man who cannot take a hint, though he is as good-natured as he is obtuse—these there are, and many more, who are the human mosquitoes of the world.

Akin to hobbies, as we said at the beginning, are tastes, harmless for the most part, often æsthetic, and almost always beneficial. Indeed, many a taste, well regulated, has become an antidote or a preservative against vice; and, to put it from a very low point of view, a taste is generally far more economical than dangerous company and degrading sin. The Saturday Review, in an article on this subject last year, said with truth: “Tastes are not, as a rule, exorbitantly expensive; they are certainly very much cheaper than vices. A very moderate percentage of an income, judiciously laid out, will soon secure an excellent library. It is surprising how small a sum will suffice for the purchase of every standard work worth having. The most famous private libraries cost their owners nothing in comparison with the price of a few race-horses.” Although we have somewhat disparaged amateurs as a kind of “bores,” this was not meant to dissuade young men and women from cultivating some taste which will serve as a resource for evening hours or any otherwise unoccupied time, and be a relaxation from necessary work, as well as a gradual safeguard against coarse pleasures. As long as such pursuits are [Pg 420] undertaken with due modesty as to one’s proficiency in them, and not as a mere social “accomplishment” to be obtruded on others on all possible occasions, they are infinitely to be commended. They grow on one, too, and soon become the chief point of attraction in our intellectual life, especially if our business happens to be, as that of most persons is, of a prosaic nature. As we grow old they may develop into hobbies; never mind, they will still make us happy and never cause us shame. On the other hand, what will tendencies to convivial “pleasures,” or to frivolous and objectless conversation, or to gadding about to theatres, balls, and races, come to in the end? Dead-Sea fruit.

Among the minor arts which tend to occupy one’s leisure pleasantly and usefully are wood-carving, turning, ivory-carving, and leather-work. Even commoner things may be taken up. We have known young men who, during a long convalescence, took to mending cane chairs as a mode of making their fingers useful when their brains were still too weak to be taxed. Basket-making, decalcomania of the higher order—i.e., a sort of easy glass-painting akin to decalcomania, are all useful and possible methods of employing one’s self and cultivating a pleasant domestic taste. Mechanics, too, and household carpentry we have often seen fostered in young people and become their pride, while illumination—a really high style of art, though a rare gift—is not so uncommon as some may think. Of such tastes as gardening, reading, embroidering, and music we say nothing; they are too well known. Such a taste generally ends in a collection, and then the pleasure is enhanced a hundred-fold; and, as the Saturday Review says, it really needs but a comparatively small outlay to secure a very fair collection of any kind. This in its turn helps to study by giving us the means of reference or comparison. And if in any family the members were seriously to look up the money really wasted—that is, the money spent in transitory, unhealthy pleasures, the value of which dies in the mere excitement of the moment, leaving no pleasant memory or useful impression behind, and often, on the contrary, leading to a remorseful, or at least an uncomfortable, remembrance—they would find that every year there goes forth imperceptibly from the collective treasury of the home enough to beautify their lives and increase their happiness if only they would lead it into the right channels. The money would not be missed, while their pleasures would be tenfold and lasting. Even the very poorest of the poor spends uselessly—and alas! often wickedly—what would make him a happy, self-respecting man; and, strictly speaking, no one can say that he cannot afford good and healthy pleasures, for, as a matter of fact, he does afford bad and unhealthy, or, to say the least, unsatisfactory, ones. Let every one ask this question of his own experience: Which costs most in the long run, a healthy pleasure, say even an innocent hobby, or a vicious and lowering pursuit?

[Pg 421]

A PLEA FOR OUR GRANDMOTHERS.

That there are many flaws and deficiencies in the social structure of our bustling republic, from its foundation in the single family to the collection of families forming general society, cannot be denied. Among these none are more palpable than the failure to provide comfortable space, suitable appointments, and a well-defined position therein for our grandmothers.

Their claims to consideration as a class, existing—albeit by mere sufferance—in every city, village, and rural corner throughout the length and breadth of our wide domain, seem to have been crowded out and lost in the confusion and dust upwhirled by our great social vehicle in its onward sweep toward an imaginary and unattainable El Dorado. No one seems to comprehend the binding obligation of those claims. The force of a playful remark made by the great and good Father Burke to his mother—when she complained that she failed to hear his lecture because the hall was so crowded that she could not get in—“Ah! mother dear, wasn’t that too bad? Just think of it! Why, if it hadn’t been for you, dear, I wouldn’t have been there myself!” has not come home to Americans in connection with this subject. They do not pause to reflect that, but for our grandmothers, this great multitude now rushing so furiously toward every promising avenue to wealth and influence, elbowing and jostling each other in their mad career, would not have been in existence.

Nor are the annoyances to which this class is exposed in consequence of such neglect—itself the result rather of heedlessness than design—any the less burdensome that they are mainly of so negative a character as scarcely to form the basis of a positive complaint; nay, so far from this that when they find voice in such utterance as the disquieting consciousness of their reality, in spite of their unreal guise, may force from the victims, the moan is more apt to excite ill-concealed merriment in a listener, by its quaint whimsicality, than pity or sympathy.

Yet these evils are real and constantly increasing. The most serious of them are the outgrowth of modern civilization and the progressive doctrines of the last quarter of a century. In this enlightened age it is not to be supposed that people must grow old, and it is highly improper for our grandmother to insist upon submitting to conditions proper enough to humanity before it flourished in the light of “advanced ideas,” but wholly out of place now. As recently as twenty-five years ago she was, perforce of that very submission, an important element in the domestic and social circle. She occupied a position quite independent of such prescribed rules and customs as govern other classes in society. She was not expected to conform to every caprice of fashion. She was permitted to dress in a manner consistent with her age, and no one respected her the less, or thought of indulging in sharp criticism of her style, if it was of an obsolete date. She could employ her time in suitable occupations, and render the useful and acceptable services to the family and neighborhood for which the skill [Pg 422] acquired by her long acquaintance with the world and its exigencies eminently fitted her; or repose in the calm twilight of life’s evening hour, in such habiliments as best comported with her own comfort and the requirements of her gradual descent into the valley of years.

Not so now. The milliners provide her with no bonnets or caps befitting her age; nay, they utterly refuse to attempt, at any price, the construction for her of suitable head-gear. Such manufacture has taken its place among the “lost arts,” and they do not wish to revive it. The mantua-makers insist upon “the demi-train, at least,” and she must submit in the matter of the overskirt, with its puffed abominations and puckered deformities. She is allowed no ease or comfort in her costume, but is required to assume all the grotesque discomforts invented by modern modistes for the summer-day butterflies of fashion, at the risk, if she refuses, of being followed, every time she ventures to appear among them, with such remarks as, “A nice old lady? Oh! yes; but it is a pity that she will persist in making such a guy of herself, with those old-fashioned sleeves and skirts, and her plain white muslin caps.”

It is curious to remark how different is the relative position of the grandfather, at home and abroad, from that of his female contemporary. How independent he is of conventional forms in his dress and intercourse with society; how free to go and come when he pleases, without giving occasion for wry faces or unkind criticisms if the fashion of his coat has not been changed for half a century! Is he not rather regarded with increased respect on that account?

But the prevailing modern rule in relation to the dress of women of all ages is that it shall change in style with every change of the moon, and, above all, that as much expense in material and labor shall be lavished upon its elaboration as the inventive genius of skilled artists can possibly devise. And American women—even grandmothers—are so foolish as to bow in slavish submission to this intolerable tyranny, which is working such widespread ruin and desolation in our country! “Let Fashion rule, though the heavens fall,” say they.

So completely have all correct ideas pertaining to true taste in the discriminating consistency of different costumes adapted to the different periods of life been swallowed up in the all-prevailing fashion-worship, that there is now scarcely any distinction, save in length of skirt, between the dress of the little girl of five and that of her grandmother, mother, or the young lady, her elder sister. Pitiable indeed is this loss of all sense of the fitness of things for the two extremes of human life, which should be exempted from subjection to discomforts for fashion’s sake!

What spectacle can be more mournfully absurd than that of a pale, wrinkled old face set in a ghastly silvered frame of the hairdresser’s curls and crimps, and surmounted, to complete its repulsiveness, with a bedizened hat, the form of which can only be made barely tolerable by a beautiful young face beneath it; or that of a form bending under the weight of years, carrying with trembling steps a load of jewelry and such remarkable excrescences, frills, flounces, and fur-belows, as the dressmaker insists upon cumbering it withal? These pitiful sights are constantly displayed in our palace-cars, at our [Pg 423] hotels, boarding-houses and watering-places, even by the aged invalids who frequent the latter for their healing influences.

This is all wrong! There is no good sense or propriety in it. The free-born American woman should claim immunity from such bondage, and the right to accept with cheerful grace that rest from the petty strifes and ambitions which agitate life’s noon-day to which she is entitled at its twilight-hour. If she has—either by inheritance or the successful, if not altogether honest, speculations of her male kin—come into possession of more money than she well knows how to use, she should set that inherent Yankee wit, which is her inalienable national dower, to devise some less ridiculous, at least, if not more useful, mode of disbursing it.

When we consider the multitudes of starving poor that throng our cities; the necessities of widows and orphans; the notable rarity of well-selected and amply-filled libraries among our wealthy classes, and their very meagre patronage of the fine arts, we discover that there is no lack of proper and elevating objects for expenditure. Above all, when we reflect that the possessors of wealth must inevitably be called to a rigid account of their stewardship at last, the thought is appalling, and the subject, in all its phases, for this world and the next, is a sad one to contemplate.

In pleasing contrast with the picture presented by the domestic and social attitude of the average American grandmothers of to-day is that which we have frequently been so favored as to witness among the most wealthy, as well as the poorest, classes of our faithful foreign populations; where the grandmother, in her comfortable though antiquated cap and costume, was the most honored and tenderly beloved member of the household, its arbiter in all disputes, its wise and chosen counsellor in all doubts, its nurse in sickness, comforter in affliction, and its guide to that blessed land on the confines of which her aged feet were tottering.

She indulged no worldly ambitions; gave no thought to dress, save to restrict it to the severest simplicity and neatness. She filled no brilliant rôle at home or in society, nor cared for anything but to do good to all as she had opportunity. She was not learned in the philosophy of books and literature; her deficiency in such knowledge may have been so great as to excite a sneer in her American neighbor, who had enjoyed the great “advantages” of the public-school system; but even the youngest of her numerous grandchildren—who gathered around her chair in the most cosey corner, of an evening, to listen reverently to her explanations of “Christian Doctrine,” to join with her in recitations of the beads, and to give rapt attention to her tales and legends of the “dear old land”—knew that her venerable head was stored with treasures of learning more precious than all earthly lore in the sight of Him before whom the “wisdom of this world is foolishness,” and who has chosen the “weak things thereof to confound the wise.”

How will they miss her when she is gone! For how many long years will “grandmother’s” virtues and her pious instructions form the theme, and her advice and prayers the sustaining resource, of her children’s children, while they carefully transmit to theirs her unwritten memoirs as an invaluable legacy of precept and example!

[Pg 424]

FROM LAMARTINE.

Almond-bough with blossom rife,

Pride of beauty picturing;

Blooms like thee the flow’r of life,

Blooms and withers in the spring.

Missed or gathered, prized or slighted,

Still from wreath and fingered spray

One by one its petals, blighted,

Pass, like pleasures day by day.

Taste we then its brief delight,

Ere the stealthy winds go by;

Drain the laughing chalice quite,

Drink the perfume that must die.

Oft is beauty like the flow’r

Gathered for a guest at morn,

And before the festal hour

From his chilly temples torn.

One day ends: another breaks;

Spring and all her sweets decay;

Every leaf the light wind takes

Whispers, “Gather while ye may.”

Since the rose is doomed to perish—

Perish, pass, nor bloom again,

Lovers’ lips her blossom cherish,

Love her dying sweets detain.

[Pg 425]

NEW PUBLICATIONS.

Catholic Church and Christian State. A Series of Essays on the Relation of the Church to the Civil Power. Translated, with the permission of the author, from the German of Dr. Joseph Hergenröther, Professor of Canon Law and Church History at the University of Würzburg. In two volumes. London: Burns & Oates. 1876.

It is to be regretted that the price of this excellent work has been placed so high, although its paper covers and generally cheap style of execution give it the appearance of a German rather than an English publication. The price in England is one pound sterling, which makes it necessary to sell it for eight dollars in this country, and with a decent binding it must cost ten dollars. This great cost must impede the general circulation which such a work merits and ought to obtain. In respect to the value of its contents, it is well worth the price it costs, and ought to have a place in every public library and on the bookshelves of every Catholic of intelligence and culture—indeed, of every educated man who wishes to understand the questions mooted and discussed so generally at the present time in respect to the nature and mutual relations of the church and the state. It is a masterly scientific treatise, constructed with that solid learning and thoroughness of exposition which characterize the works of genuine German scholarship. The author is one of the most eminent of the Catholic professors of Germany, at home in canon law, history and jurisprudence, well versed in theology, and enjoying an established reputation for sound orthodoxy in doctrine. The division of his topics into separate essays, each with its distinct sections, makes it easier to follow his course of exposition and reasoning than it would be if they were arranged under a more strictly methodical form, and his abundant references, frequently accompanied by citations, give evidence of the sources he has referred to, as well as the means of referring, in case of need, to these authorities. He is succinct and brief in his treatment, yet clear and precise. The subjects about which Mr. Gladstone’s Expostulation have awakened controversy are treated comprehensively and in their principles, furnishing a general defence of the Catholic Church, and a refutation of the accusations of her enemies in respect to her polity, administration, and relations to the natural and temporal order. In short, it is a text-book or manual for instruction, fitted to be used as a guide to those who have to teach, as an arsenal from which those who have to write or lecture may draw their weapons of argument, and as a standard of reference for the correct decision of the matters within its scope. The private student will find it all that is requisite for his complete and accurate information on the important topics of which it treats. We understand that the translation has been made by Miss Allies, assisted by two other ladies, and, we doubt not, under her father’s supervision. We have not seen the original, but the translation seems to have been thoroughly well executed. The work will undoubtedly take its place at once as a classic.

Histoire de Madame Barat, Fondatrice de la Societe du Sacre-Cœur de Jesus. Par M. l’Abbé Baunard. Paris: Poussielque Frères, Rue Cassette 27. 1876.

We have had the honor of receiving one of the first copies of this long-expected biography of one of the great women of this century, and take the earliest opportunity of making the due acknowledgment. This is not a book to be dismissed by a brief notice, and we hope to make it the subject of an article in one of our future numbers, after having given it the careful perusal which it merits. It is published in two goodly volumes of fair, large type, averaging each six hundred octavo pages. The Abbé Baunard is already celebrated as the author of the Life of St. John. Those who read French easily and with pleasure [Pg 426] will prefer, we suppose, to obtain the original work, which no doubt will soon be for sale in our foreign bookstores. Nevertheless, as a translation from the graceful pen of Lady Georgiana Fullerton is advertised as nearly or quite ready, we are confident that the charm of the Abbé Baunard’s style will be preserved, in so far as that is possible, in the Life of Madame Barat which is soon to appear in English. It is already evident that this biography, which is at the same time a history of the institute founded by the venerable lady who is its subject, will have a worldwide circulation. In our own country there are great numbers who are eagerly desiring the opportunity of perusing it. We have as yet only commenced the pleasing task, but we have gone far enough to warrant the assurance that those who are looking forward to the reading of it as a source of great benefit and pure enjoyment will not be disappointed.

Are You My Wife? By the author of A Salon in Paris before the War, Number Thirteen, Pius VI., etc. New York: The Catholic Publication Society. 1876. 1 vol. 8vo. pp. 292.

The startling question that gives a title to this story has been before the readers of The Catholic World for many months. Those who have followed out the puzzle presented to them through its monthly instalments will have found for themselves the solution of the problem, and formed their own opinion regarding its merits or demerits. The story is now published in book-form, and adds one more to the number of admirable original works of fiction given to the Catholic public through the pages of The Catholic World.

Are You My Wife? is remarkable, and welcome, at least in this: that it shakes itself loose from the mouldy traditions which seem to form the stock-in-trade of most of our Catholic writers of English fiction. It is a bold effort and well sustained. The story is full of interest from beginning to end; the characters clean-cut and distinct; the incidents varying and rapid; and the secret carefully concealed to the very last. It is not, perhaps, of the first, but certainly of a very good, order of art, and possesses this exceptional merit over its fellows, that while the facts on which it hangs are as interesting as those in the best works of non-Catholic novelists, the purity and moral elevation of the whole are far beyond what even the best of such writers can furnish.

It is needless here to sketch the plot, which, though woven out of natural materials, is ingeniously intricate. Many of the characters are such as may be met with any day in England. The nominal heroine is a wild, weird creation; the real heroine is Franceline, as charming a girl as ever met us in the pages of a novel or stole our hearts away in real life. No wonder all the young men go wild over her; no wonder that the old men do the same. She grows up and develops under our sight the dreamy, happy child, until she, and we with her, suddenly start to find she is a woman.

The graceful yet powerful pen that gave us such sketches as A Salon in Paris before the War, Number Thirteen, and others equally good, has not mistaken its powers—indeed, has not, we are convinced, yet tried them to the full of their bent—in the present more finished and more ambitious work. There is little or nothing in Are You My Wife? to betray the hand of an unpractised novelist. Only here and there occurs a fulsomeness of detail on minor matters that were better condensed. In one or two places, though very rarely, the conversation flags. Conversation is, as a rule, slow enough in society itself; in a book, when slow at all, it becomes intolerable. These are the only blemishes we find in an unusually interesting book. Sir Simon Harness, Ponce Anwyll, Miss Merrywig, Miss Bulpit, Angélique, and Raymond are characters with whom we regret to part, as also Franceline and Clide, were they not so well provided for. Humor, wit, and imagination are plentiful throughout the book, while the pictures of natural scenery are often unsurpassed. Here, for instance, is a picture of still life that the best of pencils or pens might be proud to own:

“On emerging from the damp darkness after an hour with Miss Merrywig, Franceline found that the sun had climbed up to the zenith, and was pouring down a sultry glow that made the earth smoke again. There was a stile at the end of the wood, and she sat down to rest herself under the thick shade of a sycamore. The stillness of the noon was on everything. A few lively linnets [Pg 427] tried to sing; but, the effort being prompted solely by duty, after a while they gave it up, and withdrew to the coolest nooks, and enjoyed their siesta like the lazy ones. Nobody stirred, except the insects that were chirping in the grass, and some bees that sailed from flower to flower, buzzing and doing field-labor when everybody else was asleep or idle. To the right the fields were brimful of ripening grain of every shade of gold; the deep-orange corn was overflowing into the pale amber of the rye, and the bearded barley was washing the hedge that walled it off from the lemon-colored wheat. To the left the rich grass lands were dotted with flocks and herds. In the nearest meadow some cattle were herding. It was too hot to eat, so they stood surveying the fulness of the earth with mild, bovine gaze. They might have been sphinxes, they were so still; not a muscle in their sleek bodies moved, except that a tail lashed out against the flies now and then. Some were in the open field, holding up their white horns to the sunlight; others were grouped in twos and threes under a shady tree; but the noontide hush was on them all. Presently a number of horses came trooping leisurely up to the pond near the stile; the mild-eyed kine moved their slow heads after the procession, and then, one by one, trooped on with it. The noise of the hoofs plashing into the water, and the loud lapping of the thirsty tongues, were like a drink to the hot silence. Franceline watched them lifting their wet mouths, all dripping, from the pool, and felt as if she had been drinking too. There was a long, solemn pause, and then a sound like the blast of an organ rose up from the pond, swelling and sweeping over the fields; before it died away a calf in a distant paddock answered it.”

The Life of Rev. Mother St. Joseph, Foundress of the Congregation of Sisters of St. Joseph of Bordeaux. By l’Abbé P. F. Lebeurier. Translated from the French. New York: D. & J. Sadlier & Co. 1876.

When, in the early part of the seventeenth century, St. Francis de Sales founded the Order of the Visitation, he placed the corporal works of mercy, such as visiting the sick and relieving the poor, among the duties of its members, but he was afterwards induced to modify the original plan by making enclosure a part of the constitution of the order. There was a demand, however, for communities of women devoted to the relief of human misery; and among the many congregations of this kind which were founded during the life or shortly after the death of St. Francis that of the Sisters of St. Joseph holds an important rank. This order came into existence under the fostering care of Father Medaille, a priest of the Company of Jesus, in the year 1650, in the diocese of Puy, and was soon established in many other parts of France. After an existence of a hundred and forty years, it was broken up and the sisters dispersed by the French Revolution; but upon the conclusion of the Concordat between Napoleon and Pius VII. the religious who still survived reassembled and opened a house in Lyons, in 1807, under the protection of Cardinal Fesch.

One of the most exemplary and useful members of the order since its restoration, Mother St. Joseph—in the world, Jane Chanay—is made known to us in the biography whose title we have given. There are few lives of which a judicious and faithful account would not be useful, and no kind of writing is more attractive to most readers than biography. It is seldom, however, that we meet with a religious biography with which we are altogether pleased, and this now before us is not at all to our taste. There is certainly no reason why the life of a nun should not be as full of interest as that of a woman engaged in the frivolities and vanities of the world, and we cannot but think it is the fault of the author that Mother St. Joseph’s has not been made both instructive and entertaining. The narrative is slow and interrupted, the style heavy, and the facts often trivial without being either amusing or edifying. We have the authority of Cardinal Donnet for the assertion that the book is commendable for the beauty of its diction; but this is certainly not true of the English translation, which is often neither correct nor elegant. Take, for instance, the following examples: “Other saints … are restored to their Creator with not a maze to dim their lustrous brightness” (p. 22). “When once the fire of jealousy is kindled in the soul, nothing can satiate its ravages” (p. 26).

We close with the following sentence, which we commend to the attention of [Pg 428] grammar-schools: “This good father having, in the course of his missions, met with several widows and pious young women who were desirous to retire from the world and devote themselves to the service of the salvation of their neighbor, but were deterred for want of means to enter convents, he formed the intention to propose to some bishop the establishment of a congregation into which those devoted women could enter and devote themselves to labor for their salvation, and fulfil all the good works of which they were capable in the service of their neighbor” (p. 66).

Principia or Basis of Social Science. By R. J. Wright. Second Edition. Philadelphia: Lippincott & Co. 1876.

The eight or ten pages of letters from various persons with which this volume is prefaced, and in which the author receives thanks for copies of his book, forcibly remind us of Sheridan’s formula for acknowledging the publications that were constantly sent him: “Dear Sir: I have received your exquisite work, and I have no doubt I shall be highly delighted after I have read it.” The persons, known and unknown, whose names are paraded here all anticipate a time when they shall be able to congratulate themselves upon having put the Basis of Social Science beneath their feet.

Mr. Wright is doubtless a well-meaning man; and if good intentions could pacify a critic’s irritable soul, between him and ourselves there would be no quarrel. His aim has been, he informs us in his preface, to write a work which, without offending the religious, political, or scientific susceptibilities of any one, would commend itself especially to “pious young men” and “students for the ministry, who really desire to be useful and to be abreast of their age on this subject”; and we are therefore prepared to find him ready to embrace with equal tenderness a Mormon prophet, an Oneida free lover, a French communist, and a Catholic monk. Mr. Wright’s sweetness and piety are as offensive to us as the caress of a Yahoo was to Dean Swift. These attempts to reconcile the antagonisms, incompatibilities, and contradictions of the age, by besmearing them all with honey, are worse than absurd; they add to the confusion and weaken the power to apprehend truth. The self-imposed task of the author of this volume is one which the greatest mind now living could not perform in a satisfactory manner. Of all sciences, the social is, if it may as yet be called a science, the most difficult, the most involved and uncertain; in its idea it is a synthesis of all knowledges, and no one who has not gathered into his own mind the intellectual achievements of the whole race should attempt to construct a philosophy of social science. The importance of the study of sociology we fully admit, and gladly welcome even the humblest efforts to increase our knowledge of this subject; but when those who ought to remain in the ranks seek to take command, they become disorganizers. Had Mr. Wright been modest, he might have been useful; having attempted too much, he has failed to accomplish anything. In fact, he has not the first requisite of an author—a knowledge of the language in which he writes. His style is barbarous and tumultuary, often ungrammatical. It must, however, be striking and emphatic, if we are to judge from the number of words printed in italics and majuscules. And his thought is like his style—incoherent, crude, and embryotic. He has read Comte, Fourier, Mill, Herbert Spencer, and Appleton’s Cyclopædia, and with their aid and the help of a certain “Theory of the Six Units” he has sought to develop an ideal of human society not more impossible than Plato’s Republic or more visionary than More’s Utopia.

The keynote to his system is the “Theory of the Six Units.” The six units are the Individual, the Family, the Social Circle, the Precinct, the Nation, and Mankind. It seems to have been his acquaintance with certain other “singular sixes” that led him to a belief in six, and but six, social units. In the first place, “the figure which gives the maximum amount of internal content with the minimum amount of external surface of similar bodies joined together is a HEXAGON.” Again: “In developed civilization there are six great classes of society”; but it is only in some future work that the author will tell us about these six great classes. And just here we wish to find fault with Mr. Wright for a habit he has of adroitly arousing our curiosity, and then, as we are beginning to imagine we are about to learn something, coolly dropping us with the remark that the matter “will be portrayed [Pg 429] in another book.” He sometimes, too, seems to take a wicked delight in puzzling his readers, as in the following sentence: “All affairs, when they become ordinary, are apt to become matters of business; and business matters are—well, we need not say what.” But to return to the “sixes.” There are six fundamental motors of human passions. There are six infinities—namely, deific spirit, soul spirit, matter, space, duration, diversity. There are six organs of sense (the old notion that there were but five is exploded)—sensation, temperature, taste, smell, hearing, sight. There are six crystallizations—monometric, dimetric, trimetric, monoclinic, triclinic, and hexagonal. There are six religious societies—Adam, Adam and Eve, Patriarchy, Israel in Egypt, Israel in Palestine, the Christian Church. It follows as a matter of course that there must be six social units; and in fact, if it were worth while, we could prove that there must be ten or twenty.

There is no unit in which Mr. Wright so much delights as the Precinct. The real cause of the American civil war he has discovered to have been a neglect of Precinct by both the North and the South; and it is quite probable, we think, there is no social or political problem which may not ultimately be solved in the same felicitous and satisfactory manner.

Genius is manifested—at least this is, we believe, the opinion of Mr. Emerson—quite as strikingly in quotation as in original composition, and we respectfully call the attention of the philosopher of Concord to Mr. Wright as a confirmatory example of this law of mind. Many a household will find food for thought in the following citation: “Family miffs are a grand institution for giving needful repose and after-exhilaration to overtasked affection.” And this other will be interesting to politicians: “It is to the criminal propensities of man that we owe civilization.” “Alas!” sighs our pious philosopher, “that the Radicals cannot make a better basis for civilization than the foregoing crime-begetting one.”

From Wells, the phrenologist, Mr. Wright gets the following quotation, which almost makes us repent of what we have written: “As a class the theologians have the best heads in the world.”

Cantata Catholica. B. H. F. Hellebusch. Benziger Bros.

This is a collection of music for the “Asperges,” “Vidi Aquam,” several Gregorian Masses, the Gregorian Requiem, the Preface, the Pater Noster, Responses, Vespers, the Antiphons of the Blessed Virgin, “O Salutaris,” and “Tantum Ergo,” besides a large number of pieces intended to be used at Benediction and at various other times. The Gregorian chants for the “Asperges,” “Vidi Aquam,” and the Masses are harmonized by Dr. F. Witt. We cannot say that we admire the peculiar “drone bass” which Dr. Witt uses so extensively, and the harmonies are, to our ears, crude, and sometimes even barbarous, and as a general rule are not in accordance with the mode. We also noticed some ear-splitting fifths, used without any excuse whatever. The Requiem is very incomplete; five verses only of the “Dies Iræ” are given, and the Gradual and Tract are entirely omitted. Mr. Hellebusch remarks in his preface that “the Preface and Pater Noster should only be accompanied when required by the officiating clergyman and after rehearsal.” In looking in the book for the reason for this remark, we find that to accompany the simple melody of the “Preface of Trinity” one hundred and ninety sharps, flats, and naturals are required; and in the accompaniment of the words “socia exultatione concelebrant,” in the “Common Preface,” we find twenty. The melody of the “Preface” has also been altered by sharpening “do” all through. Over eight pages are devoted to Responses, exclusive of the Responses for the Preface and Pater Noster. In that portion of the book devoted to Vespers are some grave errors. On page 103 is a note which informs us that “the Psalms can be chanted to any of the following authentic or simplified Vesper tones.” We have yet to learn which are the eight authentic tones, and we were not aware that authentic and simplified meant one and the same thing. The eight Psalm-tunes are given with their various endings, and with the Second, Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth, or “Final by words of one syllable.” We suppose “mediation” is meant; but then the Sixth tone has no different mediation for words of one syllable, and the rule for Hebrew proper names is not given at all. In the Fifth tone the “si” is improperly marked [Pg 430] flat. The pointing of the Psalms is very bad; we have “spirítui, spiritúi, vidít, sicút, motá,” etc. In the latter part of the book, however, the pieces are selected with good taste, and musically, although not practically, well arranged. The book has been made up in too great a hurry.

Asperges Me. Mass in F. Missa de Angelis. C. P. Morrison, Worcester, Mass.

The “Asperges” is chiefly remarkable for some very clumsy and incorrect modulations and the utter absence of any kind of melody and design. The “Mass in F” is an easy setting of the Ordinary of the Mass combined with a nauseating adaptation of English words for the use, we suppose, of the “separated brethren” who like this kind of music. We looked for and found the close on the words “Filius Patris,” with a new movement for the “Qui tollis,” and the inevitable Resurrectionem mor … tu … o … rum. The C clef is placed at the beginning of the tenor part, and the notes are incorrectly written, as if in the G clef, an octave higher. The composer ought to know that the C clef is of as much importance as either the G or F clef, and not a purely fanciful character to be used or not at the option of the writer. The harmony of the “Missa de Angelis” is entirely modern, full of chromatic passages, dissonances, etc., which Mr. Morrison again ought to know are not allowed in harmonies for Gregorian chant.

All around the Moon. From the French of Jules Verne. Freely translated by Edw. Roth. With a Map of the Moon constructed and engraved for this edition, and also with an Appendix containing the famous Moon Hoax, by R. Adams Locke. New York: The Catholic Publication Society, No. 9 Warren Street. 1876.

It is not often the case that translations are, like the present one, an improvement on the original, especially when the original work is such an admirable one as that from which this translation is made. We noticed the first part, published under the title of The Baltimore Gun Club, some time ago, favorably, and have been even more pleased with this sequel.

Mr. Roth calls the book a free translation, but this term hardly conveys the idea of the adaptation which he has really made of the text. Verne certainly intended, when he laid the scene in America, to make the characters, incidents, and conversation thoroughly American, and he succeeded as well as could have been expected; but the task was one simply impossible for a foreigner, and any translation at all approaching to literal exactness, no matter by whom made, would have been sure to have shared the defects of the text. Mr. Roth, therefore, to carry out the author’s idea, had practically to rewrite the book in such a way as to preserve the genius of the conception while altering the details in a way which required an ability like that of the author himself.

Besides having made the book really an American one, he has added to its scientific merit by a fuller explanation of the problem which is the nucleus of the story.

The “Moon Hoax,” which is appended, was probably the most successful and the best contrived of all the scientific canards which have ever appeared. It was written more than forty years ago, but its memory has not yet died out, and it was so cleverly done as to be well worthy of this reprint.

The book is illustrated by twenty-four cuts, besides the map of the moon mentioned in the title. It would really have been better without the rather clap-trap additional about the Centennial at its close, but this makes it all the more American, and may be excusable under the circumstances.

The Wyndham Family: A Story of Modern Life. By the author of Mount St. Lawrence. London: Burns & Oates. 1876. (For sale by The Catholic Publication Society.)

The best of motives and any quantity of the most pious reflections have combined to make of these two volumes a remarkably dull story. This is to be regretted; for those who can overcome the repugnance of wading through page after page of what, with the best will in the world we can only call dreary writing, will find much sound sense on the conduct of the family and what are called “the exigencies” of modern society. The author has attempted a bold feat—to paint the “heroics” of the kitchen, or, as they are called in the story, “the [Pg 431] glory of service.” That there may be, that there is often, glory in service there can be no doubt. This is the power of Christianity. That a cook may be, and indeed often is, a model of self-sacrifice, or at least a source of great self-sacrifice in others, he would be a rash man who should undertake to deny. The author of The Wyndham Family would reverse the old saying that “God sends the food, but the devil sends the cook.” To be sure, the particular cook here held up to view turns out to be quite a superior character, and this makes one of the surprises of the story. The experiment, however, can scarcely be considered a happy one. Were the two volumes condensed into one; were the atmosphere of the kitchen a little less obtrusive; were the girls in the story made to talk like girls, and not like what on this side would be called by some “school marms”; were there only a little more of the relief afforded by such a character as “Uncle Sanders,” The Wyndham Family might have been not only what it now is, a vehicle for highly moral reflections, but a popular and interesting story.

It is strange that England, which has done so much in reviving Catholic English letters within the last century, and which is so high in the higher walks of literature, should, with a very few exceptions, continue to furnish about the poorest specimens of Catholic stories that the world has ever seen. Indeed, a kind of “goody-goody” school has grown up there which holds its own with exasperating persistency. The sooner that school is broken up the better. There surely might be found a happy medium between the “penny dreadful,” or the fleshly school of fiction, and that which reads like a very weak dilution of the penny catechism.

Thirty-fourth Annual Report of the Board of Education of the City and County of New York for the Year ending December 31, 1875.

Apart from the mass of interesting statistics contained in this report, the comprehensive style adopted by the compiler of presenting facts and figures deserves special mention.

We have been interested in the development of the law compelling children to attend school, but fail to find satisfactory information regarding its workings in the report of the Superintendent of Truancy. An increase of 7,614 in the daily average attendance is claimed by him. These figures do not agree with the facts stated on pp. 12 and 213, and in addition the attendance of 1874 shows an increase of 15,094 over 1873.

After a year’s trial the superintendent comes to the conclusion that the law, as it now stands, is a failure, and recommends the enactment of other laws, and the erection of new institutions to enforce the present law, of which he says: “Instances of opposition on the part of the parents to the law, or the efforts of the agents, are extremely rare; but rather do they regard them as welcome visitors and valuable auxiliaries, their authority and suasion being earnestly solicited for the reformation of the child” (p. 424).

Flaminia, and other stories; Lucas Garcia, and other stories; Perico the Sad, and other stories; Robert, or The Influence of a Good Mother; The Crucifix of Baden, and other stories; The Story of Marcel, and other tales. New York: The Catholic Publication Society. 1876.

These are all excellent stories, choice flowers of fiction culled from French, Spanish, Italian, German, and English gardens, while those of native growth are not forgotten. They are reprints from The Catholic World; and how admirably fitted they are to meet a general want the reader may judge for himself by glancing at this month’s Bulletin, which presents the verdict of the Catholic press on them. Nothing is more needed nowadays than good popular Catholic literature, stories, perhaps, more than anything else. We accordingly welcome the republication in book form of stories which were universally well received as they appeared in the columns of The Catholic World, and only hope that the series may be continued.

Episodes of the Paris Commune in 1871. Translated from the French by the Lady Blanche Murphy. Benziger Brothers, New York, Cincinnati, and St. Louis. 1876.

This is a little volume of very readable sketches, relating the persecutions and sufferings of the various brotherhoods of Paris during the brief reign of the Commune in 1871. Their schools were closed, their houses invaded, and the brothers [Pg 432] who had not succeeded in escaping to some safe hiding-place were arrested and thrown into prison. The services of the Christian Brothers as ambulance nurses during the war were known to the whole country; but the Commune ruthlessly drove them from the bedsides of the wounded and dying soldiers. “Down with the Black-gowns!” was the cry. “Death to the Brothers! Let them go join Darboy.”

“The watchword of the Revolution,” said Raoul Rigault to M. Cotte, the writer of one of these sketches, and late director of the press ambulances of Longchamps—“the watchword of the Revolution is death to religion, to ritual, to priests!” And he added: “As long as there is left in the land one man who dares pronounce the name of God all our labor will have been in vain, and we shall not be able to lay down the sword and the rifle.”

The style of the translation is easy and simple, and these Episodes will very fittingly occupy a place in “The Catholic Premium-Book Library.”

The Story of a Vocation: How it came about, and what became of it. New York: The Catholic Publication Society. 1876.

This is really the story of two vocations—of one in the world, and of another in, but not of, the world. It is one of those pure, graceful, yet interesting tales which are only too few. The translation, from the French, is well done. Parents and those who have charge of children will find this book not only highly entertaining but of real utility.

The Episcopal Succession in England, Scotland, and Ireland, a.d. 1400 to 1875. With appointments to monasteries and extracts from consistorial acts taken from MSS. in public and private libraries in Rome, Florence, Bologna, Ravenna, and Paris. By W. Mazière Brady. Vol. I. Rome: Tipografia della Pace. 1876.

This collection of curious documents relates to the Catholic succession. It is of great utility to the searcher into ecclesiastical antiquities. The author has consulted archives and searched out old records with much diligence, and gathered together a number of curious items of information of great value and interest to the antiquarian student. The most interesting of these is the account of Dr. Goldwell, Bishop of St. Asaph, the last of the old line of Catholic succession in England, a prelate whose learning and sanctity make him worthy to close the series which St. Augustine began.

Boston to Washington. A Pocket Guide to the Great Eastern Cities and the Centennial Exhibition, with Maps. New York: Hurd & Houghton. 1876.

The title of this work will give the reader but a poor idea of its value compared with other guides, which are mere advertising sheets. This book is neat in every way—in its paper, in its printing, in its illustrations, and in its binding—and contains a great amount of interesting and correct information about the cities of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, and will prove a valuable guide to the traveller, whether native or foreign.

Voyages dans l’Amerique Septentrionale. Par L. R. Père P. J. De Smet, S. J. Bruxelles: Benziger Bros.; New York.

This is a French edition of Father De Smet’s travels as an Indian missionary in the Rocky Mountains and in Oregon. This celebrated Jesuit, besides being a zealous apostle, was also a keen observer of men and customs, and his descriptions of Indian life, with which no man was more familiar, are both entertaining and instructive. A biography of Father De Smet has been recently published in Belgium, an English translation of which would, we think, be welcomed by American Catholics.

NOTE TO THE ARTICLE ON “THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY.”

Those who read carefully the philosophical articles which appear from time to time in our pages will notice that different, and even contradictory, opinions on some points are to be met with occasionally. It seems proper to explain, therefore, that the editor, and those who assist him in supervising the conduct of the magazine, while professing a general adhesion to the doctrine of St. Thomas, allow a considerable latitude in the expression of individual opinion by the different writers who contribute articles; and do not necessarily imply, in their approbation of pieces for publication, that they concur in every respect with the statements and arguments contained in them.

[Pg 433]

THE

CATHOLIC WORLD.

VOL. XXIII., No. 136.—JULY, 1876.

SONNET.

THE CENTENARY OF AMERICAN LIBERTY.

BY AUBREY DE VERE.

A century of sunrises hath bowed

Its fulgent forehead ‘neath the ocean-floor

Since first upon the West’s astonished shore,

Like some huge Alp forth-struggling through the cloud

A new-born nation stood, to Freedom vowed:

Within that time how many an Empire hoar

And young Republic, flushed with wealth and war,

Alike have changed the ermine for the shroud!

O “sprung from earth’s first blood,” O tempest-nursed!

For thee what Fates? I know not. This I know

The Soul’s great freedom-gift, of gifts the first—

Thou first on man in fulness didst bestow:

Hunted elsewhere, God’s Church with thee found rest:—

Thy future’s Hope is she—that queenly Guest.

[Pg 434]

THE CATHOLIC CHURCH IN THE UNITED STATES,

1776-1876.

The social conditions of life which have been developed in the European colonies of North America, though to a certain extent the result of the physical surroundings of the early settlers, are chiefly the freer growth of principles which had been active, for centuries, in the Christian nations of the Old World. The elements of society here, unhindered by custom, law, or privilege, grouped themselves quickly and spontaneously into the forms to which they were tending in Europe also, but slowly and through conflict and struggle. The great and most significant fact, that it was found impossible in the New World to create privileged classes, clearly pointed in the direction in which European civilization was moving. Another fact not less noteworthy is the failure of every attempt to establish religion in this country.

Though there is but little to please the fancy or fire the imagination in American character or institutions, it is nevertheless to this country that the eyes of the thoughtful and observant from every part of the world are turned. The Catholicity of Christian civilization has generalized political problems and social movements. Civilization, like religion, has ceased to be national; and the bearing of a people’s life upon the welfare of the human race has come to be of greater moment than its effect upon the national character. It is to this that the universal interest which centres in the United States must be attributed.

We are a commonplace and mediocre people; practical, without high ideals, lofty aspirations, or excellent standards of worth and character. In philosophy, in science, in literature, in art, in culture, we are inferior to the nations of Europe. No mind transcendentally great has appeared among us; not one who is heir to all the ages and citizen of the world. Our ablest thinkers are merely the disciples of some foreign master. Our most gifted poets belong to the careful kind, who with effort and the file give polish and smoothness, but not the mens divinior, to their verse; and who, when they attempt a loftier flight, grow dull and monotonous as a Western prairie or Rocky Mountain table-land. Our most popular heroes—Washington and Lincoln—are but common men, and the higher is he who is least the product of our democratic institutions.

Our commercial enterprise and mechanical achievements are worthy of admiration, but not so far above those of other nations as to attract special attention.

If to-day, then, the American people draw the eyes of the whole world upon themselves, it is not because they have performed marvellous deeds, opened up new realms of thought, or created higher types of character, but because their social and political [Pg 435] condition is that to which Europe, whether for good or evil, seems to be irresistibly tending. Beyond doubt, the tendency of modern civilization is to give to the people greater power and a larger sphere of action. Every attempt to arrest this movement but serves to make its force the more manifest. This spirit of the age is seen in the general spread of education, in the widening of the popular suffrage, in the separation of church and state, and in the dying out of aristocracies. We simply note facts, without stopping to examine principles or to weigh consequences. Those who resist a revolution are persuaded that it will work nothing but evil, while those who help it on hope from it every good; and the event most generally shows both to have been in error. Our present purpose does not lead us to speculate as to the manner in which the general welfare is to be affected by the great social transformations by which the character of civilized nations is being so profoundly modified; but we will suppose that the reign of aristocracies and of privilege is past, and that in the future the people are to govern; and we ask, What will be the influence of the new society upon the old faith?

The essential life of the Catholic Church is independent of her worldly condition; and though we are bound to believe that she is to remain amongst men until the end, we are yet not forbidden to hold that at times she may to human eyes seem almost to have ceased to be; that as in the past Christ was entombed, the deletum nomen Christianum was proclaimed, in the future also the heavens may grow dark, God’s countenance seemingly be withdrawn, and the voice of despair cry out that all have bent the knee to Baal.

“But yet the Son of Man, when he cometh, shall he find, think you, faith on earth?” We may hope, we may despond; let us, then, dispassionately consider the facts.

First, we will put aside the assumption that it is possible to organize this modern society so as to crush the church by persecution or violence. In a social state, which can be strong only by being just, attempts of this kind, if successful, would inevitably lead to anarchy and chaos, out of which the church would again come forth with or before the civil order. We cannot, then, look forward to a prolonged and open conflict between the church and the civilized governments of the world without giving up all hope in the permanency and effectiveness of the social phase upon which we have entered. In the end the European states, like the American, must be convinced that, if they would live, they must also let live; since a modus vivendi between church and state is absolutely essential to the permanence of society as now constituted.

The question, then, is narrowed to the free and peaceable life of the church in contact with the popular governments which are already constituted or are struggling for existence; and it is in their bearing upon this all-important subject that the world-wide significance of the lessons to be learned from a careful study of the history of the Catholic Church in the United States becomes apparent. For a hundred years this church has lived in the new society, and all the circumstances of her position have been admirably suited to test her power to meet the difficulties offered by a democratic social organization. The [Pg 436] problem to be solved was whether or not a vigorous but yet orderly and obedient Catholic faith and life could flourish in this country, where what are called the principles of modern civilization have found their most complete expression.

If we would understand the history of our country, we must not lose sight of the religious character of the men by whom it was explored and colonized. Religious zeal led the Puritans to New England, the Catholics to Maryland, and the Quakers to Pennsylvania; and among the Spaniards and the French there were many who, like Columbus and Champlain, deemed the salvation of a soul of greater moment than the conquest of an empire. We might, indeed, without going beyond our present subject, speak of the heroic and gentle lives of the apostolic men who, from Maine to California, from Florida to the Northern Lakes, toiled among the Indians, and not in vain, that they might win them from savage ways and lift them up to higher modes of life. The Catholics of the United States can never forget that the labors of these men belong to the history of the church on this continent; that the lives they offered up, the blood they shed, plead for us before God; and that if their work is disappearing, it sinks into the grave only with the dying race which they more than all others have loved and served. But in this age men are little inclined to dwell upon memories, however glorious. We live in the present and in the future, and, in spite of much cheap sentiment and wordy philanthropy, we have but weak sympathy with decaying races. We are interested in what is or is to be, not in what has been; and perhaps it is well that this is so. We have but feeble power to think or act or love, and it should not be wasted. If Americans to-day are busy with thoughts of a hundred years ago, it is not that they love those old times and their simple ways, but that by contrast they may, in boastful self-complacency, glory in the present. They look back, not to regret the fast-receding shore, but to congratulate themselves that they have left it already so far behind. It is enough, then, to have alluded to the labors of the Catholic missionaries among the North American Indians, since those labors have had and can have but small influence upon the history of the church in the United States. To understand this history we need only study that of the Europeans and their descendants on this continent.

The early colonists of the present territory of the United States were as unlike in their religious as in their national characters. English Puritans founded the colonies of New England; New York was settled by the Dutch; Delaware and New Jersey by the Dutch and the Swedes; Pennsylvania by Quakers from England, who were followed by a German colony. Virginia was the home of the English who adhered to the Established Church of the mother country, and North Carolina became the refuge of the Nonconformists from Virginia; in South Carolina a considerable number of Huguenots found an asylum; and in Maryland the first settlers were chiefly English Catholics. Nearly all these colonies owed their foundation to the religious troubles of Europe. The Puritans, the Catholics, and the Quakers were more eager to find a home in which they could freely worship God than to amass wealth.

The religious spirit of New England, [Pg 437] whose influence in this country, before and since the Revolution, has been preponderant, was as narrow and proscriptive as it was intense, and a gloomy fanaticism lay at the basis of its entire political and social system. The Puritan colonies were not so much bodies politic as churches in the wilderness. To the commission appointed to draw up a body of laws to serve as a declaration of rights, Cotton Mather declared that God’s people should be governed by no other laws than those which He himself had given to Moses; and one of the first acts of the Massachusetts colony was the expulsion of John and Samuel Browne with their followers, because they refused to conform to the religious practices of the Pilgrims. If dissenting Protestants were not tolerated in New England, Catholics certainly could not hope for mercy; and, in fact, they were denied religious liberty even in Rhode Island, which had been founded by the victims of Puritan persecution as a refuge for the oppressed and a protest against fanaticism. Though Mr. Bancroft, whose partisan zeal, whenever there is question of New England, is unmistakable, denies that this unjust discrimination was the act of the people of Rhode Island, it served, at any rate, so effectually to exclude Catholics that when the war of independence broke out not one was to be found within the limits of the colony.

Puritanism, more than any other form of Protestantism, drew its very life from a hatred of all that is Catholic. The office and authority of bishops, the repetition of the Lord’s Prayer, the sign of the cross, the chant of the psalms, the observance of saints’ days, the use of musical instruments in church, and the vestments worn by the ministers of religion were all odious to the Puritans because they were associated with Catholic worship; and in their eyes the chief crime of the Church of England was that she still retained some of the doctrines and usages of that of Rome. Religion and freedom, though their conception of both was partial and false, were the predominant passions of the Puritans; and since they looked upon the Catholic Church as the fatal enemy alike of religion and of freedom, their fanaticism, not less than their enthusiastic love of independence, filled them with the deepest hatred for Catholics. They had the virtues and the vices of the lower and more ignorant classes of Englishmen, from which for the most part they had sprung. If they were frugal, content with little, ready to bear hardship and to suffer want, not easily cast down, they were also narrow, superstitious, angular, and unlovely; and these characteristics were hardened by a cold, gloomy, and unsympathetic religious faith. The credulity which led them to hang witches made them ready to believe in the diabolism of priests; while the narrowness of their intellectual range rendered them incapable of perceiving the grandeur and excellence of an organization which alone, in the history of the world, has become universal without becoming weak, and which, if it be considered as only human, is still man’s most wonderful work. With the æsthetic beauty of the Catholic religion they could have no sympathy, since they were deprived of the sense by which alone it can be appreciated. Though they fasted, appointed days of thanksgiving, and, through a false asceticism, changed the Lord’s day into the Jewish [Pg 438] Sabbath, the fasts and saints’ days of Catholics were in their eyes the superstitions of idolaters; and while they assumed the right to declare what is true Christian doctrine and to enforce its acceptance, they indignantly rejected the spiritual authority of the church, though historically traceable to Christ’s commission to the apostles.

The measures, therefore, which the colonies of New England took to prevent the establishment of the Catholic Church on their soil, were merely the expression of the horror and dread of what they conceived its influence and tendency to be. In 1631, just eleven years after the landing of the Mayflower, Sir Christopher Gardiner, on mere suspicion of being a papist, was seized and sent out of the Colony of Massachusetts Bay, and in the same year the General Court wrote a letter denouncing the minister at Watertown for giving expression to the opinion that the Church of Rome is a true church. Three years later Roger Williams, whose tolerant temper has been an exhaustless theme of praise, joined with the Puritans in declaring the cross a “relic of Antichrist, a popish symbol savoring of superstition and not to be countenanced by Christian men”; and, in proof of the sincerity of their zeal, these godly men cut the cross from out the English flag. Priests were forbidden, under pain of imprisonment and even death, to enter the colonies; and the neighboring Catholic settlements of Canada were regarded with sentiments of such bigoted hatred as to blind the Puritans to their own most evident political and commercial interests. So unrelenting was their fanaticism that one of the grievances which they most strongly urged against George III. was that he tolerated popery in Canada. In the New England colonies, down to 1776, the Catholic Church had no existence, and the same may be said of the other colonies, with the exception of Maryland and of a few families scattered through parts of Pennsylvania. In Maryland itself, where the principles of religious liberty, which now form a part of the organic law of the land, had been first proclaimed by the Catholic colonists, the persecution of the church early became an important feature in the colonial legislation. In successive enactments the Catholics were forbidden to teach school, to hold civil office, and to have public worship; and were, moreover, taxed for the support of the Established Church. The religious character of Virginia, though less intense and earnest than that of New England, can hardly be said to have been less anti-Catholic; and it is therefore not surprising that we should find the cruel penal code of the mother country in full vigor in this colony.

It would have been difficult to find anywhere communities more thoroughly Protestant than the thirteen British colonies one hundred years ago. The little body of Catholics in Maryland, in all about 25,000, who, in spite of persecution, had retained their faith, had sunk into a kind of religious apathy; and as their public worship had long been forbidden and they were not permitted to have schools, to indifference was added ignorance of the doctrines of the church. A few priests, once members of the suppressed Society of Jesus, lingered amongst them, though they generally found it necessary to live upon their own lands or with their kindred, and with difficulty kept alive [Pg 439] the flickering flame of faith. Without religious energy, zeal, or organization, the Maryland Catholics were gradually being absorbed into mere worldliness or into the more vigorous Protestant sects; and, in fact, many of the descendants of the original settlers had already lost the faith. In this way the character of the old Catholic colony had been wholly changed; so that Maryland surpassed all the other colonies in the odious proscriptiveness of her legislation, levying the same tax for the introduction into her territory of a Catholic Irishman as for the importation of a Negro slave. The existence of the Catholic families there, and of the small and scattered settlements in Pennsylvania, if recognized at all by the general public, was looked upon as an anomaly, an anachronism, which, from the nature of things, must soon disappear. There is no exaggeration, then, in saying that the Revolution found the British provinces of North America thoroughly Protestant, with a hatred of the church which nothing but the general contempt for Catholics tended to mitigate; while the seeming failure of the Catholic settlement in Maryland, one hundred and fifty years after the landing of Lord Baltimore, gave no promise of a brighter future for the faith.

In the presence of the impending conflict with England political questions became supreme, and the Convention of 1774, in its appeal to the country, entreated all classes of citizens to put away religious disputes and animosities, which could only withhold them from uniting in the defence of their common rights and liberties. Though this appeal was probably meant to smooth the way for a more cordial union between New England and the Southern colonies, which were even then as unlike as Puritan and Cavalier, it was also an evidence of the public feeling, showing that with the American people religious questions were fast coming to be merely of secondary importance. At any rate it was responded to cheerfully and generously by the Catholics, who, without stopping to think of the wrongs they had suffered, threw themselves heartily into the contest for national independence. The signer of the Declaration who risked most was a Catholic, and a Catholic priest was a member of the delegation sent to Canada to bring about an alliance, or at least to secure the neutrality of that province.

The conduct of the Catholics in the war made, no doubt, a favorable impression, and the very important aid given to the American cause by Catholic France had still further influence in softening the asperities of Protestant prejudice; but, unless we are mistaken, we must seek elsewhere for the explanation of the clause of the federal Constitution which provides that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification for any office or public trust under the United States”; as well as of the First Amendment, to the effect that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” These provisions were merely a part of a general policy, which restricted as far as possible the functions of the federal government, and left to the several States as much of their separate sovereignty as was consistent with the existence of the national Union.

This is evident from the fact that the federal Constitution placed no restriction upon the legislation of the different States in matters of [Pg 440] religion, leaving them free to pursue the intolerant and persecuting policy of the colonial era; and, indeed, laws for the support of public worship lingered in Connecticut till 1816 and in Massachusetts till 1833, and anti-Catholic religious tests were introduced into several of the State constitutions. In New York, as late as 1806, a test-oath excluded Catholics from office; and in North Carolina, down to 1836, only those who were willing to swear to belief in the truth of Protestantism were permitted to hope for political preferment. New Jersey erased the anti-Catholic clause from her constitution only in 1844; and even to-day, unless we err, the written law of New Hampshire retains the test-oath.

The provision which denied to the general government all right of interference in religious matters was a political necessity. Any attempt to introduce into Congress religious discussions would have necessarily rent asunder the still feeble bands by which New England and the Southern States were held together. The reasons of policy which forbade the federal government to meddle with slavery applied with ten-fold force to questions of religion.

The First Amendment to the Constitution, of which we Americans are so fond of boasting, cannot, then, be interpreted as the proclamation of the principle of toleration or of the separation of church and state; it is merely the expression of the will of the confederating States to retain their pre-existing rights of control over religion, which, indeed, they could not have delegated to the general government without imperilling the very existence of the Union. Nearly all the leading statesmen of that day recognized the necessity of some kind of union of church and state, and their views were embodied in the different State constitutions.

The year before the first battle of the Revolution no less than eighteen Baptists were confined in one jail in Massachusetts for refusing to pay ministerial rates; and yet John Adams declared “that a change in the solar system might be expected as soon as a change in the ecclesiastical system of Massachusetts”; and at a much later period Judge Story was able to affirm that “it yet remained a problem to be solved in human affairs whether any free government can be permanent where the public worship of God and the support of religion constitute no part of the policy or duty of the state.”

There is no foundation, we think, for the opinion which we have sometimes heard expressed, that the First Amendment to the Constitution was intended as an act of tardy justice to the Catholics of the United States, in gratitude for their conduct during the war and for the aid of Catholic France. It in fact made no change in the position of the Catholics, whom it left to the mercy of the different States, precisely as they had been in the colonial era. Various causes were, however, at work which, by modifying the attitude of the States towards religion, tended also to give greater freedom to the Catholic Church. The first of these was the rise of what may be called the secular theory of government, whose great exponent, Thomas Jefferson, had received his political opinions from the French philosophers of the eighteenth century. The state, according to this theory, is a purely political organism, and is not in any way concerned with religion; and this soon came to be the prevailing [Pg 441] sentiment in the Democratic party, whose acknowledged leader Jefferson was, which may explain why the great mass of the Catholics in this country have always voted with this party. Another cause that tended to bring about a separation of church and state was the rapidly-increasing number of sects, which rendered religious legislation more and more difficult, especially as several of these were opposed to any recognition of religion by the civil power. And to this we may add the growing religious indifference which caused large numbers of Americans to fall away from, or to be brought up outside of, all ecclesiastical organization. The desire, too, to encourage immigration—which sprang from interested motives, and also from a feeling, very powerful in the United States half a century ago, that this country is the refuge of all who are oppressed by the European tyrannies—predisposed Americans to look favorably upon the largest toleration of religious belief and practice. There is no question, then, but the Catholics of this country owe the freedom which they now enjoy to the operation of general laws, the necessary results of given social conditions, and not at all to the good-will or tolerant temper of American Protestants. Let us, however, be grateful for the boon, whencesoever derived. At the close of the war which secured our national independence and created the republic the Catholic Church found herself, for all practical purposes, unfettered and free to enter upon a field which to her, we may say, was new. At that time there were in the whole country not more than forty thousand Catholics and twenty-five priests. In all the land there was not a convent or a religious community. There was not a Catholic school; there was no bishop; the sacraments of confirmation and of Holy Orders had never been administered. The church was without organization, having for several years had no intercourse with its immediate head, the vicar-apostolic of London; it was without property, with the exception of some land in Maryland, which, through a variety of contrivances, had been saved from the rapacity of the colonial persecutors; and, surrounded by a bigoted Protestant population, ignorant of all the Catholic glories of the past, it was also without honor. But faith and hope, which with liberty ought to make all things possible, had not fled, and soon the budding promise of the future harvest lifted its timid head beneath the genial sun of a brighter heaven. The priests of Maryland and Pennsylvania addressed a letter to Pius VI., praying him to appoint a prefect-apostolic to preside over the church in the United States; and as the Holy See was already deliberating upon a step of this kind, Father Carroll was made superior of the American clergy, with power to administer the sacrament of confirmation. This was in 1784.

The priests, who at this time, for fear of wounding Protestant susceptibilities, thought it inexpedient to ask for a bishop, were now, after longer deliberation, persuaded that in this they had erred, and they therefore named a committee to present a petition to Rome, praying for the erection of an episcopal see in the United States. The Holy Father having signified his willingness to accede to this proposition, and it having been ascertained, too, that the government of this country would make no objection, they at once fixed upon Baltimore as the [Pg 442] most suitable location for the new see, and presented the name of Father Carroll as the most worthy to be its first occupant. The papal bulls were dated November 6, 1789, and upon their reception Father Carroll sailed for England, where he was consecrated on the 15th of August, the Feast of the Assumption, 1790.

Events were just then taking place in France which were of great moment to the young church on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. The French Revolution was getting ready to guillotine priests and to turn churches into barracks; and M. Emery, the Superior-General of the Order of Saint Sulpice, who was as far-seeing as he was fearless, entered into correspondence with Bishop Carroll, in England, with a view to open an ecclesiastical seminary in the United States. The offer was gladly accepted, and the year following (1791) M. Nagot organized the Theological Seminary of Baltimore, and in the same year the first Catholic college in the United States was opened at Georgetown, in the District of Columbia. In 1790 Father Charles Neale brought from Antwerp a community of Carmelite nuns, who established themselves near Port Tobacco, in Southern Maryland. This was the first convent of religious women founded in the United States, the house of Ursuline nuns in New Orleans having come into existence while Louisiana was still a French colony. A few years later a number of religious ladies adopted the rule of the Order of the Visitation and organized a convent in Georgetown; and in 1809 Mother Seton founded near Emmittsburg, in Maryland, the first community of Sisters of Charity in this country, just one year after Father Dubois, the future Bishop of New York, had opened Mt. St. Mary’s College. In 1805 Bishop Carroll reorganized the Society of Jesus, and in 1806 the Dominicans founded their first convent in the United States, at St. Rose, in Kentucky. Two years later episcopal sees were established at New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Bardstown, with an archiepiscopal centre at Baltimore.

In this way the church was preparing, as far as the slender means at her command would permit, to receive and care for the vast multitudes of Catholics who began to seek refuge in the United States from the persecutions and oppressions of the British and other European governments. But her resources were not equal to the urgency and magnitude of the occasion, and her history, during the half-century immediately following the close of the Revolutionary war, though full of examples of courage, zeal, and energy, shows her in the throes of a struggle which, whether it were for life or death, seemed doubtful.

Like an invading army, her children poured in a ceaseless stream into the enemy’s country, and, arrived upon the scene of action, they found themselves without leaders, without provisions, without means of defence or weapons of heavenly warfare. Far from their spiritual guides, in a strange land, without churches or schools, the very air of this new world seemed fatal to the faith of the early Catholic immigrants; and when, yielding to the rigors of the climate or the hardships of frontier life, they died in great numbers, their orphan children fell into the hands of Protestants and were lost to the church. Their descendants to-day are scattered [Pg 443] from Maine to Florida, from New York to California.

Bishop England, though inclined to exaggerate the losses of the church in this country, was certainly not mistaken in holding that during the period of which we speak, though there was an increase of congregations, there was yet a great falling away of Catholics from the faith in the United States.

Unfortunately, the want of priests and churches cannot with truth be said to have been the greatest evil, especially in the early years of the organization of the hierarchy. A spirit of insubordination existed both in the clergy and the laity. “Every day,” wrote Bishop Carroll, “furnishes me with new reflections, and almost every day produces new events to alarm my conscience and excite fresh solicitude at the prospect before me. You cannot conceive the trouble which I suffer already, and the still greater which I foresee from the medley of clerical characters, coming from different quarters and of various educations, and seeking employment here. I cannot avoid employing some of them, and soon they begin to create disturbances.” There were troubles and scandals in nearly all the larger cities, which in some instances were fomented by the priests themselves. The trustee system was a fruitful cause of disturbance, threatening at times to bring the greatest evils upon the church; especially as there seemed to be reason to fear lest the dissensions between the clergy and the laity might serve as a pretext for the intermeddling of the civil authority in ecclesiastical affairs. Except in the two or three colleges of which we have spoken, there was no Catholic education to be had; and for a long time the few elementary schools which were opened were of a very wretched kind. Indeed, we may say that it is only within the last quarter of a century that many of the bishops and priests of this country have come to realize the all-importance of Catholic education.

Another unavoidable evil was the mingling of various nationalities in the same church, giving rise to jealousies, and frequently to dissensions; and to this we may add that the very people to whom above all others the church in this country is indebted for its progress met with peculiar difficulties in the fulfilment of their God-given mission. This fact did not escape the keen eye of the first bishop of Charleston.

“England,” he says, “has unfortunately too well succeeded in linking contumely to their name [the Irish] in all her colonies; and though the United States have cast away the yoke under which she held them, many other causes have combined to continue against the Irish Catholic more or less to the present day the sneer of the supercilious, the contempt of the conceited, and the dull prosing of those who imagine themselves wise. That which more than a century of fashion has made habitual is not to be overcome in a year; and to any Irish Catholic who has dwelt in this country during one-fourth of the period of my sojourn it will be painfully evident that, although the evil is slowly diminishing, its influence is not confined to the American nor to the anti-Catholic. When a race is once degraded, however unjustly, it is a weakness of our nature that, however we may be identified with them upon some points, we are desirous of showing that the similitude is not complete. You may be an Irishman, but not a Catholic: you may be Catholics, but not Irish. It is clear you are not an Irish Catholic in either case! But when the great majority of Catholics in the United States were either Irish or of Irish descent, the force of the prejudice against the Irish Catholic bore against the Catholic religion, and the influence of this prejudice has been far [Pg 444] more mischievous than is generally believed.”[125]

We must not omit to add that many of the early missionaries spoke English very imperfectly and were but little acquainted with the habits and customs of the people among whom they were called to labor; while the five or six bishops of the country, separated by great distances from their priests, rarely saw them, and consequently were in a great measure unable to control or direct them in the exercise of the sacred ministry. The French missionaries, who in their own country had seen the most frightful crimes committed in the name of liberty and of republicanism, found it difficult to sympathize heartily with our democratic institutions; and from Ireland very few priests came, because the French Revolution had broken up the Continental Irish seminaries from which she drew her own supplies.

The purchase of Louisiana from France in 1803 added little or nothing to the strength of the church in the United States, since, owing to the wretched French ecclesiastical colonial policy, which did not permit the appointment of bishops, the Catholic population of that province, a large portion of whom were negro slaves, had been almost wholly neglected. What the state of the church was in Florida at the time of its cession to the United States may be inferred from the fact that in the whole province there was but one efficient priest, who at once withdrew to Cuba, and afterwards to Ireland, his native country. In the early years of the present century Protestant feeling in this country was much more earnest and self-confident than at present—in the simple days of camp-meetings and jerking revivals and childlike faith in the pope as Antichrist, and in priests and nuns as Satan’s chosen agents; when the preachers had the whole world of anti-popery commonplace wherein to disport themselves without fear of contradiction. The universal feeling of pity for those who doubted the supreme wisdom of our political institutions was bestowed with not less boundless liberality upon all who failed to perceive that American Protestantism was the fine essence and final outcome of all that is best and purest in religion. Catholic opinion, on the other hand, was feeble, unorganized, and thrown back upon itself by the overwhelming force of a public sentiment strong, fresh, and defiant. We were, moreover, still under the ban of English literature that for three hundred years had been busy travestying the history and doctrines of the church, to defend which was made a crime. There were but few Catholic books, and those to be had generally failed to catch the phases of religious thought through which American Protestants were passing. It was more than thirty years after the erection of the see of Baltimore that the Charleston Miscellany, which Archbishop Hughes called the first really Catholic newspaper ever published in this country, was founded; and fifty years after the consecration of Bishop Carroll there were but six Catholic journals in the United States.

Much else might be said in illustration of the difficulties with which the church has had to contend, and of the obstacles which she has had to overcome, in order to win the position which she now occupies in the great American republic. [Pg 445] Enough, however, has been said to show that it would be difficult to imagine surroundings which, while allowing her freedom of action, would be better suited to test her strength and vitality.

The 15th of next August eighty-six years will have passed since the consecration of Bishop Carroll, and to this period the organized efforts of the church to secure a position in this country are confined. The work then begun has not for a moment been intermitted. In the midst of losses, defeats, persecutions, anxieties, doubts, revilings, calumnies, the struggle has been still carried on. Each year with its sorrows brought also its joys. The progress, if at times imperceptible, was yet real. When in the early synods and councils of Baltimore were gathered the strong and true-hearted bishops and priests who have now gone to their rest, there was doubtless more of sadness than of exultation in their words as they spoke of their scattered and poorly-provided flocks, of the want of priests, of churches, of schools, of asylums, of the hardships of missionary life, and of labors that seemed in vain. Still, they sowed in faith, knowing that God it is who gives the increase. Like weary travellers who seem to make no headway, by looking back they saw how much they had advanced. New churches were built, new congregations were formed, new dioceses were organized. On some mountain-side or in deep wooded vale a cloister, a convent, a college, a seminary arose, one hardly knew how, and yet another and another, until these retreats of learning and virtue dotted the land. The elements of discord and disturbance within the church grew less and less active, the relations between priest and people became more intimate and cordial, the tone of Catholic feeling improved, ecclesiastical discipline was strengthened, and the self-respect of the Catholic body increased.

The danger, which at one time may have seemed imminent, of the estrangement of the laity from the clergy, disappeared little by little, and to-day in no country in the world are priest and people more strongly united than here. With the more thorough organization of dioceses and congregations parochial schools became practicable, and the great progress made in Catholic elementary education is one of the most significant and reassuring facts connected with the history of the church in the United States. The number of pupils in our parochial schools was, in 1873, 380,000, and to-day it is probably not much short of half a million, which, however, is even less than half of the Catholic school population of the entire country. But the work of building schools is still progressing, and the conviction of the indispensable necessity of religious education is growing with both priests and people; so that we may confidently hope that the time is not very remote when in this country Catholic children will be brought up only in Catholic schools. By establishing protectories, industrial schools, and asylums we are growing year after year better able to provide for our orphan children.

The want of priests, which has hitherto been one of the chief obstacles to the progress of the church, is now felt only in exceptional cases or in new or thinly-settled dioceses. A hundred years ago there were not more than twenty-five priests in the United States; in 1800 there were supposed [Pg 446] to be forty; in 1830 the number had risen to two hundred and thirty-two, and in 1848 to eight hundred and ninety. In ten years, from 1862 to 1872, the number of priests was more than doubled, having grown from two thousand three hundred and seventeen to four thousand eight hundred and nine. The lack of vocations to the priesthood among native Americans was formerly a subject of anxiety and also of frequent discussion among Catholics in this country; but now it is generally admitted, we think, that if proper care is taken in the education and training of our youths, a sufficient number of them will be found willing to devote themselves to the holy ministry.

In 1875 there were, according to the official statistics of the various dioceses, five thousand and seventy-four priests, twelve hundred and seventy-three ecclesiastical students, and six thousand five hundred and twenty-eight churches and chapels in the United States. There were also, at the same time, thirty-three theological seminaries, sixty-three colleges, five hundred and fifty-seven academies and select schools, sixteen hundred and forty-five parochial schools, two hundred and fourteen asylums, and ninety-six hospitals under the authority and control of the Catholic hierarchy of this country.

One hundred years ago there was not a Catholic ecclesiastical student, or theological seminary, or college, or academy, or parochial school, or asylum, or hospital from Maine to Georgia.

Father Badin, the first person who ever received Holy Orders in the United States, was ordained in the old cathedral of Baltimore on the 25th of May, 1793, just eighty-three years ago. It is now eighty-six years since Bishop Carroll was consecrated, and down to 1808 he remained the only Catholic bishop in the American Church, whose hierarchy is composed at present of one cardinal, ten archbishops, forty-six bishops, and eight vicars-apostolic.

In 1790 there was not a convent in the United States; in 1800 there were but two; to-day there are more than three hundred and fifty for women, and there are probably one hundred and thirty for men.

We may be permitted to refer also to the increase of the wealth of the church in this country, especially since this seems to be the cause of great uneasiness to the faithful and unselfish representatives of the sovereign people. The value of the property owned by the church in this country, as given in the census reports, was, in 1850, $9,256,758; in 1860, $26,774,119; and in 1870, $60,985,565. The ratio of increase from 1850 to 1860 was 189 per cent., and from 1860 to 1870 128 per cent.; while the aggregate wealth of the whole country during these same periods increased in the former decade only 125 per cent. and in the latter only 86 per cent. In 1850 the value of the church property of the Baptists, the Episcopalians, the Methodists, and the Presbyterians was greater than that of the Catholics, but in 1870 we had taken the second rank in point of wealth, and to-day we think there is no doubt but that we hold the first.

“Whatever causes,” says Mr. Abbott, in his recent article on The Catholic Peril in America, “may have contributed to this significant result, it is certain that among the chief of them must be reckoned exemption [Pg 447] from just taxation, extraordinary shrewdness of financial management, and fraudulent collusion with dishonest politicians.”

Those who know more of the history of the church in this country than can be learned from statistical reports, or articles in reviews, or cyclopædias are aware that there are no possessions in the United States more honestly acquired, or bought with money more hardly earned, than those of the Catholic Church; and that her present wealth, instead of being due to special financial shrewdness, has in many instances been got in spite of great and frequent financial blundering; while the bishops and priests of America, with here and there an exception, have neither had nor sought to have any political influence, nor would they, if disposed to meddle with partisan politics, meet with any encouragement from the Catholic people. Their position with regard to the question of education is the result of purely conscientious and religious motives; and while claiming for Catholics the right to give to their children the benefit of religious training, they have everywhere and repeatedly given the most convincing proofs of their sincere desire to concede to all others the fullest liberty in this as in other matters; and though they cannot approve of that feature in the common-school system which excludes all teaching of doctrinal religion, they have never thought of pretending that those to whom it does commend itself should not be permitted to try the experiment of a purely secular education, provided they respect in others the freedom of conscience which is now a part of the organic law of the land.

With very few exceptions, Catholics have, throughout the whole country, been rigidly excluded from all the higher political offices; though now, unfortunately, this can hardly be considered a grievance, since the general corruption and unworthiness of public life have caused the more respectable class of American citizens to shrink from the coarseness and vulgarity of our partisan contests. On the other hand, those nominal Catholics who acquire influence in what are called “ward politics” are generally very much like other politicians, eager to serve God and the country whenever it puts money in their purse. What political reasons may have determined the great body of Catholic voters in this country to prefer the Democratic to the Whig, and later to the Republican, party, we know not; but we are very sure that nothing could be more unfounded than to imagine that the welfare or progress of the church can in any way be connected with the success of Democratic partisanism. As a religious body we have nothing to hope from either or any party. We ask nothing but the liberty which with us is considered the inalienable heritage of all Christian believers; and for the rest, we know that a politician doing a good deed is more to be shunned than an enemy plotting evil.

The property of the Catholic Church in the United States has not been exempted from taxation, except under general laws which applied equally to that of all other religious denominations; and though we can imagine nothing more barbarous, more hurtful to the progress of the national architecture and to the general æsthetic culture of the people, than a change in the policy which has hitherto prevailed, not in this country alone, but in all the civilized states of the world; nevertheless, if those who hold that religion [Pg 448] has no social value succeed in revolutionizing legislation on this subject, the Catholics will not be less prepared than their neighbors to abide the issue.

A more interesting study than the wealth of the church is the growth of the Catholic population in the United States, though, in the absence of reliable or complete statistics on this subject, we are not able to give an entirely satisfactory or exact statement of the facts. The “number of sittings,” to use the phrase of the official reports, given in the United States Census, is of scarcely any assistance in determining the religious statistics of the country. The number of Protestant church sittings, for instance, was in 1870 19,674,548, whereas the membership of all the Protestant sects of the country was only about 7,000,000; and it is well known that, while in most Protestant churches many seats are usually unoccupied during religious service, in the Catholic churches the same seat is frequently filled by three, or four, or even five different persons, who take it in succession at the various Masses.

Ninety-one years ago Father Carroll set down the Catholic population of the United States at twenty-five thousand, and he may have fallen short of the real number by about ten thousand. In 1808, when episcopal sees were placed at Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Bardstown, the Catholic population had increased to about one hundred and fifty thousand. In 1832 Bishop England estimated the Catholics of the United States at half a million; but in 1836, after having given the subject greater attention, he thought there could not be less than a million and a quarter. Both these estimates, however, were mere surmises; for Bishop England, who always exaggerated the losses of the church in this country, not finding it possible to get the data for a well-founded opinion as to the Catholic population, was left to conjecture or to arguments based upon premises which, to say the least, were themselves unproven. The editors of the Metropolitan Catholic Almanac for 1848, basing their calculations upon the very satisfactory returns which they had received from the thirty dioceses then existing in the United States, set down our Catholic population at 1,190,700, and this is probably the nearest approach which we can make to the number of Catholics in this country at the time the great Irish famine gave a new impulse to emigration to America. From 1848 down to the present day the increase of the Catholic population has been very rapid, it having risen in a period of twenty-eight years from a little over a million to nearly seven millions. The third revised edition of Schem’s Statistics of the World for 1875 gives 6,000,000 as the Catholic population of the United States, and the American Annual Cyclopædia for 1875 reckons it as more than 6,000,000; and from a careful consideration of the data, which, however, are still imperfect, we think it is at present probably not less than 7,000,000. This remarkable growth of the church here during the last thirty years must be attributed to various causes, by far the most important of which is beyond all doubt the vast immigration from Ireland; to which, indeed, we must also chiefly ascribe the progress of the church during this century in all other countries throughout the world in which the English language is spoken. No other people could have done for the Catholic [Pg 449] faith in the United States what the Irish people have done. Their unalterable attachment to their priests, their deep Catholic instincts, which no combination of circumstances has ever been able to bring into conflict with their love of country; the unworldly and spiritual temper of the national character; their indifference to ridicule and contempt; and their unfailing generosity—all fitted them for the work which was to be done here, and enabled them, in spite of the strong prejudices against their race which Americans had inherited from England, to accomplish what would not have been accomplished by Italian, French, or German Catholics. Another cause of the more rapid growth of the church during the last quarter of a century may be found in the more thorough organization of dioceses, congregations, and schools, by which we are better able to shield our people from unhealthy influences, and thus year after year to diminish our losses; while the increasing number of converts to the faith helps to swell the Catholic ranks. Of 22,209 persons who were confirmed in the diocese of Baltimore from 1864 to 1868, 2,752, or more than 12 per cent., were converts; and our converts are generally from the more intelligent classes of Americans. The efforts to arrest the progress of the church, which now for nearly half a century have assumed a kind of periodicity, may be placed among the causes which have added to her strength. These attempts are made in open violation of the religious and political principles which are the special boast of all Americans, and the only arguments which can be adduced to justify them are drawn from fear or hatred. Whenever we have been made the victims of lawlessness or fraud, as in the burning of the Charlestown convent and the churches of Philadelphia, or in the spreading “Awful Disclosures” throughout the land, the sympathies of generous and honest men have been attracted to us. And when Protestant bigotry has made an alliance with a political party in order to compass our ruin, it has merely succeeded in forcing the opposing party to take up throughout the whole country the defence of the Catholics. Thus during the brief day of the “Know-nothing” conspiracy large numbers of Protestants, for the first time since the Reformation, were led to examine into the history of the church, with a view to defend her against the traditional objections of Protestantism itself. In fact, in a country which looks with equally tolerant complacency upon every form of belief or unbelief from Atheism to Voudooism, from the Joss-House of the Chinaman to the Mormon Tabernacle and breeding caravansary of free-love, to imagine that there can be either decent or reasonable motives for exciting to persecution of the Catholic Church is sheer madness; nor can we think it less absurd to suppose that the good sense and justice of the American people will allow them to commit themselves to a policy as inconsistent as it would be outrageous.

However this may be, there can be no doubt but the repeated and unprovoked attacks made upon the Catholics of the United States by fanatics and demagogues have helped to increase their union and earnestness; and this leads us away from the growth of the church in her external organization to the consideration of the development of her spiritual and intellectual life. [Pg 450] And here we are at once struck by the similarity between her progress and that of the country itself, which has been diffusive at the expense of concentration and thoroughness. Nevertheless, no attentive observer can fail to be struck by the intense and earnest religious spirit by which the great body of the Catholics of the United States are animated, as well as the readiness with which they co-operate with their priests in promoting the interests of religion. Nowhere do we find greater eagerness for instruction in the truths of the faith, or greater willingness to make sacrifices in order to give to the young a religious education, than among the Catholics of this country. Our priests are, as a body, laborious, self-sacrificing, and disinterested, and are honestly struggling to make themselves worthy of the great mission which God has given them in America.

Our position in this country hitherto has turned the thoughts of our best minds to polemical and controversial writing, which, though useful and even necessary, has only a temporary value, since it is addressed primarily to objections and phases of belief which owe their special significance to transitory conditions of society and opinion. Controversies between Catholics and Protestants which forty years ago attracted general attention and produced considerable impression, would now pass unnoticed; for the simple reason that Americans, in the confusion of sects and religious opinions, have come to realize that Protestantism has no doctrinal basis, and is left to trust exclusively to religious sentiment. Dogmatic Protestantism is of the past, and the most popular preachers are those who appeal most skilfully to the religious instincts without requiring the acceptance of any religious beliefs. Most of our best writers have been men whose arduous labors left them but little time for study or literary composition, and their works frequently bear the marks of hasty performance; but they will nevertheless not suffer from comparison with the religious writings of American Protestants. The ablest man who has devoted himself to the discussion of religion and philosophy, or probably any other subject, in the United States during the last hundred years is Dr. Brownson, all of whose best thoughts have been given to the elucidation of Catholic truth; and though there was something wanting to make him either a great philosopher or a great theologian, or even a perfect master of style, we know of no other American of whom this may not also be justly said; unless, perhaps, we may consider Prescott, Hawthorne, or Irving worthy of the last of these titles. And though we Catholics have no man who is able to take up the pen which has just fallen from the hand of Dr. Brownson, none who have the power which once belonged to England and Hughes, we are in this not more unfortunate than our country, which no longer finds men like Adams or Jefferson to represent not unworthily its supreme dignity; nor any like Webster, Clay, or Calhoun, whose minds were as lofty as their honor was pure, to lend the authority of wisdom and eloquence to the deliberations of a great people.

During the hundred years of our independent life the external development of the church, like that of the nation, has been so rapid that all individual energies have to a [Pg 451] greater or less degree been drawn to help on this growth. Another century, bringing other circumstances, with them will bring the opportunity and the duty of other work. A more thorough organization must be given to our educational system; Catholic universities mast be created which in time will grow to be intellectual centres in which the best minds of the church in this country may receive the culture and training that will enable them to work in harmony for the furtherance of Catholic ends; a more vigorous and independent press, one not weakened by want or depraved by human respect or regard for persons, must be brought into existence. We must prepare ourselves to enter more fully into the public life of the country; to throw the light of Catholic thought upon each new phase of opinion or belief as it rises; to grapple more effectively with the great moral evils which threaten at once the life of the nation and of the church. All this and much else we have to do, if our God-given mission is to be fulfilled.

And now we will crave the indulgence of our readers while we conclude with a brief reference to what we conceive to be the office which the Catholic Church is destined to fulfil in behalf of the American state and civilization.

De Tocqueville, in his thoughtful and singularly judicious treatise on American institutions, makes the following very just remarks:

“I think the Catholic religion has been falsely looked upon as the enemy of democracy. On the contrary, Catholicism, among the various sects of Christians, seems to me to be one of the most favorable to the equality of social conditions. The religious community in the Catholic Church is composed of but two elements—the priest and the people. The priest alone is lifted above his flock, and all below him are equals. In matters of doctrine the Catholic faith places all human capacities upon the same level; it subjects the wise and the ignorant, the man of genius and the vulgar crowd, to the details of the same creed; it imposes the same observances upon the rich and the poor; it inflicts the same austerities upon the powerful and the weak; it enters into no compromise with mortal man, but reducing the whole human race to the same standard, it confounds all the distinctions of society at the foot of the same altar, even as they are confounded in the sight of God. If Catholicism predisposes the faithful to obedience, it certainly does not prepare them for inequality; but the contrary may be said of Protestantism, which generally tends to make men independent more than to render them equal.… But no sooner is the priesthood entirely separated from the government, as is the case in the United States, than it is found that no class of men are naturally more disposed than the Catholics to transfuse the doctrine of the equality of conditions into political institutions”[126]

The generous sentiments which two centuries and a half ago led the Catholics of Maryland to become the pioneers of religious liberty in the New World, are still warm in the hearts of the Catholic people of the United States. We have even here been the victims of persecution, and it is not impossible that similar trials may await us in the future; but we have the most profound conviction that, even though we should grow to be nine-tenths of the population of this country, we shall never prove false to the principle of religious liberty, which, to the Catholics of the United States, at least, is sacred and inviolable. For our own part, we should turn with unutterable loathing from the man who could think that any other course could ever be either just or honorable.

The Catholics of this republic are [Pg 452] deeply impressed with the inviolability of the rights of the individual. We believe that the man is more than the citizen; that when the state tramples upon the God-given liberty of the most wretched beggar, the consciences of all are violated; that it is its duty to govern as little as possible, and rather to suffer a greater good to go undone than to do even a slight wrong in order to accomplish it. For this reason we believe that when the state assumed the right to control education, it took the first step away from the true American and Christian theory of government back towards the old pagan doctrine of state-absolutism. Though we uphold the rights of the individual, we are not the less strong in our advocacy of the claims of authority. In fact, the almost unbounded individual liberty which our American social and political order allows would fatally lead to anarchy, if not checked by some great and sacred authority; and this safeguard can be found only in the Catholic Church, which is the greatest school of respect the world has ever seen. The church, by her power to inspire faith, reverence, and obedience, will introduce into our national life and character elements of refinement and culture which will temper the harshness and recklessness of our republican manners. By her conservative and unitive force she will weld into stronger union the heterogeneous populations and widely-separated parts of our vast country. The Catholics were the only religious body in the United States not torn asunder by sectional strife during our civil war, and we are persuaded that, as our numbers grow and our influence increases, we are destined to become more and more the strong bond to hold in indissoluble union the great American family of States. The divisions and dissensions of Protestantism have a tendency to prepare the public mind to contemplate without alarm or indignation like divisions and dissensions in the state; and all who love the country and desire that it remain one and united for ages must look with pleasure upon the growth of a religion which, while maintaining the unity of its own world-wide kingdom, inspires those who are guided by its teachings with a horror of political dissensions and divisions.

[125] Bishop England’s works, vol. iii. p. 233.

[126] Democracy in America, vol. i. p. 305.

[Pg 453]

A FRENCHMAN’S VIEW OF IT.[127]

M. Claudio Jannet has recently sent forth from the little town of Aix, in Provence, a work on the United States of the present day which may be both interesting and profitable to American readers. It does not appear that M. Jannet has visited the country whose moral, social, and political condition he sets himself to describe. His information has been gathered from books, pamphlets, and periodicals; his conclusions are the result of deliberation rather than the hasty observations of a tourist, and they are all the more valuable because they are not distorted by the usual blunders and prejudices which obstruct the vision of the average Frenchman in America. The European traveller, particularly the French traveller, finds many things in our country to shock his prejudices and offend his tastes. The discomforts of the journey, the harshness of the climate, the extravagance of living, the imperfections of our domestic economy, the general crudeness of our new and incomplete civilization, the press and hurry of business, the lack of æsthetic culture, the vulgarity of popular amusements—all these things put him out of the humor to be just. He dislikes the surface aspects of American life, and, with the best disposition in the world, he commonly fails to see what lies underneath. He fills his note-book with dyspeptic comments, and when he goes home he writes a volume of blunders, and all the Americans who read it laugh at it. Take, however, a conscientious Frenchman of sober and reflective turn of mind, shut him up in his own study, supply him with an abundance of the right kind of American books and newspapers, let him ponder over his subject at leisure in the midst of his accustomed comforts, and the chances are that he will write a very good essay on the condition of this country, and tell a great many wholesome truths which we ourselves hardly suspect.

M. Jannet’s book has been evolved in this way. His industry in the collection of materials seems to have been remarkable; and if his judgment has not always kept pace with it, the instances in which he has been misled are fewer than we should have expected. For most of his mistakes he can show the excuse of an American authority. It does not become us, therefore, to find too much fault with him. We are rather disposed to overlook errors in the statement of particular facts, and consider the really valuable and novel points in his essay, with the moral which he wishes us to draw from it. We shall find in what he says abundant food for reflection, even when we believe him to be wrong.

He sets out with an attempt to show that the spirit of revolution has been waging incessant war for nearly a hundred years upon “the work of Washington,” and that the Constitution, as it was devised by [Pg 454] the wise and conservative party represented by our first President, has been almost torn to shreds, and is destined to destruction by the aggressions of radicalism. M. Jannet’s references to “the school of Washington” seem rather odd to an American reader. We doubt whether there ever was a distinct political school to which that name could be properly applied; and it is not at all clear that there have been two well-defined and antagonistic political principles in conflict since the very foundation of the government, as Ormuzd and Ahriman, the spirit of good and the spirit of evil, waged perpetual warfare, in the Zoroastrian system, for the dominion of the world. The philosophical historian is fond of tracing in the revolutions of states and the development of political theories the steady growth of some fixed principle of action. But it is a specious philosophy which takes no account of accidents. M. Jannet has made the mistake of going too deep, and overlooking what lies right on the surface. He sees the spirit of radicalism, fostered by the influx of communistic and infidel immigrants from Europe, attacking the conservative safeguards originally established in our federal and State constitutions, assailing the rights of the States, extending the suffrage, sweeping the country into the vortex of uncontrolled democracy. “Popular sovereignty” is the watchword of this radical movement. “The doctrine of popular sovereignty,” says M. Jannet, “is based upon the idea that man is independent, and that consequently there can be no authority over him except with his own consent. This principle established, there can no longer be any question of limiting the suffrage by conditions of capacity, of fitness, or of the representation of interests, since sovereignty is an attribute of the voter in his quality as a man. The exclusion of women and minors from the polls is only an abuse, a relic of old prejudices. Thus the most advanced party already places female suffrage at the head of its programme, and perhaps it will some day be established in the United States. The people, being sovereign by nature, cannot be checked in its will by any custom, any tradition, any respect for acquired rights. Whatever it wills is just and reasonable by the mere fact that it so wills. There can be no permanent constitution for the country; the constitution can be only what the people wills, or is thought to will, for the time being.” About the year 1850, according to our author, the heresy of “popular sovereignty,” otherwise the religion of revolution, obtained full headway, and the radical party, making skilful use of the anti-slavery sentiment which had hitherto been cultivated only by a small band of eccentric philanthropists, captured the masses of well-meaning, unreflecting voters. Liberty and emancipation were their watchwords; but their real purpose was only the supremacy of the mob. Slavery was the abuse which they pretended to attack, but they only feigned a horror for it in order to win over the small but zealous party of sincere abolitionists; their actual object was to abolish the federal Union with its limited powers, and set up a unitary democracy based upon the despotism of universal suffrage. “From the day when this party came into power by the election of Lincoln,” says M. Jannet, “nothing remained for the South but to take up arms to [Pg 455] protect its rights against the projects already disclosed.” And he adds that the radical movement towards pure democracy “alone can explain the unheard-of ferocity with which the Northern armies fought, and the odious persecution which followed their triumph, and which still lasts, ten years afterwards.”

Thus the anti-slavery agitation was only an incident—and, indeed, M. Jannet seems not to regard it as a very important one—in the long, uninterrupted, deplorable decline of America from a moderately conservative federal republic to the despotism of an ignorant, centralized democracy. It can hardly be necessary to point out to American readers the serious mistake in M. Jannet’s theory. It is useless to look beyond slavery for an explanation of the changes wrought within the past fifteen years in the character of the American government. Mr. Seward was right when he declared that there was an irrepressible conflict between slavery and freedom. It had been gathering force for years when it broke into war in 1861; it had been the original cause of nearly all the encroachments upon the rights of the States which preceded the Rebellion, and it had made the very words “State rights” odious to a vast majority of the Northern people. The plain truth is that the only State right which the conservative and aristocratic party cared about maintaining was the right to hold human beings in bondage, and buy and sell them like cattle. They chose to identify a political theory with a hateful social institution, and it was only natural that, when the end came, theory and institution should go down together. The evil influence of slavery, however, has survived the extinction of slavery itself. We must not forget that the active men of 1876 were boys in the exciting period just before the war, and their political creed took shape at a time when the doctrine of State rights was the defence of the slave-driver and the secessionist, and the federal power was the safeguard of freedom and union. The ideas impressed upon them during the years of conflict have remained during the years of peace, and have affected in a most serious manner the fortunes of the country during the period of reconstruction. For four years, so crowded with great historical changes that they may be counted as equivalent to nearly a whole generation of uneventful peace, the nation was taught by the necessity of war to believe that the reserved rights of the States must yield to the paramount necessity of preserving the Union, and ultimately of destroying slavery for the sake of union. It would be unfair to say that the letter of the Constitution fell into contempt, but there was a general agreement that constitutions, to be worth anything, must be elastic instruments, stretched to cover unforeseen emergencies. Naturally, when the war was over we did not return at once to the old ideas. In the provisions for saving the fruits of the contest, guarding against fresh attempts at disunion, and protecting the emancipated race in its newly-acquired liberties, the despotic and absolute spirit of the war still prevailed. The federal government which had put down the rebellion was called upon to secure its victory. So for the next ten years we saw a constant assumption at Washington of powers which no Congress or President would have dreamed of asserting a generation [Pg 456] ago. The “reconstructed States” became little more than vassal provinces, practically ruled at the seat of the federal government. In some cases, even after the military governors had disappeared and the States had been restored to representation in Congress, and nominally to their full powers of self-administration, we have seen soldiers sent from Washington to decide local election contests, legislatures dispersed at the point of the federal bayonet, and the verdict of the ballot rudely set aside by the President’s despotic order. The general course of legislation for the Southern States at Washington was inspired by the belief that the whole Confederacy was a hot-bed of insurrection and crime. Special laws were enacted to prevent the “rebel element” from acquiring that predominance in the Southern communities which naturally belonged to it, and to lift up the negroes to a political power to which they were not entitled by their numbers, and for which they were not qualified by character or education. The control of elections was taken away from the States by the Enforcement laws, and the ordinary police duties of preserving the peace were usurped by federal appointees under a strained interpretation of the statutes. An incident reported in Alabama during the political campaign of 1874 illustrates the extreme length to which federal interference was carried, and the ingenuity with which it was employed for merely partisan purposes. A Republican politician had been murdered in August of that year, and the perpetrators of the deed had not been discovered. The guilt was charged, however, upon several active Democrats, and just before the election they were arrested by a federal marshal and committed for trial. Of course there was no law which gave the federal authorities cognizance of murder, and no indictment for that offence could be found in a federal court; but it was desirable that the arrests should be made for political effect, and the accused were consequently indicted under a clause of the Enforcement law for “conspiracy to prevent a citizen from voting “—a conspiracy to prevent his voting in November by killing him in August! The arrest served its purpose, and it is hardly necessary to say that the case never was tried.

But of late the progress of the country towards centralization has been sensibly checked. The abuses of the past few years have been followed by a popular reaction. The temper of the South is better understood. The North begins to see the dangers of the course it has been following, and at the same time to feel ashamed of its injustice. And more than all else, the Supreme Court of the United States, in two able decisions, sweeps away a great mass of the most mischievous Enforcement legislation, and redefines the almost obliterated boundaries of State and federal authority. The judgment of the court in the Grant Parish and Kentucky cases marks an era in our constitutional history. It neutralizes a great deal of the evil consequences of the war period, and can hardly fail of a most salutary effect upon future legislation. When he has read it, even M. Jannet, perhaps, will take a more cheerful view of our condition.

But let us leave the historical part of M. Jannet’s book, and look at the picture which he draws of our actual condition. We do not purpose to criticise it. We shall let our readers correct errors for themselves, as they can easily do, [Pg 457] while we content ourselves with showing them how the political and social aspects of our country impress an intelligent foreign student. M. Jannet is deceived sometimes; he takes too seriously the satire of “the American humorist Edgar Poë,” and the mixture of sarcasm and burlesque which he cites from “The gilded age by Mark Twain and Dudley”; but upon the whole he tells the sober truth. He gives a pretty exact account of our electoral system, and especially of our system of nominations, which practically prevents the people from voting for anybody except the favorites of a little knot of professional politicians assembled in a committee or ward meeting. As political struggles in the United States, he says, are not for the triumph of principles, but only for the possession of power, politics has naturally become debased, high-minded citizens have insensibly become disgusted with it, and at the same time the rising flood of universal suffrage has driven the wealthy classes out of political life. Between 1824 and 1840 the party organizations were definitively settled, and since then politics has been the exclusive appanage of politicians by profession. M. Jannet gives a very unpleasant sketch of this class of persons, and describes the machinery of manipulating conventions and setting up candidates with considerable minuteness and accuracy. Nor is it possible for us to read without mortification his account of the manner in which the professional politicians carry on the government:

“Such institutions leave the nation completely disarmed against corruption. No one, either in the executive or the legislative branch, has any interest in stopping it. We shall even see that, under the political customs of the country, the representatives of power in every grade have a manifest interest in tolerating it.… Before the presidential election the politicians who manage the conventions of the party make careful bargains with their candidate for the distribution of the offices. The President, when he desires a re-election, has here in the same manner a powerful motive of action; all the federal employees fight for him with ardor and by every possible means, for the retention of their places depends upon his triumph. It is easy to see how party spirit is inflamed by the prospect of so much booty in case of success. The evils of this system have become more striking as the number of federal employees has increased. Given the prevalence of dishonesty and love of money, it is evident that office-holders who can retain their places only a few years must make use of the time to enrich themselves.… But corruption is not confined to the employees, properly speaking; it extends in a large measure even to the representatives of the nation. The President nominates his cabinet, subject to the confirmation of the Senate. But in the party conventions the President’s choice is fixed in advance. Arrangements of the same kind are made with the senators; for their approval is necessary for a thousand federal appointments, and naturally for the most important. The result of this state of things is that the Senate which, by the Constitution is a directing political body without whose co-operation it is impossible for the President to carry on the government, becomes a theatre of incessant intrigue and corruption.”

We prefer not to follow M. Jannet in his brief recital of the Crédit Mobilier scandal, the Fremont affair, the Pacific Mail bribery, the operations of the Tweed and Erie Rings, the boldness of the lobby, the power of the railway corporations in politics, the pressure of enormous debts and taxes as the inevitable consequence of legislative venality, and the degradation of the judicial office. It is a horrible account, but it is not exaggerated. [Pg 458] For all his statements—save, of course, some mistakes of secondary importance—M. Jannet can show good American authority.

In the face of all this disorder and corruption the best citizens, disgusted with political life, hold themselves every year more and more strictly aloof from it.

“Men of property, merchants, and manufacturers are injured by the mismanagement of affairs, and deplore it; but each one finds it for his individual advantage not to lose his time in trying to correct public evils. The country is still rich enough to bear the waste and rascality of a government which calls itself popular.… Even in these days there are certain influences of religion, race, or locality which sometimes bring honest and capable men into the local political assemblies; but the ruling trait of American democracy is nevertheless the ostracism of the upper classes and of eminent men. The consequence is that these classes become more and more dissatisfied with democratic institutions, and cast wistful eyes towards the constitutional government, in reality more free than theirs, which Great Britain and her colonies enjoy. From De Tocqueville and Ampère to Duvergier de Hauranne and Hepworth Dixon, all observers have been struck by this sentiment, not in general openly expressed, but sufficiently shown by the considerable number of distinguished Americans who pass the greater part of their lives out of the country.”

In this there is just a modicum of truth—less now, perhaps, than there was when it was written; for there is to-day an unmistakable tendency among our best citizens to resume that share in the management of public affairs from which they have too long suffered themselves to be excluded. But M. Jannet follows Hepworth Dixon in his stupendously absurd remarks on the “moral emigration” of the best men of America, and finds it a proof of distaste for democratic institutions that Washington Irving should have rambled about the Alhambra, Bancroft accepted the mission to England, and Hawthorne the consulate at Liverpool; that Motley should have read the archives of the Dutch Republic at the Hague, Power and Story studied among the monuments of Italy, and Longfellow amused himself with the “Golden Legend” when he might have found so many heroic subjects at home! We are astonished that M. Jannet, who has certainly read a great many American books, should not have perceived the dense ignorance which distinguishes this particular portion of Dixon’s New America perhaps above the rest of the book. M. Jannet has only to pause and reflect for a moment, and he will not accuse Diedrich Knickerbocker and the author of the Life of Washington and Rip van Winkle of neglecting his own country to lounge in Granada, nor blame the poet of Cambridge because he rhymed the “Golden Legend” as well as the story of Evangeline and Miles Standish. Hawthorne too, the most thoroughly national of American romancers, and Bancroft, who has spent a lifetime in the study of American history! Is it also to Mr. Hepworth Dixon that M. Jannet is indebted for the discovery stated in the following passage?

“Americans, even those who at heart are most disgusted with democracy, have a passionate love of their country, and look upon themselves as the first nation of the world. This patriotism, despite its exaggerations, is a great power for the country. Without precisely desiring the establishment of a constitutional monarchy, many enlightened Americans aspire to a stronger and more stable government under a republican form. I have been struck, in the intercourse that I have had with many of them, by the secret [Pg 459] admiration with which the rule of Napoleon III. in its day inspired them. This rule, democratic in its origin, revolutionary in its principle, but favorable to the preservation of material order and the acquisition of wealth, agreed very well with their desire for additional security, and at the same time with their lack of principles. Sentiments of this kind—and they are wide-spread—are one of the greatest dangers that threaten American society.”

Of course the corruption which disgraces politics appears likewise in the private life of the people. The constant aim of the Yankee, says M. Jannet, is to make money.

“The love of money seizes the young man from the time of his adolescence, and does not let the old man allow repose to the evening of his life. Except in the old slave States, there is no class of people of leisure in America. From top to bottom of the ladder, all society is a prey to devouring activity. Its economical results are considerable; the rapid growth of the nation and its prodigious development in all the arts of material well-being are the fruits of this ardent labor which knows no rest. If the Americans love money, it is not for the sake of mere acquisition, but in order that they may give themselves up to the enjoyment of luxuries and launch into new speculations. Harpagon is a type which does not exist among them. Indeed, they generally lack those habits of patient economy which constitute the strength and the virtue of our old races of peasants and bourgeois. Their readiness to spend and their generosity in case of need equal their appetite for gain. One who fails to take account of this characteristic restlessness of American life will get but an imperfect idea of the private habits and public institutions of the people. In no country are ‘honors’ more eagerly sought after or is democratic vanity more freely indulged; but it must be confessed that ‘honor’ is interpreted among Americans, or at least among Yankees, in quite a different sense from that which is accepted in Europe. No man plumes himself upon disinterestedness. Magistrates, generals, statesmen, accept subscriptions of jingling dollars as testimonials of public esteem. It is alike in dollars that they pay, among the Yankees, for injuries and insults. This universal thirst for gold has perhaps the good effect of softening political asperities, at least so long as a boundless field remains open for work and speculation. The unbridled love of money, in fact, lowers all men to the same level, and stifles alike fierce fanaticisms and generous passions. The same ardor in the pursuit of wealth soon scatters the family. Aged parents, home, or the paternal acres, nothing can restrain those who are ruled by this passion alone. There is no attempt, as there is with us, to conceal the love of money. ‘The almighty dollar!’ cry the Americans with admiration. A new-comer is presented to them. ‘How much is this man worth?’ they ask, instead of inquiring, as we should do, about his antecedents and his merit. Everything is overlooked for a rich man, and, except in a few chosen circles, a bankruptcy counts for nothing when fortune smiles again. Nowhere is merit valued without money. Hence the inferiority of American literature and art; hence the commercial customs that prevail in professions which we style liberal. Physicians, counsellors at-law, even ministers of the Gospel (we speak, be it understood, only of the Protestant sects), advertise as freely as the commonest working-man. Poverty is held in contempt to a degree of which our older society, formed in the school of Catholicity and chivalry, can have no idea. In spite of universal suffrage and absolute political equality, there is no country in which so great a gulf has been placed between the rich and the poor. This superficially democratic society would not live in peace two days, if it were not that the poor man can raise himself with a little trouble to comfort, if not to fortune. But when the natural riches of the country become less abundant and the demand for labor abates, will not these hard social customs become a cause of formidable antagonism? Distant as this future may still appear, the question is one which no serious observer can well avoid asking.

“The pursuit of wealth is the main-spring of material progress, but when it is carried to an extreme it misses the very object of its pursuit. The excessive love of money has developed in the United States a financial dishonesty [Pg 460] which stains the national character and causes a great loss of the public property. Who has not heard of the great fires which so often destroy entire quarters of the large cities? They are often kindled by individuals who wish to conceal their bankruptcy or to get the amount of their insurance. These crimes affect a multitude of innocent persons and cause an increase in the rates of insurance; in short, it is the nation at large which pays for such frauds by an increase in the cost of all its products. It is the same thing with failures. They entail no dishonor, as they do in France; that is why they are so many.…

“The causes of this perversion of the moral sense are complex. Amid the almost infinite subdivision of Protestant sects there is no longer any religious teaching which addresses itself with authority to the mass of the nation. We do not take sufficient account of what Catholicism is doing in our country to maintain the fundamental ideas of morality even among men who during their lives remain strangers to its practices. The corruption of the public authorities and the inefficient administration of justice have also a great influence.… Moreover, we must take into consideration the very mixed character of the population. Even the native Americans are incessantly in motion. They transfer themselves from one end of the country to the other for the slightest of reasons, and thus they escape the salutary control of local opinion which, among stable populations, is one of the most powerful moral influences. The establishment of joint-stock companies for financial and commercial enterprises—an innovation which dates from about fifty years ago—has done a great deal to weaken the sentiment of responsibility.… If certain companies are honestly administered, a great number are made the occasion of shameless frauds. We see audacious speculators buying up a majority of the stock in order to make secret issues of new shares. This operation is called ‘stock-watering.’ It is estimated that between July 1, 1867, and May 1, 1869, twenty-eight railway companies increased their capital from $287,000,000 to $400,000,000. These shares only serve for stock-gambling, and woe to those who have them left on their hands! ‘It would appear,’ says an American writer, ‘that the railroad speculators have three objects in view: First, to get as much as possible of the public lands; experience has proved that the more they ask the more they will obtain, and that the ease with which Congress is induced to favor their projects is proportioned to the liberality with which they distribute funds for corruption. Secondly, to raise in Europe as large a loan as possible, no matter at what rates. Thirdly, when they have got all the land and all the money they can, and have attracted all the immigration from Germany they can hope for, they sell the railroad, at whatever loss to the bondholders, and make a little ring of members of the company its sole proprietors!’ The great number of these immoral speculations, the adventurous character of commerce, and the senseless luxury in which all business men indulge bring on periodically grave financial crises of which Europe feels only the after effects. Malversation is common even in institutions which have the best reasons to be free from it. Enormous defalcations are daily committed in the administration of charitable works, neutralizing in a great measure the generosity with which the Americans have endowed them.”

Alas! it is impossible to deny that these statements are substantially true. The discoveries of corruption in public life which have recently produced so much political excitement surprise nobody who has studied American society. This is a “representative” democracy; and though certain well-understood causes, which it would be out of place to discuss here, have long been at work driving the highest class of our citizens out of public employment, it is undeniable that as a general rule the morality of men in office is about on a level with that of the voters who put them there. When peculation and swindling become common in commerce, and a man who makes money is always treated with respect until he goes to the penitentiary, it is almost inevitable that there should be bribery in the cabinet [Pg 461] and conspiracy in the antechambers of the White House. The stream cannot rise higher than its source.

But if we wish to understand the real condition of the American people, we must study it in the nurseries of all public virtue—the home, the school, and the church. With the first of these the woman question has a most intimate connection. De Tocqueville said that Americans did not praise women much, but daily showed their respect for them. Now, says M. Jannet, things have sadly changed. We have ceased to respect women, and we are always talking about their rights. There is a considerable party among us which not only insists upon the right of women to vote and hold office, but would make of them lawyers, physicians, and ministers of the Gospel, and give them the direction of industrial and commercial enterprises precisely as if they were men. M. Jannet confesses that American women, on the whole, show very little eagerness to play the new rôle which the modern social reformers have created for them; but the agitation, if it produces no practical results, has a very unhappy influence upon the female mind, and a bad effect upon female education. How fearfully the family relation has been impaired in America all intelligent observers know. The laxity and confusion of the marriage laws; the shocking frequency of divorce; the publicity given to scandalous and indecent investigations; the prevalence of the crime of infanticide, against which the press, the pulpit, and the medical profession have long exclaimed in horror; the growing inability or unwillingness of American women to bear the burden of maternity; the rapid decay of the American element in the population through the excessive proportion of deaths to births; the breaking up of homes; the license allowed to the young of both sexes—all these things are the appalling symptoms of a deep-seated social disorder. We have been in the habit of making it a reproach to the French that there is no word in their language which expresses the American and English idea of home; but it may be questioned whether, retaining the word, we are not in danger of losing the reality. In the cities, at all events, there has been within the last quarter of a century a lamentable change in domestic life. Fashionable society has broken up the family gatherings around the evening lamp. The mother no longer lives in the midst of her children; she spends her days in shopping, visiting, and receiving, and her nights in the ball-room. Children are educated by hired nurses, and before they are full grown emancipate themselves from the control of parents whom they have never been taught to respect and obey. “At home,” in the jargon of the day, has become a travesty of its original meaning; it designates the exhibition of a domestic interior from which all the characteristics of home life are rigorously excluded. Architects are forgetting the meaning of home, and in the fashionable house of the period the domestic virtues could hardly find a lodgment. The hotel and the boarding-house are driving out of existence those model homes which were once the glory of America. What else could we expect? It is the woman who gives character to the household, and the tendency of our time is to remove woman from the [Pg 462] fireside and set her upon the platform.

That there is nothing in the American school system to supply the defects of American home education no Catholic will need to be assured. The whole system rests upon the principle that the school-teacher has nothing to do with the cultivation of the moral nature of his pupil. His duty is limited to the atlas, the copy-book, and the multiplication-table. The pretext upon which this rule has been adopted, says M. Jannet, is respect for all religious beliefs, but its real end is to create a generation without any positive religious belief whatever. Zealous Christians even among Protestants are not deceived by it. A report upon the state of schools in Pennsylvania in 1864 says: “The importance, not to say the absolute necessity, of religious education becomes day by day more apparent. If we wish to maintain our institutions, it is essential to raise the standard of character and to revive among our people the spirit of Christianity. The generation which will soon succeed us should not only be skilful of hand, stout of heart, and enlightened in mind, but it must learn also to love God and man and practise duty.” But unfortunately, continues M. Jannet, such remonstrances have proved unavailing, and the “unsectarian” system is now permanently established—a sad result for which the Protestant clergy is in great part to blame. Nearly all of them approve the system, in the belief that Sunday-schools will be sufficient for religious instruction; but “true Christians point out that this separation of the two branches of education tends to make religion regarded as something foreign to the practical affairs of life.” Our author shows how steadily the godless theory of education has gained acceptance; he perceives the growing disposition to enforce it by the authority of the federal government, and make it obligatory upon the States to provide irreligious schools, and upon the people to use them. In the progress of this destructive tendency he traces the influence of German ideas, political, pseudo-philosophical, socialistic, and atheistic, in which lies one of the greatest dangers of the republic. “Two things strike us in these new currents of opinion: on the one hand, their opposition to the old bases of Anglo-Saxon ideas and liberties under which the United States lived until about 1850; on the other, their identity with the principles disseminated in Europe by the revolutionists. It is impossible for an impartial observer not to recognize here the effect of one and the same cause acting in accordance with a well defined aim. This cause, this agent, let us say at once, is Freemasonry. It is easy to judge of the real purpose which it has in view by studying it in the United States. There the conflicts and passions of the Old World have no place; what Freemasonry seeks to accomplish is the destruction of all positive religion and of every principle of authority in man’s political and social relations.”

Protestantism, far from checking these disastrous tendencies, has allowed itself to increase them; and even if it had the will to constitute itself the defender of the state and the family, it is torn by intestine divisions and driving rapidly towards disintegration. Yet M. Jannet does not quite give us up for lost. “The crisis which is now passing over the country and checking [Pg 463] its material prosperity may be the signal for a reform, in forcing honest men to recognize the vices of their institutions and the corruption of their manners.” There are four influences which he hopes may combine to save us. These are, 1, the wisdom and energy of the people of the South, who, after ten years of persevering efforts, have at last begun to recover the direction of their local affairs, and to clear away “the ruins caused by the war and the domination of the Radicals.” 2. The success obtained by the Democrats, or rather the Conservatives, in the elections of November, 1874, and April, 1875—a success that will put an end to the despotism with which the Radicals have cursed the country for fifteen years. We give these two points for what they are worth; of course we do not believe that there is any such fundamental difference between the people of the North and the people of the South, the people who call themselves Republicans and the people who call themselves Democrats, as M. Jannet imagines. 3. The great number of American families who, in the midst of corruption and disorder, have faithfully preserved the virtues and domestic habits which lie at the foundation of all prosperous society. 4. Lastly and chiefly, the marvellous progress of the Catholic Church.

We make no comment upon this portion of his essay, but we end our review with a few lines from his closing paragraph which it will do us Americans, at the beginning of our new century, no harm to take to heart: “In all countries, in all times, under the most diverse historical and economical conditions, the moral laws which govern human society are unchanging and inevitable. Founded upon the decalogue, nay, upon the very nature of God, the distinction between good and evil knows no mutation. Everywhere men are prosperous or unfortunate, according as they keep the divine law or break it.”

[127] Les Etats-Unis Contemporains, ou les Mœurs, les Institutions et les Idées depuis la Guerre de la Sécession. Par Claudio Jannet. Paris: E. Plon et Cie. 1876.

[Pg 464]

LETTERS OF A YOUNG IRISHWOMAN TO HER SISTER.

(FROM THE FRENCH.)

Orleans, January, 1867.

I hasten to tell you, my darling sister, of our happy arrival in the city of Joan of Arc. It was cold during this long journey, but I was so silkenly enveloped inside the elegant coupé which was René’s New Year’s gift to me that I did not feel it.

Ah! qu’un autre vous-même est une douce chose!—“How sweet it is to have a second self!” You know how often I used to say this at the Sacred Heart, and with what questioning eyes our Parisian companions were wont to regard the daughters of Erin. Our impassioned fondness for one another surprised them, and we said that doubtless in France people did not know how to love. Dearest, we have now learnt that the country of our adoption is as warm as our native land. What kind hearts have we not found here! I am glad, therefore, to remain here for the winter; besides, with René I cannot grow weary anywhere. Why, darling Kate, are you not with us? Prepare yourself for frequent letters, as I have the mania of a scribbling friendship, to the astonishment of my mother-in-law. True, my writing-desk accompanies me everywhere, and before all other pleasures I prefer that of conversing with you.

Our home is delightful for comfort and elegance. We—that is, René and I—occupy the second story. Our house is in the Rue Jeanne d’Arc, and I have only to go to the window to see the beautiful cathedral, which I do not fail to visit often, there to pray in union with my Kate. A tout seigneur tout honneur.[128] Let us, then, speak first of this marvel of stone; of this Gothic pile whose lofty towers excite the admiration of the artist. Dearest, shall I tell you? I felt myself more at home there than in any other church. I am not going to describe either the rich chapels or the splendid windows. In these first visits to Sainte-Croix my heart melted with joy at the thought that I am a Catholic. “Well, my little Irlandaise, and so you are enthusiastic about Orleans,” said René softly to me, on observing the flush upon my cheeks.

I have been shown also the statue of Joan of Arc in the Place du Martroi. This, however, I do not admire; it is not the young shepherdess of my dreams, but a robust maiden of vigorous mould on horseback. But the bas-reliefs!… These are magnificent, sublime! What memories! What a history!—put to death upon the soil of this same France which she had saved. My blood boils when I think of the cruelty of England.

We are quite a large colony here. I must introduce you, Miss Kate, into this family circle. You scarcely know my mother-in-law, having only had an occasional glimpse of her amid the solemnities of my marriage, and when you were thinking only of your Georgina. We orphans were all in all to each [Pg 465] other—we who were then on the point of being separated. Dear, dear Kate! my alter ego, my idol, who, wholly possessed by the highest love, have willed to consecrate your youth and future to the service of our Lord in the persons of his poor; and now there are you in your coarse habit, while Georgina the worldly is adorning herself with the jewels which became you so well!

My mother-in-law, who is kindness itself to me, is a person of exceeding dignity; quite a mediæval châtelaine, with the noble bearing of the heroines of Walter Scott. Her piety is fervent, and, her sons tell me, just a little austere. Ah! dearest, what a blessing is such a mother as this. The breath of the present age has not passed over her dwelling; her children believe and worship; and I seem to behold in her a Christian of the early centuries or a Blanche of Castile. My four sisters-in-law are very kind to the last comer, your Georgina. You saw my brothers in Paris.[129] Mme. Adrien is a Belgian, lively and graceful, and as proud of her “jewels” as the Cornelia of antiquity. She has three sons, who are pupils of the Jesuit Fathers in the Rue des Postes, and whom we shall only see during the vacations. Her daughter Hélène, a superb blonde, worthy of inspiring a Raphael, has just completed her education at the Benedictines of ——. Mme. Raoul was born of a French family on the other side of the Rhine. Her two daughters, Thérèse and Madeleine, are my delight. I sometimes go and look at them sleeping, and then go to sleep myself to dream of angels. Picture to yourself these twins, the one small and fair, the other tall, slender, with a pale complexion and brown curls; gayly bearing the light burden of their ten years, and alike in one thing only—the voice; and thus they often amuse themselves in taking us by surprise and making us guess which of the two is speaking. Mme. Paul has four treasures: the dauphin, Arthur, and demoiselles Marguérite, Alix, and Jeanne, the pretty one who arrived last—all this little population, young, fresh, smiling, chattering, and roguish. Mme. Édouard, the most sympathetic of all, the most French, and the most attractive, who has been married three years, is rich in the sweetest little cherub that could flatter maternal pride.

Adieu, dearest; this is only a sign of life. I am tired with the expeditions of the day, and René reminds me that it is late. Be happy, my Kate, and help me to bless God for my happiness; I am so afraid of being ungrateful.

Your Georgina.

January, 1867.

Booksellers are abundant here, my dear; and René, who knows my weakness, daily brings me something new. I have just read Mme. Rosély, by Mlle. Monniot, a name dear to our youth. How much I should like to know this authoress! The mind capable of such conceptions must be a personification of virtue and devotedness. The thought occurred to me of writing to her. Dear busy one, you will not even open this book; and yet how much it would please you, it is so beautiful! What pleasure it gave me there to find Margaret again, become [Pg 466] a sister of Bon-Secours![130] I visited yesterday two churches, St. Paul and Recouvrance, both newly restored. There are fine windows at St. Paul’s, but the colors are too vivid for my taste. To the right is a chapel nearly dark, and a black Virgin held in great veneration—Notre-Dame des Miracles. I shall often return thither. I prayed there with all my heart for you, for our friends, for our own Ireland. Recouvrance is a charming church, close upon the Loire. (Did I tell you of my transport on seeing the beautiful river about which I had written volumes in the upper classes?) The altar is surmounted by sculptures—Mary and Joseph finding Jesus in the midst of the doctors. This sanctuary is a casket. Around the side aisles are delicious little chapels, with frescoes by Hippolyte Lazerges. I will mention those of the baptistery—Moses striking the rock, and the Samaritan at Jacob’s well. The Samaritan is admirably fine in form and expression. I stayed long before it—this fair page of Scripture made to live, as it were; the Saviour teaching the truth to this sinful woman! Here are the most beautiful confessionals that can be seen, with exquisite little paintings—the father of the prodigal welcoming his son, and the good Shepherd recovering his sheep from among the thorns.

Your letter has just reached me. Thanks, Kate! How sweet and good a thing it is to be so loved! Fain would I shed around me some little of the happiness with which I am flooded. My mother-in-law is so kind as to let me share in her works of charity, and my good René accompanies me into the abodes of the poor. Oh! in these low streets what miseries there are, what repulsive infirmities! These poor quarters remind me of London. In the evening we pay visits. Orleanese society appears to me much less frivolous than that of Paris. I felt very shy at the prospect of all these introductions, but they came about in the most natural way in the world. Our family party is so united, so animated, that we have no need to seek amusement from without. At ten o’clock Grandmother gives the signal for us to separate. René and I prolong the evening by reading together. With regard to René, I am full of remorse for having—quite inadvertently, however—neglected to enclose in my last letter the one which he had written to you, and which you must since have received. Oh! how excellent he is, this brother of yours; and how proud of him I am—so intellectual, so distinguished, so handsome, and, what is far better and worth all the rest, so pious! Every morning we go together to Mass at Sainte-Croix. The Masses of communion are said in an expiatory chapel before the image of the Mother of Sorrows. From an artistic point of view this chapel is an anachronism—a Greek marble in a Gothic church. But what peace reigns there, what recollection; and one can pray there so well! Orleans seems to me empty in the absence of its great bishop, now in Rome. Do you remember our enthusiastic exclamations while reading his excellent work on education? I am impatient to be presented to him, to speak to him of Ireland—of this people which he has justly called “a people of martyrs and apostles.”[131]

Have read the Souvenirs d’une Institutrice, by Mme. Bourdon. That isolation, those struggles against [Pg 467] penury, that life so troubled and stormy, made a hymn of thanksgiving gush out of my heart to Him whose providence has ordained for me so different a destiny. “O fortune!” said the Solitary of Cayla, “what suffering dost thou not cause when thou art adverse!” Dear Kate, with all my heart I pity the poor, especially the mothers. René made a discovery yesterday—a young married couple in utter distress, owing to the illness of the husband. The young mother is wholly occupied in the attendance necessary to the sick man and to her new-born son, who might be well named Benoni, the poor darling! It does not possess even a cradle. How I wept while listening to the story of their last three months! We sent the doctor to them, and I felt the pleasure of a child in myself choosing whatever I thought needful for this family. Mary and Joseph must have been thus at Bethlehem. The poor woman had sold her furniture bit by bit, not venturing to beg or speak to any one of her troubles; and yer the charities here are admirably organized.

Lucy (Mme. Édouard) is coming with us to-morrow on a pilgrimage to Cléry; I shall pray there for my Kate, and for all whom we love. I go the round of the churches with Lucy; René carves, paints, or writes, and we have music together. My mother-in-law has given me a beautiful piano, one of Pleyel’s. Our brothers have excellent voices. Lucy and I play splendid pieces of Mendelssohn, Mozart, and Beethoven. What concerts, what harmonies, what an enchanted life! From eight o’clock in the evening until ten we work for churches or the poor. Don’t be uneasy, dear Kate, with regard to what you call the unsettled, aimless life of the world; my hours and minutes are regulated with a mathematical precision. René loves order above everything, and my mother-in-law’s hobby is punctuality. Your Georgina, who is not over-exact and a bit of a loiterer, is making rapid strides to attain to the perfection of her lord and master, who is good and lovable a thousand times over, and never scolds.

Do you remember our old mistress Annah, who invariably used to say upon quitting us, “My husband will scold,” at which we always laughed, little giddy ones that we were? I bow before your gravity, and kiss you a hundred and a hundred times.

February, 1867.

I am just come from St. Pierre du Martroi, where the Père Minjard has been preaching a sermon in behalf of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul—an institution shown by the eloquent orator to be a source of comfort to sorrows otherwise inconsolable, and also a preservative against a social danger. What a picture he drew of atheistic poverty—poverty without God! What eloquence! What a soul of fire! At last, under this austere Dominican habit, I have beheld a man of genius. Thought makes this manly countenance its abode, and here dwells intellect in its plenitude. His eyes sparkle at times with a lightning flash almost dazzling. Ah! dear Kate, what an absorbing discourse.

How exactly like yourself it is to be so interested in Benoni and his family! I scarcely venture to go there, the poor woman so overwhelms me with her thanks. In vain I tell her again and again that she is my sister, and that in giving her a little from my abundance I [Pg 468] have done nothing more than my strict, rigorous, obligatory duty. She receives me as if I were an angel from Paradise. The young man is recovering his health, and the child his roses. Thanks to my good René, who is really the most generous of men, I have installed them in a commodious and airy apartment where everything is bright with sunshine. This morning the God of the Eucharist entered this truly sanctified dwelling. This little household is so religious, resigned, and thankful to a kind Providence that God must take pleasure in it as in a temple.

Our pilgrimage was charming. Lucy consecrated her baby to Our Blessed Lady; and how happy the little love appeared to be about it! The church of Cléry is of Gothic architecture, sufficiently remarkable, but how dilapidated, poor, and bare! I noticed a clock and a Christ which must be as old as the time of Louis XI.; a magnificent Way of the Cross; beautiful antique carving in a small chapel which is quite in a ruinous state. The black Virgin is Notre-Dame de Cléry, who shared with Notre-Dame d’Embrun the affection and the eccentric devotion of the son of Marie d’Anjou, in whose mind they represented two distinct persons; and were invoked (O blasphemy!) almost as witnesses of the atrocities and revengeful deeds of the sombre lord of Plessis-lez-Tours. The black Virgin is over the high altar. I had a couple of tapers placed before this miraculous image, one for my Kate’s intentions and one for my own. The tomb of Louis XI. and of Charlotte of Savoy is in the nave. By the side of the pulpit is a monument of black marble; four colonnades of white marble support the upper portion, also of the same material, upon which the King of France is kneeling, his hand joined and his face turned towards the altar of the Blessed Virgin. His countenance has not by any means the wily and cruel expression given to him in the portraits of the time. At the four corners are four angels facing the spectators. On the way home we visited the Church of St. Fiacre. The road is animated in spite of the season; there, too, is the river, the beautiful river, the river so eminently French. Besides, must not even the dullest landscape appear radiant when one is twenty years old, with a husband whom one adores, a golden future in prospect, and heaven itself in the heart? Kate dearest, I am faithful to my daily Te Deum; it is the only hymn that can express what I feel.

My mother-in-law gave a large dinner-party in the evening. I made myself resplendent … in simplicity! This, at least, is the encomium bestowed on me by René, who pretends that I was very much admired. I would not say this to any one but my sister. Great names were represented there; some of the greatest in France—names of chivalrous associations. How happily inspired was Mother St. Athanasius in making us read the chronicles of the middle ages! It is to my having done so that I am indebted for the most gracious smiles of two honorable dowagers to whom I spoke of the glorious and historical deeds of their ancestors. Edward sang with me Le fil de la Vierge;[132] and altogether la petite Irlandaise found the evening too short and the company too amiable. These kind brothers and sisters never weary of bringing me forward, placing me in the light, and [Pg 469] making everybody love me; my mother-in-law calls me her lily, her heath-flower, her violet; and the children are wild about Aunt Georgina. Dear Kate, how ravishingly fair is the dawn of my existence as a young wife!

A fortunate meeting, dearie—namely, with Margaret W——, the beautiful Englishwoman, who is, she says, en passage here. I was at Ste. Croix, lost in my thanksgiving after communion, when a rustling of silk and lace reminded me that I was still on earth, and a musical voice with a slight English accent said in my ear: “C’est bien vous?—Is it really you, Georgina?” I raised my head and recognized our friend. We came out together. Margaret has since paid me a visit, and my mother-in-law asked her to spare a whole day to Georgina. All the family is won by the grace and lively wit of la belle Anglaise. She is on her wedding tour; her husband is very agreeable—an accomplished gentleman, with the manners and bearing (if you please) of a peer of England. Lady Margaret told us about her presentation at court. Queen Victoria is very fond of her. In the evening twilight [133] we found ourselves alone together; then, looking straight into my eyes, Margaret asked me: “Are you truly and perfectly happy, Georgina?” You may guess what was my answer. “So much the better; so much the better,” sighed the lofty lady; and then, blushing and with a full and beating heart, she confided to me her grief—her husband does not love her! And yet he had seemed to me full of thoughtful attention to her. “Ah! dear Georgina, if you only knew what I suffer. I love Lord William passionately. I believed in his love, and now I know that my large fortune tempted his mother, who, by dint of entreaties, persuaded him to marry me, when he really loved his cousin, a poor and pretty orphan, who was, moreover, well deserving of his affection.” I did not know what to say to her. Was she seeking consolation? I cannot tell. She was lofty and proud until this intimate confidence. I took her hand, and with the utmost tenderness expressed my sympathy, assuring her that no one could see her without loving her, and that there could be no doubt that Lord William returned her affection. She burst into tears and kissed me twenty times. Had I convinced her? In the evening I watched the English peer attentively; his amiability was perfect. I managed skilfully to bring out the talents of Margaret, who sang and played the loveliest things, and with such an expression!… Pray for this heart, dear Kate. Ah! how true it is that a serpent hides among the flowers. Who would not envy the happiness of this young bride, endowed with all the good things of this world, and of an aristocratic beauty really incomparable? On returning from Italy Margaret will visit Switzerland. We have agreed that she is to write to me, and that we will do impossibilities to meet again.

René complained of my being melancholy after the departure of “the English.” I could not confide to him the secret of my friend. “Dear Georgina, has this fine bird of passage inspired you with her wandering propensities?” “You know very well, René, that with you I desire nothing.” “Smile, then, my lady, or I shall think you are ill; come, sing me ‘The Lake,’ to shake off your gloom.”[134]

[Pg 470] My eyes will no longer stay open, dear sister; my tender affection to you.

February 17, 1867.

A heavenly day, dear Kate; all fragrant with holy friendship, and, still better, with divine love. Père Minjard preached a charity sermon at Ste. Croix on behalf of the schools in the East. We went en chœur,[135] as the twins say. What incomparable eloquence! Nothing so captivates me as the art of language. I was fascinated, and as if hanging on the lips of this son of Lacordaire. He took for his text, “We must rescue Christ. Christ is in danger.” In a sustained and always admirable style he showed us Christ, in peril in the Gospel, by false criticism; in peril in tradition, by false science; in peril in the church teaching, by false politics; in peril in the church taught, by false literature—all this is a social danger. Oh! what beautiful things, what sublime thoughts; I could have wished the sermon never to end, and felt myself living a life of intelligence in a higher region than I had ever dreamed of before. Here is one among other beauties: “In our hours of poetry and youth have we not all dreamed of the East, with its clearer sun, its balmier breezes, its holier memories?… Such is, in fact, the incomparable favor that Christ has granted us in leaving in our hands the destiny of his name and his works.” Would that I could transcribe to you this living harmony, this austere teaching, ardent and true! How splendidly he brought before us the ancient memories of that East from which everything we have has come to us; the grand and Christian souvenirs also of the Crusades, and of those ages of faith when men were capable of a passionate ardor for the beautiful and the good! Never had I imagined such rapidity of thought, such facility of elocution, such magnificence of language. The few words of allusion to Mgr. Dupanloup were of exquisite delicacy: “And I say this with so much the more freedom because he to whom my eulogies would be addressed is not present.” What a picture, too, he drew of the debasement of our souls if we no more had Jesus Christ!

A walk yesterday in the Jardin des Plantes. Our English parks are naturalized in France, except in the official gardens—flat and monotonous squares. A fine view from the top of the rising ground and the sky of France with René—all this I found superb. The twins were with us, amusing themselves with a violet, and at every step uttering exclamations of joy. Thérèse takes the airs of a duchess, and thus gets called by no other name—a custom which does not seem to displease her. As for Mad, so small and fragile, I have named her Picciola. My nieces are already pious, and delight to take me into the churches; we have seen five—the Visitation, the Sacrè-Cœur, the Presentation, the Bon-Pasteur, and the Sainte-Enfance.

Great sensation at home: my mother expects her elder sister, la tante solennelle—the solemn aunt—as the dauphin, Arthur, has whispered to me. Everybody makes up a countenance and a toilet suitable to the occasion; even the babies put on serious faces. These preparations make me afraid. I whisper to you that the least cloud frightens me; our sky is always so clear. My mother-in-law, kind and maternal as she is to me, nevertheless intimidates me greatly. René is going away to-morrow on business, and [Pg 471] this first separation causes me more pain than I am willing to confess. I long so much to say to him: “Take me with you.” I feel it would be unreasonable. He is going to travel eighty leagues in a few days, and does not wish to expose me to this fatigue, though it seems to me that with him nothing could be difficult. What will you say, dear Kate, to your Georgina?—that you no longer recognize her great courage, and that inability to bear the least contrariety is not the mark of a Christian; that I ought rather to thank Providence for sending me the opportunity of gaining a little merit. Dear little preacher! the heart that loves does not reason, and René is my universe. But I promise you to accept this light trial.

Send your good angel to the traveller, darling Kate.

Evening.—I set out to-morrow with the dawn! René read in my eyes that I was fretting, and altered his itinerary; I am radiant, and looking forward to a thousand delights.

Love your Georgina. Let us pray together for our green Erin, so worthy of our love. I have always in my heart the hope of its resurrection.

March 6, 1867.

Shall I tell you about my journey, dearest Kate? We made a halt in Brittany, the land of true poets, where we are to pass the summer. As we walked over the barren heaths we shut our eyes and evoked the old memories of Armorica, while the mild image of Guy de Bretagne and of Isabelle aux Blanches Mains [136] mingled in our imaginations with the shades of the martyrs. Dear Kate, I enjoyed this excursion immensely. The farther I go, the more I realize the happiness which God has allotted me in giving me for guide, adviser, and support this dear and gentle René, so truly the brother of my heart. We have been reading together the life of Saint Elizabeth by M. de Montalembert. The “dear saint” of Protestant Germany was wont to call her husband by the sweet name of brother, and this we thought so suave, so charming, and angelic that we agreed to call each other brother and sister when we are alone. Oh! what a heavenly thing is Christian love. That which I first of all admired in René, even when he was to me merely a stranger, was his recollectedness in church. He has often said to me—and with what earnestness!—“Georgina, let Jesus be all in all to us.” It is to your prayers, my darling Kate, that I owe this happy destiny.

What a surprise! My Aunt de K—— was not expected before the end of the week; but this morning, on returning from my visits among the poor, René left me at the house door, and I hastened as usual into the drawing-room to say good-morning to the dear little ones who daily welcome me with shouts of joy. On entering I beheld an unknown face; it was the solemn aunt. A sudden blush mounted even to my forehead. My mother-in-law introduced me; while I lost myself in reverences, my aunt bestowed on me a half-inclination of the head—so cold! looking at me all the time with so searching an eye that I was almost out of countenance. Fortunately, the door was again thrown open very wide, and a footman in full livery announced Mme. Edouard, M. Gaston (this is the pretty baby), and in succession [Pg 472] M. et Mme. Adrien, M. et Mme. Raoul, M. et Mme. Paul. All were richly dressed. I hid myself as well as I could behind Lucy’s fauteuil to keep my shabby toilet out of sight, and then took advantage of the entrance of the children to make my escape before the entry of René. The solemnity of the déjeûner nearly sent me to sleep. At eight o’clock in the evening Mme. de K—— retired to her room, alleging that she was fatigued with her journey; you may judge whether any one tried to detain her. Then we began to dress ourselves up, and exchanged silence for joyous dances and merry laughter. Duchesse was a “golden fairy,” superb with her lofty air; there is a touch of my solemn aunt about her. Picciola was charming in her ribbon-decked costume of a shepherdess. Your Georgina was dressed en Sévigné; the sparkling Lucy as a soubrette of the time of Louis XIV. A few intimate friends joined us about nine o’clock. The brilliant chords of the piano troubled not the repose of Mme. de K——, who was purposely lodged far from the noise. Our songs, our dances, and lively follies went on till one o’clock; and as I am not tired, and, besides, make a point of sending you news of us before mortifying Lent shall have proclaimed a truce to our delights, with René’s permission I relate to you these little events. Dear Kate, my letters will no longer speak of anything but sanctity. I kiss you with all my heart. My brother, who is beginning to read me a chapter of the Imitation, tells you how much he is devoted to you in Him whose love is the bond of our souls.

March 10.

My dearest Kate, do not be anxious if I tell you that I am going to keep all the fasting days of Lent. The good doctor gives me permission to do so, in spite of my eighteen years, on condition that in case of the slightest fatigue I give it up. This is understood. M. l’Abbé Charles Perraud, of the Oratory, is preaching the Lent at Sainte-Croix. What a congregation! It was a compact crowd. The text was, “Man does not live by bread alone.” In order to please your love of sacrifice I will not send you another note during all these forty days; but as I have not yet made any vow to renounce the most legitimate gratifications of the heart, I shall keep a journal with great regularity, to send you after Easter.

I am reading again Rob Roy with René; this is for our secular reading, but for the spiritual we have the Conferences of Fathers Lacordaire and De Ravignan.

12th.—Was at the sermon: “Enter into your heart.” The orator spoke of recollectedness, inviting us to enter into our heart, promising that by so doing we should find light, joy and virtue; these were the three points of his discourse. We take interminable walks with Isabelle (Mme. Raoul) and her children. I am working a magnificent chasuble which I wish to present to our curé in Brittany. René reads to us the Revue du Monde Catholique and the Union. These gentlemen do not go to the club, but occupy themselves, according to their respective tastes, in painting, carving, illuminating, and creating surprises for us. My solemn aunt took her departure this morning, and all that is cold, heavy and pompous went with her.

I have not told you that Hélène and I are the best of friends. We are of the same age; she has always had an especial liking for René, [Pg 473] and she also entrusts me with her confidences. Dear Kate, this good young heart has likewise been wounded by the divine Hand, and she who is the idol of her family desires to leave us, that she may give herself wholly to God. The poor mother knows nothing, but she has a presentiment of this secret (at the same time sweet and distressing), and strives to dissuade her daughter from her purpose. Hélène wishes to be a Carmelite. She has her grandmother’s energy and greatness of soul, and nothing can shake her resolution. Thus there will be a separation under this happy roof; the singing-bird is about to spread her wings and fly away to other skies. Since my pretty niece opened her heart to me I have become quite thoughtful. If it should so happen that God required of me a similar sacrifice; and if, after giving up my sister to him, I must also give him a child of my own!… But I put aside this apprehension. Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof.

14th.—“Bear God in your heart and glorify him in your bodies.” This sermon has deeply impressed me; how I love the Catholic doctrine respecting the body of man!

I love to communicate by the side of René. Hélène followed us this morning; in returning from the altar I involuntarily looked at her, and was struck by the air of ecstatic joy and profound happiness which shone on her countenance. Kate, she is truly called! Adrien dotes upon his daughter. Each one of the family feels the charm of her bright and cheerful piety, which makes her admirable even in the smallest things; she is grandmother’s right hand, who feels herself living over again in this fair child.… How we are going to suffer!

16th.—A long walk with all the darlings, which made me miss a sermon of the Abbé Bougaud, whom I so much want to hear. Visited two churches. Orleans is full of them, and reminds me of the towns in Italy, where one comes upon them at every step. I have had some letters from Ireland, from our friends in Dublin. Lizzie asks me if, like her, I have a “dear, sweet home”; she is enchanted with her position. Ellen, the lively Ellen, gently rallies me on my love for France, and reminds me of Petrarch:

Non e questa la patria!

How she misjudges my feelings if she thinks that my happiness could make me forgetful of Ireland!

21st.—Sermon on the love of our neighbor. I have no trouble in loving this dear neighbor of mine. Duchesse allows herself to rally her aunt on what she calls her love of everybody! Happily for this lofty little person, Berthe (Mme. Raoul) wages unflinching war against the slightest tendency to pride, and the uncles surpass one another in teasing her out of it. My room is all perfumed with the sweet fragrance of violets. René has brought me home splendid ones from his morning’s ramble. I delight in my bouquets like a child with a plaything; it is long since I have had any flowers, and I love these balmy things, which the poetic Margaret calls the “beauties of nature, queens of solitude, and daughters of the sun.”

25th.—The weather was fine; René had the horses put in, and we set out together, delighted to be alone. As we were coming down the Rue Royale I caught sight of Hélène and her father, lost in admiration before some fine engravings. “Shall we [Pg 474] take them with us?” I said to René; and a minute afterwards the future Carmelite was giving us her impressions of the day. How charming she is! And all this beauty is going to conceal itself under the austere bandeau and thick veil.… We went to the Chapelle Saint-Mesmin, where Monseigneur has his college and his summer residence. The pure air, the perfumes of the spring, the evening calm, gave me an inexpressible feeling of enjoyment. For a moment I forgot this earth, and in the isolation of thought went back to my childhood; saw our beloved home, and our so lamented mother watching us at play. Why is she not with us still? She would have been so proud of René. “What are you thinking of,” asked Hélène, “looking in this way up to heaven like the picture of the Mignon of Ary Scheffer?” “She is dreaming of Ireland,” replied my brother, who had understood me.

31st.—Sermon on the intellectual life: “Lord, give me understanding and I shall live.” My mother-in-law was rather unwell; I passed the day in her room. The whole flight of doves, profiting by this fine Sunday, went out to flutter in the bright sunshine. Hélène presented her grandmother with a bunch of double violets; she took them with a smile, and then delicately placed them in my hair, saying as she did so: “Darling Violet, receive your sisters.” I kissed her hand—that soft, white hand which reminds me of my mother’s.

April 2.—“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” The days succeed each other, but are not much alike, it is said, immutability not belonging to this earth. That which always resembles itself is my union with René. He is no sooner absent than something within me suffers; as soon as he returns my heart overflows with joy. Lucy asked me, “Are you never sad?” “Never!” “Happy sister!” she rejoined; “as for me, I weep sometimes when baby suffers; then I feel as if all was lost—as if I must die. Edward calls this exaggeration.” “Dear Lucy, the Holy Ghost has said, ‘If you are glad of heart, sing: if sorrowful, pray.’ Pray, then, so that you may never be sad. God is so good that we ought to serve him with a joyful heart.”

7th.—Played some splendid duets with Hélène, who has remarkable power. Sermon on the supernatural life: “If you eat not the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.” The Père Perraud was the intimate friend of the gentle Abbé Perreyve—“this delightful apparition,” said M. de Montalembert, “which, after an interval of thirty years, has made me seem to see again Lacordaire as he appeared before the court of the peers of France, young, eloquent, intrepid, gentle and frank, austere and charming, but above all ardent and tender, endowed with that spring of fascination, that key of hearts, which is found so rarely here below. In him one saw again that noble and sympathetic look which no one who had once received it could ever forget—that eye, questioning and candid as that of a child.”

I am reading again, with René, Quentin Durward and Charles the Bold. I am translating into English Les Enfants d’Édouard for Lucy, who says she likes English better than anything, and wishes to teach it to her son. Edward (ours) pretends that I possess all the qualifications for a good professor. They will spoil me, these kind brothers.

[Pg 475] 12th.—Way of the Cross, of the Friday. I love this devotion. Even the dauphin, Arthur, begs to go to it; he has a taste for music, and the pretty voices of the children of the choir fascinate him.

I have to-day been absorbed in a delightful book for which I am indebted to the obliging kindness of Adrien. It is the letters of Silvio Pellico, translated by M. Latour. What an admirable man Silvio is! Do you recollect the Mémoires d’Andryane? Silvio speaks of this book, and deeply regrets that his friend, the Frenchman, did not use more reserve in his confidences to the public, as there were still prisoners in the Spielberg.

14th.—Copied a beautiful letter of Mgr. le Comte de Chambord, our king, as duchesse proudly says. Mgr. Dupanloup is at Orleans; this evening he appeared in the pulpit. I was there; for, although the sermon was for men only, I like so much to witness this fine spectacle of the nave quite filled with men. I know of nothing more solemn and imposing than the Miserere chanted by this multitude of deep and powerful male voices, accompanied by the rich tones of the great organ. My heart beat; for I was about to listen to the great orator. Alas! after the invocation Monseigneur left the pulpit, and was replaced by the Père Perraud. He took for his text the words of the prophet Isaias: “Watchman, what of the night? Watchman, what of the night? And the watchman answered: The morning cometh, and also the night: if you seek, seek: return, come.”[137] M. Bougaud preaches the retreat for ladies; we are entering upon the week that is indeed holy.

15th.—Dear Kate, I am in a state of enthusiasm. M. Bougaud is quite what his Sainte Chantal had led me to anticipate: an ardent soul, a heart of fire, his style unique, rich, picturesque, poetic, incisive, penetrating; the priestly heart which knows all the feelings, the aspirations, and the needs of souls.

“Who are you, and what say you of yourselves?” It was admirably fine. He described to us the three wounds, the three martyrdoms, or the three honors of man in this world:, in the mind, the thirst for infinite illumination; in the heart, a keen and incessant hunger after affections; and in the whole being, the craving for eternity. It is from eternity that we are descended, and thither we must ascend again.

I warmly expressed my admiration to René and Edouard, who were waiting for me. My sisters were detained at home by their maternal cares, but it is settled that to-morrow we are to go in choir.

16th.—Sermon on the duties of mothers: “Three things constitute a great soul, a soul strong and invincible: a horror of sin, a contempt for all that passes away, and the love of God.” Oh! if it were granted me to have a child, what happiness it would be to me to develop in him these three things.

17th.—I have not been to the sermon, dear Kate … A letter from Fanny W—— has informed me of the sudden death of our dear Mary. I have been weeping all day, thinking of the despair of her poor mother. There had been nothing to prepare her for this thunderclap. Mary appeared to have entirely recovered from the fall she had last year, of which the only remaining effect was an excessive paleness—“a paleness which rendered her so attractive that no one saw in it any alarming symptom. The eve of her death [Pg 476] she was speaking of you, of Kate, the chosen one of her heart. Our vigil was prolonged to a later hour than usual; I make use of the word vigil, because Mary loved it. We spoke of the great subjects of interest about which she was so enthusiastic—of the church, of Ireland, and of Poland, that other martyr; and Mary said to us: ‘How the saints must implore the Lord for their brethren upon earth!’ Dear soul! she also implores him now. Comfort us, darling Georgina.” I have written. I have tried to comfort these two hearts, so stricken by death—that wound which is incurable here below. May God be their help! Dear Kate, you will not hear of this loss for eight days to come, in the midst of the Catholic alleluia; but it is indeed alleluia that one ought to sing over this early tomb. Happy are they whom God calls to himself! René has been reading to me this evening some chapters on the sufferings of Jesus Christ, by Father Thomas of Jesus. Truly, the Calvary of Lady W—— is the sudden departure of her angelic child; and who can console a mother?

Fanny is saddened on account of their isolation, although, with the marvellous intuition of pure souls, she feels that death separates bodies only. “She is always present to me,” she writes. A world of memories revived within me upon reading these pages, bedewed with many tears. How warmly this family is attached to us!

18th.—I could write a volume upon this Holy Thursday, the Thursday par excellence. At seven o’clock I was in the Black Chapel with René; and we did not leave Ste. Croix until past eleven. What a service, dear Kate! The Catholic worship is nowhere more magnificently celebrated. To adorn this vast temple, Monseigneur is having admirable Stations of the Cross sculptured in the walls themselves; the sculptor requires a year for each station, of which the earlier ones are now open to the pious curiosity of the public. Before one o’clock I set out with René, Hélène, and the twins for the visits to the churches—a veritable steeplechase. Duchesse had laid a wager with Arthur that she would see fifteen; and as she was bent upon gaining it, she so prettily pressed me to show her “some more” that we still went on and on. We had afterwards a time of repose; a sermon from that true orator, M. Bougaud: “Whensoever you shall do these things, do them in remembrance of me.” Our Lord has left us a remembrance. What is this remembrance, and with what feelings ought we to regard it? What eloquence! How well he depicted this remembrance, and also how thorough an insight he possesses of the heart! What happy similitudes and figures! How he feels and how he loves! It is plain that the love of God predominates all else in this soul. “When I was young I took offence at Bossuet for saying that friendships pass away with years; but now I am offended with him no more: he saw clearly; he saw only too well.” “When I glance over the globe I am greatly moved. I see Ireland dying of famine; Poland groaning forth her last sigh of agony; Germany, who has not yet stanched the bleeding wounds inflicted by her fratricidal wars; Italy, binding up her wounds in the sun like a poor stricken Samaritan; France, who perhaps in a few months’ time will be covered with blood—all the nations shattered and expiring.… “Dear Kate, I wept as I listened to this enumeration; [Pg 477] for I thought of Mary, who died almost while speaking of the martyr-nations. With regard to what M. Bougaud said about the love of God, my pen is powerless to express it.

We are come back this evening from Ste. Croix. Never did I see anything more imposing. The cathedral was full. The singing of the Stabat was something admirable. We were in the transept, and before us this mass of men like a moving sea, a profusion of lights, numerous clergy, the grand voice of the organ, and in the tribune the children of the choir, with the voices of angels. I was transported. A good day, upon the whole, although I should have preferred to all this agitation a few hours of solitude at the feet of Jesus. It is late; René is waiting for me for the holy hour. Good-night, dear Kate; let us love Jesus more and more.

19th.—This morning I hastened with Hélène to make the Way of the Cross before there was a crowd. The service was very fine. Monseigneur was present; he seemed to me to be in great suffering. I was at the sermon preached by M. Bougaud on the Passion. What attractive eloquence! What love for the divine Crucified One! The preacher showed us the Passion as the true Sacrifice in which are united the three parts of the sacrifices of antiquity: oblation, immolation, and communion. He portrayed the august Victim, his beauty, his courage, and his love; and in accents of the most touching pathos he retraced for us the great tragedy of the cross. How he has understood and experienced the Saviour’s love! Speech is inadequate to express his lofty enthusiasm, accompanied as it is by a heart and an imagination enkindled with such fervor.

On a day like this one does not know how to quit the church. We were there again this evening for the sermon of the Père Perraud: “He was bruised for our sins.” This young preacher was truly eloquent; he too believes and loves, and the love of God is a flame which is marvellous in its inspiration. He pointed out to us in the Passion of Jesus Christ a great teaching: hatred of sin; a sure hope; the mercy of the Lord. Kate dearest, this is the first Good Friday that I have ever spent away from you!

20th.—Heard three Masses with René; his ardent piety is a help to my tepidity. This is the vigil par excellence, the last of the holy forty days.

M. Bougaud’s concluding sermon has been worthy of the preceding ones; it was taken from the words of St. Augustine, spoken on the same day, in the year 387, when St. Ambrose gave holy baptism to this son of so many tears: “I believe in God; I believe in Jesus Christ; I believe in the church.” To listen to M. Bougaud is a royal treat; I hung, as it were, on his lips, drinking in that eloquence which is indeed the two-edged sword spoken of in Scripture. “God is the place of souls. A place is that which bears, which supports.” How ably he developed this great proposition! “Jesus Christ is the only veritable source of love, devotedness, immolation, and sacrifice. All in the present age that is vile, or despicable, or impious will never be able to effect anything against the church; while all it has that is beautiful, noble, refined, great, and excellent will never be able to effect anything but by the church; these I call the two axioms of the [Pg 478] intelligence and love of the church. The distinctive and immortal sign which characterizes the church, and which belongs to her alone, is not science, eloquence, or genius; it is devotedness, immolation, sacrifice.” And speaking of the love of God, of Jesus Christ, and of the church, the characteristic of living souls, he said: “It is needful to awaken in souls this threefold love.” It was beautiful, sublime; but a discourse like this cannot be reproduced by lips profane. This evening we had no regular sermon, owing to the fatigue of the preacher. He contented himself with thanking his male auditors for their assiduous and willing attention (the Abbé Bougaud thanked us also, with a charm peculiarly his own), gave a résumé of the principal features of the plan he has been following in this course of instruction, and, after saying a few words on the subject of the Paschal Communion, ended by inviting to it those who have not yet responded to the call of their Saviour, entreating them to be among the workmen who came at the eleventh hour. O Lord Jesus! draw all souls unto thee; reveal to them the incomparable sweetness of thy service.

Dear Kate, I am told so much of the beauties of the Procession of the Resurrection that I have decided to go to it. Marianne promises to wake me. Do you remember the good Duchess Elizabeth giving orders for her foot to be pulled in the night by one of her attendants, and of the pleasing trait of the Landgrave? To-morrow I shall have this volume put into the post; read in every line the unalterable affection of your Georgina. I do not mention René, our hearts having been melted into one alone. Alleluia, dear sister of my soul! When will the Catholic alleluia be sung in all the universe? Who can ever have made the title of papist a term of reproach? May England herself one day become papist and receive the pardon of Ireland! O my country! how devotedly I love her.

[128] “To every noble, all honor” (proverb).

[129] Mmes. de T—— were detained in Brittany at the time of Georgina’s marriage. The birth of Jeanne, Mme. Paul’s fourth child, took place the same day.

[130] Our Lady of Good Help.

[131] Sermon preached at St. Roch, 1861.

[132] “The Virgin’s Thread,” the poetic and popular name in France for the gossamer.

[133] L’entre chien et loup.

[134] Désassombrir.

[135] In choir—in a body; a whole party.

[136] The white-handed Isabelle.

[137] Is. xxi. 11.

TO BE CONTINUED.

[Pg 479]

THE TYPICAL MEN OF AMERICA.

The commemoration of the birth of American independence one hundred years ago, which is now engaging the attention of our entire community, and exciting a lively interest in every quarter of the civilized world, while it affords us an excellent opportunity for the display of the most tangible evidences of great national prosperity and progress in arts, sciences, and industrial pursuits, will not be without its salutary influence on the thousands of intelligent foreigners who this year, for the first time, may visit our shores. Whether these strangers come to us merely to gratify their curiosity, or, actuated by a laudable spirit of investigation, to study our laws, institutions, and peculiar systems of labor, a personal inspection of our social and political condition will doubtless have the effect of removing many latent prejudices and false conceptions from their minds which have been planted and fostered there by ignorant journalists and hostile critics.

And if, instead of confining their observations to the things to be seen in the grand Exhibition at Philadelphia, or even to the seaboard cities, with their fleets of shipping, gigantic warehouses, and immense factories, they should penetrate into the interior, they will behold a condition of society unequalled in any country or age. There, in the near and far West, the observant traveller will find millions of happy homesteads, wherein the laborious husbandman can repose in the twilight of his useful existence, conscious that the fertile soil upon which he has spent the best years of his manhood, and the roof-tree that covers him, are absolutely his own, subject to no earthly authority but the law which he and his fellows have devised for their mutual happiness and protection.

But while these advances in material as well as political greatness are naturally subjects of honest pride with the people of this country, they likewise give rise to grave reflections, and instinctively suggest the question: Has our progress in the higher aims of life, in civilization, morality, and religion, kept pace with our extraordinary increase in wealth, population, political power, and material development? We have no desire to throw a passing shadow over the festive spirit of this centennial year by dwelling too emphatically on individual and national faults—faults which, though more apparent in our popular system of government than in the more secretive polity of other nations, are nevertheless common to all—but we are obliged in candor to admit that the grosser pursuits of life, the desire to possess the perishable things of the world, have occupied much more the attention of the busy brains and restless physical energy of our population, than the cultivation of solid mental gifts and the practice of public and private virtues.

Much, of course, may be urged in palliation of this undue tendency to materialism. Possessing a fertile, unsettled country of vast dimensions [Pg 480] and inexhaustible agricultural and mineral wealth, it was not unnatural that the new-born energies of our young republic should be directed to the attainment of personal independence, by the cultivation and exploration of the almost illimitable public domain of which we became the owners by right of conquest or purchase. But is it not now time to pause on the threshold of our second century of existence, and enquire whether, in this headlong pursuit of material success, we have not almost lost sight of the great and sole end for which man was created, and the means by which his destiny in this world and the next is to be accomplished? Has not our test of human usefulness been an incomplete one, and our standard of mental and moral excellence far too low?

In nature, it is said, everything is great or little by comparison. If the same rule be applied to the conduct and achievements of the men of the present day, as contrasted with those of a past age, we fear it would be found that, while we are willing to honor the virtues of our ancestors and eager to claim a share of their glory, we have lamentably failed in following their brilliant example, and much more so in improving on their plans and methods of benefiting mankind. And yet examples worthy of imitation are not wanting in the short but eventful pages of our history. We need not go back to remote antiquity for them, or even search through tomes of mediæval chronicles for what is so plentifully supplied us in modern records—models of moral purity, unsullied reputation, unselfish ambition, and perfect manhood. Take, for instance, those two illustrious men whose names are most inseparably connected with American history—Christopher Columbus, the discoverer of the New World, and George Washington, the central figure in that group of patriots and statesmen who founded the only really free republic that now exists or ever had an existence.

From the day he left his father’s house in Genoa, at the early age of fifteen, till, spent by toil and worn down by disease, he expired in Valladolid, the great discoverer pursued one unvarying course with a tenacity of purpose and a strength of will that were truly heroic. But Columbus was more than a hero: he was a Christian in the highest sense, a Catholic thoroughly imbued with the doctrines of the church, and as jealous of her honor and authority as the most loving son could be of the reputation of his earthly mother. During nearly half a century of constant study, adventure, grand successes, and disheartening changes of fortune, the experienced seaman, erudite astronomer, and close observer of natural phenomena exemplified in his whole career, with singular consistency, all the supernatural virtues with which God is sometimes pleased to endow his creatures. To a mind well disciplined and stored with all the human knowledge of his age were added a profound faith; deep-seated reverence for authority; a sincere love, not only for friends and relatives, but for all mankind; and an implicit reliance on the beneficence and justice of divine Providence that no terror could shake and no reverse lessen in the slightest degree.

A careful examination of the career of Columbus leads to the conviction that his chief object and ultimate aim from the beginning, what in after-life became more apparent, was to rescue the Holy [Pg 481] Sepulchre from the polluting grasp of the infidel, and to bring the light of Christianity to races of men who were in darkness; all other efforts, though consistent with this grand scheme, were subordinate and auxiliary to it. Actuated by an ambition less exalted or an enthusiasm less aborbing, he could never have attained that glorious success which, though partial, has linked his name to immortality. Neither was this crusader a theorist or a religious fanatic, but, on the contrary, one of the most practical and calculating of men. Though thoroughly satisfied with the feasibility of his plans and confident in the rectitude of his motives, he neglected no opportunity of qualifying himself for the noble task upon which he had set his heart. While others attempted to reach Asia by slow and uncertain coasting along the western shores of Africa, he proposed to launch boldly out on the unknown and trackless deep, and, by taking a direct course westward, to reach the remotest parts of the East, where was situated, it was reported, the great Christian empire of Kublai Khan, the land of gold and precious stones, a tithe of which would be sufficient to initiate and sustain a new and more successful crusade against the Mohammedans.

With this end constantly in view, Columbus carefully studied every work on cosmogony and the physical sciences within his reach, accurately noted down each new discovery in navigation, and was never tired of consulting old mariners on their experience and observations. Even the writings of learned churchmen were placed under contribution. “He fortified himself,” says one of his biographers, “by references to St. Isidore, Beda, St. Ambrose, and Duns Scotus.” He also became a practical sailor, and grew as familiar with the frozen seas of Iceland and the torrid heats of the African coast as with the bays and inlets of his native Italy. “I have been seeking out the secrets of nature for forty years,” he tells us, “and wherever ship has sailed, there have I voyaged.”

Having at length, by study and personal observation, accumulated a large and varied stock of scientific knowledge, the future discoverer retired with his family to the remote island of Porto Santo, the advanced outpost of African discovery. There for several years he devoted his leisure to the patient collation and arrangement of his authorities, till he was able to reduce a mass of crude philosophical speculations and ill-digested cosmical theories to an elaborate system, which, if not altogether borne out by subsequent investigation, was in the main correct, and far in advance of the intelligence of the fifteenth century.

His plans thus thoroughly matured, Columbus considered that the time had arrived to put them into execution. He had already submitted certain proposals to Portugal, but they were rejected by a body called the Geographical Council, who, while they treated with seeming contempt the scheme of the astute Italian, had the unparalleled meanness to appropriate and attempt to use secretly the results of his long years of toil and study. Armed with letters of recommendation, he now appeared before the court of Spain, and, with the earnestness and lucidity of a mind thoroughly convinced by long and patient analysis, he explained to Ferdinand and Isabella his great project of crossing the Atlantic and adding to their dual crown, not [Pg 482] only a new continent, but the everlasting glory of having been the means of bringing into the bosom of the church millions of human beings. Though engaged in the desperate war which ended in the final overthrow of Moslem power in Spain, the Catholic sovereigns gave the daring adventurer a kind reception, and referred his proposition to a junta of cosmographers for consideration. The members of that body, however, seem to have been as incapable of understanding the merits of the questions submitted for their deliberation as they were of appreciating the high resolve and mental comprehensiveness of their originator. After five tedious years, during which Columbus, with anxious steps but unfaltering courage, followed the court from place to place as the exigencies of the war required, the junta reported that his plans were “vain and impossible.”

Disgusted, but not disheartened, Columbus retired to the small port of Palos, where, in the society of a few learned men, clerical and lay, he forgot for a while his disappointment, but not his darling project. Through the interference of friends negotiations with the Spanish court were renewed, and again broken off on account of the conditions demanded by Columbus being considered exorbitant. He did not think so, however, and the result proved that he did not overrate the value of his services. Abandoning all hope of co-operation from Spain, the gifted Italian was about to pass the Pyrenees, and was actually on his way to the French frontier, when a courier was despatched to recall him to court. The remonstrance of influential friends, and the fear of yielding to a rival the profits as well as the political prestige which were sure to follow the success of Columbus’ projects, at last overcame the caution of Ferdinand; while a strong sympathy with the daring designs of the gifted adventurer, and an ardent desire for the propagation of the faith, made Isabella an active advocate of his interests. At Santa Fé, on the 17th of April, 1492, the agreement between Columbus and the Catholic sovereigns was signed, whereby he became admiral and viceroy of all the seas and countries he might discover; a sharer, to the extent of one-tenth, in all the profits accruing from the trade with such foreign possessions; and, by virtue of his contribution of one-eighth of the expenses of the voyage, a proportionate part of the gains which might result from it.

These conditions, which had previously been looked upon as inadmissible, but which were now willingly allowed, furnish the key to the character of Columbus. Few men of that age cared less for titles, power, or wealth than he; but these means were necessary, he considered, for the accomplishment of his grand ulterior design—the Christian possession of Palestine. He had studied human nature thoroughly, and knew that no great movement, social or political, could ever command the confidence and sympathy of the world unless directed by leaders of approved position and sustained by liberal expenditures of money.

So far, then, his wish was gratified. Ferdinand, the cautious, had yielded a reluctant consent to the fitting out of the expedition on satisfactory terms, and Isabella, his consort, the noblest woman that ever graced a throne, pawned her jewels to procure funds for its proper equipment. Amid the congratulations [Pg 483] of his sanguine friends and the prayers of the populace, Columbus, with his fleet of three frail boats and scanty crews, “after they had all confessed and received the sacraments,” set sail from Palos on the memorable 3d of August, 1492.

Once out of sight of land, on the boundless ocean where keel of ship had never ploughed before, naught around him but a gloomy waste of waters, naught above him save the sun and stars, no friend to consult, no familiar voice to whisper hope or combat despair, with a crew both ignorant and superstitious, he held on his prearranged course, self-reliant, watchful, and dauntless. Night succeeded day, and light followed darkness, in dreary succession, yet still no land appeared. Appalled by imaginary dangers and sick from hope deferred, his men, whose hearts were never wholly in their work, first began to murmur, then broke out into open reproaches, and finally threatened to throw their captain into the sea. It was amid such trying circumstances that the true character of the man became manifest in all its magnificent proportions. Calm alike in sunshine and storm, his hand constantly on the tiller and his eye directed to the west, he heeded little the rumbling of mutinous discontent beneath his feet, nor for a moment did he allow himself to doubt that God in his own good time would conduct him safely to the haven of his hopes.

In the dark watches of the night, when the waves ran highest and the heavens were obscured as with a pall, he felt that he had that within his soul beckoning him on, more brilliant in its coruscations than the starry cross that illumines the southern hemisphere, as unerring in its guidance as the beacon which of old led the children of Israel through the pathless desert—implicit belief in the sublimity of his mission, and an entire reliance on the mercy of his Creator, in whose hands he felt himself an humble instrument for the accomplishment of noble ends. Nor were his confidence and humility long unrewarded. After eight weeks of constant watching and unspeakable anxiety, land was at length discovered, the first glimpse of the New World presented to European eyes; and scarcely had the anchor of the Santa Maria become embedded in the sands of San Salvador, than her brave commander and his now repentant followers hastened ashore to plant the sacred emblem of our salvation, and, weeping and prostrate on that heathen soil, to pour forth their thanksgiving to the Almighty.

The honors which were showered upon Columbus on his return to Spain after this great event were in strange contrast to the neglect, treachery, and injustice of which he was afterwards the victim. Three times again did he cross and recross the Atlantic, making on each occasion new and important discoveries. But ignorance, venality, and envy of his fair fame and spotless honor conspired to raise up against him a host of powerful enemies, who at last stripped him of his hard-earned rewards, and would, had it been possible, have robbed him even of the glory of having been the discoverer of America. However, he bore his trials with fortitude as he had worn his great honors with meekness, seldom retorting on his enemies, and but once, as far as we are aware, condescending to complain of the rank ingratitude of a country to which he had given a whole continent. This occurred during his [Pg 484] fourth voyage, in a despatch to the king, in which he says: “Wearied and sighing, I fell into a slumber, when I heard a piteous voice saying to me: ‘O fool! and slow to believe and serve thy God, who is the God of all. What did he more for Moses, or for his servant David, than he has done for thee? From the time of thy birth he has ever had thee under his peculiar care. When he saw thee of a fitting age, he made thy name to resound marvellously throughout the earth, and thou wert obeyed in many lands, and didst acquire honorable fame among Christians. Of the gates of the ocean sea, shut up with mighty chains, he delivered to thee the keys; the Indies, those wealthy regions of the world, he gave thee for thine own, and empowered thee to dispose of them to others according to thy pleasure. What did he more for the great people of Israel when he led them forth from Egypt? or for David, whom from being a shepherd he made a king in Judea? Turn to him, then, and acknowledge thine error; his mercy is infinite. He has many and vast inheritances yet in reserve. Fear not to seek them. Thine age shall be no impediment to any great undertaking. Abraham was above a hundred years when he begat Isaac; and was Sara youthful? Thou urgest despondingly for succor. Answer! Who hath afflicted thee so much and so many times—God or the world? The privileges and promises which God hath made to thee he hath never broken; neither hath he said, after having received thy services, that his meaning was different, and to be understood in a different sense. He fulfils all that he promises, and with increase. Such is his custom. I have shown thee what thy Creator hath done for thee, and what he doeth for all. The present is the reward of the toils and perils thou hast endured in serving others.’”

Whether Columbus had a vision, which is not improbable, or that he adopted this metaphorical style of complaint to avoid giving offence to Ferdinand, it is equally characteristic of the depth of his religious feelings and the depth of his gratitude to the Almighty. But remonstrance, no matter how just or how delicately urged, had little effect on the court of Spain. He was soon after recalled, to end his days in comparative want and obscurity. It was not apparently in the designs of Providence that Columbus should have succeeded in his primary object—the delivery of Jerusalem—but his half-success, the demonstration of the rotundity of the earth and the discovery of our hemisphere, were productive of more benefit to humanity than the complete victories of most other great benefactors of mankind. While he has handed down to all ages an imperishable name, he has also left an example to posterity—and particularly to us Americans, who owe him so much gratitude and reverence—that far outweighs in importance his contributions to science and his efforts to aggrandize his adopted country. He has proved in his own person that a soul filled with deep and intense devotion to the Creator, and a will conformable in all things to his laws, are alone capable of leading human beings to the achievement of true and lasting greatness.

Equally salutary, though different in degree and purpose, is the lesson taught us by the life and labors of George Washington, who may be considered as having been in the natural what Columbus was in the supernatural order—a noble [Pg 485] specimen of humanity; a lover and benefactor of his kind.

As Americans, we cannot study too diligently the character of him who was properly called the Father of his Country. No other among our Revolutionary ancestors embodied in himself so many of those civic virtues which constitute the perfect citizen. Like most men who have played prominent parts on the world’s stage, Washington was born with strong passions and an imperious disposition; but careful self-culture early changed his powerful impulses into tenacity of purpose and strength of will, while his natural exclusiveness gave him afterwards that dignity of word and action which is absolutely necessary for those who are called upon to command. As general of the army and president of the infant republic, he had men around him of more brilliancy, larger experience, and greater mental attainments; but he alone possessed in a superior degree that well-balanced organization and intuitive wisdom to which all could pay the homage of obedience.

Washington’s mind, however, was neither synthetical nor originating. He was more a man of ability than of genius. He never could have initiated a revolution, though once begun, as experience has proved, he was admirably adapted to carry it out successfully. In a monarchy, he might have been a loyal, chivalrous subject; under a wise, conservative government, he would have been the first to oppose innovation; under all circumstances, he could not have failed to be a high-toned, accomplished, and honorable gentleman.

We are not surprised that our Protestant fellow-citizens love to point with commendable pride to the example of their great and good co-religionist, though Protestantism, particularly that professed in his day, and by his family and associates, had little to do with the formation of his character or the regulation of his public actions; but as Catholics we yield to none in admiration and affection for the noblest citizen of our common country. We can never forget that when our numbers were “few and faint, but fearless still,” when Puritan fanaticism and Anglican superciliousness endeavored to underrate our services, malign our motives, and misrepresent our doctrines, George Washington, rising superior to the narrow, petty bigotry of his generation, was the first to give a hearty and candid recognition to our claims as good and faithful citizens. His words to Bishop Carroll and the other representatives of the Catholics of the Revolution are indelibly impressed on the memory of the millions of Catholics among us who feel, and are proud to acknowledge, that to him and his associates they are mainly indebted for the civil and religious liberty they now so freely enjoy. “As mankind become more liberal,” he wrote, “they will be more apt to allow that all those who conduct themselves as worthy members of the community are equally entitled to the protection of civil government. I hope ever to see America among the foremost nations in examples of justice and liberality. And I presume that your fellow-citizens will not forget the patriotic part which you took in the accomplishment of their Revolution and the establishment of their government, or the important assistance which they received from a nation in which the Roman Catholic faith is professed.”

[Pg 486] Though a sincere Christian, Washington cannot be said to have been a religious man. The cold formalities of Episcopalianism to which he was accustomed could not touch his heart nor inspire his soul with great and glowing emotions; but this was more the fault of the system in which he was reared than of himself. The motives of his actions seem to have been principally based on a refined sense of honor, on his comprehension of the requirements of the natural law, which in his regard was usually in conformity with the teachings of the church. He was just, honest, truthful, and manly; faithful in his social relations and moderate in his ambition. Had he possessed some of the glorious enthusiasm of Columbus, great as he was, he might have been still greater; and had the discoverer united to his other wonderful qualities the worldly wisdom of Washington, his star might not have descended amid the darkness and disappointment which clouded the last years of his eventful life.

Taking the character of the two greatest personages, we find in their collective lives the development of the highest qualities which human nature is capable of exhibiting. As such, we desire to hold them up for imitation to the youth of this country, who in a short time will take the place of the present generation in the conduct of our civil and domestic affairs. That those men were of different races and peculiar national tendencies does not prevent the blending of their characters into one harmonious whole. The greatest nations of ancient and modern times, those which have developed the most equitable and stable systems of government, with the greatest liberty and the highest civilization, have been formed upon the union of various tribes, clans, and families, having many radically different tendencies and special characteristics. In what one people may be deficient another may have a superabundance; and the volatile and supersensitive nature of one race is counteracted by the sedateness and stolidity of others less imaginative. As the river Nile, flowing from different sources, bears in its course the riches of the soils of a hundred climes, and empties them all into the lap of Egypt, so families of men, gifted by their Creator with various qualities of heart and mind, collect together, each with its contribution, to form a lasting and magnificent commonwealth. This is as true of religious as of political society. The church, guided by a divine instinct, finds employment and turns to account the genius of all her children, no matter how peculiar or dissimilar their attributes. She welcomes and perfects the organizing power of the Latin races, and the fire and enthusiasm of the Celtic, equally with the solidity of the Germanic and the imagination of the Orientals. Unity in diversity, authority with liberty, are essentials and correlative in the science of good government, whether it be that of a republic or of the universal church.

Who knows but that the nation now in process of forming in the bosom of our republic, from the various races of Europe, with ampler natural capacities quickened into greater activity by the political character of its institutions, is destined, in the order of events, to give to Christianity an expression more adequate and more in accordance with its universal spirit and divine origin? The church of Christ has no reverses in the movement of her [Pg 487] divine mission, and she has turned to account each race according to its gifts in the Old World from her beginning. May not all these, in their best energies combined in the New, be called to realize the highest type of the Christian character? Do not the leading traits of Columbus and Washington point out to us the ideal Christian, the union of the most exalted faith with the thoroughest manhood? For as Christ was perfect God and perfect man in one personality, so is he who unites the most exalted faith with the most thorough manhood in one personality the complete Christian. Is not this ideal Christian the glorious promise of the future of this New World?

Protestantism, which has been the religion of the vast majority of our countrymen, is gradually losing its hold upon their convictions. The religion alone which can claim the attention of all mankind is the Catholic. It alone has all the notes of truth, both inward and outward, in its favor.

Unsupported by religious convictions, no nation can realize its true destiny. Unity of religious conviction, and the virtues necessary to uphold its institutions, are more necessary to a republic like ours than to any other form of political government. The principles and views of human nature on which our republic is based are sustained by the doctrines of Christianity taught by the Catholic Church. Gradually the church and the republic are approaching each other, and with this nearer approach there springs up reciprocal appreciation and sympathy. Fanatics on one hand, and infidels on the other, may warn, may threat, and may attempt to keep them apart by conspiracy and persecution, but in vain; for God, in whose providence they are destined to be united, will not be frustrated by the puny efforts of his enemies to keep them asunder. Out of this divine wedlock will spring forth children whose lives will be of the highest type of Christian manhood, and whose civilization will be the most glorious development of God’s kingdom on earth.

[Pg 488]

CATHOLICS IN THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION.

The moment of England’s triumph in the last century was the dawn of American independence. When England, aided by her colonies, had at last wrested Canada from France, and, forcing that weakened power to relinquish Louisiana to Spain, had restored Havana to the Catholic sovereign only at the price of Florida, her sway seemed secure over all North America from the icy ocean to the Gulf of Mexico, from the shores of the Atlantic to the Mississippi. But her very success had aroused questions and created wants which were not to be answered or solved until her mighty American power was shattered.

While Spain and France kept colonies in leading-strings, England allowed her American provinces to thrive by her utter neglect of them. Monarchs granted charters liberally, and with that their interest seemed to vanish, until it was discovered that offices could be found there for court favorites. But the people had virtually constituted governments of their own; had their own treasury, made their own laws, waged their wars with the Indian, carried on trade, unaided and almost unrecognized by the mother country.

The final struggle with France had at last awakened England to the importance, wealth, and strength of the American colonies. It appeared to embarrassed English statesmen that the depleted coffers of the national treasury might be greatly aided by taxing these prosperous communities. The Americans, paying readily taxes where they could control their disbursement, refused to accept new burdens and to pay the mother country for the honor of being governed. The relation of colonies to the mother country; the question of right in the latter to tax the former; the bounds and just limits on either side, involved new and undiscussed points. They now became the subject of debate in Parliament, in colonial assemblies, in every town gathering, and at every fireside in the American colonies. The people were all British subjects, proud of England and her past; a large majority were devoted to the Protestant religion and the house of Hanover, and sought to remain in adherence to both while retaining all the rights they claimed as Englishmen.

A small body of Catholics existed in the country. What their position was on the great questions at issue can be briefly told.

They were of many races and nationalities. No other church then or now could show such varieties, blended together by a common faith. Maryland, settled by a Catholic proprietor, with colonists largely Catholic, and for a time predominantly so, contained some thousands of native-born Catholics of English, and to some extent of Irish, origin, proud of their early Maryland record, of the noble character of the charter, and of the nobly tolerant character of the early laws and practice of the land of Mary. In Pennsylvania a smaller Catholic body existed, more scattered, by no means so compact or so influential [Pg 489] as their Maryland brethren—settlers coming singly during the eighteenth century mainly, or descendants of such emigrants, some of whom had been sent across the Atlantic as bondmen by England, others coming as redemptioners, others again as colonists of means and position. They were not only of English, Irish, and Scotch origin, but also of the German race, with a few from France and other Catholic states. New Jersey and New York had still fewer Catholics than Pennsylvania. In the other colonies, from New Hampshire to Georgia, they existed only as individuals lost in the general body of the people. But all along the coast were scattered by the cruel hand of English domination the unfortunate Acadians, who had been ruthlessly torn from their Nova Scotian villages and farms, deprived of all they had on earth—home and property and kindred. With naught left them but their faith, these Acadians formed little groups of dejected Catholics in many a part, not even their noble courage amid unmerited suffering exciting sympathy or kindly encouragement from the colonists. Florida had a remnant of its old Spanish population, with no hopes for the future from the Protestant power to which the fortunes of war and the vicissitudes of affairs had made them subjects. There were besides in that old Catholic colony some Italians and Minorcans, brought over with Greeks under Turnbull’s project of colonization. Maine had her Indians, of old steady foes of New England, now at peace, submitting to the new order of things, thoroughly Catholic from the teaching of their early missionaries. New York had Catholic Indians on her northern frontier. The Catholic Wyandots clustered around the pure streams and springs of Sandusky. Further west, from Detroit to the mouth of the Ohio, from Vincennes to Lake Superior, were little communities of Canadian French, all Catholics, with priests and churches, surrounded by Indian tribes among all which missionaries had labored, and not in vain. Some tribes were completely Catholic; others could show some, and most of them many, who had risen from the paganism of the red men to the faith of Christ.

Such was the Catholic body—colonists who could date back their origin to the foundation of Maryland or Acadia, Florida or Canada, Indians of various tribes, new-comers from England, Germany, or Ireland. There were, too, though few, converts, or descendants of converts, who, belonging to the Protestant emigration, had been led by God’s grace to see the truth, and who resolutely shared the odium and bondage of an oppressed and unpopular church.

The questions at issue between the colonies and the mother country were readily answered by the Catholics of every class. Catholic theologians nowhere but in the Gallican circles of France had learned to talk of the divine right of kings. The truest, plainest doctrines of the rights of the people found their exposition in the works of Catholic divines. By a natural instinct they sided with those who claimed for these new communities in the western world the right of self-government. Catholics, of whatever race or origin, were on this point unanimous. Evidence meets us on every side. Duché, an Episcopal clergyman, will mention Father Harding, the pastor of the Catholics in Philadelphia, for “his known attachment to British liberty”—they had not yet begun to [Pg 490] talk of American liberty. Indian, French, and Acadian, bound by no tie to England, could brook no subjection to a distant and oppressive power. The Irish and Scotch Catholics, with old wrongs and a lingering Jacobite dislike to the house of Hanover, required no labored arguments to draw them to the side of the popular movement. All these elements excited distrust in England. Even a hundred years before in the councils of Britain fears had been expressed that the Maryland Catholics, if they gained strength, would one day attempt to set up their independence; and the event justified the fear. If they did not originate the movement, they went heartily into it.

The English government had begun in Canada its usual course of harassing and grinding down its Catholic subjects, putting the thousands of Canadians completely at the mercy of the few English adventurers or office-holders who entered the province, giving three hundred and sixty Protestant sutlers and camp-followers the rights of citizenship and all the offices in Canada, while disfranchising the real people of the province, the one hundred and fifty thousand Canadian Catholics. How such a system works we have seen, unhappily, in our own day and country. But with the growing discontent in her old colonies, caused by the attempts of Parliament to tax the settlers indirectly, where they dared not openly, England saw that she must take some decisive step to make the Canadians contented subjects, or be prepared to lose her dear-bought conquest as soon as any war should break out in which she herself might be involved. Instead of keeping the treaty of Paris as she had kept that of Limerick, England for once resolved to be honest and fulfil her agreement.

It was a moment when the thinking men among the American leaders should have won the Canadians as allies to their hopes and cause; but they took counsel of bigotry, allowed England to retrace her false steps, and by tardy justice secure the support of the Canadians.

The Quebec act of 1774 organized Canada, including in its extent the French communities in the West. Learning a lesson from Lord Baltimore and Catholic Maryland, “the nation which would not so much as legally recognize the existence of a Catholic in Ireland, now from political considerations recognized on the St. Lawrence the free exercise of the religion of the Church of Rome, and confirmed to the clergy of that church their rights and dues.”

Just and reasonable as the act was, solid in policy, and, by introducing the English criminal law and forms of government, gradually preparing the people for an assimilation in form to the other British colonies, this Quebec act, from the simple fact that it tolerated Catholics, excited strong denunciation on both sides of the Atlantic. The city of London addressed the king before he signed the bill, petitioning that he should refrain from doing so. “The Roman Catholic religion, which is known to be idolatrous and bloody, is established by this bill,” say these wiseacres, imploring George III., as the guardian of the laws, liberty, and religion of his people, and as the great bulwark of the Protestant faith, not to give his royal assent.

In America, when the news came of its passage, the debates as to their wrongs, as to the right of Parliament to pass stamp acts or levy [Pg 491] duties on imports, to maintain an army or quarter soldiers on the colonists, seemed to be forgotten in their horror of this act of toleration. In New York the flag with the union and stripes was run up, bearing bold and clear on a white stripe the words, “No Popery.” The Congress of 1774, though it numbered some of the clearest heads in the colonies, completely lost sight of the vital importance of Canada territorially, and of the advantage of securing as friends a community of 150,000 whose military ability had been shown on a hundred battle-fields. Addressing the people of Great Britain, this Congress says: “By another act the Dominion of Canada is to be so extended, modelled, and governed as that, by being disunited from us, detached from our interests by civil as well as religious prejudices; that by their numbers swelling with Catholic emigrants from Europe, and by their devotion to administration so friendly to their religion, they might become formidable to us, and on occasion be fit instruments in the hands of power to reduce the ancient free Protestant colonies to the same slavery with themselves.” “Nor can we suppress our astonishment that a British parliament should ever consent to establish in that country a religion that has deluged your island in blood, and dispersed impiety, bigotry, persecution, murder, and rebellion through every part of the world.”

This address, the work of the intense bigot John Jay, and of the furious storm of bigotry evoked in New England and New York, was most disastrous in its results to the American cause. Canada was not so delighted with her past experience of English rule or so confident of the future as to accept unhesitatingly the favors accorded by the Quebec act. She had from the first sought to ally herself with the neighboring English colonies, and to avoid European complications. When she proposed the alliance, they declined. She would now have met their proposal warmly; but when this address was circulated in Canada, it defeated the later and wiser effort of Congress to win that province through Franklin, Chase, and the Carrolls. It made the expeditions against the British forces there, at first so certain of success by Canadian aid, result in defeat and disgrace. In New York a little colony of Scotch Catholics, who would gladly have paid off the score of Culloden, took alarm at the hatred shown their faith, and fled with their clergyman to Canada to give strength to our foe, when they wished to be of us and with us. In the West it enabled British officers to make Detroit a centre from which they exerted an influence over the Western tribes that lasted down into the present century, and which Jay’s treaty—a tardy endeavor to undo his mischief of 1774—did not succeed in checking.

Pamphlets, attacking or defending the Quebec act, appeared on both sides of the Atlantic. In the English interest it was shown that the treaty of Paris already guaranteed their religion to the Canadians, and that the rights of their clergy were included in this. It was shown that to insist on England’s establishing the state church in Canada would justify her in doing the same in New England. “An Englishman’s Answer” to the address of Congress rather maliciously turned Jay’s bombast on men like himself by saying: “If the actions of the different sects in religion are inquired into, we shall [Pg 492] find, by turning over the sad historic page, that it was the —— sect (I forget what they call them; I mean the sect which is still most numerous in New England, and not the sect which they so much despise) that in the last century deluged our island in blood; that even shed the blood of the sovereign, and dispersed impiety, bigotry, superstition, hypocrisy, persecution, murder, and rebellion through every part of the empire.”

One who later in life became a Catholic, speaking of the effect of this bill in New England, says: “We were all ready to swear that this same George, by granting the Quebec bill, had thereby become a traitor, had broke his coronation oath, was secretly a papist,” etc. “The real fears of popery in New England had its influence.” “The common word then was: ‘No king, no popery.’”

But though Canada was thus alienated, and some Catholics at the North frightened away, in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and the French West the fanaticism was justly regarded as a mere temporary affair, the last outburst of a bigotry that could not live and thrive on the soil. Providence was shaping all things wisely; but we cannot be surprised at the wonder some soon felt. “Now, what must appear very singular,” says the writer above quoted, “is that the two parties naturally so opposite to each other should become, even at the outset, united in opposing the efforts of the mother country. And now we find the New England people and the Catholics of the Southern States fighting side by side, though stimulated by extremely different motives: the one acting through fear lest the king of England should succeed in establishing among us the Catholic religion; the other equally fearful lest his bitterness against the Catholic faith should increase till they were either destroyed or driven to the mountains and waste places of the wilderness.”

Such was the position of the Catholics as the rapid tide of events was bearing all on to a crisis. The Catholics in Maryland and Pennsylvania were outspoken in their devotion to the cause of the colonies. In Maryland Charles Carroll of Carrollton, trained abroad in the schools of France and the law-courts of England, with all the learning of the English barrister widened and deepened by a knowledge of the civil law of the Continent, grappled in controversy the veteran Dulany of Maryland. In vain the Tory advocate attempted, by sneers and jibes at the proscribed position of the foreign-trained Catholic, to evade the logic of his arguments. The eloquence and learning of Carroll triumphed, and he stood before his countrymen disenthralled. There, at least, it was decided by the public mind that Catholics were to enjoy all the rights of their fellow-citizens, and that citizens like Carroll were worthy of their highest honors. “The benign aurora of the coming republic,” says Bancroft, “lighted the Catholic to the recovery of his rightful political equality in the land which a Catholic proprietary had set apart for religious freedom.” In 1775 Charles Carroll was a member of the first Committee of Observation and a delegate to the Provincial Convention of Maryland, the first Catholic in any public office since the days of James II. “Charles Carroll of Carrollton, the great representative of his fellow-believers, and already an acknowledged leader of the patriots, sat in the Maryland Convention as the [Pg 493] delegate of a Protestant constituency, and bore an honorable share in its proceedings.”

When the news of Lexington rang through the land, borne from town to town by couriers on panting steeds, regiments were organized in all the colonies. Catholics stepped forward to shoulder their rifles and firelocks. Few aspired to commissions, from which they had hitherto been excluded in the militia and troops raised for actual service, but the rank and file showed Catholics, many of them men of intelligence and fair education, eager to meet all perils and to prove on the field of battle that they were worthy of citizenship in all its privileges. Ere long, however, Catholics by ability and talent won rank in the army and navy of the young republic.

We Catholics have been so neglectful of our history that no steps were ever taken to form a complete roll of those glorious heroes of the faith who took part in the Revolutionary struggle. The few great names survive—Moylan, Burke, Barry, Vigo, Orono, Louis, Landais; here and there the journal of a Catholic soldier like McCurtin has been printed; but in our shameful neglect of the past we have done nothing to compile a roll that we can point to with pride.

When hostilities began, it became evident that Canada must be gained. Expeditions were fitted out to reduce the British posts. The Canadians evinced a friendly disposition, giving ready assistance by men, carriages, and provisions to an extent that surprised the Americans. Whole parishes even offered to join in reducing Quebec and lowering the hated flag of England from the Castle of St. Louis, where the lilies had floated for nearly two centuries. But the bigotry that inspired some of our leaders was too strong in many of the subordinates to permit them to reason. They treated these Catholic Canadians as enemies, ill-used and dragooned them so that almost the whole country was ready to unite in repulsing them. Then came Montgomery’s disaster, and the friends of America in Canada dwindled to a few priests: La Valiniere, Carpentier, the ex-Jesuits Huguet and Floquet, and the Canadians who enlisted in Livingston’s, Hazen’s, and Duggan’s corps, under Guillot, Loseau, Aller, Basadé, Menard, and other Catholic officers.

Then Congress awoke to its error. As that strategic province was slipping from the hands of the confederated colonies, as Hazen’s letters came urging common sense, Congress appointed a commission with an address to the Canadian people to endeavor even then to win them. Benjamin Franklin was selected with two gentlemen from Catholic Maryland—Samuel Chase and Charles Carroll. To increase their influence, Congress requested the Rev. John Carroll to accompany them, hoping that the presence of a Catholic priest and a Catholic layman, both educated in France and acquainted with the French character, would effect more than any argument that could be brought to bear on the Canadians. They hastened to do their utmost, but eloquence and zeal failed. The Canadians distrusted the new order of things in America; the hostility shown in the first address of Congress seemed too well supported by the acts of Americans in Canada. They turned a deaf ear to the words of the Carrolls, and adhered to England.

Canada was thus lost to us. Taking our stand among the nations of the earth, we could not hope to [Pg 494] include that province, but must ever have it on our flank in the hands of England. This fault was beyond redemption.

But the recent war with Pontiac was now recalled. Men remembered how the Indian tribes of the West, organized by the mastermind of that chief, had swept away almost in an instant every fort and military post from the Mississippi to the Alleghanies, and marked out the frontier by a line of blazing houses and villages from Lake Erie to Florida. What might these same Western hordes do in the hands of England, directed, supplied, and organized for their fell work by British officers! The Mohawks and other Iroquois of New York had retired to the English lines, and people shuddered at what was to come upon them there. The Catholic Indians in Maine had been won to our side by a wise policy. Washington wrote to the tribe in 1775, and deputies from all the tribes from the Penobscot to Gaspé met the Massachusetts Council at Watertown. Ambrose Var, the chief of the St. John’s Indians, Orono of Penobscot, came with words that showed the reverent Christian. Of old they had been enemies; they were glad to become friends: they would stand beside the colonists. Eminently Catholic, every tribe asked for a priest; and Massachusetts promised to do her best to obtain French priests for her Catholic allies. Throughout the war these Catholic Indians served us well, and Orono, who bore a Continental commission, lived to see priests restored to his village and religion flourishing. Brave and consistent, he never entered the churches of the Protestant denominations, though often urged to do so. He practised his duties faithfully as a Catholic, and replied: “We know our religion and love it; we know nothing of yours.”

Maine acknowledges his worth by naming a town after this grand old Catholic.

But the West! Men shuddered to think of it. The conquest of Canada by a course of toleration and equality to Catholics would have made all the Indian tribes ours. The Abnakis had been won by a promise to them as Catholics; the Protestant and heathen Mohawks were on the side of England, though the Catholics of the same race in Canada were friendly. If the Indians in the West could be won to neutrality even, no sacrifice would be too great.

Little as American statesmen knew it, they had friends there. And if the United States at the peace secured the Northwest and extended her bounds to the Mississippi, it was due to the Very Rev. Peter Gibault, the Catholic priest of Vincennes and Kaskaskia, and to his sturdy adherent, the Italian Colonel Vigo. Entirely ignorant of what the feeling there might be, Col. George Rogers Clark submitted to the legislature of Virginia, whose backwoods settlement, Kentucky, was immediately menaced, a plan for reducing the English posts in the Northwest. Jefferson warmly encouraged the dangerous project, on which so much depended. Clark, with his handful of men, struck through the wilderness for the old French post of Kaskaskia. He appeared before it on the 4th of July, 1778. But the people were not enemies. Their pastor had studied the questions at issue, and, as Clark tells us, “was rather prejudiced in favor of us.” The people told the American commander they were convinced [Pg 495] that the cause was one which they ought to espouse, and that they should be happy to convince him of their zeal. When Father Gibault asked whether he was at liberty to perform his duty in his church, Clark told him that he had nothing to do with churches, except to defend them from insult; that, by the laws of the state, his religion had as great privileges as any other. The first Fourth of July celebration at Kaskaskia was a hearty one. The streets were strewn with flowers and hung with flags, and all gave themselves up to joy. But Clark’s work was not done. The English lay in force at Vincennes. Father Gibault and Colonel Vigo, who had been in the Spanish service, but came over to throw in his fortunes with us, urged Clark to move at once on Vincennes. It seemed to him rash, but Father Gibault showed how it could be taken. He went on himself with Dr. Lefont, won every French hamlet to the cause, and conciliated the Indians wherever he could reach them. Vigo, on a similar excursion, was captured by British Indians and carried a prisoner to Hamilton, the English commander at Vincennes, but that officer felt that he could not detain a Spanish subject, and was compelled by the French to release him. When Clark, in February, appeared with his half-starved men, including Captain Charlevoix’s company of Kaskaskia Catholics, before Vincennes, and demanded its surrender with as bold a front as though he had ten thousand men at his back, the English wavered, and one resolute attack compelled them to surrender at discretion. What is now Indiana and Illinois, Wisconsin and Upper Michigan, was won to the United States. To hold it and supply the Indians required means. Clark issued paper money in the name of Virginia, and the patriotic Colonel Vigo and Father Gibault exhausted all their resources to redeem this paper and maintain its credit, although the hope of their ever being repaid for their sacrifice was slight, and, slight as it might have been, was never realized.[138] Their generous sacrifice enabled Clark to retain his conquest, as the spontaneous adhesion of his allies to the cause had enabled him to effect it. The securing of the old French posts Vincennes, Fort Chartres, and others in the West which the English had occupied, together with the friendship of the French population, secured all the Indians in that part, and relieved the frontiers of half their danger. Well does Judge Law remark: “Next to Clark and Vigo, the United States are more indebted to Father Gibault for the accession of the States comprised in what was the original Northwestern Territory than to any other man.”

Those Western Catholics did good service in many an expedition, and in 1780 La Balm, with a force raised in the Illinois settlements and Vincennes, undertook to capture Detroit, the headquarters of the English atrocities. He perished with nearly all his little Catholic force where Fort Wayne stands, leaving many a family in mourning.

The first bugle-blast of America for battle in the name of freedom seemed to wake a response in many Catholic hearts in Europe. Officers came over from France to offer their swords, the experience they had acquired, and the training [Pg 496] they had developed in the campaigns of the great commanders of the time. Among the names are several that have the ring of the old Irish brigade. Dugan, Arundel, De Saint Aulaire, Vibert, Col. Dubois, De Kermorvan, Lieut.-Col. de Franchessen, St. Martin, Vermonet, Dorré, Pelissier, Malmady, Mauduit, Rochefermoy, De la Neuville, Armand, Fleury, Conway, Lafayette, Du Portail, Gouvion, Du Coudray, Pulaski, Roger, Dorset, Gimat, Brice, and others, rendered signal service, especially as engineers and chiefs of staff, where skill and military knowledge were most required. Around Lafayette popular enthusiasm gathered, but he was not alone. Numbers of these Catholic officers served gallantly at various points during the war, aiding materially in laying out works and planning operations, as well as by gallantly doing their duty in the field, sharing gayly the sufferings and privations of the men of ’76.

Some who came to serve in the ranks or as officers rendered other service to the country. Ædanus Burke, of Galway, a pupil of St. Omer’s, like the Carrolls, came out to serve as a soldier, represented South Carolina in the Continental Congress, and was for some time chief-justice of his adopted State. P. S. Duponceau, who came over as aide to Baron Steuben in 1777, became the founder of American ethnology and linguistics. His labors in law, science, and American history will not soon be forgotten.

Meanwhile, Catholics were swelling the ranks, and, like Moylan, rising to fame and position. The American navy had her first commodore in the Catholic Barry, who had kept the flag waving undimmed on the seas from 1776, and in 1781 engaged and took the two English vessels, Atlanta and Trepassay; and on other occasions handled his majesty’s vessels so roughly that General Howe endeavored to win him by offers of money and high naval rank to desert the cause. Besides Catholics born, who served in army or navy, in legislative or executive, there were also men who took part in the great struggle whose closing years found them humble and devoted adherents of the Catholic Church. Prominent among these was Thomas Sims Lee, Governor of Maryland from 1779 to the close of the war. He did much to contribute to the glorious result, represented his State in the later Continental Congress and in the Constitutional Convention, as Daniel Carroll, brother of the archbishop, also did. Governor Lee, after becoming a Catholic, was reelected governor, and lived to an honored old age. Daniel Barber, who bore his musket in the Connecticut line, became a Catholic, and his son, daughter-in-law, and their children all devoted themselves to a religious life, a family of predilection.

In Europe the Catholic states, France and Spain, watched the progress of American affairs with deepest interest. At the very outset Vergennes, the able minister of France, sent an agent to study the people and report the state of affairs. The clear-headed statesmen saw that America would become independent. In May, 1776, Louis XVI.. announced to the Catholic monarch that he intended to send indirectly two hundred thousand dollars. The King of Spain sent a similar sum to Paris. This solid aid, the first sinews of war from these two Catholic sovereigns, was but an earnest of good-will. In [Pg 497] France the sentiment in favor of the American cause overbore the cautious policy of the king, the amiable Louis XVI.. He granted the aid already mentioned, and induced the King of Spain to join in the act; he permitted officers to leave France in order to join the American armies; he encouraged commerce with the revolting colonies by exempting from duties the ships which bore across the ocean the various goods needed by the army and the people. The enthusiasm excited by Lafayette, who first heard of the American cause from the lips of an English prince, soon broke down all the walls of caution. An arrangement was made by which material of war from the government armories and arsenals was sent out, nominally from a mercantile house. A year after the Declaration of Independence, France, which had opened her ports to American privateers and courteously avoided all English complaints, resolved to take a decisive step—not only to acknowledge the independence of the United States, but to support it. Marie Antoinette sympathized deeply with this country, and won the king to give his full support to our cause. On the 6th of February, 1778, Catholic France signed the treaty with the United States, and thus a great power in Europe set the example to others in recognizing us as one of the nations of the earth. America had a Catholic godmother. Amid the miseries of Valley Forge Washington issued a general order: “It having pleased the Almighty Ruler of the universe to defend the cause of the United American States, and finally to raise us up a powerful friend among the princes of the earth, to establish our liberty and independence upon a lasting foundation, it becomes us to set apart a day for gratefully acknowledging the divine goodness and celebrating the important event, which we owe to his divine interposition.” France now openly took part in the war, and in July, 1778, a French fleet under d’Estaing appeared on our coasts, neutralizing the advantage which England had over us by her naval superiority. The ocean was no longer hers to send her army from point to point on the coast. This fleet engaged Lord Howe near Newport, and co-operated with Sullivan in operations against the English in Rhode Island. After cruising in the West Indies it again reappeared on our coast to join Lincoln in a brave but unsuccessful attack on Savannah, in which fell the gallant Pulaski, who some years before had asked the blessing of the pope’s nuncio on himself and his gallant force in the sanctuary of Our Lady of Czenstochowa, before his long defence of that convent fortress against overwhelming Russian forces.

In July, 1780, another fleet, commanded by the Chevalier de Ternay, entered the harbor of Newport, bringing a French army commanded by an experienced general, John Baptiste de Vimeur, Count de Rochambeau. An army of Catholics with Catholic chaplains, observing the glorious ritual of the church with all solemnity, was hailed with joy in New England. The discipline of that army, the courteous manners of officers and privates, won all hearts. What that army effected is too well known to be chronicled here in detail. When Lafayette had cornered Cornwallis in Yorktown, Washington and Rochambeau marched down, the fleet of the Count de Grasse defeated Admiral Graves off the [Pg 498] capes of Virginia, and, transporting the allied armies down, joined with them in compelling Cornwallis to surrender his whole force; and old St. Joseph’s Church, in Philadelphia, soon rang with the grand Te Deum chanted in thanksgiving at a Mass offered up in presence of the victorious generals.

None question the aid given us by Catholic France. Several who came as volunteers, or in the army or fleet, remained in the United States. One officer who had served nobly in the field laid aside his sword and returned to labor during the rest of his life for the well-being of America as a devoted Catholic priest.

But France was not the only Catholic friend of our cause. Spain had, as we have seen, at an early period in the war, sent a liberal gift of money. She opened her ports to our privateers, and refused to give up Captain Lee, of Marblehead, whom England demanded. She went further; for when intelligence came of the Declaration of Independence, she gave him supplies and repaired his ship. She subsequently sent cargoes of supplies to us from Bilbao, and put at the disposal of the United States ammunition and supplies at New Orleans. When an American envoy reached Madrid, she sent blankets for ten regiments and made a gift of $150,000 through our representative. When the gallant young Count Bernardo de Galvez, whose name is commemorated in Galveston, was made governor of Louisiana, he at once tendered his services to us; he forwarded promptly the clothing and military stores in New Orleans; and when the English seized an American schooner on the Louisiana lakes, he confiscated all English vessels in reprisal.

Spain had not formally recognized the United States. She offered her mediation to George III., and on its refusal by that monarch, for that and other causes she declared war against England. Galvez moved at once. He besieged the English at Baton Rouge, and, after a long and stubborn resistance, compelled it to surrender in September, 1780; he swept the waters of English vessels, and then, with the co-operation of a Spanish fleet under Admiral Solano and de Monteil, laid siege to the ancient town of Pensacola. The forts were held by garrisons of English troops, Hessians, and northern Tories, well supplied and ready to meet the arms of the Catholic king. The resistance of the British governor, Campbell, was stout and brave; but Pensacola fell, and British power on our southern frontier was crushed, and neutralized. Spain gave one of the greatest blows to England in the war, next in importance to the overthrow of Burgoyne and Cornwallis.

On the Northwest, too, where English influence over the Indians was so detrimental, Spain checked it by the reduction of English posts that had been the centre of the operations of the savage foe. America was not slow in showing her sense of gratitude to Catholic Spain. Robert Morris wrote to Galvez: “I am directed by the United States to express to your excellency the grateful sense they entertain of your early efforts in their favor. Those generous efforts gave them so favorable an impression of your character and that of your nation that they have not ceased to wish for a more intimate connection with your country.” Galvez made the connection more intimate by marrying a lady of New Orleans, [Pg 499] who in time presided in Mexico as wife of the Viceroy of New Spain.

But it was not only by the operations on land that the country of Isabella the Catholic aided our cause. Before she declared war against England, her navy had been increased and equipped, so that her fleets co-operated ably with those of France in checking English power and lowering English supremacy on the ocean.

Yet a greater service than that of brave men on land or sea was rendered by her diplomacy. Russia had been almost won by England; her fleet was expected to give its aid to the British navy in reasserting her old position; but Spain, while still neutral, proposed an armed neutrality, and urged it with such skill and address that she detached Russia from England, and arrayed her virtually as an opponent where she had been counted upon with all certainty as an ally. Spain really thus banded all Continental Europe against England, and then, by declaring war herself, led Holland to join us openly.

Nor were France and Spain our only Catholic friends. The Abbé Niccoli, minister of Tuscany at the court of France, was a zealous abettor of the cause of America. In Germany the Hessians, sent over here to do the work of English oppression, were all raised in Protestant states, while history records the fact that the Catholic princes of the empire discouraged the disgraceful raising of German troops to be used in crushing a free people; and this remonstrance and opposition of the Catholic princes put a stop to the German aid which had been rendered to our opponent.

Never was there such harmonious Catholic action as that in favor of American independence a hundred years ago. The Catholics in the country were all Whigs; the Catholics of Canada were favorable, ready to become our fellow-citizens; France and Spain aided our cause with money and supplies, by taking part in the war, and by making a Continental combination against England; Catholic Italy and Catholic Germany exerted themselves in our favor. Catholics did their duty in the legislature and in the council-hall, in the army and in the navy; Catholics held for us our northeastern frontier, and gave us the Northwest; Catholic officers helped to raise our armies to the grade of European science; a Catholic commander made our navy triumph on the sea. Catholic France helped to weaken the English at Newport, Savannah, and Charleston; crippled England’s naval power in the West Indies, and off the capes of Virginia utterly defeated them; then with her army aided Washington to strike the crowning blow at Cornwallis in Yorktown. Catholic Spain aided us on the western frontier by capturing British posts, and under Galvez reduced the British and Tories at Baton Rouge and Pensacola. And, on the other hand, there is no Catholic’s name in all the lists of Tories.

Washington uttered no words of flattery, no mere commonplaces of courtesy, but what he felt and knew to be the truth, when, in reply to the Catholic address, he said: “I presume that your fellow-citizens will not forget the patriotic part which you took in the accomplishment of their Revolution and the establishment of their government, or the important assistance which they received from a nation in which the Roman Catholic faith is professed.”

[138] “Father Gibault, but especially Vigo, had on hand at the close of the campaign more than $20,000 of this worthless trash (the only funds, however which Clark had in his military chest), and not one dollar of which was ever redeemed.”

[Pg 500]

THE IRISH HOME-RULE MOVEMENT.[139]

What is the real nature of the new political movement or organization in Ireland which emblazons on its banner the device “Home Rule”? Beyond all question it has attained to national dimensions. It has concentrated upon itself more of the attention and interest, hopes and sympathies, of the Irish people than any political endeavor on the same field of action for many years. More than this, it seems to have succeeded in exacting a tribute to its power and authority which no previous movement received from the adverse ministers, publicists, and people of England. These, while they combat it, deal with it as “Ireland.” It makes propositions, exacts terms, directs assaults, assents to arrangements on behalf of and in the name of the Irish people; and, as we have indicated, the singular part of the case is that not only is its action ratified and applauded by them, but its authority so to act in their name is virtually recognized by the government. In the House of Commons it takes charge of Irish affairs; has almost an Irish (volunteer) ministry, certainly an organized party not inferior, if not superior, in discipline to that of the “government” or “opposition.” We hear of its “whips,” its councils, its special division-lists, its assignment of particular duties, motions, or bills to particular individuals; and, lastly, we hear of it boldly challenging the Disraelian hosts, fighting them in debate throughout a set field-day, and, despite the actual government majority of forty-eight and working majority of seventy, running the ministerialists to within barely thirteen votes.

In all this there is much that is new in the history of Irish politics; and it were impossible that it should not intensely interest, if not affect, the Catholic millions of America, bound, as most of them are, to Ireland by the sacred ties of faith and kindred and nationality.

What, then, is Home Rule? Is it Fenianism, “veiled” or unveiled? Is it Repeal? Is it less than repeal, or more than repeal? Is it a surrender or a compromise of the Irish national demand; or is it, as its advocates claim, the substance of that demand shaped and adjusted according to the circumstances, requirements, and necessities of the present time?

With the fall of the Young Ireland party, and the disastrous collapse of their meditated rather than attempted insurrection in 1848, there seemed to foes and friends an end of national movements in Ireland for the balance of the century. It is almost a law of defeats that the vanquished are separated into two or three well-defined parties or sections: those whom the blow has intensified and more embittered in their opposition; those whom it wholly overawes, who thereafter consider they have done enough for [Pg 501] honor, and retire entirely from the field; and, lastly, those who recognize, if they do not accept, the defeat; who admit the impossibility of further operations on a position so advanced, fall back upon some line which they imagine they can hold, and, squaring round there, offer battle with whatever of strength and resources survive to them. This is just what resulted in Ireland in 1848-49. The Young Ireland movement of 1848 was never national in dimensions or acceptance. O’Connell’s movement was, from 1842 to 1844; but from that date forward, though there were two or three rival movements or parties, having for their leaders respectively O’Connell, Smith O’Brien, and John Mitchel, no one of them had the nation at its back. The Young Irelanders led away from O’Connell the youth, talent, enthusiasm, and, to a large extent, though not entirely, the resolute earnestness and honesty of the old Repeal party. It is a very common but a very great fallacy that they broke away on a “war policy” from the grand old man whose fading intellect was but too sadly indicated in the absurd conduct that drove the young men from his side. They had no “war” policy or design any more than he had (in the sense of a war attack on England), until they caught up one in the blaze and whirl of revolutionary intoxication scattered through Europe by the startling events of February, 1848, in Paris. They seceded from O’Connell on this point,[140] because they would not subscribe to the celebrated test resolutions (called “Peace Resolutions”) declaring that under no circumstances was it or would it be lawful to take up arms for the recovery of national rights. Spurning such a declaration, but solemnly declaring they contemplated no application of its converse assertion in their political designs for Ireland, the seceders set up the “Irish Confederation.” But the magic of O’Connell’s name, and indeed the force of a loving gratitude, held the masses of the people and the bulk of the clergy in the old organization. The Confederates were in many places decidedly “unpopular,”[141] especially when, the Uncrowned Monarch having died mournfully in exile, his following in Conciliation Hall raised the cry that the Young Irelanders “killed O’Connell.” Soon afterwards the seceders were themselves rent by a secession. The bolder spirits, led by John Mitchel and Devin Rielly, demanded that the Confederation, in place of disclaiming any idea of an armed struggle against England, should avowedly prepare the people for such a resort. The new secession was as weak in numbers, relatively towards the Confederation, as the original seceders were towards the Repeal Association. The three parties made bitter war upon one another. A really national movement there was no more.

Suddenly Paris rose against Louis Philippe, and throughout Europe, in capital after capital, barricades went up and thrones came down. Ireland caught the flame. The Mitchel party suddenly found themselves masters of the situation. The Confederation leaders—O’Brien, Duffy, Dillon, O’Gorman, Meagher, and Doheny—not only found their platform abandoned, but eventually, though not without some hesitation [Pg 502] and misgiving, they themselves abandoned it too, and threw themselves into the scheme for an armed struggle in the ensuing summer or autumn. It was thought, perhaps, that although this might not reunite the O’Connellites and the Young Irelanders, it would surely reunite the recently-divided sections of the O’Brien following; but it did so only ostensibly or partially. There were two schools of insurrectionists in the now insurrectionary party: Mitchel and Rielly declared that O’Brien and Duffy wanted a “rosewater revolution”; O’Brien and Duffy declared the others were “Reds,” who wanted a jacquerie. The refusal of the leaders to make the rescue of Mitchel the occasion and signal for a rising, led to bitter and scarcely disguised recrimination; and when, a couple of months later, they themselves, caught unawares and unprepared by the government, sought to effect a rising, the result was utter and complete failure. The call had no real power or authority behind it. The men who issued it had not the mandate of the nation in any sense of the word. They were at the moment the fraction of a fraction. They had against them the bulk of the Repeal millions and the Catholic clergy; not against them in any combative sense, but in a decided disapproval of their insurrection. Some, and only some, of the large cities became thoroughly imbued with and ready to carry through the revolutionary determination—an impress which Cork has ever since retained; but beyond the traditional vague though deep-rooted feeling of the Irish peasantry against the hateful rule of England, the rural population, and even the majority of the cities and towns, had scarcely any participation in “the Forty-Eight movement.”

When, therefore, all was over, and the “Men of ’48,” admittedly the flower of Ireland’s intellect and patriotism, were fugitives or “felons”—some seeking and receiving asylum and hospitality in America, others eating their hearts in the hulks of Bermuda or the dungeons of Tasmania—a dismal reaction set in in Ireland. The results above referred to as incidental to defeats as a rule were plainly apparent. Of the millions who, from 1841 to 1848, whether as Repealers, O’Connellites, Confederates, Mitchelites, Old Irelanders, or Young Irelanders, partook in an effort to make Ireland a self-governed or else totally independent nation, probably one-half in 1849 resigned, as they thought, for ever, all further hope or effort in that direction. Of the remainder, a numerically small party—chiefly, though not all, men who had belonged to John Mitchel’s section of the Young Irelanders—became only the more exasperated by a defeat in which they felt that their policy had not had even a chance of trying what was in it; a defeat, too, that left the vanquished not one incident to solace their pride and shield them from humiliation and ignoble ridicule. Chafing with rage and indignation, they beheld the rest of what remained at all visible of the national party effecting that retrograde movement alluded to in a foregoing page. Of all the brilliant leaders of Young Ireland, Gavan Duffy alone now remained to face on Irish soil the terrible problem, “What next?” Openly proclaiming that the revolutionary position could not be held, he ordered a retreat all along the line. Halting for a while on an attempt to revive the original Irish Confederation policy—an attempt which he had to abandon for want of support—he at [Pg 503] length succeeded in rallying what could be called a political party on a struggle for “Tenant Right.” It raised in no way the “national” question. It gathered Presbyterians of the north and Catholics of the south, repealers and anti-repealers, in an organization to force Parliament to pass a bill preventing the eviction of tenant-farmers unless for non-payment of rent; preventing also arbitrary increasing of rent that might squeeze out the farmer in another way. “Come, now, this is something practical and sensible,” said matter-of-fact non-repealers and half-hearted nationalists. “Why, it is craven surrender and sheer dishonor!” cried the irreconcilable section of the ’48 men. A band of thirty or forty members of Parliament were returned at the instance of the Tenant League to work out its programme. They were mostly corrupt and dishonest men, who merely shouted the new shibboleth for their own purposes. Were the people thoroughly in earnest, and did they possess any really free voting power (there was no vote by ballot then), all this could be cured; but as things stood, the parliamentary band broke up in the first three months of their existence. The English minister bought up its noisiest leaders, of whom Keogh (now a judge) and Sadleir are perhaps most widely remembered. In some cases the constituencies, priests and people, condoned their treason, duped into believing it was not treason at all, but “a great thing to have Catholics on the bench.” In other places the efforts of priests and people to oppose the re-election of the traitors were vain; free election amongst “tenants at will” being almost unknown without the ballot. The tenants’ cause was lost. Thus ruin, in its own way as complete and disastrous as that which overtook the insurrectionary attempt of 1848, now overthrew the experiment of a great popular campaign based on constitutional and parliamentary principles. Not only was there now no movement for nationality in Ireland; there was not an Irish movement of any kind or for any Irish purpose at all, great or little. It was Pacata Hibernia as in the days of Carew and St. Leger.

Now came the turn for the unchanged and exasperated section of the ’48 war party. Few in numbers, and scattered wide apart, they had hissed forth scorn and execration on Duffy’s parliamentary experiment as a departure from the revolutionary faith. If he in 1849 answered to their invectives by pointing to the fiasco of the year before, they now taunted him with the collapse of 1853. Not more than two or three of the ’48 men of any prominence, however, took up this actually hostile attitude. Most of them—O’Brien, Dillon, Meagher, O’Gorman, and even Martin—more or less expressly approved the recent endeavor as the best thing practicable under the circumstances in Ireland. Now, however, the men who believed in war and nothing but war, in total separation and nothing short of separation, would take their turn. The Fenian movement thus arose.

If neither of the sections or subsections of the Irish nationalists in 1848 could be said to have succeeded in rallying or representing the full force, or even a considerable proportion, of Irish patriotism, this new venture was certainly not more fortunate in that respect. Outside its ranks, obstinately refusing to believe in its policy, remained the bulk of the millions who had followed [Pg 504] O’Connell or Smith O’Brien. Yet the Fenians worked with an energy worthy of admiration—except where the movement degenerated into an intolerance that forbade any other national opinions save those of its leaders to be advanced. In truth, their influence on Irish politics was very mixed in its merits. In some places it was a rude and vaunting rowdyism that called itself Fenianism; in others an honest, manly, self-sacrificing spirit of patriotism marked the men who were its confessors and martyrs. If in their fall they drew down upon Ireland severities worse than anything known since 1798, it is only fair, on the other hand, to credit in a large degree to the sensations aroused by their trials the great awakening of public opinion on the Irish question which set in all over England at the time.

And now once more the board was clear. England had won the game; not a pawn remained untaken on the Irish side. Not an Irish association, or society, or “agitation,” or demand of any kind challenged Britannia’s peace of mind. Once more it was a spectacle of the lash and the triangle; state-trials, informers, and prosecutors; the convict-ship and the hulk; the chain-gangs at Portland and Chatham.

“Who will show us any light?” exclaims one of the Young Ireland bards in a well-known and beautiful poem. Such might well have been the exclamation of Ireland in 1867. Was this to be the weary cycle of Irish effort, for ever and for ever? Was armed effort hopeless, and peaceful effort vain? Was there no alternative for Irishmen but to become “West-Britons,” or else dash their brains out against a dungeon wall? Could no one devise a way whereby to give scope and vent to the Irish passion for national existence, to give a field to Irish devotion and patriotism, which would be consonant with the spirit of manhood, without calling for these hecatombs of victims?

Suddenly a new element of consideration presented itself; new, indeed, and rather startling.

It was Irish Protestantism offering the hand of reconciliation to Ireland.

The Tory party had come into power in the course of the Fenian prosecutions, and had carried on the work in a spirit which Cromwell himself would approve. They really held office, not because they had an effective majority in the House of Commons, but because the liberals were broken up and divided, unable to agree on a policy. To turn to his own account the “Fenian scare” was Mr. Gladstone’s brilliant idea. To make a dash on the Irish Church establishment would rally all the mutinous fractions of liberalism, on the principle of “hit him, he has no friends.” It would gratify all England as a sort of conscience-salve for the recent dragonnades and coercion laws. Yes; this was the card with which to beat Disraeli. True, Mr. Gladstone had only a few years before put down his foot and declared that never, “no, never,” could, would, or should that Irish Church be disestablished or interfered with in any way. What was he to say now to cover this flank movement, made for purely party purposes? In all Britain there is no brain more subtle, none more fertile of strategic resource, than that of W. E. Gladstone. He put it all on Fenianism. He had changed his mind, not because he was out of office with a weak and [Pg 505] broken party, and wanted to get back with a strong and united one, but because he had opened his eyes to Fenianism! He never hit on a more successful idea. On the cry of “Down with the Irish Church!” he was swept into office at the head of the most powerful majority commanded by any minister since Peel in 1841. It must not be thought that Mr. Gladstone was insincere, or meant anything but service to Ireland (while also serving his party) by this move. He has the faculty of intensely persuading himself into a fervid conscientiousness on any subject he likes, whether it be Free Trade, Church Establishment, Church Disestablishment, or Vaticanism.

The Irish Protestants had an unanswerable case against England—that is, as between them and her—on this matter of disestablishment. It was, on her part towards them, an open, palpable, and flagitious breach of faith—breach of formal treaty in fact. The articles of the Union in 1800 expressly covenanted that the maintenance of the Irish Church establishment was to be one of the cardinal, fundamental, essential, and everlasting conditions of the deed. Mr. Gladstone snapped his fingers at such considerations. “Mind, you thereby repeal and annul the Union,” cried Irish conservatives. “We will kick another crown into the Boyne,” said Parson Flanagan at an Orange meeting. “We have held by this bargain with you with uneasy consciences,” said and wrote numbers of sincere Irish Protestants; “break it, and we break with you, and become Irishmen first and before everything.”

It was rightly judged by thoughtful observers that, though noisy braggarts of the Parson Flanagan class would not only let the crown alone, but would cringe all the more closely by England’s side even when the church was swept away, there was much of sober earnestness and honest resolve in what hundreds of Protestant laymen (and even clergymen) spoke upon this issue. Yes, though the bulk of Irish Protestants would prove unequal to so rapid a political conversion, even under provocation so strong, there would still be a considerable movement of their numbers towards, if not into, the Irish camp. Time, moreover, and prudent and conciliatory action on the part of their Catholic countrymen, would be always increasing that rapprochement.

And so in the very chaos and disruption and upheaval of political elements and parties in Ireland from 1868 to 1870 there was, as by a mysterious design of Providence, a way made for events and transformations and combinations which otherwise would have been nigh impossible.

The church was disestablished; Irish Protestants were struck with amazement and indignation. England had broken with them; they would unite with Ireland. But, alas! no; this was, it seemed, impossible. They could never be “Fenians.” No doubt they, after all, treasured in their Protestant hearts the memory, the words, and, in a way, the principles of their great coreligionists, Grattan and Flood, Curran and Charlemont. In this direction they could go; but towards separation—towards an “Irish republic,” towards disloyalty to the crown—they would not, could not, turn their faces. These men belonged in large part to a class, or to classes, never since 1782 seen joining a national movement in any great numbers. They were men of high position; large landed proprietors, [Pg 506] bankers, merchants, “deputy-lieutenants” of counties, baronets, a few of them peers, many of them dignitaries of the Protestant church, some of them fellows of Trinity College. Such men had vast property at stake in the country. They saw a thousand reasons why Irishmen alone should regulate Irish affairs, but they would hold by a copartnership with Scotland and England in the empire at large. This, however, they concluded, was not what the bulk of their countrymen was looking for; and so it almost seemed as if they would turn back and relapse into mere West-britonism as a lesser evil for them than a course of “rebellion” and “sedition.”

At this juncture there appeared upon the scene a man whose name seems destined to be writ large on the records of a memorable era in Irish history—Isaac Butt.

When, on Friday evening, the 15th of September, 1865, the British government seized the leading members of the Fenian Society and flung them into Richmond jail, it became a consideration of some difficulty with the prisoners and their friends how and by whom they should be defended. In one sense they had plenty of counsel to choose from. Such occasions are great opportunities for briefless advocates to strike in, like ambitious authors of unacted plays who nobly offer them to be performed on Thanksgiving day or for some popular public charity. No doubt the prisoners could have had attorneys and lawyers of this stamp easily enough; but it was not every man whom they would trust equally for his ability and his honesty. Besides, there was the money difficulty. The crown was about to fight them in a costly law duel. To retain men of the front rank at the bar would cost thousands of pounds; to retain men of inferior position would be worse than useless. Could there be found amongst the leaders of the Irish bar even one man bold enough and generous enough to undertake the desperate task and protracted labor of defending these men, leaving the question of fee or remuneration to the chance of funds being forthcoming? What of the great advocates of the state trials of 1843 and 1848? Holmes—clarum et venerabile nomen—dead! Shiel—gone too; Whiteside—on the bench; O’Hagan—also a judge; Sir Colman O’Loghlen—a crown prosecutor; Butt—yes, Butt, even then in the front rank, the most skilful, the boldest, the most eloquent, and most generous of them all—he is just the man! Where is Butt?

Where, indeed? He had to be searched and sought for, so utterly and sadly had a great figure silently disappeared from the forum. Thirty years before Isaac Butt was the young hope of Protestant conservatism, the idol of its salons. He had barely passed his majority when he was elected to the professorship of Political Economy in Trinity College; and, at an age when such honors were unprecedented, was elevated to a “silk-gown,” as Queen’s Counsellor at the bar. Yet there was always about young Butt an intense Irishism; he was a high-spirited Protestant, a chivalrous conservative; but even in that early time the eagle eye of O’Connell detected in him an Irish heart and a love of the principles of liberty that would yet, so he prophesied, lead Butt into the ranks of the Irish people. The English Tory leaders enticed him over to London, and sent him into Parliament for one of their boroughs—Harwich. [Pg 507] They made much of him—and were his ruin. In the whirl of parliamentary life, in the fascination of London society, he abandoned his professional business and fell into debt difficulty, and dissipation. Had he been less independent and less self-willed, he would no doubt have been richly placed by his ministerial friends. Somehow or another he and they drew apart as he went sullenly and recklessly downward. In 1864 he had almost dropped out of sight, having just previously ceased to sit in Parliament.

To the solicitation to undertake the defence of the Fenian prisoners he responded by giving them, it may be said, three whole years of his professional life. He flung himself into that fight for the men in the dock with the devotion, the enthusiasm, the desperate energy of a man striving for life itself. His genius and ability, conspicuous before, shone out more than ever. He was admittedly the first lawyer of his day; and now not only the crown counsel but the judges on the bench felt they were dealing with their master. Of money he took no thought. Indeed, in the best and worst days of his fortunes he gave it little heed. He has been known in the depth of his difficulties to hand back a special fee of a hundred guineas which he knew a poor client could not spare, and the same day pay his hotel bill with a check doomed never to be cashed. The incident is unfortunately only too typical of one phase of his nature.

Three or four years immersed in such labors—one protracted series of state trials—dealing in the most painfully realistic way with the problem of Ireland’s destiny, could not fail to have a profound effect on a man like Butt. Meantime, he grew into immense popularity. His bold appeals for the prisoners, which soon came to be the sentiments of the man rather than the pleadings of the advocate, were read with avidity in every peasant’s cottage and workman’s home. The Fenians, broken and defeated as an organization, yet still ramifying throughout the country, looked to him with the utmost gratitude and confidence. Under his presidency and guidance a society called the Amnesty Association was established for the purpose of obtaining the royal clemency for at least some of the Fenian convicts. A series of mass-meetings under its auspices were held throughout the island, and were the largest assemblages seen in Ireland since the Repeal meetings of Tara and Mullaghmast. In fine, Mr. Butt found himself a popular leader, at the head of at all events the pro-Fenian section of Irish political elements, and daily becoming a power in the country.

The resentful Protestants, just now half-minded to hoist the national flag, were many of them Butt’s old comrades, college-chums, and political associates. He noted their critical position, and forthwith turned all his exertions, in private as well as in public, to lead them onward to the people, and to prevent them from relapsing into the character of an English garrison. In his public speeches he poured forth to them the most impassioned appeals. In private he sought out man by man of the most important and influential among them. “Banish hesitation and fear,” he cried. “Act boldly and promptly now, and you will save Ireland from revolutionary violence on the one side, and from alien misgovernment on the other. You, like myself, have been early [Pg 508] trained to mistrust the Catholic multitude, but when you come to know them you will admire them. They are not anarchists, nor would they be revolutionists if men like you would but do your duty and lead them—that is, honestly and faithfully and capably lead them—in the struggle for constitutional liberty.” The Protestants listened, almost persuaded; but some sinister whisper now and again of the terrors of a “Catholic ascendency” in an Irish parliament—a reminder that Irish Catholics would vote for a nominee of their clergy right or wrong, and consequently that if the Irish Protestant minority threw off the yoke of England, they should bear the yoke of Rome—seemed to drive them, scared, from the portals of nationality.

About this time, the beginning of 1870, Mr. Gladstone raised to the peerage Colonel Fulke Greville Nugent, M.P. for Longford County. He was a respectable and fairly popular “liberal” in politics, was a good landlord, and, though a Protestant, kindly and generous to the Catholic clergy and people around him. He had held his seat by and from the priests; for Longford County, from the days when it heroically won its independence a generation before, had been virtually in the gift of the Catholic clergy. This vacancy occurred in the very fever of the Amnesty excitement. A few months before Mr. Gladstone had rather harshly refused the appeal for Amnesty; and Tipperary made answer and commentary thereon by electing to Parliament one of the Fenian convicts, at the moment a prisoner in Chatham. It was proposed to imitate this course in Longford, but a more worthy resolve was taken: John Martin of Rostrevor—“Honest John Martin”—one of the purest, most heroic, and lovable of Irish patriots, was put in nomination, although at the moment he was travelling in America and unaware of the proceedings. But the clergy had at a private conference committed themselves to the son of their late member—a brainless young officer in the army. Neither party would withdraw their man; and out of this arose a conflict as fierce, bitter, and relentless as if the parties to it had been ancient and implacable foes instead of lifelong and loving friends. Altar denunciations of the most terrible kind were hurled at the men who dared to “oppose their clergy” by advocating John Martin. Platform denunciations were hurled at the men who dared to go “against Ireland” by preferring to a stainless and devoted patriot a brainless little fop who had not a political idea in his head or a spark of Irish patriotism in his heart.

Ireland, and England too, looked on in intense amazement and curiosity. Here was a great problem brought to a critical test. The old story of the anti-Catholic English press, that Irish Catholics would slavishly “vote black white at the ordering of their priests,” was about to be proved true or put to shame. The Longford clergy defeated John Martin and carried their man, but he was subsequently unseated on petition. The experiment otherwise, however, was decisive. For John Martin, a Presbyterian Protestant, a Catholic people fought their own clergy as vehemently as they and those clergy had ever fought the Tory landlords. It was an exceptional and painful incident, but at the moment one of vast importance, which proudly vindicated [Pg 509] both priests and people from a damaging calumny.[142]

There was no misunderstanding all this. No Irish Protestant, patriotically inclined, could any longer be scared by the bugbear of “Catholic intolerance.” The time at last had come for the step they meditated. The moment had arrived also for some attempt to answer the aspirations of Ireland. And “the Hour had brought the Man.”

On the night of Thursday, the 19th of May, 1870, there were quietly assembled in the Bilton Hotel, Upper Sackville Street, Dublin—the most exclusive and aristocratic of the quasi-private hotels in that city—a strange gathering. Such men had never met to confer or act together before. It was a “private conference of Irish gentlemen to consider the state of Ireland.” But looking around the room, one might think the millennium at hand, when the wolf would lie down with the lamb and the lion slumber with the fawn. Men who were Tories, nay, Orangemen; men who were “ultra-montanes,” men who had been Repealers, men who were Whigs, men who had been rebels; Protestants, Catholics, Presbyterians, Quakers, Fenians, anti-Fenians, knights, high sheriffs, aristocrats, democrats—a strange array, about fifty in all.[143] Soberly and earnestly and long they discussed and debated and deliberated. The men seemed thoroughly to realize the gravity of what they were about. [Pg 510] They did not claim any representative character whatever; they spoke each man for himself. The questions they had proposed to discuss dealt merely with “absenteeism and the consequent loss of trade and national prosperity,” and “the advantages of a royal residence in Ireland in a political and financial point of view.” But in the very first moments of discussion even the new converts to nationality took up bolder ground. Lord Mayor Purdon, a Protestant Conservative, a man universally respected in Dublin; Sir William Wilde (husband of the Young Ireland poetess “Speranza”), an archæologist of European fame; the Hon. Capt. King-Harman; and the Rev. J. E. Galbraith, fellow of Trinity College, one of the most distinguished mathematicians of the age, were amongst the men of conservative politics who came especially to the front. The nationalists, both “extreme” and “moderate,” interfered but little in the discussions, looking on greatly astonished at all they heard and saw; but their part of the case was well handled by the man who was really the guiding spirit of the scene, and who eventually rose and in a brief speech of thrilling power proposed:

“That it is the opinion of this meeting that the true remedy for the evils of Ireland is the establishment of an Irish parliament with full control over our domestic affairs.”

A dozen men rose to second this resolution of Mr. Butt, which was carried in the meeting not only without a dissentient voice, but with enthusiasm. Considering the composition of the assemblage, this was one of the most startling incidents in Irish politics for half a century. Having appointed a committee to report resolutions to a future meeting, the assembly adjourned.

This was the birth of the Home-Rule movement.

The course of procedure adopted, following upon the above events, was one quite unique in Irish politics. Usually the promoters in such cases would hold a meeting as “we the people of Ireland” and begin to act and speak in the name of the country. Not only was this line of conduct eschewed, it was expressty repudiated, by the semi-private society or association which at first grew out of the Bilton Hotel meeting. It was only four months afterwards (1st of Sept., 1870) that they ventured to assume public form or shape as a political organization. During all this interval they announced themselves simply as a number of Irishmen associated together in an endeavor to ascertain the feeling of the country upon the subject of national autonomy. They had themselves arrived at certain general conclusions or resolutions (hereafter to be noticed), but they declared they could not arrogate to themselves any right or authority to speak for the nation at large. When at length they broke ground and took the field publicly as the “Irish Home Government Association,” they still disclaimed the [Pg 511] right to assume the authoritative functions or tone of a great national organization.[144] That would come at the right time, if the country thought well of calling forth such a body; but this was at best a sort of “precursor society” projecting certain views, and submitting them to public examination by the people, with the avowed intention on the part of these “precursors” of some day, if they found encouragement for their course, calling on the country to pass its deliberate and decisive verdict upon those views, so that Ireland, the nation, might speak, and, speaking, command obedience from all loyal and faithful sons.

This was all Butt’s sagacity. Festina lente was the motto that befitted work so grave and momentous as an effort to lift Ireland up and bid her hope and strive once more. There was need of this deliberation and caution. The experiment of bringing together such elements as he gathered around this new venture was a hazardous one. There were prejudices to be allayed, objections to be removed, antipathies to be conquered. Notoriously there were men who wanted not to go very far on a road so new to them, and whom a very little bit indeed of self-government would satisfy. Just as notoriously were there men who wanted to go a great deal further than they could get the rest of their countrymen to join them in attempting. These two sections—the Protestant loyalists and the Fenian secessionists—were the most widely opposed. Then there were men of the “Old Ireland” school and men of the “Young Ireland” school—men who objected to “repeal” as worthless without the addition of a separate and responsible Irish administration; and men who objected to repeal as dangerous without stronger guarantees against conflict and separation of the kingdoms.

It was expected that the greatest difficulty would be with the (Irish) Fenians; but this was not so. Mainly through Mr. Butt’s great influence with them, but partly because adversity had taught them useful lessons, they either came into the new scheme or else declared for a friendly neutrality. Not that any of them did so in the sense of recanting their Fenian principles. They expressly reserved their own convictions, but announced their determination to give a fair trial and a friendly aid to an honest endeavor in the direction proposed. Some of their body, absent in America, disapproved of this resolve, and bitterly decried the idea of letting any patriotic scheme but their own find tolerance, much less favor, from their ranks. In England, however—i.e., among the Irish in England—where the wreck and disorganization that had broken up Irish Fenianism had had little effect, and where for several years past there had resided whatever of strength and authority remained of that body, the proposals of Mr. Butt were taken up heartily, and even enthusiastically, by them.

A much more formidable work it was found to be to assure the men of large property that this was not an embryo scheme for rebellion and revolution; to persuade the Catholic clergy that it was not either a [Pg 512] cloak for Fenianism or a snare of Orangeism; and to convince the Protestants that it was not a trap laid for them by Cardinal Cullen and the Jesuits.

And now what was the scheme or plan or “platform” put forward after such deliberation, inquiry, negotiation, and investigation? What specifically has been the Irish national demand as put forth to the world in 1870, solemnly ratified in a great National Conference in 1873, and unmistakably and triumphantly endorsed at the general elections of February, 1874?

Substantially the old demand and declaration on the basis of which Ireland has been ready enough any time for the last two hundred and fifty years to compromise with the English connection—equality in a copartnership, but no subjugation; the national autonomy of Ireland secured; the right of Ireland to legislate for and control her own affairs established. The Irish Confederate government of 1642, the free Irish parliament of 1690, the free Irish parliament of 1782, and the decree of the Irish millions organized in the Repeal movement of 1843 formulated just that programme—modified somewhat, no doubt, each time, it might be, according to the requirements of the period; but still, as the student of authentic historical documents will discover, it was on all those memorable occasions in substance the same. The Catholic Confederation at Kilkenny in the seventeenth century, and the Protestant convention at Dungannon in the eighteenth, spoke in almost identical tones as to Ireland’s position under the triple crown of Scotland, England, and Ireland. It was very much as if Virginia in 1865 said: “I have fought you long and bravely; recognize and secure to me the fulness of state rights, and I will loyally cast in my lot as a member of the United States.” How closely the founders of the new Irish movement kept on the old lines may be seen from the subjoined “platform” laid down by the “Home Government Association” in 1870:

“HOME GOVERNMENT ASSOCIATION.

“GENERAL PRINCIPLES.

“I.—This association is formed for the purpose of obtaining for Ireland the right of self-government by means of a national parliament.

“II.—It is hereby declared, as the essential principle of this association, that the objects, and THE ONLY OBJECTS, contemplated by its organization are:

“To obtain for our country the right and privilege of managing our own affairs, by a parliament assembled in Ireland, composed of her majesty the sovereign, and her successors, and the Lords and Commons of Ireland:

“To secure for that parliament, under a federal arrangement, the right of legislating for and regulating all matters relating to the internal affairs of Ireland, and control over Irish resources and revenues, subject to the obligation of contributing our just proportion of the imperial expenditure:

“To leave to an imperial parliament the power of dealing with all questions affecting the imperial crown and government, legislation regarding the colonies and other dependencies of the crown, the relations of the United Empire with foreign states, and all matters appertaining to the defence and the stability of the empire at large.

“To attain such an adjustment of the relations between the two countries, without any interference with the prerogatives of the crown, or any disturbances of the principles of the constitution.

“III.—The association invites the co-operation of all Irishmen who are willing to join in seeking for Ireland a federal [Pg 513] arrangement based upon these general principles.

“IV.—The association will endeavor to forward the object it has in view, by using all legitimate means of influencing public sentiment, both in Ireland and Great Britain, by taking all opportunities of instructing and informing public opinion, and by seeking to unite Irishmen of all creeds and classes in one national movement, in support of the great national object hereby contemplated.

“V.—It is declared to be an essential principle of the association that, while every member is understood by joining it to concur in its general object and plan of action, no person so joining is committed to any political opinion, except the advisability of seeking for Ireland the amount of self-government contemplated in the objects of the association.”

Though rather diffidently and unostentatiously projected, the new movement was hailed with general approbation. Yet it had for some time hanging on either flank very bitter though not very numerous assailants. The ultra-tories, led by the Dublin Daily Express, shrieked fiercely at the Protestant conservatives that they had entered the camp of Fenianism and Romanism; the ultra-whigs, led by the Dublin Evening Post, howled wildly at the Catholics that they were the tools of Orangemen who shammed Home Rule merely to spite Mr. Gladstone for disestablishing the Protestant Church. There can be no doubt this latter idea had long a deterrent effect on the Catholic bishops and clergy; they thought the new movement too like a Protestant revenge on an English minister whom they regarded as a benefactor. “The newly-born patriotism of these Tory-nationalists will soon vanish,” they said (not without show of reason); “wait until they have driven Mr. Gladstone from office, and got Disraeli back again—they will then draw off quick enough from Home Rule.” “Very likely,” answered the Catholic Home-Rulers; “we are quite prepared to find a large percentage of these men fall off, but enough of them will remain faithful and true to make the movement a success; and especially the Protestant youth of the country henceforth will be ours.”

Time—at all events such time as has since elapsed—has quite vindicated this view.

Meantime the country was pronouncing gradually but decisively on the movement. Within the first six months the following corporations, town commissions, and boards of guardians passed formal votes endorsing its principles:

Cork	(Municipal Council).
Limerick	“	“
Athlone	(Town Commission).
Ballinasloe	“	“
Clones	“	“
Dungarvan	“	“
Galway	“	“
Kingstown	“	“
Longford	“	“
Nenagh	“	“
New Ross	“	“
Mullingar	“	“
Queenstown	“	“
Tuam	“	“
Dublin	(Board of Guardians).
Cork	“	“
Drogheda	“	“
Galway	“	“
Kilkenny	“	“
Kilmallock	“	“
Millstreet	“	“
Limerick	Farmers’ Club
Cork	“	“
Mallow	“	“

This was barely a few months’ work as to the pronouncement of popularly-elected public bodies. A number of public meetings in various parts of the country, attended by tens of thousands of the [Pg 514] people, gave a further stamp of approval and a cheer of welcome to the movement.

The mode of electing the governing body or council of the association was peculiar. In place of the usual mode—proposing the list at the annual public meeting, and passing it there and then—the members of the council were elected by ballot-papers; each member of the association, no matter where resident, receiving his paper and exercising his vote as well as if he lived on the spot in Dublin. Much curiosity existed to see the result of this secret ballot-vote in a large body so mixed in religious class and (in a sense) political opinions. Two-thirds or three-fourths of the voters would be Catholics—was it not a grievous peril that by any chance they might ballot in a nearly exclusively Catholic council, and thus sow misgiving and mistrust amongst the Protestants? But never yet have the Catholics of Ireland, in private or in public, failed to refute by a noble tolerance the evil suspicions of their foes. The very first council thus elected (under circumstances, too, that precluded concert or arrangement as to either general or particular result) turned out to be composed of thirty-two Catholics and twenty-nine Protestants; and two Protestants headed the poll![145] The announcement had a profound effect, not only in cementing and solidifying the new union of parties and creeds within the organization, but also in spreading its principles abroad. A good idea of the varied classes composing the governing body thus elected may be gathered from the following analysis of the Home-Rule Council for 1872:

Catholic clergy,	5
Protestant clergy,	4
(The late) Lord Mayor,	1
Aldermen,	7
Deputy lieutenants,	3
Doctors of medicine,	3
Knights,	3
Justices of the peace,	4
Lieutenant-Colonel,	1
Members of Parliament,	5
Queen’s counsel,	1
Solicitors,	2
Town councillors,	3

The British Liberal party, who at first pooh-poohed the “Home-Rule craze,” at length began to take alarm; for without the Irish vote that party could neither attain to nor retain office. They warned the Catholic hierarchy to discourage this mischievous business. It was at best “inopportune”; it would arrest Mr. Gladstone’s beneficent design of settling the Catholic university education question; and would only “play the Tory game.” Liberalism was not going to die easily. Things came to a crisis in the Kerry election of 1872. On the death that year of Lord Kenmare, his son, Viscount Castlerosse, then Catholic-whig-liberal member for Kerry, attained to the earldom, and thus created a vacancy in the parliamentary representation. By a compact between the great landlords of the county, Whig and Tory, thirty years previously, it was agreed to “halve” the county between themselves: one Protestant Tory member from the great house of Herbert of Muckross, and one Catholic Whig from the noble house of Kenmare—an “alliance offensive and defensive” against all third parties [Pg 515] or popular intruders being thus established. On this occasion the new Earl of Kenmare nominated as his successor in the family seat his first cousin, Mr. James A. Dease, an estimable Catholic gentleman acceptable to the people in every way but one: he was not a Home-Ruler. Although the Catholic bishop, Right Rev. Dr. Moriarty, joined the county landlords in nominating Mr. Dease, the bulk of the Catholic clergy, and the people almost unanimously, revolted, and, amidst a shout of derision at such a “hopeless” attempt, hoisted the flag of Home Rule. They, Catholics almost to a man, chose out as their candidate a young Protestant Kerryman barely home from Oxford University—Roland Blennerhassett, of Kells. He was a Home-Ruler, and much loved even as a boy by the Celtic peasantry of that wild Iveragh that breaks the first roll of the Atlantic billows on the stormy Kerry coast. Ireland and England held breath and watched the struggle as a tacitly-admitted test combat.

“Who spills the foremost foeman’s life,

His party conquers in the strife.”

Such an election-struggle probably had not stirred Ireland since that of Clare in 1829. It resulted in an overwhelming victory for Home Rule. Deserted by every influence of power that should have aided and befriended them (save their ever-faithful priests, who, in nearly every parish, marched to the poll at the head of their people)—the frieze-coats of “O’Connell’s county,” rising in their might, tore down the territorial domination that had ruled them for thirty years, and struck a blow that decided the fortunes of the Home-Rule movement.

Barely less important (and only less important because of some peculiar features in the Kerry struggle) was another election being fought out in Galway County at the same moment. That county, about a year previously, had elected unopposed, on Home-Rule principles, a man the value of whose accession to the national ranks it would be almost impossible to overestimate. This was Mitchell Henry, of Kylemore Castle, near relative by descent of that Patrick Henry illustrious in American annals. Not because of his large wealth—he is said to have succeeded on his father’s death to a fortune of over a million pounds sterling—but for his high character, his great ability and thoroughly Irish spirit, he was a man of great influence, and his espousal of Home Rule was quite an event. Now, however, another election, this time contested, fiercely contested, had arisen; the candidates being Colonel Trench, son of Lord Clancarthy, Whig and Tory landlord nominee, and Captain John Philip Nolan, Home-Rule candidate, under the auspices of the great “Prelate of the West,” the world-famed Archbishop of Tuam. For years the grand old man had not interfered in an election or emerged from the sorrowful reticence into which he retired after the ruin of the Tenant League. But Ireland was up for the old cause, and “John of Tuam,” O’Connell’s stoutest ally in the campaign for Repeal, was out under the old flag. Not to let his name and his influence be discredited in his old age was as much the point of battle, certainly the point of honor, on the part of the people, as to return the Home-Ruler. The struggle was one of those desperate and merciless encounters between landlord tyranny [Pg 516] on the one side and conscience in the poor man’s breast on the other, which used to make Irish elections as deadly and disastrous as armed conflicts in the field. Happily, it was the last of its class ever to be seen in Ireland; for the Ballot Act, passed a year after, closed for ever the era of vote-coercion. Captain Nolan was triumphantly returned. The famous “Galway Election Petition,” in which Judge Keogh so distinguished himself, unseated him (for a time) soon after; but Kerry and Galway struck and won together that week in February, 1872; and the one blaze of bonfires on the hill-tops of all the western counties, the following Saturday night, celebrated the double victory for the national cause.

In the course of the next succeeding year every election vacancy in Ireland but one resulted in the return of a Home-Ruler, Mr. Butt himself being among the number. There was now no longer any question as to the magnitude of the dimensions to which the movement had attained. “Home Rule” had become a watchword throughout the land; a salutation of good-will on the road-sides; a signal-shout on the hills. To this had grown the work begun almost in fear and trembling that night at the Bilton Hotel in 1870. The hour could be no longer delayed for convening the whole Irish nation in solemn council to make formal and authoritative pronouncement upon the movement, its principles, and its programme. In the end of the summer of 1873 it was accordingly decided that in the following November an Aggregate Conference of Delegates from every county in Ireland should be convened in the historic Round Room of the Rotunda, memorable as the meeting-place of the Irish Volunteer Convention more than three-quarters of a century before.

But the history of that important event fitly belongs to another chapter of such a record as this. The point now arrived at closes the first stage of the Home-Rule movement—from 1870 to 1873. The second three years—from 1873 to 1876—will exhibit it in a new light, with the mandate of a nation as its authority, and a powerful parliamentary party as its army of operation.

[139] The above article is from the pen of Mr. A. M. Sullivan, M.P. for Louth, editor of the Dublin Nation, and one of the leaders in the national movement for Home Rule in Ireland. The movement is one of great importance and significance. It has many enemies. It has been and continues to be much misrepresented. For these reasons we open our pages to one of its ablest and most eloquent exponents to give its history to our readers. Mr. Sullivan will resume and close the subject in the next number of The Catholic World.—Ed. C. W.

[140] There were certain other issues, chiefly as to alleged profligacy of financial expenditure, and as to audit and publication of accounts, etc., which need not be considered here.

[141] Their meetings in Dublin were constantly “mobbed” for some time.

[142] Not many months later the climax was capped by the triumphant return of Mr. Martin for Meath, probably the most Catholic constituency in Ireland; the candidate whom he defeated (in a stiff but thoroughly good-humored contest) being the son of Lord Fingal, one of the best and most popular of the Irish Catholic nobility.

[143] As this assembly has become in a degree historical, it may be interesting to give the following list (never before published) of those who attended it, and others added by vote thereat to make up a Committee on Resolutions. In nearly every case an indication of the political and religious opinions of the parties is now added. The list includes some of the largest merchants in Dublin:

The Rt. Hon. Edward Purdon, Lord Mayor, Mansion House, Protestant Conservative.

Sir John Barrington, ex-Lord Mayor, D.L., Great Britain Street, Prot. Cons.

E. H. Kinahan, J.P., ex-High Sheriff, Merrion Square, Tory.

James V. Mackey, J.P., Beresford Place, Orangeman.

James W. Mackey, ex-Lord Mayor, J.P., 40 Westmoreland Street, Catholic Liberal.

Sir William Wilde, Merrion Square, F.R.C.S.I., Prot. Cons.

James Martin, J.P., ex-High Sheriff, North Wall, Cath. Lib.

Cornelius Denehy, T.C., J.P., Mountjoy Square, Cath. Lib.

W. L. Erson, J.P., Great Charles Street, Or.

Rev. Joseph E. Galbraith, F.T.C.D., Trinity College, Prot. Cons.

Isaac Butt, Q.C., Eccles Street, Prot. Nationalist.

R. B. Butt, Eccles Street, Prot. Nat.

R. W. Boyle, Banker, College Green, Tory.

William Campbell, 26 Gardiner’s Place, Cath. Lib.

William Daniel, Mary Street, Cath. Lib.

William Deaker, P.L.G., Eden Quay, Prot. Cons.

Alderman Gregg, Sackville Street, Prot. Cons.

Alderman Hamilton, Frederick Street, Cath. Repealer.

W. W. Harris, LL.D., ex-High Sheriff of the County Armagh, Eccles Street, Prot. Cons.

Edward M. Hodson, Capel Street, Prot. Cons.

W. H. Kerr, Capel Street, Prot. Cons.

Major Knox, D.L., Fitzwilliam Square (proprietor of Irish Times), Prot. Cons.

Graham Lemon, Town Commissioner of Clontarf, Yew Park, Prot. Cons.

J. F. Lombard, J.P., South Hill, Cath. Repealer.

W. P. J. McDermott, Great Britain Street, Cath. Rep.

Alexander McNeale, 104 Gardiner Street, Prot. Cons.

W. Maher, T.C., P.L.G., Clontarf, Cath. Rep.

Alderman Manning, J.P., Grafton Street, Prot. Cons.

John Martin, Kilbroney, “Forty-eight” Nationalist, Presbyterian.

Dr. Maunsell, Parliament Street (editor of Evening Mail), Tory.

George Moyers, Richmond Street, Or.

J. Nolan, Sackville Street (Secretary Fenian Amnesty Association), Cath. Nat.

James O’Connor, Abbey Street (late of Irish People), Cath. Fenian.

Anthony O’Neill, T.C., North Strand, Cath. Rep.

Thomas Ryan, Great Brunswick Street, Cath. Nat.

J. H. Sawyer, M.D., Stephen’s Green, Prot. Nat.

James Reilly, P.L.G., Pill Lane, Cath. Nat.

Alderman Plunket, James’ Street, Cath. Nat. Rep.

The Venerable Archdeacon Goold, D.D., M.B., Protestant Tory—son of Goold of ’82.

A. M. Sullivan, T.C., P.L.G., Abbey Street, Cath. Nat. Rep.

Peter Talty, Henry Street, Cath. Rep.

William Shaw, M.P., Beaumont, Cork (President of Munster Bank), Prot. Lib.

Captain Edward R. King-Harman, J.P., Creevaghmore, County of Longford, Prot. Cons.

Hon. Lawrence Harman King-Harman, D. L., Newcastle, County of Longford, Prot. Cons.

George Austin, Town Commissioner of Clontarf, Winstonville, Prot. Cons.

Dr. Barry Rathmines, Cath. Lib..

George Beatty, Henrietta Street, Prot. Cons.

Joseph Begg, Capel Street, Cath. Nat. (Treasurer of Fenian Amnesty Association).

Robert Callow, Alderman, Westland Row.

Edward Carrigan, Bachelor’s Walk, Cath. Lib..

Charles Connolly, Rogerson’s Quay, Cath. Lib..

D. B. Cronin, Nassau Street, Cath. Fenian.

John Wallis, T. C., Bachelor’s Walk, Prot. Cons.

P. Walsh, Merrion Row, Cath. Nat.

John Webster, Monkstown, Prot. Cons.

George F. Shaw, F.T.C.D., Trinity College, Prot. Cons.

P. J. Smith, Dalkey, Cath. Nat. Repealer.

George E. Stephens, Blackhall Place, Prot. Cons.

Henry H. Stewart, M.D., Eccles Street, Prot. Cons.

L. J. O’Shea, J.P., Margaret Place, Cath. Rep.

Alfred Webb, Abbey Street, Nat., “Quaker.”

[144] “This association has never proposed to itself the position and duties of such a great popular organization as must eventually take up and carry out to the victorious end the national question. It has rather proposed to itself the less ambitious though not less arduous task of preparing the ground for such a comprehensive organization.”—First Report of the Irish Home Government Association. Dublin: Falconer, Upper Sackville Street. 1871.

[145] Every year nearly the same five or six men have been returned at the head of the paper; Isaac Butt always first, next to him either O’Neill Daunt or John Martin; the others almost invariably being Rev. Professor Galbraith, A. M. Sullivan, J. P. Ronayne, and Mitchell Henry.—[Mr. Ronayne, we regret to say, died while this article was in our hands.—Ed. C. W.]

[Pg 517]

SIR THOMAS MORE

A HISTORICAL ROMANCE.

FROM THE FRENCH OF THE PRINCESSE DE CRAON

IX.

After the king had declared that he no longer wished her to assume any authority in the household, the queen secluded herself entirely in the most retired portion of the palace. In default of happiness, she at least found forgetfulness there; for it was no longer thought necessary to watch over her. Her rival, on the contrary, glorying in the light of the king’s favor and of her own youth and beauty, spent her days in festivity and enjoyment. She allowed herself to be carried away by the flattery of the throng of courtiers who followed in her train and servilely implored a glance from the eye, a smile or a word from her whom they had so quickly abandoned but a short time before.

For several days, however, the tumult of these fêtes, the sound of music and dancing, had not entered to wound the heart of Catherine in her seclusion. She was seated near the fire, and turning in her hands some worsted stuff intended to make a garment for a poor child. The heavy folds of the curtains hung motionless, the light flame of the waxen tapers burning near her had not wavered, and yet Catherine started nervously and trembled. The anguish of mind she had so long endured had, so to speak, worn away the mortal covering and brought her soul in direct contact with exterior objects; she saw that which possessed no corporeal shape, she heard that which had no sound. Some person unknown has entered her apartments; her beautiful eyes are turned towards the door. Very soon, in fact, the curtains roll on their golden rings. A man enters. He advances a step and pauses. It is Norris, the favorite attendant of Henry VIII.

“What wouldst thou?” asked the queen with that sweet but imposing majesty of manner so natural to her that she could not lay it aside.

“Madam—the king—madam!” And the unfortunate man hesitated, trembling in every limb.

A mist passed over Catherine’s eyes.

“Madam,” he was at last able to articulate, “the king, my lord, sends me to tell you that before daybreak to-morrow morning he wishes you to be ready to leave the palace.”

The queen turned pale.…

“Has your majesty any command to give me?” said Norris after a moment’s silence.

“The king shall be obeyed,” replied the queen coldly, and she made a sign for him to withdraw. He bowed and hastily left the apartment. Catherine remained mute with grief and astonishment. “I have, then, still more to suffer!” she cried at length, falling on her knees. “He drives me from his presence—he, my own husband. He will not even permit me to breathe in the most remote corner of his palace!… Ah! well. Yes, I will [Pg 518] fly from this house of malediction, whose hearthstone has been soiled by infamy, and may I never enter it again!”

But, alas! Catherine had as yet spoken for herself alone. Suddenly the mother’s heart asserted its supremacy; she arose hastily, seized one of the lights near her, and, passing rapidly through several apartments, she at length paused, panting for breath.

“No one!” she exclaimed, looking wildly around her, “no one has been near these apartments to disturb her rest. The most profound silence reigns.” And in her turn she feared to awaken her daughter.

Softly approaching the bed on which reposed the little Mary, she drew aside with her royal hand the heavy curtain of purple and gold. The child was sleeping profoundly; her head rested on one of the delicate arms; her long, golden hair, loosened from all confinement, hung over her lovely neck and shoulders, and down on her light muslin nightdress. She had thrown off the bedclothing that covered her. The blood, pure and calm, circulated gently through the transparent veins. She seemed as happy, as tranquil, as her mother was agitated and miserable. Catherine, in an agony inexpressible, regarded her sleeping child, her hand nervously clenching the curtain she was holding back.

“Sleep on, my daughter, sleep!” she murmured. “Mayst thou never know the weary vigils and bitter anguish of suffering! But what do I say? Does he not involve thee in the unjust proscription of thy mother? The hatred he bears towards her, will he not extend it to thee? Art thou not the very link that must be broken?”

And Catherine, in despair, drew back like a stranger in this apartment she must leave before the dawn of the morning.… Again she returned to the couch of her child. She bent over her; her lips almost touched her forehead. Then a gloomy courage took possession of her soul.

“Why torture myself thus,” she cried, “since thou art still left to me? Though all forget me, though the earth open beneath me, I will never more be separated from thee. Thou shalt be my joy, my life, my hope; thou shalt become my sole, my only friend! One day, yes, one day thou wilt understand thy mother. Let him cast thee far away from him—ah! what matters it? I open my heart to thee! The earth is vast; she will welcome her unfortunate children. And when, worn down by sorrow, I shall be ready to yield up my life, my hand will still be raised to bless thee, and my eyes will be fixed upon thine. It shall be thou who wilt close these eyes before I descend into the night of the grave, and thy tears will bedew my last resting-place. Then wilt thou be courageous, and in thy turn learn how to vanquish and defy evil fortune.”

Thus spoke the unhappy queen. She arose and again fell on her knees. But the hour strikes—that hour she had desired, hoped, waited for, as a moment of happiness, of hope and consolation. It now strikes, clashing, resounding through the silent chambers of her stricken heart, only to awaken a new and fearful sorrow. Still, she hesitates not; she again embraces the child, then tears herself away—flies. She hastens eagerly on—Catherine has disappeared.…

* * * * *

On being informed of the clergy’s refusal the king fell into a furious [Pg 519] rage. For three days the bishops were shut up in Westminster. The royal commissioners went to and fro continually from the king’s palace to the assembly; but the deliberations were conducted with so much secrecy that nothing was known of them outside.

Meanwhile, night came on, and the most profound silence reigned throughout the long cloisters of the abbey. The pale rays of the moon alone illuminated the splendid arches. The sanctuary was deserted, and the red flicker of a lamp suspended in the immense vault showed no larger than a luminous point set in space. A woman covered with a long veil stood within the sacred place, leaning against the iron railing, apparently absorbed in prayer. But no, she was not praying; the human soul must be calm and resigned before it can truly lift itself up towards God. Burning tears streamed from her eyes in torrents upon the stone pavement beneath her feet; she started at the slightest creaking of the wooden stalls surrounding the choir, and her attentive ear caught even the least breath of air. Anon footsteps were heard.

“St. Catherine, pray for us,” said a dear and well-known voice.

“Amen,” responded the queen; and she advanced towards two men who were approaching.

“More!” she exclaimed, “More! you have abandoned me, then?”

“Never, madam!”

“Well, then,” she cried, seizing his hand, “abandon me now! Cease, cease to sacrifice yourself for me! Know that you have no longer a queen; the banished Catherine leaves to-morrow the palace of her cruel husband. No place of refuge is offered her; she is left to choose some obscure corner of the earth where she will be at liberty to die. But he is mistaken! I will never leave the soil of England—no, never!” she cried. “I will never look again upon my own happy land. ‘Woman,’ they would say to me, ‘you have deserted your children; you have not known how to die in the land over which you ought to reign; has the Spanish blood, then, ceased to flow in your veins?’ No, never!”

On hearing her speak thus More stood transfixed with astonishment and sorrow.

“They have dared!” he said at last, “they have dared, Rochester!”

“Yes,” replied the queen, “they have dared! But, Rochester, speak; the time is short; every moment is precious. What has passed in the assembly?”

“Where shall I find words to tell you, madam?” replied the good and venerable old man. “Parliament has been won over; your friends, powerless, have been made to tremble for their own lives; threats of death pass from mouth to mouth. I myself have scarcely been able to escape their criminal attempts on my life; a dish on my table was poisoned, and several of my people have died from eating of it. Consternation reigns secretly in every heart. The clergy are threatened on all sides; the people are exasperated by a thousand calumnies, the sources of which remain scrupulously concealed. The soil of old England seems about to be shaken to its foundations. Vice stalks forth with head erect, while the virtuous man flies in terror. There is time yet, madam. Save yourself! Save us all! Renounce an alliance so fatal for you; abandon this prince who no longer puts [Pg 520] any restraint upon his passions—he is not worthy of you; and let the house of the Lord become your retreat and be your refuge!”

“What sayest thou?” replied Catherine. “Was it for cowardly advice like this I called you to me, Rochester? And my daughter—what kingdom and what father would you give her?”

“God, madam, and the justice of her cause!” cried the afflicted old bishop.

“Then you have yielded?” said the queen.

“Yes,” replied Rochester, “we have recoiled before our worst fears; we have made a pact with falsehood, since we can no longer believe in the veracity of the king. He has summoned before him in turn each one of the most influential members of the conference. He has sworn to them, in the presence of God himself, that he desired in naught to usurp the authority of the spiritual head of the church; that naught could ever change him from being the faithful and obedient child of the church he is; that he hated heresy, and that his sole desire was to prevent it spreading in his kingdom—in a word, that he wished to live and die in the Catholic faith, in the faith of his fathers, and that he only asked of them a title that would give him honor and prove the confidence they had in their prince and the love they bore toward their lawful sovereign. Now, madam, what shall I say to you? He has been so far successful in convincing them that they have carried the majority of votes. We have granted him everything—with this restriction, however: that we acceded to his demand only so far as the law of God would permit. But, alas! discouragement and dissensions have entered among us, and the choice of men by whom the king surrounds himself is sufficient evidence of the road he is resolved to follow. Thomas Audley replaces More, and Cranmer, that base intriguer, is installed in the place of the learned and immortal Warham.”

“Great heaven!” said the queen, “that vile tool of Anne Boleyn primate of England? Then all is lost to faith, hope, the future, succor—all!”

Meanwhile, a strange disturbance was heard, and all at once a door leading to the interior of the abbey was opened. A number of the king’s guard appeared, armed and bearing torches. The queen, terrified, hurriedly retired with More and Rochester within the shadow of a chapel where for centuries had reposed the ashes of the old Saxon kings. The tombs, on which they were represented in sculpture the size of life, lying at full length, their hands crossed on their breasts, the head and feet resting on pillows of stone, cast deep shadows all around them. These shadows, fortunately, concealed the queen, Rochester, and More entirely from observation, while they could see distinctly all that took place in the choir.

The monks, marching in two lines, defiled two by two and took their places in the stalls, while the guards stationed themselves at the different openings. The gleam of the torches lighted up everything. Soon was seen to enter the Abbot of Westminster, who preceded three men richly dressed and enveloped in cloaks. They all three seated themselves in large velvet arm-chairs; but one of them sat in the loftiest and most richly adorned of all. In a word, it was plain that a tribunal was constituted, but that it waited the presence of the accused in order to give judgment. He tarried not long. [Pg 521] The door again opened, and they beheld a young woman enter whose countenance was very pale. She walked between two guards, and her dress was that of a religious.

“What!” said Sir Thomas in a stifled tone. “Why, that is the Holy Maid of Kent! I believe she has her hands bound. No, it is her veil. What a strange matter! Poor young girl! The rumor of her predictions must have reached the king’s ears. I have so constantly warned her not to meddle in affairs of state!” murmured More.

“Can it be she?” cried the queen and Rochester in the same breath. “More, are you sure of it?”

“Quite sure,” he answered. “I remember perfectly her pale and suffering countenance.”

In the meantime they made the young girl seat herself on a stool in the midst of the assembly, and the Abbot of Westminster began to interrogate her.

“What is your name?” he asked in a very loud tone of voice.

She neither moved nor replied.

“I conjure you, my sister, to answer me,” he added more solemnly still. “What is your name?”

“Elizabeth Barton,” she answered, fixing on him a lingering look of surprise and astonishment.

“Where were you born?”

“In Aldington, in the county of Kent,” answered she very distinctly.

“What is your age?”

“Twenty-three years.”

“Why did you become a religious?” continued the abbot.

“I am not a religious; I have assumed this habit in order to do penance and take care of the poor.”

“Who has persuaded you to do this?”

“Myself.”

“But do you not pretend to have revelations from heaven, and have you not told the assembled people of extraordinary things which are hidden in the future?”

“Yes, my lord,” she replied; and her eyes began to gleam with a singular light.

“Well! repeat what you have said,” interrupted he who was seated in the loftiest chair, rising abruptly to his feet. “Repeat what you have said,” he continued. And the long, flame-colored plume that shaded his large hat seemed to tremble with impatience, like the head which it covered.

At the sound of that voice, so imperious and bearing the expression of a soul so deeply agitated, the Holy Maid of Kent seemed stricken with horror. She arose and stood in the midst of the assembly, and, turning toward the speaker, extended her hand.

“O King Henry!” she cried, “think not to conceal yourself from my eyes. I know you; I know with what power you are invested; and now you would have me tell you what I have said and teach you what I have learned. Well, then, … yes, … king, … but mortal like myself, … tremble, recoil with horror and dismay, at sight of the black hypocrisy with which you have enveloped your heart. Look well; fix your eyes on the infamous vices that have eaten out the last sentiment of virtue God had implanted there.… Your crimes have multiplied like the sands which roll with the waves in the depths of the sea; you will inundate the steps of your throne with the blood of the noblest and purest. Heresy, introduced by you into this land, will multiply under a thousand different forms; everywhere with truth will be banished true charity. The years of your [Pg 522] reign will witness the birth of more calamities than the rain of heaven will cause flowers to grow. The woman you desire will dishonor your bed and perish on the scaffold which your own hands will have erected; and your daughter, the child you this day reject, shall reign. Yes! she shall reign,” she cried, “in spite of all your efforts. Then your bones, eaten by worms, shall be buried under the stones of the sepulchre; but your execrable memory shall live among men, and your name—this name of Henry VIII., stamped with the ineffaceable seal of blood—will carry down to ages most remote the horrible memory of a monster!… I have spoken!”[146]

Who could describe the effect produced by these last words on the spectators? Whiter than the linen robe which enveloped his form, the Abbot of Westminster was seized with terror. It was he who had persuaded the king to summon this woman, in order, he said, to undeceive the people, who believed in her, and pacify in this way the credulous and superstitious masses.

A prolonged silence reigned throughout that vast temple; who should dare to speak?

Cromwell alone turned towards the king. He encountered his fixed and furious gaze, which plainly said: “Woe to those who have deceived me!”

He was not at all disconcerted by it. “Be calm, sire,” he said in a low voice, “be calm; nothing is lost yet.”

Henry made no reply, but Cromwell needed no answer.

“My dear sister,” he said in a gentle and honeyed tone, “who has instructed you to say these things?” And he saw Henry VIII. convulsively clench his fists.

“No one,” answered she in a sweet, sonorous voice.

“No one! That is hard to believe,” he replied in a tone almost of derision.… “You have, at least, repeated all this to several others.… That the king, your lord, may believe you to be sincere, you should hide nothing from him. Have you not written to Cardinal Wolsey?”

“Without doubt,” she replied, “I have informed him of what I ought to have let him know, … because that was my duty. Sir Thomas More, the lord chancellor, can bear witness that I tell you the truth.”

“Ah! Sir Thomas too,” replied with emphasis the odious Cromwell; and he dwelt especially on the name of this just man. “Sir Thomas More! It is very well, my dear sister. We verily believe thee.”

The anxiety that seized on the invisible spectators of the chapel may be imagined. The queen was entirely absorbed with the thought of her daughter; but on hearing the terrible indiscretion of this foolish or inspired woman she with difficulty stifled a cry of terror.

“More has written to you, then?” continued Cromwell, whose ingenuity was never at fault.

“Yes, to recommend himself to my prayers, but not on this subject.”

“But you have spoken with him many times,” replied Cromwell in a confident tone, although he really knew nothing about it.

“Once only,” she answered, “in the house of the Carthusians at Richmond, where I saw him with Masters Beering, Risby, and my Lord Rochester.… But they [Pg 523] advised me not to speak of these things, and to keep my revelations secret.”

“They were only the more criminal,” replied Cromwell; “because it was their duty to have unfolded the wicked designs of which you are guilty toward his royal majesty.”

At the word “guilty” she raised her head and fixed her black and piercing eyes upon Cromwell.

“Guilty!” she exclaimed. “It is a crime, then, to speak the truth?”

She said no more, but took her seat without awaiting permission.

In the meantime the king, thanks to Cromwell, had time to recover from the astonishment that had seized him, and to hide from the monks the humiliation which he could hardly wait to avenge; for, not disdaining himself to subdue this feeble enemy whom they had represented as unable to speak in his presence, he had believed, on the faith of his confidants, it was worth while to summon the Holy Maid of Kent before him, in order to show that she was worthy of no confidence. Now the most furious thoughts were at strife within him. How had she recognized him? Had the queen’s friends instructed her?… But she would not name them. What a story this would make throughout the kingdom! And his hardened heart could not cease being troubled.

Cromwell, despite the joy he felt at having made her name More and the Bishop of Rochester, was at a loss how to close with dignity this disagreeable scene. The monks opened their office-books and pretended to be reading; the woman remained seated on her stool and said nothing more; the guards waited some signal, which no one gave.

The king decided the question, which was becoming every moment more and more embarrassing.

“It is well,” he said; “we have had enough of it; I am satisfied.”

He arose abruptly. All followed him; the guards threw open the doors, extinguished the lights, led away the Holy Maid of Kent, and the monks slowly retired into the abbey.

* * * * *

The hours of night rapidly succeeded each other; already a whitish circle began to rise and extend over the horizon. Nevertheless, all were wrapped in sleep in the plain and beneath the shadow of the woods. The industrious husbandman still rested his weary limbs on his rude couch; the dog which guarded his thatched cottage had ceased to howl; and even the invalid found, at the approach of day, a moment of repose. But idleness, always so prolonged in the palaces of kings, seemed to have been banished from the palace of Whitehall. Lights were seen glancing to and fro athwart the large windows; hurried footsteps were heard running up and down the marble stairways; whilst a coach with several horses attached, slowly drove around a distant courtyard.

Anne Boleyn herself was already occupied with the arrangement of her attire. She was seated upon soft cushions of velvet before a toilet table of ebony and gold. A young girl named Anne Savage, whom she preferred above all her maids because of her uninterrupted cheerfulness, her merry chat, and her expertness in the arts of the toilet, perfumed the long and beautiful hair which she was arranging with extreme care on the brow of her mistress, while the latter was searching in a casket she held in her lap for the [Pg 524] jewels she wished to adorn her ears and add to her coiffure.

“There is nothing at all in this box!” cried Boleyn, tossing over pell-mell the most magnificent jewelry.… “These emeralds are so trying to the face! These pearls injure the complexion! Anne, go bring me something else. All these are frightful I tell you!… But what is that? I hear a noise, … a cry.… Listen.… No, … it is in the king’s apartments.…”

“I hear nothing,” replied Anne Savage after a moment’s silence, during which she had not breathed.

“Ah! yes, I hear it,” replied Anne Boleyn; “I suspect the cause of it, too.… But I do not want to think about this.… However, it is a bad omen.…”

And as Lady Boleyn was very superstitious, and her conscience far from easy, she let the casket fall at her feet, and, bowing her head on her bosom, seemed to be absorbed in deep reflection.

Anne Savage tried to complete the coiffure as she sat in that position, but she failed in her task.

“If my lady cannot hold up her head,” at last cried the maid impatiently, “it will be impossible for me to arrange her head-dress properly.”

This admonition recalled Anne Boleyn to herself; she immediately raised her head and began carefully to scrutinize herself in the mirror placed before her. Well pleased with her appearance, she arranged two or three hair-pins ornamented with pearls strung like the beads of a rosary, and drew down a little the net-work of gold that fell below her cap and confined her tresses.

With this improvement she arose, in order to choose from among the dresses she had caused to be brought and laid out on all the furniture in the room.

“This blue, … or rather this lilac,” she murmured; “no, these embroideries are heavy and ugly. I will try this white.… I would have liked a rose-color; here is one. Really, there is nothing here that pleases me.… It is true,” she continued spitefully, “any of these ought to be good enough for one who is going to be married in a garret!”

“In a garret!” interrupted the maid. “What! is it not in the chapel my lady is to be given away?”

“No,” replied Lady Boleyn, reddening. “The king has changed everything since yesterday evening. He has had an altar put up in one of the upper rooms of the palace. You alone are to carry my train, and Norris and Heneage will serve as witnesses. These are the honors which he deigns to accord the Queen of England.… Ah! my dear Anne, I am very miserable,” added Lady Anne, almost ready to burst into tears.

“In a garret!” repeated Savage, and she stood as if stupefied. “In a garret! O my lady! how can you suffer this?… Well, now do you not think I was right in telling you that you would do wrong to marry the king, and abandon so cruelly Lord Percy, Earl of Northumberland, and lord of I know not how many boroughs? He would not have believed himself obliged to marry you in the garret of Northumberland Castle! He loved you so much; he was so proud of you! Many a time has he said to me: ‘Anne, you are a good girl; you have the same name as your mistress. You shall never leave my wife; I will give you a marriage portion and an honest man for a [Pg 525] husband.’ Besides, madam,” continued Anne Savage in a grave, sententious manner, “I can never forget that my grandfather, who was very learned and respected by all the parish, used to say to me as I would sit by his side to sew: ‘Remember well, my little Anne, never to marry a man who is above you in wealth or rank; otherwise you will not be happy, because love flies away very quickly, and reproaches follow.’”

“Ah! my dear Anne, do not recall anew my regrets,” cried Lady Boleyn, with tears in her eyes. “I have never ceased to love Percy; … and when I compare the violence and haughty manner of the king with the gentleness and virtues of Percy, I am miserable for having listened to my ambition. Oh! how severely I am punished. Henry considers me overwhelmed with honor by his loving me! Submissive to all his caprices, I am for ever fearful of losing his favor; while Percy, happy in the sole hope of marrying me, always thanked me for every smile or word that I addressed him. Anne, do you believe that he has entirely forgotten me?” she asked suddenly.

“Truly, my lady, I wot not; I only know by my cousin Savage that he no longer receives any one in his fair castle at York.… But be it as it may, how, my lady, could it profit you to-day?”

“Nay, as thou sayest, naught, my poor Anne,” replied Lady Boleyn; but as she spoke she could not restrain her tears.

She recalled to mind all that she had done to induce the king to marry her; that, since she had been able to attain an end so difficult, she certainly ought to feel satisfied; and yet, in spite of these considerations, she found herself overwhelmed with regrets for the past and fears for the future. She reflected that Henry had conducted himself so cruelly toward the queen, if ever she ceased to please him she would have everything to fear; and the happiness of that brilliant picture of thrones and honors which she had always dwelt on with such ardent longings seemed to vanish at the very moment when she saw it about to be realized. But Anne Savage could not conceive what should afflict her on this point.

“Why,” she exclaimed, “should you torture yourself in this way? It is too late to think of bringing him back, since he is already married. Besides, it is very strange; for you have told me a hundred times that you loved nobody but the king.”

“You are right,” replied Lady Boleyn; “that is true. I did love him, and I love him still; but I feel that it is impossible to love very long a person whom one cannot respect.”

“Better to have thought of that sooner,” murmured the maid; but she took care not to say so aloud.

Absorbed as she was in her sorrow, Lady Boleyn did not forget the care of her toilet, and, to assist in drying her tears, she turned the Venetian mirror in every direction in order to survey herself; but she was by no means satisfied with the ensemble nor the details it presented to her.

“See!” she cried, “how badly these sleeves fit; and these heavy plaits around my waist. In sooth, never was I so badly dressed. This white satin robe with silver flowers is frightful.… Besides, I wanted a rose-colored dress, … but of a color that is not here. They leave me with naught indeed. This [Pg 526] may not be borne. Go, bid all my women enter; I would know what they think of me.”

Anne Savage ran to open the door. Scarcely had she opened it.…

But let us leave the frivolous and coquettish Boleyn to adorn with so much care that form which the dust of the tomb has long since claimed, and follow rather this man, all flushed, out of breath, and hurried, who eagerly mounts the stairs in search of the king. The guards are standing near the doors; the mats on which they passed the night are still lying on the floor in the lower hall of the palace; they rub their half-opened eyes, still bewildered with sleep. They offer the usual salutations to Norris, who advances, and whom they recognize; but he passes through their midst without seeming to perceive them, and enters abruptly the apartment of the king.

Henry VIII., leaning against one of the windows, his face pressed close to the glass, was gazing eagerly out to behold all he had been able to see of Catherine’s departure; but, hearing the door open, he turned quickly around, withdrew from the window, and, going to the far end of the apartment, took his seat.

“Well, good Norris,” he said, looking attentively at him, “what a sad air you wear! It was, then, very difficult to get Catherine off? I had foreseen it all, however.”

“Your majesty had foreseen it all, and yet methinks you have chosen not to be by the while.”

“What, then, has happed?”

“Naught, of great moment—no, in sooth, naught but what should have been. But I vow my heart was bruised sore when the queen’s grief brake forth. Nothing loath was she to go; but when she saw the Princess Mary was not let go with her, and the door of the coach closed, she fain would have cast herself without. Then she uttered cries the most heartrending, and, stretching out her arms towards us, besought us to let her return and once more embrace her daughter. The princess, seeing the despair of her mother, with sobs and cries begged to follow her. At length, there being no way to prevent the queen from descending, she clasped her a thousand times in her arms. She then wrote something on a scrap of paper I have here, and bade me deliver it to your majesty, which I promised to do. She entreated all present to beg you to have compassion on her and send the Princess Mary to her; that she asked but this one favor, and then she would consent to do all that you wished. It was necessary to carry her to the coach; for she fell fainting while embracing her daughter for the last time.”

“Always these fainting fits of hers,” replied the king angrily; “yet will she say it is I who have slain her. Come, let us see the paper!”

Norris presented it.

The king opened it and read the following words which the queen had written in a trembling hand:

“Sire: What have I done to you that you treat me thus? You banish me from your palace and condemn me to exile. Alas! to this I had submitted; but why have you the cruelty to separate me from the only good of mine that is left in all the world? You know well that never have I gainsaid wish of yours; but is it in my power not to be your lawful wife? I conjure you, then, to have compassion on me! Give me back my daughter; give her to me, and I will weep no [Pg 527] more the lot you have cast for me. Become a stranger in the land over which you reign, at least permit to die in peace an unfortunate woman whom you have deprived of her rank, her country, and her friends. Leave me my daughter to console the last days of a life that is almost ended. What can you hope or fear from her? Since you cast her out from your arms, leave me the happiness to take her to mine. I am her mother; I have brought her into the world in sorrow; I have nourished her from my own bosom—she is mine; and, since it is your will to deprive her of a father, do not, at least, tear her from the arms of her unhappy mother.”

This letter, still all wet with tears, produced a painful impression on the mind of Henry.

“This fellow will assuredly find me of the cruelest,” he said to himself. “It is well, it is well,” he added in a loud voice. “It is a request that she makes to me; we will see to it later on. Everything is ready, Norris?” he added immediately.

“Yes, sire; your orders have been executed with the greatest exactness. Heneage and Lady Berkley are below; they await your majesty.”

“Is Dr. Roland also there?” demanded the king. “Yes, sire; he has been there more than an hour.”

“Well, go and seek Lady Boleyn.”

Norris immediately descended. He found all the doors of Lady Boleyn’s apartments open, and in the distance heard exclamations mingling, and unceasingly repeated.

“Oh! how lovely is my lady. Never did she look more fair!” they cried. “How handsomely my lady’s hair is dressed, and what beautiful hair it is! What a sweet complexion, what a charming figure! There is not a woman in all the kingdom who is my lady’s equal!”

Hearing this concert of praise, Anne Boleyn began to take courage.

“No, no,” she said with an air of disdain; “I am very badly dressed to-day.”

As she said these words Norris entered and announced to Lady Boleyn that the king awaited her.

She followed him at once, accompanied by Anne Savage; the other women stood in astonishment, and were very curious to know why this favor was shown to their companion, while the jealousy with which they already regarded her was still further increased.

[146] See Sanders on the Holy Maid of Kent.

TO BE CONTINUED.

[Pg 528]

THE TRANSCENDENTAL MOVEMENT IN NEW ENGLAND.[147]

This volume reads pleasantly. There is attached to it a peculiar interest, and something of the charm of a romance, for those who have had some knowledge of the transcendental movement in New England, and acquaintance with its leaders. The author has evidently written his account with feelings of sympathy and friendship, which he acknowledges, and these have led him to bring out all the good points of the movement, while its shortcomings, exaggerations, and absurdities are scarcely, if at all, hinted at. The style is clear and smooth, the narrative never falters; the writer has contrived to throw a certain halo around the leaders of transcendentalism, and succeeded in presenting in his book a series of ideal portraits calculated to impose somewhat upon strangers. The impression which the work leaves on the mind of the reader is as if he had been listening to the conversation of a member of a mutual admiration society. Octavius Brooks Frothingham is not a “central thinker,” his knowledge of the subject of which he treats is very limited, and his religious insight is null. Transcendentalism requires a differently-equipped man to be its historian. There is, somehow, a narrowness of structure and a peculiar twist in the faculties of the New England mind—perhaps a constitutional inheritance—which renders it inapt to conceive first principles and grasp universal truths; and although transcendentalism was an effort to rise above this condition, it nevertheless carried with it in its flight all these defects.

Our author has not written a history, but an interesting sketch which will be useful, no doubt, to some future historian. To write a history, especially of a philosophical and religious movement such as transcendentalism pretended to be, and really was, requires more than an acquaintance with persons and facts. One must comprehend its real origin, and have mastered and become familiar with his subject. This is a task which Mr. Frothingham has not accomplished.

Every heresy segregates its adherents from the straight line of the true progress of the human race, all deviations from which are, in the nature of things, either transitory or fatal. They live, for the greater part, outside of the cumulated wisdom and the broad stream of the continuous life of humanity. When the heresy has almost exhausted its derived life—for no heresy has a source of life in itself—and the symptoms of its approaching death begin to appear, the intelligent and sincere who are born in it at this stage of its career are the first to seek to regain the unbroken unity of truth. This is reached by two distinct and equally legitimate ways. The first class gains the knowledge of the whole body of the originally revealed truth, from which its heresy cut it off, by tracing the truths retained by the sect to their logical connection with other no less important [Pg 529] truths equally contained in the same divine revelation. The second class falls back upon the essential truths of natural reason; and as all supernatural truth finds its support in natural truth, it follows that the denial of any of the former involves a denial of the latter. Heresy always involves a mutilation of man’s natural reason. Once the integral natural basis recovered, the repudiation of heresy as contrary to reason follows logically. But the experience of the human race, that of the transcendentalists included, shows plainly that nature does not suffice nature; and this class, at this moment, starts out to find a religion consonant with the dictates of reason, satisfactory to all their spiritual necessities, and adequate to their whole nature. They ask, and rightly, for a religion which shall find its fast foundations in the human breast. This appeal can only be answered, and is only met, by the revelation given to the world in the beginning by the Author of man, completed in the Incarnation, and existing in its entirety and in unbroken historical continuity in the Catholic Church alone.

This dialectical law has governed the course of all heresies, from which they could not by any possibility escape; the same law has governed the history of Protestantism on its native soil, in Germany, as well as in old England, in New England, and wherever it has obtained a foothold.

Our business at present is with those of the second class, under which head come our New England transcendentalists; and what is not a little amusing is the simplicity with which they proclaim to the world, in this nineteenth century of the Christian era, the truths of natural reason, as though these were new and original discoveries! They appear to fancy that the petty sect to which they formerly adhered, and their dreary experience of its rule, have been the sad lot of the whole human race! It is as if a body of men had been led astray into a cavern where the direct rays of the sun never penetrated, and, after the lapse of some generations, their descendants approach its mouth, breathe the fresh air, behold the orb of light, the mountains, the rivers, and the whole earth covered with trees, flowers, and verdure. For the first time this glorious world, in all its wonderful beauty, bursts upon their view, and, in the candor of their souls, they flatter themselves that they alone are privileged with this vision, and knowledge, and enjoyment! Their language—but, be it understood, in their sober moods—affects those whose mental sight has not been obscured by heresy; somewhat like the speech of children when first the light of reason dawns in their souls. For the transcendental movement in New England was nothing else, in its first instance, than the earnest and righteous protest of our native reason in convalescence against a false Christianity for its denial or neglect of rational truths.

Mr. Frothingham tells us that “he was once a pure transcendentalist,” and that perhaps “his ardor may have cooled.” We protest, and as a disinterested party assure him that he writes with all the glow of youth, and in his volume he has furnished a pretty cabinet-picture, in couleur du rose, of transcendentalism in New England, without betraying even so much as the least sign of a suspicion of its true place in the history either of philosophy or religion. In seeking for the “distinct [Pg 530] origin” and the place in history of the transcendental movement in New England, he goes back to Immanuel Kant, born at Königsberg, in Prussia, April 22, 1724, and finds it, as he supposes, in Kant’s famous Critique of Pure Reason, published in 1771. After mentioning some of the disciples of Kant, we are taken to the philosophers of France—Cousin, Constant, Jouffroy; then we are next transported across the Channel to old England, and entertained with Coleridge, Carlyle, and Wordsworth; finally we are landed in New England and are told:

“With some truth it may be said that there never was such a thing as transcendentalism out of New England. In Germany and France there was a transcendental philosophy, held by cultivated men, taught in schools, and professed by many thoughtful and earnest people; but it never affected society in its organized institutions or practical interests. In old England this philosophy influenced poetry and art, but left the daily existence of men and women untouched. But in New England the ideas entertained by foreign thinkers took root in the native soil and blossomed out in every form of social life. The philosophy assumed its full proportions, produced fruit according to its kind, created a new social order for itself, or rather showed what sort of social order it would create under favoring conditions. Its new heavens and new earth were made visible, if but for a moment, and in a wintry season” (p. 103).

The contact with the productions of the foreign philosophers as well as religious and literary writers whom Mr. Frothingham mentions undoubtedly stimulated and strengthened the transcendental movement in New England; but it did not originate it. The movement was the spontaneous growth of the New England mind, in accordance with the law which we have stated, aided by the peculiar influence of our political institutions, as will be shown further on. Its real authors were Channing, Alcott, and Emerson, who were neither affected at their start nor afterward—or if at all, but slightly—by foreign or extraneous influences.

Moreover, the Kantian philosophy afforded no logical foothold for the defence of the movement in New England. Were our New Englander, who still clings to his early faith in transcendental ideas, to present himself to the philosophical offspring of Kant, he would no more pass muster than his old orthodox Protestant antagonist of the exclusive traditional school. The logical descendants of Kant are, in the region of philosophy, to use an Americanism, played out, and those who still keep up an existence will be found in the ranks of positivism, materialism, and blank atheism.

The idea of God, the immortality of the soul, the liberty of the will, the creation of the world—these and all such ideas the descendants of Kant have politely conducted to the frontiers of philosophy, and dismissed each and every one, but not before courteously thanking them for their provisional services. Our New Englander would appear to their eyes as a babe still in swaddling-clothes, or as a child learning to read by amusing itself with the pictures of old Mother Goose stories. Whatever hankering Mr. Frothingham and some few others may have after their first love of transcendental ideas—and those in New England with whom they are most in sympathy, one and all are moving in the same direction—they are only in the initial stage of the process of evolution of the Kantian germ-cell, the product of Protestant protoplasm, and will end eventually in the same logical issues as [Pg 531] their less sentimental German, French, and English confrères.

To give us a right history of transcendentalism, Mr. Frothingham must enlarge the horizon of his mental vision, and include within its scope a stretch of time which elapsed before his ancestors were led off by heresy into the cavern of obscurity. He will find a historical no less than a “dialectical basis” for its ideas or primary truths, and other truths of natural reason of which he has not yet made the discovery, in the writings of Clement of Alexandria, in Augustine, in Vincent of Lerens, in Anselm, and above all in Thomas of Aquinas, whose pages contain all the truths, but purified from the admixture of error, of the pagan philosophers, as also of those who had preceded him in Christian philosophy—men whose natural gifts, as well as devotion to truth, were comparable, to say the least, with Immanuel Kant and his French, or English, or American disciples. Those profound thinkers maintained and demonstrated the truth of the great ideas which Kant, according to his own showing, neither dared affirm nor deny, and which the transcendentalists held for the most part by openly contemning logic and by submissively accepting the humiliating charge of being “sentimentalists.” What those great men taught from the beginning has been always taught, even to our day, by all sound Catholic teachers in philosophy. So jealous has the supreme authority of the church been in this matter of upholding the value of the natural powers of human reason against those who would exalt tradition at its expense it has required, if they would teach philosophy in the name of the church, as a test of their orthodoxy, a subscription to the following proposition: “Reason can with certitude demonstrate the existence of God, the spirituality of the soul, and the liberty of man.” Had the author of the volume which we are briefly reviewing read the Summa of St. Thomas, or only the chapters which treat of these subjects, and understood them—which is not, we hope, asking too much from an advanced thinker of our enlightened age, inasmuch as St. Thomas wrote this work in the “dark ages” for mere tyros—he would have gained a stand-point from which he might have done what he tells us in his preface was “the one purpose of his book—to define the fundamental ideas of philosophy, to trace them to their historical and speculative sources, and to show whither they tended” (p. viii.) Such a work would have been more creditable to his learning, more worthy of his intellectual effort, more satisfactory to intelligent readers, and one of permanent value. We commend to Octavius Brooks Frothingham the perusal and study of St. Thomas’ Summa—above all, his work Contra Gentiles, which is a defence of Christianity on the basis of human reason against the attacks of those who do not admit of its divine revelation; or if these be not within his reach, to take up any one of the modern works on philosophy taught in Catholic colleges or seminaries to our young men.

After all, perhaps, the task might prove an ungracious one; for it would not be flattering to the genius of originality, on which our transcendentalists pride themselves, to discover that these utterances concerning the value of human reason, the dignity of the soul, and the worth of man—barring occasional extravagant expressions attributable [Pg 532] to the heat of youth—were but echoes of the voice of the Catholic Church of all ages, of the traditional teachings of her philosophers, especially of the Jesuitical school; all of which, be it said between ourselves, has been confirmed by the sacred decrees of the recent Vatican Council! Still, passing this act of humiliation on their part, it would have afforded them what our author says their system “lacked,” and for which he has had recourse—in our opinion in vain—to the great German systems: namely, a “dialectical basis.” He would have found in Catholic philosophy solid grounds to sustain every truth which the transcendentalists so enthusiastically proclaimed in speech, in poetry, and prose, and which truths, in their practical aspect, not a few made noble and heroic sacrifices to realize.

To have secured such a basis would not have been a small gain, when one considers that these primary truths of reason are the sources from which religion, morals, political government, and human society draw their vitality, strength, and stability. Not a small service to humanity is it to make clear these imperishable foundations, to render them intelligible to all, and transmit them to posterity with increased life and strength. It is well that this noble task of philosophy did not depend on the efforts of the transcendentalists; for Mr. Frothingham sadly informs us in his preface that “as a form of mental philosophy transcendentalism may have had its day; at any rate it is no longer in the ascendant, and at present is manifestly on the decline, being suppressed by the philosophy of experience, which, under different names, is taking possession of the speculative world” (p. vii.) Who knows what might have been the precious fruits of all the high aspiration and powerful earnestness which were underlying this movement, if, instead of seeking for a “dialectical basis of the great German systems,” its leaders had cast aside their prejudices, and found that Catholic philosophy which had interpreted the divine oracles of the soul from age to age, consonant with man’s original and everlasting convictions, and sustaining his loftiest and noblest hopes?

But with the best will in the world to look favorably on the practical results of the transcendental movement, and our sincere appreciation of its leaders—both of which, the issues and the men, are described from chapter vii. to xv., which latter concludes the volume—in spite of these dispositions of ours, our sympathy for so much praiseworthy effort, and our respect for so many highly-gifted men, in reading these chapters a feeling of sadness creeps over us, and we cannot help exclaiming with the poet Sterling:

“O wasted strength! O light and calm

And better hopes so vainly given!

Like rain upon the herbless sea,

Poured down by too benignant heaven—

We see not stars unfixed by winds,

Or lost in aimless thunder-peals,

But man’s large soul, the star supreme,

In guideless whirl how oft it reels!”

But this is not to be wondered at; for although these men had arrived at the perception of certain great truths, they held them by no strong intellectual grasp, and finally they escaped them, and their intellectual fabric, like the house built upon sand, when the storm came and the winds blew, great was the fall thereof. This was the history of Brook Farm and Fruitlands, communities in which the two wings of transcendentalism attempted to reduce their [Pg 533] ideas into practice. Here let us remark it would have increased the interest of the volume if its author had given to his readers the programme of Brook Farm, “The Idea of Jesus of Society,” together with its constitutions. It is short, interesting, and burning with earnestness. There is scarcely any account of the singular enterprise of the group of idealists at Fruitlands, and the name of Henry Thoreau, one of the notables among transcendentalists, is barely mentioned, while to his life at Walden Pond there is not even an allusion. True, these experiments were, like Brook Farm, unsuccessful, but they were not without interest and significance, and worthy of a place in what claims to be a history of the movement that gave rise to them; at least space enough might have been afforded them for a suitable epitaph.

We will now redeem our promise of showing how the influence of our political institutions aided in producing what goes by the name of transcendentalism. But before doing this, we must settle what transcendentalism is; for our author appears to make a distinction between idealism and transcendentalism in New England. Here is what he says:

“There was idealism in New England prior to the introduction of transcendentalism. Idealism is of no clime or age. It has its proportion of disciples in every period and in the apparently most uncongenial countries; a full proportion might have been looked for in New England. But when Emerson appeared, the name of idealism was legion. He alone was competent to form a school, and as soon as he rose, the scholars trooped about him. By sheer force of genius Emerson anticipated the results of the transcendental philosophy, defined its axioms, and ran out their inferences to the end. Without help from abroad, or with such help only as none but he could use, he might have domesticated in Massachusetts an idealism as heroic as Fichte’s, as beautiful as Schelling’s, but it would have lacked the dialectical basis of the great German systems” (p. 115).

If we seize the meaning of this passage, it is admitted that previous to the knowledge of the German systems Mr. Emerson had already defined the axioms, run out their inferences to the end, and anticipated the results of the German transcendental philosophy. But this is all that any system of philosophy pretends to accomplish; and therefore, by his own showing, the distinction between idealism and transcendentalism is a distinction without a difference.

Mr. Frothingham, however, tells us on the same page that “transcendentalism, properly so-called, was imported in foreign packages”; and Mr. Frothingham ought to know, for he was once, he tells us, “a pure transcendentalist”; and on pages 128 and 136 he criticises Mr. Emerson, who identifies idealism and transcendentalism. With the genius and greatness of the prince of the transcendentalists before his eyes, our author, as is proper, employs the following condescending language: “It is audacious to criticise Mr. Emerson on a point like this; but candor compels the remark that the above description does less than justice to the definiteness of the transcendental movement. It was something more than a reaction against formalism and tradition, though it took that form. It was more than a reaction against Puritan orthodoxy, though in part it was that. It was in a very small degree due to study of the ancient pantheists, of Plato and the Alexandrians, of Plutarch, Seneca, and Epictetus, though one or two of the [Pg 534] leaders had drunk deeply from these sources. Transcendentalism was a distinct philosophical system” (p. 136).

So far so good. Here is the place, if the author knows what he is talking about, to give us in clear terms the definition of transcendentalism. But what does he? Does he satisfy our anticipations? Mr. Emerson, be it understood, does not know what transcendentalism is! Well, hear our author, who thinks he does. He continues: “Practically it was an assertion of the inalienable worth of man; theoretically it was an assertion of the immanence of divinity in instinct, the transference of supernatural attributes to the natural constitution of mankind.… Through all was the belief in the living God in the soul, faith in immediate inspiration, in boundless possibility, and in unimaginable good” (p. 137). Ordinarily when writers attempt to give a definition, or convey information of a “distinct philosophical system,” they give one to understand its first principles or axioms, its precise method, and its important conclusions, and particularly wherein it differs in these respects from other systems of philosophy. This is what Mr. Frothingham in the passage last quoted has led us to expect; but instead of this he gives to the reader mere “assertions” and “beliefs.” And these assertions and beliefs every one knows who has heard Dr. Channing, or Mr. Emerson, or Mr. Alcott, or who has a slight acquaintance with their writings, to have been the sources of inspiration in their speech, which appear on almost every page they have written! Proof is needless; for there is no one who will venture a contradiction on this point. The men who were most influenced by the study of the philosophers abroad were neither the originators nor leaders of the so-called transcendental movement in New England—Brownson, Parker, and William Channing. Mr. Frothingham, we submit, has not made out his case, and has given too much credit where it was not due, while robbing others of their just merit, whatever that may be. If “transcendentalism was a distinct philosophical system,” nowhere in his book has this been shown.

Transcendentalism, accepting the author’s statement as to its true character, was never a philosophical system in New England; and had its early disciples been content to cultivate the seeds sown by its true leaders, instead of making the futile attempt to transfer to our clime exotics from Germany which would not take root and grow in our soil, we should have had, in place of a dreary waste, stately trees whose wholesome and delicious fruits would now refresh us.

And now for our reasons why it was native to the soil from which it sprang. If we analyze the political system of our country, we will find at its base the maxim, “Man is capable of self-government.” The American system exhibits a greater trust in the natural capacities and the inherent worth of man than any other form of political government now upon this earth. Hence all the great political trusts are made elective; hence also our recourse to short periods of election and the great extension among us of the elective franchise. The genius and whole drift of the current of our political life runs in this direction. Now, what does this maxim mean, that “Man is capable of self-government”? It means that man is endowed by his Creator with reason to know [Pg 535] what is right, true, and good. It means that man possesses free-will and can follow the right, true, and good. These powers constitute man a responsible being. It supposes that man as he is now born is in possession of all his natural rights, and the primal tendencies of his native faculties are in accordance with the great end of his existence, and his nature is essentially good. But such views of human nature are in direct opposition to the fundamental doctrines of Puritanism and orthodox Protestantism. These taught and teach that man is born totally depraved, that his nature is essentially corrupt, and all his actions, springing from his nature, nothing but evil. Now, the political influence of our American institutions stimulated the assertion of man’s natural rights, his noble gift of liberty, and his inalienable worth, while the religion peculiar to New England preached precisely the contrary. In the long run, the ballot-box beat the pulpit; for the former exerted its influence six days in the week, while the latter had for its share only the Sabbath. In other words, the inevitable tendency of our American political system is to efface from the minds of our people all the distinctive dogmas of the orthodox Protestant views of Christianity by placing them on a platform in accordance with man’s natural capacities, his native dignity, and with right and honorable views of God. Herein lies the true genesis of Unitarianism and its cogenitor, the transcendental movement in New England.

Dr. Channing was right in discarding the attempt to introduce the worse than idle speculation of the German and French philosophical systems in New England. “He considered,” so says his biographer, “pretensions to absolute science quite premature; saw more boastfulness than wisdom in ancient and modern schemes of philosophy; and was not a little amused at the complacent confidence with which quite evidently fallible theorists assumed to stand at the centre, and to scan and depict the panorama of existence.” “The transcendentalists,” he tells James Martineau in 1841, “in identifying themselves a good deal with Cousin’s crude system, have lost the life of an original movement.” In this last sentence Dr. Channing not only anticipated history but also uttered a prophecy. But how about a philosophy whose mission it is to maintain all the great truths for which he so eloquently and manfully fought? How about a conception of Christianity which places itself in evident relations with human nature and the history of the universe?—a religion which finds its sanctuary in man’s soul, and aims at the elevation of his finite reason to its archetype and its transformation into the Infinite Reason?

Unitarianism in New England owes its existence to the supposition that Calvinism is a true and genuine interpretation of Christianity. “Total depravity,” “election,” “reprobation,” “atonement,” etc., followed, it was fancied, each other logically, and there was no denying one without the denial of all. And as it was supposed that these doctrines found their support in the divinity of Christ, and in order to bring to ruin the superstructure they aimed at upsetting its base by the denial of the divinity of Christ. They had grown to detest so heartily the “five points” of Calvinism that they preferred rather to be pagans than suckled in such a creed. [Pg 536] Is it probable, is it reasonable to suppose that our New Englanders, who have a strong vein of earnest religious feeling in their nature, would have gone across the ocean to find a support for the great truths which they were so enthusiastic in affirming among the will-o’-the-wisps of the realms of thought, when at their very doors was “the church which has revealed more completely man to himself, taken possession of his inclinations, of his lasting and universal convictions, laid bare to the light those ancient foundations, has cleansed them from every stain, from every alien mixture, and honored them by recognizing their impress of the Divinity?”

But Mr. Frothingham tells us: “The religion of New England was Protestant and of the most intellectual type. Romanism had no hold on the thinking people of Boston. None besides the Irish laboring and menial classes were Catholics, and their religion was regarded as the lowest form of ceremonial superstition” (p. 107); and almost in the same breath he informs his readers that “the Unitarians of New England were good scholars, accomplished men of letters, humane in sentiment and sincere and moral in intention” (p. 110). Is Octavius Brooks Frothingham acquainted with all “the ceremonial superstitions” upon this earth, and does he honestly believe that the Catholic religion is “the lowest form” of them all? Or—what is the same thing—does he think that the “good scholars and accomplished men of letters” of New England thought so? Perhaps such was his received impression, but that it was common to this class of men we stoutly deny. No one stood higher among them than Dr. Channing, and his estimate of the Catholic religion was certainly not the same as Mr. Frothingham’s. It would be difficult to find in a non-Catholic writer a higher appreciation of her services to humanity, and more eloquent descriptions of certain aspects of the Catholic Church, than may be found in his writings. Mr. Frothingham ought to know this, and only the limits of our article hinder us from citing several of these. Is he aware that President John Adams headed the subscription-list to build the first Catholic church in Boston. Our author, by his prejudices, his lack of insight, and limited information, does injustice to the New England people, depreciates the intelligence and honesty of the leaders in Unitarianism, and fails to grasp the deep significance of the transcendental movement.

He does injustice to the people of Boston especially, who, when they heard of the death of the saintly Bishop Cheverus, tolled the bells of the churches of their city to show in what veneration they held his memory; and if he was not of the age to have listened, he must have read the eloquent and appreciative eulogium preached by Dr. Channing on this great and good man. And Bishop Cheverus was the guide and teacher of the religion of the Irish people of Boston!

Mr. Frothingham will not attempt to make a distinction between the “Catholic religion” and “the religion of the Irish menial and laboring classes”—a subterfuge of which no man of intelligence and integrity would be guilty. The Irish people—be it said to their glory—have from the beginning of their conversion to Christianity kept the pure light of Catholic faith unsullied by any admixture of heresy, and have remained firm in their obedience to the divine authority of the [Pg 537] holy church, in spite of the tyranny, of the bitterest persecution of its enemies, and all their efforts of bribery or any worldly inducements which they might hold out. When our searchers after true religion shall have exhausted by their long and weary studies Zoroaster, Pythagoras, Svenalis, Plato, Epictetus, Brahma, Buddha, Confucius, Mahomet, and any other notable inventor of philosophy or religion; when they have gathered up all the truths scattered among the different heresies in religion since the Christian era, the end of all their labors will only make this truth the plainer: that the Catholic Church resumes the authority of all religions from the beginning of the world, affirms the traditions and convictions of the whole human race, and unites, co-ordinates, and binds together all the scattered truths contained in every religious system in an absolute, universal, divine synthesis.

[147] Transcendentalism in New England. A History. By Octavius Brooks Frothingham. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. 1876.

CHARLES CARROLL OF CARROLLTON.[148]

Illustration: Medallion of Charles Carrollton

Charles Carroll’s is a household name in the American family—the name of a man marked among his peers for a purity of character on which a Christian mind loves to dwell: integer vitæ scelerique purus! His independence was so noble and sublime, yet so toned with homeliness withal, that of him it was said he walked the streets of his regenerated country with brow erect and mien expanded, because he was sans peur et sans reproche, a preux chevalier—the idol in the family sanctuary. He alone of the great founders chosen by the angel of [Pg 538] this land was destined to witness, beyond the span of days usually allotted to man, the unparalleled prosperity and unequalled development of the resources of a virgin country. Such was the well-earned reward of a career marked by the purest disinterestedness in motives, justice in the choice of means, and humblest dependence on the assistance of the Lord God of nations.

On the anniversary of that day when the covenant that saved mankind was announced by an archangel from the highest heavens, and ratified on earth by the assent of the lowly maid of Jesse, the Ark and the Dove moored on the American waters of the Potomac. A stalwart band of men who were to herald—and they alone of all the Pilgrims—the great covenant of true liberty leaped on shore and planted the standard of salvation. They planted the cross on a new land to be added to Mary’s dowry. Truer men were never hailed by an uncivilized people—men who had learned how to fulfil their destinies in the schools of Bethlehem and of Golgotha.

The Catholic student of American history feels his heart glowing with sentiments of the holiest pride, as, reverting to the twenty-fifth day of March, 1632, he reads that the Catholic pilgrim alone, with his descendants after him, has held steadfastly and without swerving, even to this day, to the true dictates of that moral and religious economy whereby man can secure his happiness and moral independence here, with a never-wavering certainty of thereby securing a claim to an everlasting welfare hereafter. Cardinal McCloskey to-day represents and enacts these very same principles and laws among and to the millions of Catholics in America, which the humble Jesuit missionary Andrew White proclaimed among and to the tribes of the Potomac two hundred and forty-three years ago—nay, the same principles and laws which were, by the Lord’s mandate, proclaimed by Peter and the apostles when for the first time they announced their mission to the throngs gathered in the city of David.

We love to dwell on these facts. The child who was christened in his mother’s arms in Jerusalem on the day after Pentecost became endowed with the same heavenly prerogatives as the Indian babe regenerated in the laver of redemption by Father White sixteen ages later or by any priest of the church on this very day! In very deed, the indelible marks and divine perfections of the heavenly court are mirrored and reflected by the city of God on earth. That same and one Christ who reigned, with his laws, in the church of Jerusalem, and a thousand years after in Vineland of North America, reigns and rules to-day, with the same laws, from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

Meanwhile, where is the church of the Puritans? Where are her antecedents? Has any of her aspirations been fulfilled? Is there any mark of benediction left by her professors?

The past of Charles Carroll clusters around his life in manifold benedictions; his name is borne aloft on the waters of that grand stream over which the bark of Peter has triumphantly glided for eighteen centuries, and will continue its triumphant course to the consummation of the world. Such is the perpetuity of faith!

A half-century had hardly passed away since the landing of the Pilgrims when Daniel Carroll, the grandsire of our Charles, came to [Pg 539] America (A.D. 1680). He was an Irishman, of that prodigious stock which, in the wonderful ways of Providence, being transplanted on our shores, was on some future day to give to America most energetic and determined laborers in the rearing of our independence. Surely did the orator of Concord, amid the festivities of the last Centennial, prove himself miserably ignorant of what his sires owed to the Irish [149] of Pennsylvania.

For let it be recorded for the hundredth time: but for those men our cause would have been lost, in the straits to which the public weal was brought. They came to the rescue, and George Washington took good heart and went on to victory.

Daniel was born in Littemourna, King’s County, Ireland. During the reign of James II. he held responsible offices. Lord Baltimore was his patron, and by his favor, close application, sterling honesty, and persevering industry he became the owner of large estates, and the family prospered and increased in wealth, although not in social or political position, during the second and third generations.[150]

Daniel Carroll rose very high in the estimation of the colony, and was chosen to offices of important and delicate trust. So great was his renown for spotless integrity, extraordinary ability, and love of the public weal that when Protestant bigotry obtained the upper hand, and, in the language of McMahon, the non-Catholic historian of Maryland, “in a colony which was established by Catholics, and grew up to power and happiness under the government of a Catholic, the Catholic inhabitant became the only victim of religious intolerance,” he was exempted from the opprobrious and hateful disqualifications inflicted upon his coreligionists by the penal code—an exemption, at first sight, of doubtful honor, were it not for the exceptional nature and circumstances of the case. It entailed not the least compromise on the part of the recipient, who accepted it without hindrance to an open profession of his faith; moreover, it enabled him to shelter less favored colonists in the enjoyment of rights most dear to their hearts and indispensable to their happiness.

[Pg 540] Charles Carroll, the father of the signer, was born in 1702. He was a high-spirited man, but he had no chances to display his talents, nor field on which to exert his energies. He chafed under the wrong and ingratitude with which the children of mother church were harried in the “Land of the Sanctuary” which they had opened to the oppressed of all climes. Alluding to the legislation of the Maryland colony in 1649, Chancellor Kent says: “The Catholic planters of Maryland won for their adopted country the distinguished praise of being the first of American States in which toleration was established by law. And while the Puritans were persecuting their Protestant brethren in New England, and Episcopalians retorting the same severity on the Puritans in Virginia, the Catholics, against whom the others were combined, formed in Maryland a sanctuary where all might worship and none might oppress, and where even Protestants sought refuge from Protestant intolerance.”

But Protestant intolerance demolished the sanctuary, the handiwork of noble and loving Catholic hands. In accord with the wish of many, Mr. Carroll entertained the idea of seeking freedom of action, liberty of conscience, and equality of rights under another sky. Thus, in one of his journeys to Europe, he applied to the French minister for the purchase of a tract of land in Louisiana. The project was far advanced, when the minister growing alarmed at the vast purchase which it was their wish to make on the Arkansas River, the negotiations were (providentially?) broken off. The project, viewed in the light of succeeding events, may appear, as it was then by many deemed, injudicious. Yet great praise is due to Charles Carroll, Sr., for his taking the lead in the movement at a time when, as Mr. Latrobe observes, “the disqualifications and oppressions to which Catholics were subjected amounted to persecution. Roman Catholic priests were prohibited from the administration of public worship. The council granted orders to take children from the pernicious contact of Catholic parents; Catholic laymen were deprived of the right of suffrage; and the lands of Catholics were assessed double when the exigencies of the province required additional supplies.”… Nay, more: a Catholic was levelled to the condition of a pariah or a helot—he was not even allowed to walk with his fellow-citizen before the State-house. Things were carried to a point beyond endurance. No wonder the Catholics of Maryland felt relief even in the thought of fleeing from home. And yet, with these facts, admitted by all American historians, staring him in the face, the British ex-premier has dared to flaunt a lie in the face of the whole world!

Charles Carroll, Sr., died at a patriarchal age, more than four-score years. Like Simeon of old, he had long waited for the consolations of Israel, for the day when the spouse of Christ would cast aside the slave’s garb, and, emerging from American catacombs, come forth in the radiant panoply of freedom and celestial splendor. He himself never had faltered in this hope. He always felt that Mary’s land would not be forsaken by her in whose name it was first held. He saw his country free, and he rejoiced. He witnessed around him the beneficent results accruing from the influences of mother church. He raised his [Pg 541] hand to bless God, to bless his kin, to bless the land. But how shall we portray the emotions of his heart when no more in hiding-places, but in full noon-day, openly and freely, he saw the clean Sacrifice offered by the priests of the Most High? And when the form of his beloved son knelt before him for a last blessing, how with the father’s benedictions must have mingled feelings of pride and gratitude because even by the untiring labors of that son had the blessings of liberty to church and state been won!

It was the writer’s good-fortune, a great many years ago, to seek for rest in what, among Catholic Marylanders, was formerly known as the “Jesuit Tusculum.” In a secluded nook in Cecil County, on the Eastern Shore, lies embosomed within dense thickets and shady lanes the Bohemia Manor, a dependency of Georgetown College. When the Catholic youth of Maryland were debarred the privilege of collegiate training in their native schools, the members of the Company of Jesus had, at a very early period, opened there a boarding-school, especially for such of the American boys as would afterwards, like their persecuted peers in England, seek for a sound education and a thorough Christian training at the well-known academies of Belgium and France. Wandering through those woods, rowing over the meandering streams whose soft murmurings give life to the silent homes of the crane and gentle game, the youthful forms of the Carrolls and Brents, Dorseys and Darnells, haunted the imagination and brought one back to those days of fervent Catholic spirit, pure hearts, and high-minded youths who waxed in years and strength under the saintly training of Hudson and Manners, Farmer and Molineux. To the care of experienced, learned, and saintly Jesuits was entrusted the training of that part of the Lord’s vineyard which, amid persecution and manifold dangers, mirrored the days of primitive Christianity.

Young Charles Carroll, who was born in 1737, was sent thither to drink the first pure waters of secular learning and Christian training. At one time well-nigh twoscore of the sons of the more fortunate colonists were there united with him at the Tusculum of the Company of Jesus.

But a day of separation dawned. Charles was in his eleventh year when not the swift steamship of our time but a laggard craft was to convey him to distant shores. He was accompanied in his journey by his cousin, John Carroll, with whom many years after he accomplished a most delicate and important mission at the command of the government. Thus he added to the ties and sympathies of blood a link of such friendships as are so apt to knit in college life and ever after congenial souls and hearts beating in unison. True, when the day arrived on which each was to enter an avenue of life that would lead to the career for which each was fitted by nature, they chose different gates, but came forth on the great drama of life to be the leaders of two generations, one in the church, the other in the state. Charles Carroll with unerring finger points to the Catholic layman the resources which he should improve for the perfect execution of his part; John Carroll has represented him who is the infallible guide of the church, becoming at the same time the model of bishop and priest, the pride and the joy of the [Pg 542] anointed minister of that same church in the United States.

Six years did young Carroll spend at St. Omer’s, in French Flanders, in the study of the classics of ancient and modern times under Jesuit tuition; thence he passed to Rheims; and lastly he entered the college of Louis le Grand in Paris. In the two last places he applied himself, under the guidance of learned Jesuits, to the study of logic and metaphysics, mathematics and natural sciences. When at Louis le Grand the elder Charles crossed the ocean a third time to feast his eyes and gladden his doating heart on the son who had waxed in years as well as in grace. He found the promising boy grown into a manly youth, and bade him say farewell to the charms of a life whose days glided on in unruffled peace, breathing in an atmosphere of religion and science. His intercourse there was with men whose aspirations were to the greatest glory of God, whose conversation was in heaven. These men, so noble, so learned, so perfect, had entwined the hearts of their pupils with their own.

In 1757 Charles Carroll removed to London to enter upon the study of law. Admitted to the Inner Temple, an inmate, or at least a frequenter, of those halls wherein surely the Holy Ghost did not hold an undisputed sway, the noble-minded and pure-souled Maryland youth must have felt the change to the quick. What a contrast to the simplicity of his western home at the paternal manor, the sweet influences and innocent life at the Bohemian Tusculum, and in the blessed halls of Bruges and St. Omer’s! At the Temple he spent the five years requisite in order to be called to the bar; but he remained in Europe until 1764, when he again set sail for his western home.

A great change had meanwhile come over the moral atmosphere of his native State. Whilst bickerings about religion were growing distasteful, a rumbling noise of threatened disasters in the distance drew the hearts of the colonists together. Indistinct and sombre figures of enemies lurking around the premises counselled measures of internal peace, equal distribution of civil rights, and a unity of sentiments and aims as the only hope of averting ruin and of conquering a powerful foe. Ties of friendship were strengthened, measures of concerted action were discussed, whilst religious questions were laid aside, and arrogant claims of superior rights on the part of non-Catholics forgotten, in the presence of an impending danger; the more so because it was felt that there was a party brooding in their midst which was in accord with the enemy outside.

When the boy left the land of his birth, and the prow of the ship that bore him ploughed the waters of the Atlantic, his soul expanded with a heretofore unexperienced sentiment of liberty; for only then did he begin to feel that freely under the canopy of heaven he could practise his religion without let or hindrance, without the sneers or intermeddling of his neighbors. Add to this the anticipated enjoyment of the liberty in wait for him on the eastern lands of Catholic faith. Yet the prospective and future return to the land of bondage must from time to time have thrown shadows of sadness over the gushing and joyful youth at school. But now comes a truce to religious dissensions and family [Pg 543] quarrels; a victory is gained: the church is free, her shackles broken. Catholic and non-Catholic worship at the altar of their choice freely and publicly. They are all children of the same political family, members of the same moral body!

But the liberties of the colonies are crushed by the mother country, and Charles Carroll lands on these shores only in time to be one of the mourners at the funeral of liberty. His countrymen had been galled with bitterness by the contempt, insolence, and arrogance of the British soldiery, and felt a contempt for the martinet leaders of the Braddock defeat, while at the same time a feeling of superiority was engendered in their heart by the warlike qualities displayed by rank and file under the leadership of him who was already first in the hearts of his peers. They chafed at being made the hewers of wood and drawers of water to British indolence; they felt the sanctuary of their homes desecrated by the writs of assistance; their inmost souls were moved with indignation at being ordered to sacrifice their hard-earned comforts, their very subsistence, to the pleasure of a ribald soldiery. Such things could not be endured by the sons of liberty. And thus it happened that Charles Carroll was not welcomed with the cheers of a hearty greeting; he only heard the groans, the smothered curses, the oaths of vengeance deep and resolute, uttered by his oppressed fellow-colonists.

His soul was fired with wrath and zeal; but a wrath subdued by self-control, a zeal swayed by prudence. His was a self-possession that was never thrown off its guard. He seemed ever to be on the alert against surprises—a foe more fatal to armies than cannon and shot.

During the excitement of the Stamp Act Charles Carroll, who had returned from the Continent “a finished scholar and an accomplished gentleman,” was at first a silent but careful and discerning observer. He studied the tendency of events, and the moral elements on which these events should work some remarkable development. Cautious but firm, he gradually entered the lists, and then in the struggles which seemed so unequal he fought heart and soul with that noble galaxy of Maryland patriots who, bold and undismayed, opposed an unbroken front to those first encroachments which were even countenanced by interested parties in the colony. But for a prompt resistance a breach would have been opened for such inroads into the domain of our liberties as would break down its ramparts, overwhelm our defenders, and enslave the people.

It is not necessary for us here to relate how the obnoxious law was repealed—a tardy and unwilling act of atonement (“an act of empty justice,” as McSherry well defines it); yet its revocation was hailed by the colonies with great rejoicings as the harbinger of a better rule and the dawn of a day of just polity in the home government. Surely, the rulers in the mother country had felt the temper of her children abroad; they loved her fondly as long as she proved herself a mother; woe were she to forget the ties of love and harshly deal with them!

Charles Carroll was neither blinded nor hoodwinked by this sporadic token of motherly justice. Those years of residence in England were not lost to him. He well knew the temper of the British lion, his arrogance and his treachery. Sooner or later another paroxysm of exigencies [Pg 544] would come over him; they must be met, cost what it may.

“Wicked is the only word which I can apply to the government of your colonies. You seem to regard them as mere material mines from whence the mother country is to extract the precious ore for her own luxury and splendor.”[151]

The victory gained and the danger averted for the nonce, Mr. Carroll devoted himself to promoting the welfare of the colony. In fact, whilst a short period of comparative peace lasted outside the colonies, Maryland was not free from internal disturbance. Two sources of disquietude were then opened—the Proclamation and the Vestry Act. Nor was the colony less annoyed by the unfaithfulness of leading merchants in Baltimore, who, goaded by thirst of money and not prompted by feelings of love for their country, had slackened in their opposition to the encroachment of the government at home. They only followed in the wake of New York and Philadelphia, and even of Boston. The love of lucre and the diseased tastes of what was then called the quality allowed the merchants of those cities to fall away from the compact entered upon with the sister colonies. To advance their interests and to satisfy a portion of the community, they forsook their principles and paid the hated tributes for proscribed commodities. But outside Baltimore the people in the counties remained firm and unshaken in their patriotism.

Charles Carroll was young in years, but ripe in judgment. The future statesman lost no opportunities. It was of the utmost importance that he should thoroughly know the habits of his fellow-citizens and their calibre, whether he looked upon them as a distinct colony or in their relations to the other provinces; what were the materials and the resources of the whole country; what guarantees could be drawn from the past for the welfare of the future; how far or within what bounds should the liberties of the colonies be restrained; what security for the rights of conscience; were the rights of each colony to be paramount over the exigencies of the whole family of provinces?… To a mind well stored with the choicest theoretical lore it became an easy matter to trace its course and clearly see the way ahead. Thus prepared, he grappled with Charles Dulany, the champion of those who opposed the people’s claims and remonstrances. Dulany was his senior by many years, had grown up identified with the selfish interests of office-holders and of the established clergy, himself high in the councils of the government, whilst his opponent had just arrived from a long sojourn abroad, and was a “papist” enthralled and disfranchised.

The main point of dispute turned on the rights of the government of the colony to tax the people arbitrarily for the payment of officers and the support of the clergy. The history of the Proclamation, drawn up by Dulany himself, and the burial thereof amid a most solemn pageant by the freemen of Annapolis on the 14th of May, 1673, are too well known to require detailing here. It is enough to say that by general acclamation the people acknowledged Charles Carroll as their champion. He could not be selected as a delegate, enthralled as he was, but in public meetings held in Frederick, Baltimore, and Annapolis [Pg 545] they unanimously voted and formally tendered him the thanks of the people.

Mr. Carroll entered the lists veiled under the name of First Citizen, whilst Dulany met him in combat as Antilon—an unnecessary disguise, for he was too well known, being the patriot “who,” says McSherry, “had long stood the leading mind of Maryland.” The war was carried on in the columns of the Maryland Gazette, and Mr. Carroll sustained his character of “finished scholar and accomplished gentleman.” Never did he swerve from the high tone of a writer who was conscious of his own powers. Assailed with offensive names by his adversaries, he never descended to their level. When the real name of the First Citizen was yet unknown, the excitement created by his articles, written in a style ready and incisive, and withal most graceful, was enhanced by and received a keener zest from the stimulus of curiosity. Wonderful was the avidity with which they were sought and read. These articles fed the public spirit, inspired the people with courage, and shaped the course to be pursued not only by the colonists of Maryland, but even in sister colonies. The articles by First Citizen were held in so much esteem that Joseph Galloway, when speaker in the Pennsylvania Assembly, would copy them with his own hand, on the loan from a fortunate subscriber, and send them to Benjamin Franklin.

Thus the popular party triumphed. The party of oppression, with the established clergy at their back, was discomfited. Hammond and Paca were elected. Maryland was saved, and her saviour was Charles Carroll. Amid these controversies arose a young man, spirited, wealthy, and highly educated, who threw himself headlong into the struggle, and, growing with its trials, became renowned in its darkest hours, and honored and cherished in its glorious success” (McSherry, p. 170). That young man, only seven-and-twenty, was already a renowned statesman.

A distinguished non-Catholic historian remarks that Charles Carroll brought to play on whatever he undertook “a decided character, stern integrity, and clear judgment.” Truly, the star of his name had reached the meridian of its course already. There it became fixed. His countrymen were guided by it during the dark days of the most perilous events, through battles and storms, dissensions and heart-burnings, the exuberancy of victories and the dejection of defeats. Thirty years, the best of his life, his whole manhood, a long manhood—for he grew old only when others cease to live—he devoted to the welfare of his country.

The life of Charles Carroll becomes at this period so entwined and blended with the history of the country that our article would swell into a portly volume were we to undertake a narrative of the details of his public career. We have endeavored to give a faithful portrait of the character of a man who is the pride of the secular history of the Catholic Church in America. It has been our aim to give a key to open the inmost recesses of that soul the noblest of the noble, that heart the purest of the pure, that mind greatest among the great. Therefore we shall only hint at the events of his public life, omnia quæ tractaturi sumus, narratione delibabimus, as Quintilian would teach us.

As foreseen, the British lion awoke from his apparent lethargy, [Pg 546] and with a roar and a spring he bounded anew. Stung to the quick at being, even only once, foiled in his endeavors to saddle on the colonies unjust burdens, he made renewed attempts, and the tax on the “detestable weed” was revived. The people arose in their indignation, and gave vent to it in the hazardous but successful festivities of the famous Boston Tea Party. Massachusetts was disfranchised. Indeed, it was the vent of a petty spite. Not the Bay State alone, but all the colonies, would soon disfranchise themselves, all in a body, and in a way of their own. But Massachusetts had given the example, and Maryland followed close in the wake. The latter even improved on the act of the former; for what had been achieved in the Boston Bay under disguise the citizens of Maryland consummated at Annapolis openly and undisguised. And yet brave Maryland had intestine troubles that engrossed her attention—troubles which were aggravated even by the fact that the abettors thereof were interested in carrying out the measures of the home government. But there shone above them the guiding star—Charles Carroll led them to victory. Undaunted and uncompromising, Mr. Carroll looked coming events in the face; and when Mr. Chase indulged in the hope that there would be no more trouble, for “had they not written down their adversaries?” he would not thus flatter himself with illusions of enduring peace. To other means they would have yet to resort. “What other means have we to resort to?” asked the other. “The bayonet,” calmly rejoined Charles Carroll. And so firm was his conviction that they should resort to arms that he held his opinion against many at home and abroad. His reply to the Hon. Mr. Graves, M.P., who averred that six thousand soldiers would easily march from one end of the colonies to the other, is too characteristic of the statesman not to copy it here: “So they may, but they will be masters of the spot only on which they encamp. They will find naught but enemies before and around them. If we are beaten on the plains, we will retreat to our mountains and defy them. Our resources will increase with our difficulties. Necessity will force us to exertion, until, tired of combating in vain against a spirit which victory after victory cannot subdue, your armies will evacuate our soil, and your country retire, a great loser by the contest. No, sir; we have made up our minds to abide the issue of the approaching struggle, and, though much blood may be spilt, we have no doubt of our ultimate success.” In these few lines the spirit, the gallantry, the tactics, the greatness of our armies from Lexington to Yorktown are both eloquently and accurately described.

And when a second cargo of the “detestable weed” entered the waters of Maryland, the friends of Mr. Stewart, a leading merchant in the colony, to whom the brig Peggy Stewart belonged, and to whom the cargo was consigned, appealed to Charles Carroll for advice and protection. The First Citizen was ever consistent. Was not the importation an offence against the law? Was not the majesty of the people insulted? To export the tea to the West Indies or back to Europe was no adequate reparation—what if Mr. Stewart was a friend of his?… “Gentlemen, set fire to the vessel, and burn her with her cargo to the water’s edge!” With sails set and colors flying, she floated, a sheet of fire, [Pg 547] amid the shouts of the people on shore.

Besides the powerful promptings of a heart burning with love of country, Charles Carroll felt moved to deeds of heroism and self-defence by motives of equal, if not superior, importance. He became, nay, he seemed to feel that he was, in the hands of Providence, the chosen champion to assert Catholic rights and liberty—ay, might we not look upon him as the O’Connell of America in the eighteenth century? It can be proved beyond all doubt that the Catholics of the colonies placed great trust in him. Surely he became their representative. There was power in his name. He had become a leading genius, inspiring with wise resolves, and determination to carry them out, those valiant men of his faith who had clustered around the Father of his Country, or were admitted to the councils of the nation, or formed part of the rank and file in the American army, or had it in their power to swell with generous hands the national resources. This power of Mr. Carroll was felt even outside the pale of his own church. The case of the Peggy Stewart is one to the point.

Another and far more important illustration of his power is the following: Thomas Conway, a meteor of sinister forebodings, with his plots of disaster and ruin, has defiled a very short page of American history. Yet, brief as his career was in this country, it worked mischief. “Conway’s Cabal” is well known. It is well known how the despicable adventurer was bribed into a conspiracy against Washington in favor of an unpopular superior officer. Charles Carroll was a member of the Board of War. In that board there was a party covertly yet powerfully at work to displace the commander-in-chief in favor of Horatio Gates. Mr. Carroll, as usual, always on his guard, watched his opportunity. He was approached cautiously and warily, even before a vote was taken. Then calmly and stoutly, yet with that rock-like firmness of his that had become proverbial, he said: “Remove General Washington, and I’ll withdraw.” Words were those pregnant with weighty consequences. Carroll was at the head, he was the representative of the Catholics. Maryland went with him; the Catholics of Pennsylvania, nine-tenths of the whole population, an element of great power, indispensable to success, were with him. The colonies needed the aid of Catholic France sadly. What if Charles Carroll withdrew to Carrollton? What if he recrossed the ocean? George Washington was not removed; and under God’s favor was not George Washington the chosen leader, the appointed conqueror, the Moses of his day, the Josue of his people? Who was there to take his place as the first over those fierce legions of sturdy and resolute assertors of a nation’s life?

We must be allowed here to transfer to these columns, in words far more eloquent and true than we could ever command, both the source and the development of the ideas to which the deeds of those two men in the infancy of the nation has given rise in our mind.

In a dialogue between himself and a mysterious apparition on the threshold of that Temple whose entrance was forbidden to the Emperor Theodosius, Frederick Faber, yet an Anglican, thus addresses his companion:

“Do you not think that we should [Pg 548] be in a more healthy state if there were a greater indifference to politics amongst us?”

“No,” replied he; “I know of no indifference which is healthy, except indifference to money. The church has a great duty to perform in politics. It is to menace, to thwart, to interfere. The Catholic statesman is a sort of priest. He does out in public the secular work of the retired and praying priesthood; and he must not be deserted by those spiritual men whom he is arduously, wearily, and through evil report conscientiously representing.”

Could modern publicist ever utter words more squarely tallying with the circumstances of our own times?

We have followed our hero only to the performance of his first acts in the great drama in which the Ruler of nations had appointed him to bear such important parts. Charles Carroll, in his adjuncts and circumstances, as regards both his cast of religion and politics, stood alone among his peers. Much he had to destroy ere he could build. But he addressed himself to his work with well-appointed tools, a clear mind, a steady hand, a glowing heart, and an immovable reliance in Him who hath said that “unless the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it; unless the Lord keep the city, he watcheth in vain that keepeth it” (Ps. cxxvi.) Thus appointed, he never faltered. On, on he advanced, step after step; stretching forth himself to those things that were before him, he pressed towards the mark, until he had received the prize.

More than onescore years and ten he labored as man never did labor for the well-being of his country. When he had reached the sixty-fourth year of his life, and only then, he rested; he unbuckled his armor and laid it down, to enjoy the blessings which his own heart and mind had drawn on America. How beautifully were his talents apportioned, in equal distribution—thirty years of study in the best schools of Europe; thirty years of the most faithful service in the greatest work that it ever was the lot of man to be engaged in; thirty years of unruffled peace in the bosom of his family, in the home of his youth, which became the Mecca of the people, as a writer calls it—a shrine of wisdom and goodness! There “the patriarch of the nation” taught two generations; he laid before their appreciative minds the principles and inspired their grateful hearts with those sentiments of Christian polity of which he himself was such a shining ornament and faithful embodiment.

We well remember how, in days long passed away, old men who had known him in the days of his manhood were wont to speak of him; how that heart, so noble and so pure, fondly watched the healthy growth of that tree of liberty to plant which he himself had lent a strong hand. These men would tell how the ripe and veteran statesman felt as much zest in the enjoyment of surrounding events as when, a boy and a youth, he applied himself to literary studies, or pursued the more arduous acquisition of scientific lore in the halls of philosophy or in those of law and jurisprudence. His was an equanimity of character seldom witnessed in man. And that placid, calm bearing which made his countenance the mirror of a soul preserved in patience and perfect in self-control never forsook him to the very last [Pg 549] hours of his life. A very old member of the Company of Jesus, a professor and superior of the Georgetown University, has more than once related, within hearing of the writer, that the appearance of Charles Carroll riding into the college enclosure, on a docile and yet lively pony, when the great patriot had already overstepped the fourscore years of life, conveyed the impression of a youthful and innocent old age, so full of charm and gravity, pensiveness and gayety, authority and condescension, that it was felt indeed, but could not be described. It was the reflection of a past without reproach, and of a future without fear. His very carriage, the manner of his conversation, were an embodiment of his last words: “In the practice of the Catholic religion the happiness of my life was established!” Holy words! Sublime expression of the hopes of Christianity! May the example of such a man never fail, and be for ever the mould in which the young American spirit should be cast! Providence seems to have granted him so long an existence because he was the purest of the Revolutionary patriots, and he wished his example to last the longest!

After his death no page was ever written to vindicate his character or plead in behalf of one single shortcoming! No word of merciful forgiveness was heard at his grave. His peers, his descendants, had naught to forgive. With one voice of acclamation from one end of the country to the other, amid wreaths of unspotted lilies and fragrant roses, his name was emblazoned on the fair escutcheon of the American nation as the name of

THE CHRISTIAN KNIGHT WITHOUT FEAR AND WITHOUT REPROACH.

On the shield of this untrammelled and free American Church let two names for ever be emblazoned with undying fame—John and Charles Carroll; one the father of his clergy, the other the leader of his people; John Carroll, the first vicar-apostolic, the first American bishop; Charles Carroll, a signer of our Magna Charta, the assertor and defender of those rights which shall for ever be the palladium of religious freedom. Could a line of conduct be laid before us in more unmistakable words and surer meaning?

Not by the ties of blood alone were those two souls knit to one another, like David and Jonathan of yore; but inspired with love of country, and deep, holy, unswerving affection for the church, they fully appreciated the resources, moral and physical, which with proper culture would make of this land a favorite portion of the mystical Vineyard and the asylum for the oppressed. John within the sacred enclosure of God’s tabernacle, Charles in the halls of legislation, they worked in different departments, yet with one accord, the former to give the great garden fit husbandmen, and provide it with every appurtenance in nurseries of virtue and learning; the latter to lead the instincts born with a people, purified by trials and trained to justice, into a current which, swelling in its course within the bounds of Christian discipline, would, the one directing, strengthening, hallowing the other, run to endless days in great majesty and overwhelming power.

Charles outlived the archbishop by many years, and witnessed the triumphs of the Redeemer’s spouse to the achievement of which his great kinsman had devoted the resources of his extraordinary mind, the most tender and inviolate [Pg 550] affections of his exuberant heart, and the untiring exertions of a long apostleship.

And here we feel as if we may lay down our pen and look upon our task as accomplished. We have endeavored to be the faithful limner of a character noblest among the noble, the pride and the guide of our Catholic laity in the American Church.

How grand that figure loometh in the galaxy of our greatest men! Great and grand, pure, unselfish, guileless, wise, loving, he stands on a pedestal of imperishable renown, religion blended with wisdom, charity with prudence, firmness with condescension!… When shall we look upon his like again? Yea, the memory of his deeds is fresh, and his many virtues as a Christian and as a statesman are even mirrored in the lives of many noble, devoted, valiant followers—bright examples of true patriotism and golden righteousness to our rising youth, on whose stern vigor, unfaltering courage, and sterling virtues mother church will lean for comfort and defence—a youth called, may be, to fight even fiercer battles than our great ancestor, their shining model, had to meet; battles that will need stout hearts, level minds, souls prompt in bold resolves. But the God of yesterday is the God of to-day; and with Charles Carroll in the van our gallant youth will advance to the battle, sure also of the victory.

[148] The medal of which the above is an engraving gives its own history. It was struck, we are informed at the expense of the Carroll family. It was suggested long since that if the fiftieth anniversary of American Independence was so befittingly honored by thin tribute of love and heartfelt gratitude of a whole nation to the only survivor of the signers, and he a Catholic, it would be dulce et decorum for the Catholics of these United States to restrike it for distribution, and as a lively reminder on the dawn of the hundredth anniversary. Nor would it be a difficult or costly undertaking. We are told the die is still preserved, although not at the mint. The only alteration should occur in the legend of the reverse, thus: d. Nov. 14, 1832, æt. 98. The exergue should read: July IV. MDCCCLXXVI.

[149] “We enter upon the second century of the republic with responsibilities which neither our fathers nor the men of fifty years ago could possibly foresee.” Again: “This enormous influx of strangers has added an immense ignorance and entire unfamiliarity with republican ideas and habits to the voting class.” And: “It has introduced powerful and organized influences not friendly to the republican principle of freedom of thought and action,” etc.—Geo. W. Curtis, LL.D., of New York, oration before the town authorities of Concord, Mass., April 19, 1875. Printed by permission. The New England Historical and Genealogical Register, vol. xxix., October, 1875.—Strange that Mr. Curtis should have forgotten the foreign influx among the signers! Yet Thornton was born in Ireland; Smith also, Taylor also; Lewis in Wales; Witherspoon near Edinburgh; Morris in Lancashire, England; Wilson in Scotland; Gwinnett in England. Strange that of fifty-nine signers so many should be strangers, besides those who were born of foreigners! And strange that the most refined and elegant civilians George Washington associated with in Philadelphia were Irishmen. And was not that a strange influx of Nesbitt saving Washington’s army from starvation? And what of the $25,000 that Barclay gave, and the $50,000 given by McClenaghan, etc., etc.?—an influx in infinitum. The influx worked well a hundred years ago; fear not, it will work well even now, but keep demagogues and false patriots aside. Yet on what side are most of them to be found?

[150] Hence sprung the qualification added to the name of Daniel’s grandson. When Charles, as one of the members delegated by the State of Maryland to attend the Convention in Philadelphia, advanced on the 2d of August, 1776, to the secretary’s desk to sign his name to the Declaration, allusion was made to the great wealth of the Maryland delegate, who would thereby jeopardize it all. “But,” remarked a bystander “it will be hard to identify; are there not several Charles Carrolls?”

“Ah! yes,” rejoined the signer; and dipping the pen anew in that famous ink-stand, with that noble grace of person so peculiar to him, he bent over the parchment once more, and added, of Carrollton. Surely Carrollton was the only manor of that name, and our Charles was the only master thereof. Hence the qualification which has since become useless—Charles Carroll of Carrollton. In our days the great American family knows only one Charles Carroll.

[151] A supernatural interlocutor in Father Faber’s Sights and Thoughts. London: Rivingtons, 1842, p. 181.

THE CATHOLIC SUNDAY AND PURITAN SABBATH.

“Mamma, what kind of a place is heaven?” inquired a boy, after a two hours’ Sunday session in a parlor corner, with the Bible for mental aliment. “Why, my child, heaven is one perpetual Sabbath!” “Well, ma! won’t they let me go out sometimes, just to play?” Absurd as was his mode of expressing it, the boy was right as to the fundamental idea; and though he could not have given the steps by which he reached the conclusion, yet he judged well that the Almighty, when sending us into this world, did not decree that we should be perpetually miserable in it. The enforced performance of what was intended for a devotional exercise was, in his case, beginning to bear its legitimate and inevitable fruits of irksomeness at the outset, wearisomeness while it lasts, and loathsomeness at the end.

All who claim the name of Christians observe, with greater or less strictness, one day in seven as a day of rest and worship; the devotional exercises conjoined therewith, emanating from the authority of the church in the case of Catholics, and from the varying taste and fancy of the sect, congregation, or even, it would seem, of the individual, among non-Catholics. We propose in this article to inquire into the origin of the Catholic usage regarding the Sunday; the grounds and mode of its observance among Protestants; the difference between the sectarian modes of keeping it and that enjoined by the church. And as about every religious practice where variance exists there must be a right and a wrong—a method of observance consistent with authority and reason, [Pg 551] and one either less so or entirely incongruous therewith—we shall try to find (apart from the authority of the church, which, though ample for us, would be of little avail for outsiders) on which side right reason is, and to show the absurdity of wrong custom in the matter.

The church tells us simply what the law of nature informs us of, the existence of God the Creator, and of our duty of worshipping him; but the time when all other things must be abandoned for this special purpose is subject to another law—the ceremonial—and as under the Mosaic dispensation that law was only a shadow of future good, to be laid aside when the true Light should descend upon earth, so the Jewish Sabbath, which was clearly established in the third commandment of the Decalogue, is no longer to be held sacred, but the first day of the week, which was consecrated by the resurrection of Jesus Christ and the descent of the Holy Ghost, is by her ordered to be kept holy; and she enjoins on all her children at least to hear Mass devoutly and to abstain from servile labor on that day. Having to provide, however, for all sorts and conditions of men, the church adds that reasons of necessity or transcendent charity will excuse us from either obligation. And this is all that our holy mother enjoins on the subject. As Catholics we accept and celebrate the Sunday wholly on her authority; and, à fortiori, we are not bound to any further observance of it than she dictates.

While it is clear from Holy Scripture that the apostles did meet with each other and with the early converts to Christianity twice on the Dominica or Lord’s day, yet there is nothing to show that it was even habitual with them to convene on that day; still less is there anything, either in the form of precept or exhortation, in the entire New Testament, that would manifest the fact of any change in the ceremonial law of Moses on the subject. There is no announcement whatever either of the abrogation of the Sabbath of the Jews or of the establishment of Sunday instead; so that, had we but the Scripture to refer to, we should grope in the dark both as to the obligation itself and the mode of its fulfilment. But when we come to the fathers of the Church, the very earliest of them indicate distinctly that the Christians of their day did habitually meet together on the first day of the week (called by them κυριακὴ, or Dominica). As we go on we find them frequently enjoin, both expressly and by clear implication, the obligation resting upon all Christians of meeting together on that day for participation in the Holy Mysteries. Later still we find them affirm this duty as of apostolic institution. To give a single example of many, St. Saturninus, before suffering martyrdom at Abitina, in Africa, in the year 304, under Diocletian, for celebrating Mass on Sunday, exclaims, in presence of his judges: “The obligation of the Sunday is indispensable; it is not lawful for us to omit the duty of that day!” From the earliest Christian records to the present day there is no break, no link wanting. Historians have clearly shown the practice of the faithful, and councils have firmly enjoined and reiterated it. So much for the origin and history of Sunday worship in the Church.

It is, of course, one of the cardinal principles of Protestantism—in fact, its sole raison d’être—that “the [Pg 552] Bible is the only rule of faith and practice”; that everything therein commanded should be performed literally; and that whatever has no clear and direct warrant of Scripture is purely of man’s device, and, by consequence, of no authority whatsoever. All very fine, in words; but when we examine how the doctrine works in point of fact, we shall find an amazingly great discrepancy between the expressed faith and the actual, tangible practice. There has certainly been no considerable drain upon the reservoirs of our large cities in carrying out the injunction that “if ye wash not one another’s feet, ye have no part in me.” It is not, so far as we are informed, peculiarly characteristic of any sect of Protestants, when “smitten on one cheek,” immediately to “turn the other” for a repetition of the blow. No special alacrity has ever been shown, even by the straitest sects, in eager obedience to the command, “From him that borroweth from thee, turn not thou away”; and so far are they from obeying the absolute injunction of the Apostle James to “call in the priests of the church to the sick,” and to “anoint them with oil in the name of the Lord,” that they rave and rage against Catholics for doing so, and affirm it to be a superstitious observance. If St. Paul ever expressed himself clearly on any point, he certainly does so most unmistakably when he says that “it is a shame for a woman to speak in the church”; yet the sectarian world is now very largely supplied with “reverend” ladies, widowed, married, and maiden, who evangelize with great acceptance, and even officiate as regular pastors to various congregations throughout the country. It would seem, therefore, that the cardinal principle aforesaid must have either disappeared or some ingenious mode have been discovered by which it works only when wanted, to be set aside whenever its admission would run counter to the whim which may happen to be in vogue.

Now, the only texts of the New Testament that mention the Sunday in such way that it would be possible to draw from them any inference in regard to its observance are Acts xx. 7 and 1 Cor. xiv.. 1, neither of which declares the abolition of the ancient Sabbath or enjoins the observance of Sunday. But notwithstanding this fact, Protestants at large have accepted our Sunday, whether on tradition, which they reject; or on the authority of the church, which they despise; or, finally, of their own good pleasure—certainly not on Scripture, since it is not instituted therein. It is hardly worth while, owing to their paucity, to mention as exceptions the Sabbatarians, who maintain that Christians have no authorization for changing the divine institution of the Jewish Sabbath, and who consequently observe Saturday. Luther does not pretend any divine authority for the change, but takes for granted that “mankind needs a rest of one day, at least, in seven; and the first day, or Sunday, having prescription in its favor, ought not lightly to be changed.” He says elsewhere that “if any man sets up its observance on a Jewish foundation, then I order you to labor on it, to ride or dance on it, or to do anything whatever on it that shall remove its infringements on Christian liberty.” The Augsburg Confession pointedly says: “Those who judge that in place of the Sabbath the Lord’s day was instituted, as a day necessarily to be observed, do very grossly err.” Calvin says in [Pg 553] his Institutes: “It matters not what day we celebrate, so that we meet together for the desirable weekly worship; there is no absolute precept”; and he adds that the sticklers for Sunday are “thrice worse in their crass and carnal view of religion than the Jews whom Isaias (ch. i. 13) denounced.” The doctrine of the English Reformers on the subject is most concisely and strikingly put by Tyndale, who, in his Answer to Sir Thomas More, thus speaks:

“As for the Sabbath, we be lords over the Sabbath, and may yet change it into Monday, or into any other day, ass we see need, or may make every tenth day holy day, only ass we see cause why. We may make two every week, if it were expedient and one not enough to teach the people. Neither was there any cause to change it from Saturday, but to put a difference between ourselves and the Jews; neither need we any holy day at all, if the people might be taught without it.”

Even in Scotland John Knox, who attached himself to the innovators with a bigoted zeal, did not pretend to find any Gospel warrant for what he was pleased to call the Sabbath; and Dr. Hessey candidly acknowledges that the strained sabbatarianism of Scotland is by no means to be attributed to him or his coadjutors, mentioning at the same time that Knox, when on a visit to Calvin at Geneva, found that eminent Reformer occupied, on the Sunday of his arrival, at a game of bowls! If, then, it be plain that the arch-innovators are not responsible for that peculiarly unlovely, rigid, and ultra-Judaic observance of the Sunday (the traces of which, growing fainter year by year, are yet plainly discernible in the laws, institutions, habits, and manners of the English-speaking portion of the Protestant world), whence did it originate? Why are the ideas of English-speaking Protestants so widely different from those of their brethren, and even of their own founders, on this subject?

Fuller (in whose pages much quaint and naïve information about the history of those transition days is to be found) tells us that the Puritans, “who first began to be called by that name about 1564,” and who dissented from the church of King Henry on the ground that the Reformation had not gone “far enough,” were, like all other renegades, anxious to distinguish themselves by hostility at every point to the camp they had abandoned. They preached that to throw bowls on the Sabbath “were as great sin as to kill a man”; to make a feast or wedding dinner on that day “were as vile sin as for a father to cut the throat of his son with a knife”; and that to ring more bells than one “were mickle sin as is murder.” Of this brood was Vincent Bownde, whose great work on the Observance of the Sabbath first appeared in 1595; and to this book, which began the polemical controversy on the subject, is due the rabid sabbatarianism of the English Puritans during the remainder of the reign of Elizabeth and the dynasty of the Stuarts. The Scottish Calvinists eagerly seized the cry, and from both sects (their influence, pertinacity, and numbers being much greater than those of the Anglican Establishment, which was itself, of necessity, largely tinctured by their practice), through our own hard-headed but harder-hearted Puritans of New England, who practised this unmitigating observance of the day with the same zeal of enforcement that they displayed in many other grimly ludicrous things, we of this age and [Pg 554] country are still to a great extent under the sway of an intolerant and enforced sabbatarianism which the spread of intelligence and liberality is gradually wearing away, but which, after all, dies very hard. Just as no enmity is so envenomed, no hatred so intense, so in like manner no distinctive practice or usage disappears so slowly, as those originally engendered by religious faction. It was clear that no Scriptural authority existed for the abrogation of the Jewish Sabbath, and equally evident that the denial of the authority of the church destroyed for ever all ecclesiastical sanction for Sunday. There remained, consequently, no possible authorization for it but to insist that the mere meeting together of the apostles on that day (which, so far as anything to the contrary can be shown from Scripture, might have been accidental) constituted sufficient warrant; and next to regulate the observance of the day by the practice of the Jews with regard to the Sabbath. This Bownde did without hesitation. His book, gratifying as it did at once the malignity of the Puritans against the church, their envy of the established sect, and their own exclusiveness, became exceedingly popular, was largely read and quoted, and its influence remains to the present day. Here in the United States we yet retain traces of it in our laws; as, indeed, we still do of that other intolerance by which Catholics were, in former days, not allowed to hold civil office. In some of the New England States Sunday (or Sabbath, as they wrong-headedly insist on calling it) begins at sunset on Saturday; but in most of them it legally begins at twelve o’clock on Saturday night, lasting twenty-four hours. In some States contracts made on that day are void; but generally they are binding, if good in other respects. Of course the name Sunday is the Anglo-Saxon Sunnan-dœg, equivalent to the Roman dies solis, so called in both tongues from its being anciently devoted to the worship of the sun. Sabbath is the Hebrew noun shabbāth (rest) from the verb shābath (to rest).

To ourselves and those who think with us that the state, in legislating about matters of religion, whether doctrinal or merely of exterior observance, is overstepping her proper limits—nay, who go further, and insist that government was no more instituted to educate our children than to feed and clothe them; that there is not an assignable ground for the former which would not be even more conclusive for the latter—it follows that all such legislation, from that of Cromwell’s Puritans and the Six Sessions of Scotland, down through the Blue Laws of Connecticut, to the last municipal regulation that allows no concert on Sunday unless it be a “sacred” one, and no procession accompanied by a band of music on that day, seems, what it really is, an absurdity and a monstrosity, a relic of odious strifes and bitter hates; and we would be glad, in common, we think, with sensible and tolerant men of all creeds, to see our statute-books rid of its remotest traces.

In speaking of any religious practice enjoined by the Catholic Church we have this advantage: viz., that what it is at one place or time it is in all places and at all times. The practice, then, of Catholics, in accordance with the church teachings above stated, is to hear Mass on Sunday, and, except in cases of necessity, to abstain from servile labor. Most Catholics also attend Vespers on that day, though [Pg 555] there be no absolute obligation. We take no extreme cases, either of the very pious on the one side who for their souls’ sake may be said to make a Sunday of every day in the week, or of those on the other hand whose religion sits so lightly upon them that it is sometimes difficult to tell whether, beyond a feeble claim to the name of Catholic, they have any religion at all. Among the 200,000,000 Catholics of the world are to be found many of both descriptions. We speak, however, of the average. Among these, Mass and Vespers being over, there will be found no strait-lacedness; no tone peculiar to a Sunday, put on for that day, and not observable on other days; no hesitation in conversing about sublunary affairs of all kinds that can and may engage the attention during the week. Should a concert-hall be open, as in Europe is often the case, the Catholic hesitates not to go there, providing it be one to which he would go on any day—i.e., if it be a proper place for himself or family under any circumstances. He converses on business or for pleasure with his friends in the public gardens, at the cafés; with his family he visits other families with whom they may be intimate. He does not hesitate to write a business letter, to view a lot which he thinks of purchasing, or to take the railway train on that day. It is needless to go further. He has complied with the command of the church, and, not being a law unto himself spiritually, he invents for himself no obligations superadded to those of the church, which, in accordance with the commands of Scripture, he believes himself bound to hear.

In speaking of Protestant doctrine or practice we are, of course, more at a loss to speak definitely than when we lay down Catholic usage; since the former rarely remains the same on any single point, even within the same sect, for an ordinary generation of man. Why, fifty years ago Christmas was an abomination, “a rag of popery,” to all but the Anglicans. The sign of the cross was “the mark of the beast.” An organ in a meeting-house was “a seeking out of their own inventions.” Of the least approach to a liturgical observance, were it but the repetition of the Creed, it was said: “In vain do they worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men.” Now nearly all the sects make a feint of some sort of service or observance of the Christmas season; the cross is displayed within and without many church buildings; not merely organs but string and brass bands fill the choirs of Protestant fashionable churches; they may nearly all be heard falsely repeat, Sunday after Sunday, that they “believe in the holy Catholic Church”; and the prophet who should now foretell their changes in another half-century would run the risk of being mobbed in the public streets.

We give the doctrinal teaching of the Presbyterians on Sunday and its observance, or at least of so many of the different religious bodies going under that name as still subscribe to, and say they deduce their doctrines from the Bible via the Westminster Confession of Faith. It was formerly, and is to some extent still, the most generally received teaching on the subject of observing the Sabbath among English-speaking Protestants, who seem to have had a monopoly of spiritual information and an exclusive enlightenment on this whole matter. How much the bitter hatred [Pg 556] existing between Roundhead and Cavalier had to do with the firm hold the said observance took on Puritans and their descendants is not to the present purpose to inquire. In response to the question, “How is the Sabbath to be sanctified?” we have this answer:

“The Sabbath is to be sanctified by a holy resting all that day, even from such worldly employments and recreations as are lawful on other days; and spending the whole time in public and private exercises of God’s worship, except so much as may be taken up in works of necessity and mercy.”

What was meant by this is sufficiently indicated by the legislation effected both before and subsequent to the meeting of the “Assembly of Divines.” We are assured by excellent authorities that in England, some twenty years after the appearance of Bownde’s book, people “dared not, for fear of breaking the Sabbath, kindle a fire, or dress meat, or visit their neighbors; nor sit at their own door nor walk abroad; nor even talk with each other, save and it were of godly matters.” In 1643 the Long Parliament enacted laws “for the more thorough observance of the Sabbath,” and caused to be burnt by the hangman James I.’s Book of Sports. In the next year the Court of Six Sessions forbade in Scotland all walking in the streets on the Sabbath after the noonday sermon; and soldiers patrolled the streets, arresting both old and young whom they should find outside their houses and not on the way to or from church. The gates of Edinburgh were ordered to be shut from ten P.M. of Saturday till four A.M. of Monday; and the case is on record of a widow who had to pay a fine of two merks for having “had a roast at the fire during sermon time.”

It is told of an English lady of rank in our own day that, having procured some Dorking fowl, she some time after asked the servant who attended to them whether they were laying many eggs; to which the latter replied with great earnestness: “Indeed, my lady, they lay every day, not excepting even the blessed Sabbath!” Nor is the puritanic feeling still existing to a considerable extent among some few of the sectaries in Scotland badly illustrated by Sandie’s remark when he saw a hare skipping along the road as the people were gathering for sermon: “Ay! yon beast kens weel eneuch it’s the Sabbath day!” And the countryman passing on his way to “meeting,” who, when asked by a tourist the name of a picturesque ruin in the vicinity, answered: “It’s no the day to be speerin’ sic like things,” gives the reader an idea of certain peculiarities (formerly quite prevalent among Protestants, and still too common for the comfort of those who have many of the straiter sort for neighbors) which, we believe, are gradually but surely fading out before the progress of intelligence and with the wave of superstition and intolerance. For it must be borne in mind that the same Westminster Confession, relying too on Scripture, insists on the right and power of the civil magistrate circa sacra, contends that “he beareth not the sword in vain,” and that kings should be “nursing fathers” and queens “nursing mothers” to the church. We will do our modern Presbyterians the charity to believe that in subscribing to this instrument, they do so with some “mental reservation”; otherwise the cry against union of church and state [Pg 557] that we so frequently hear from them would (when taken in connection with their former antecedents as a sect and their present professed standards) be quite unintelligible.

Now, of the mode of keeping Sunday followed by Protestants in Continental Europe we need not speak, nor of the practice of Anglicans in the same regard, save in so far as the latter have (principally through the lower or evangelical division of their body) been modified and influenced by its former subjection and present proximity to the Puritan element of the English population. In the countries of Europe claimed as Protestant, and as a very natural as well as logical result of the indifferentism taught by the so-called fathers of reform, Luther and Calvin, it is difficult for the tourist to discern in Prussia, Holland, Denmark, Sweden, or Norway, save by the greater number of people at the theatres, concerts, and exhibitions, in the beer-gardens, taverns, and other places of resort, whether the day be Sunday or not. Some, of course, attend church on that day, it being almost the only day of the week on which such service is ever held. Geneva and the non-Catholic cantons of Switzerland may be passed with the same description, which completely exhausts Protestant Continental territory in Europe. Nor of the mode of observing Sunday inculcated by the Anglicans in England can we say that it is at all overdone or puritanical. They have, at least, escaped the dismal parody of asceticism which distinguishes such of their Scotch neighbors as have any trace of the ancient practice left.[152] Let us glance a moment at the laws of our Puritan friends of New England, that we may get an idea of bigotry run mad, and of the deductions that may be drawn from Vincent Bownde’s book and the teachings of the Westminster divines. “Having themselves,” as Washington Irving well observes,” served a regular apprenticeship in the school of persecution, it behoved them to show that they were proficients in the art.” The Puritans of Massachusetts thus legislate in regard to the “Sabbath” in the “Plymouth Code”:

“This court, taking notice of the great abuse and many misdemeanors committed by divers persons profaning the Sabbath, or Lord’s day, to the great dishonor of God, reproach of religion, and grief of spirit of God’s people, do therefore order that whosoever shall profane the Lord’s day by doing unnecessary servile work, by unnecessary travelling, or by sports or recreations, he or they that so trespass shall forfeit, for every such default, forty shillings, or be publicly whipped; but if it clearly appear that the sin was proudly, presumptuously, and with a high hand committed, against the known command and authority of the Blessed God, such a person, therein despising and reproaching the Lord, SHALL BE PUT TO DEATH, or grievously punished, at the discretion of the court.”

In support of the same wretched Sabbath superstition the colonies of Hartford and New Haven issue the following edicts:

21. “No one shall run on the Sabbath day, or walk in his garden or elsewhere, except reverently to and from meeting.”

22. “No one shall travel, cook victuals, make beds, sweep house, cut hair, or shave on the Sabbath day.”

23. “No woman shall kiss her child on the Sabbath or fasting day.”

[Pg 558]

Omitting, for very shame’s sake, to say anything of No. 38 of Governor Eaton’s code, the reader will perceive in the above quotations to what absurd results logical consistency drives the fanatic when he becomes so by cutting adrift from the safe moorings of God’s church and trusts his salvation to the puny cockboat of private judgment. These Puritans had disclaimed the title of the church which originated the Sunday; they would not, like Cranmer, accept it as “a mere appointment of the magistrates”; so there was nothing left for them but to slur over the utter vagueness of its mention in the New Testament, and refer the whole observance back to Moses and the Third Commandment. In doing this why were they not consistent throughout? Why did they not let their lands rest in the seventh year? Why not observe the year of Jubilee ordered by the sanction of the same Lawgiver?

As before stated, Protestant practice, like the doctrines from which it emanates, is Proteus-like in form and phase; nor is the method followed in the observance of Sunday any exception to the general rule. But, upon the whole, the offspring of Knox, the descendants of Bownde, and the adherents of the straiter sects stand up more strenuously and make a stouter fight (not in argument, but by sheer persistence) for the rigorous keeping of the “Sabbath” than they have found it convenient to do for many doctrines and usages which, logically speaking, were of far more importance to Protestantism as a system. Our outward and visible life in the United States, in Canada, and in the British Isles is to this day, in this one matter, largely tinctured and deeply infected with the plague of stupid and superstitious keeping of the Sunday, begun in factious opposition to the English state establishment, propagated by the work of Bownde, eagerly appropriated by Andrew Melville and the Scottish politico-religious agitators of his day, and transmitted to us through the Rump Parliament and the Puritans of New England. The “able and godly” ministers of these latter, who, in the words of Mr. Oliver, “derided the sign of the cross, but saw magic in a broomstick,” though their descendants have recoiled from the teachings of their childhood into Unitarianism or infidelity; though not one-half the adult population of New England now belongs to any Christian sect; and though of all bodies of men that ever existed under a guise of religion in the face of day they were the most inconsistent, the most bigoted, the most superstitious, the most intolerant, and the most relentlessly persecuting, are yet often forced upon our admiration. It has somehow become the fashion to laud these bigots to the heavens in annual palavers of New England Societies, Plymouth Rock orators, Fourth of July and other spread-eagle speakers; and though their other doctrines and practices have vanished, leaving on their chosen ground scarce a trace behind, yet we are reminded of their spirit and quondam influence by the shackles of legal enactment in regard to Sunday observance; by the tumult that rises from certain classes of Protestants as silent custom or outspoken enactment from time to time sweeps out of existence some one or other of the trammels with which Puritanism, in its day of power, enthralled us. [Pg 559] With what persistent zeal do they not agitate in the newspapers and petition authorities, municipal, State, and federal, against the running of the horse-cars, the rail-cars, and the mail steamers on the Sabbath! How terrible, in their eyes, are the Sunday excursions of the laboring people of our large cities! How clearly do they not perceive that liberty is a good thing only so long as everybody thinks and acts exactly as they do! Did they not prove that we lost the day on a famous occasion during the civil war by delivering battle on Sunday? How insanely anxious are they not to have the Almighty (their Almighty, that is to say) in some way constitutionally harnessed to the already hard-racked instrument which consolidates the government of these States! It is true that these men are the têtes montées of fanaticism of this sort, and we are far from affirming that a majority of their co-religionists go with them. Indeed, we know, from daily observation, that in many of the sects there exists but little of the spirit indicated, and that what remains is fast disappearing. But there exists enough of the embers to render walking amid them very annoying, and, with the assistance of a good breeze from the preachers, these embers may easily, and on small provocation, be fanned into a flame! Has not fanaticism displayed an unexpected vigor in connection with the question of opening our great Centennial Exposition on the only day on which the industrious poor can have the chance of seeing it without manifest injury to their temporal interests?

Our Protestant friend of the stricter sort awakes on the Sunday morning, bethinks himself of the day, dresses (having shaved himself provisorily on Saturday night), schools his countenance into the most malignantly orthodox cast, takes in hand the Bible, Baxter’s Call, or Boston’s Fourfold State, and descends to the parlor; that is, he would descend but that he hears one of his boys whistling in an adjoining room, who must at once be reproved therefor, to be more fully punished next day.

“To Banbury came I, O profane one!

There I saw a Puritane one

Hanging of his cat on Monday

For killing of a rat on Sunday.”

Having thus effectually “borne testimony” and quenched the spirits of the juvenile members of the family, who, fully knowing what Sunday means to them, have learned experimentally that

“Stone walls do not a prison make,

Nor iron bars a cage,”

he sits down gazing at his book, fancying, in some vague way, that he is doing God service (though how or to what end would seem indistinct, since, according to his most cherished doctrine, there is no merit whatever in good works). He hears with disgust the bell of the irreligious milkman, sees the unsanctified horse-car pass his door, the irreverent baker make his round, and notes the profane newsboy cry the Sunday papers. This last is the most afflictive dispensation of all, and the one against which he has most vainly and frequently petitioned, never thinking that, even on his own grounds, the real gravamen is in the papers of Monday morning, the work for which must necessarily be done on Sunday. Breakfast comes at length—eaten in solemn silence—the children being “hard up” for an apposite moral or religious observation, and fearful lest, should they [Pg 560] say anything, it might be something mundane. Nor can the mother help them to diminish the gloom of the occasion, having been herself furtively engaged in eking out the shortcomings of the servant in preparing the meal, and painfully aware that, according to the family scheme of orthodoxy, she has not been sanctifying the Sabbath. Family worship (on this day longer in the prayer than usual) adds in no way to the general cheerfulness. Each boy and girl, supplied with a Sunday-school book of the stereotyped pattern and contents, and given to understand the enormity of even the desire to take a walk on that day, longs in the inmost heart that the day were over. Church time comes, when, with a warning that they will be expected to answer on the text, the sermon, and an admonition against drowsiness, all are trooped off to meeting, the parents bringing up the rear. Then ensues an hour and a half of dreary listening to what most of them cannot, by the remotest possibility, comprehend. More than likely some of them may have been overcome by sleep; in which case even the negative pleasure of apathy is taken away, and its place supplied by a fearful looking-for of judgment, either by rebuke or castigation. The dinner is, in want of hilarity, a repetition of the breakfast; for no secular idea may be expressed, and the spirit does not move the younger branches, in any special degree, to an interest in the rather languid remarks of the paterfamilias upon the theological tendencies of the sermon; said observations being delivered in his Sunday tone, compared with which a gush of tears would be exhilarating. Books are retaken; no cheerful game or romp among the children; no free play or interchange of ideas between the parents. To write a letter would be a crying sin for the father. It is a heinous fault when his mind spontaneously wanders to that note of his due on Wednesday next; and although the mother had the interesting and enlivening lucubrations of Edwards on the Will in her hands, yet there is much reason to believe that the washing of to-morrow has more than once intervened to prove Edwards in the right; not to mention the occasion on which she caught herself recalling the trimmings of Mrs. X—‘s bonnet in the front pew. No visit from, none to, any family of their acquaintance; either would be a sin against the sanctity of the Sabbath! We need not visit the Sunday-school, to which the superstitious folly of the parents, fear of their fellow church-members, the Mrs. Grundyism of sects, or an unfounded belief that something valuable is learned there compels the parents to send their children. Probably most of our readers know how these things are managed; what is the causa causativa of a Sunday-school superintendent; what is the calibre of the young men who teach, and the object which takes them there. We all, of course, know and recognize the high moral aims as well as the literary and theological ability of the misses who form the grand staff of instructors in those institutions! But we must not be diverted from our sabbatarian Sunday.

Then follows a dreary tea, meeting and sermonizing again, from which two of the children, having gone hopelessly asleep soon after the exordium, are brought home in a dazed state, nor does a protracted bout of family worship much assist in arousing them therefrom; and then to bed! We suppose the father [Pg 561] to be honest. Many such men are. We doubt not but many of the Puritans were sincere, and slit the ears of the Quakers with the serenity of good men engaged in the performance of a virtuous action. But let us put the question squarely to reasonable men: Will it be a matter of surprise if this man’s children, when they grow up, loathe and abhor all religion, thinking it all of a piece with that in which they were brought up—if they turn out, in short, what the descendants of the Puritans have become? Why, the writer is acquainted with a school, kept by a well-meaning man, in which, by tedious Bible-reading, hymn-singing, and long-winded prayers at the school opening and closing, the teacher is unwittingly the cause of more of what he would consider sacrilege, in an hour, than is heard of profanity among all the hackmen of New York on the longest day of the year; and his great object, which is to bring up Presbyterians, is thereby rendered as utterly futile as though he were an ingenious man doing his utmost to make infidels of them.

Curiously enough, people of this kind (we refer to the strict keeping of Sunday) are never satisfied with the liberty they enjoy (and which nobody wishes to curtail) of observing the day just as rigorously as they may desire. Not at all. There is no happiness or ease of spirit for them until by legal pains and penalties they can force you, me, and all their neighbors to their own peculiar way of thinking and acting. This was well illustrated by the Scotchman who, in telling how pious a people he had got among, said: “Last Sabbath, joost as the kirk was skailin’, there was a drover chiel comin’ alang the road, whustlin’ an’ lookin’ as happy as gin it was the middle o’ the week. Weel, sir, oor lads is a God-fearin’ set o’ lads, an’ they wur joost comin’ oot o’ kirk. Od! they yokit on him, an’ amaist kilt him.” This is, after all, the point of the matter. We neither can, by right, ought to have, nor have we any objection to any observance of the Sunday, however rigid or however much (to our mind) it may seem strained, overdone, and even ludicrous. That is the affair of the man himself, and should lie between his own conscience and his Creator, where we have no right to interfere. But we all want and have a right to the same privilege for own conviction, or want of conviction, that we cheerfully accord to him. Now, this such people as he never will accord to us so long as they can possibly prevent it. They never have done so in the history of the world, and, taking experience for our guide, we have no reason to suppose that they ever will. They prate largely of liberty of conscience, but that phrase means in their mouth liberty to think as you please, so long as you think with them. Though he is my neighbor, may not my daughter play the piano on Sunday on account of his tender conscience? Must I not, because he fancies the Sunday thereby desecrated, practise the flute? I do not attempt to interfere with his drone of family worship; why should he be eternally petitioning to stop the delivery of my letters, or to prevent my going down-town in the horse-cars on that day? I insist that he has as much as he is called on to do in attending to the affairs of his own conscience; that the contract is quite as much as he can conveniently and creditably get through with [Pg 562] and I object (I think with reason) to giving up mine to his charge. I want a keg of beer in my cellar, or, it may be, a basket of champagne. Because he is virtuous, shall there be no more cakes and ale? Shall his being scandalized because I think proper to take a walk on Sunday confine me all that day to the house? Must his scruples of conscience prevent myself and family from entertaining our friends on Sunday? In short, must I always be on tenterhooks to know how his conscience regards every act of mine on that day? It would seem, though, as if that were just what my neighbor and his atrabilious friends have been aiming at. For, now that I think of it, they have been since ever I remember the self-same people, who have all along got up meetings, been active in urging petitions, and done their utmost to thwart every convenience or facility that for the past twenty-five years has been contrived for public accommodation on Sunday.

On further reflection, they are the identical individuals who have publicly and privately been marplots in every matter in our vicinage, during the same length of time, which did not fully recognize their little Ebenezer or Bethel as its fount and origin; and though they are possibly not to be convinced, yet it is highly important for these people and all their class to learn once for all that the days of Puritanism are gone, and that nowadays every man is responsible for his own acts to his Creator, and not to Mr. Jones next door, nor to the congregation with which he worships. We do not wish Mr. J—— to read his letters on Sunday, nor will we force him to patronize the street-car on that or any other day; but we want him and his friends to cease from making laws that interfere with our freedom, while thrusting upon them nothing which, willy nilly, they are bound to accept.

Thus it will be seen that our objection is not to our friends of the various illiberal “schemes of salvation” as individuals, nor to their practice of a peculiar and, to us, by no means an alluring primness of speech and gait on Sunday; but to their unwillingness to allow us, who see things differently, to follow our own convictions, and to their manifest determination that we shall, in the event of their ever having the power, be forced to adapt ourselves to their views and practices. This overbearing spirit seems to be inseparable from their pharisaic practice and its resultant prejudices, so that our dislike to both is well founded. As to the sanctification of the Lord’s day, they have an indisputable right to celebrate it just as austerely as may best suit them, though we think them grossly and foolishly wrong therein. They may call the day Sabbath, if they please, though we know that word to signify Saturday, and nothing else. But in return for this (not concession, for it is their right) we wish to suggest mildly that we also have certain inalienable rights; that among these, according to a highly-respectable and much-lauded document of which we sometimes hear, “are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”; and we modestly venture the additional suggestion that the municipal and other laws which already exist, and those which these people would fain enact, touching an enforced observance of the Sunday after their fashion, interfere largely with our just liberty and militate strongly against [Pg 563] our chances of success in the pursuit of happiness.

Finally, which method of observing the day seems the more in accord with right reason? And here we wish the Protestant to lay aside a moment, if he can, the prejudice engendered by the tyranny of early education, surrounding usage, and personal habit. Our having been accustomed from early youth to a specific article of diet, clothing, or to a habit of any kind, physical or mental, does not necessarily make an entirely different usage wrong or the direct reverse sinful. If it be a command of God that Sunday shall be observed after the fashion of the ancient Jews with their Sabbath, we have nothing to say, except that even then we object to its observance being made a matter of legal enactment. No man was ever yet driven to the Almighty by fear of temporal pains and penalties; nor is any worship acceptable to our Creator unless it be a free-will offering of the heart. But when Protestants admit with us that the Mosaic dispensation is past and the type done away with in the fulness of that which it prefigured, we certainly cannot consider the law of the Pentateuch any more binding upon us in this respect than in regard to the rite of circumcision, the usage of polygamy, or the obligation of a brother to marry his deceased brother’s wife. But there is, in the New Testament, no warrant at all for the change of the day, much less any rule for its special observance; and consequently, on Protestant principles, any day in the week—indeed, any one in ten days, a fortnight, or a month—would answer the purposes of religion equally well; and as there is no Scriptural command, the mode of observance is purely of human invention.

We of course do not speak here of the Sunday, or of any one day in seven, employed (apart from religious purposes) solely for the purpose of recruiting the jaded physical energies of him who toils on the other six days in the week. The necessity for a periodical suspension of toil and labor depends on physical laws to which no reference is now made; and as the turmoil of trade and the competition of labor go on increasing, the necessity for the regular recurrence of a day of rest becomes more and more evident. The laboring classes are too numerous and too deeply interested in the preservation of the stated holiday for it ever to die out. In this view of the question—the purely physical one—the mode of observance would be simply a matter of discretion and utility, and would not come within the purview of the civil law at all; though the actual appointment of the day might, for the sake of uniformity and for many other reasons, very properly be considered as pertaining to government. We, however, speak of the day as a divine or an ecclesiastical institution, in which light its observance will depend upon the direct word of God or command of his church; but in no case will the civil law have any right to interfere either by dictum or permission.

But even supposing, for argument’s sake, what we by no means admit—viz., that the Sunday should be observed in accord with the prescriptions of the Pentateuch—we do not see how it follows that innocent and healthful recreation should be denied on that day, either to the young, for whom it is absolutely necessary, or to the middle-aged [Pg 564] and the old, to whom it is at least desirable. There is a great and palpable distinction between recreation and labor. The latter is forbidden on the Sabbath in the Decalogue; but does the former stand in the same case? The words are: “On it thou shalt not do any work.” It does not say: “On it thou shalt take no recreation, nor shalt thou play.” It is one thing to say to the hod-carrier or the navvy that he shall not mount the ladder with the heaped hod or ply the mattock and spade; and it is another and quite a different thing to say to either that he shall not take a walk in the suburbs, go with his family on an aquatic or rural excursion, or visit the “Exhibition buildings” on a Sunday. It is against such superstitious abuses, which had, in course of time, grown up on the authority of the sophistical Rabbins touching the Sabbath, that our Saviour so frequently and pointedly protests; and against the same or similar illiberal practices we now protest.

We Catholics say that the Sunday is like other holidays of obligation, of the same enactment, and on the some footing with them—i.e., they are all instituted by command of the church. Now, with the Sunday, as well as with the other church festivals of obligation, comes the duty of hearing Mass and refraining from servile labor; but the law of the church ceases at that point, and “where there is no law there is no transgression.” The Catholic believes the other days ordered by the church to be observed just as binding as Sunday; but it never enters his head to attempt to coerce Protestants either into the same belief or observance. His Protestant friend says to him in effect: “I have a very tender conscience touching the observance of this day. Your cheerfulness interferes with my devotional feelings; your Sunday recreations, walks, visits, and travel scandalize me, and offer a bad example to my rising family. On last Sunday morning yourself and family rode out in the horse-cars to the park; in the afternoon you entertained a houseful of visitors, during which time you, with the flute, accompanied your daughter on the piano. The Sunday previous you took the train for an adjoining city. The Sunday papers are frequently taken at your house. You write, post, receive, and read letters as unconcernedly on the Lord’s day as though it were the middle of the week. When we had the power you would have been firstly fined, then whipped, and for stubborn persistence put to death for this; but in these degenerate days all I can do is to put every legal and social obstruction in your way that our decaying numbers but ever persistent determination will enable us to do. Alas for the days that are gone!”

Now, with the parents on either side we have little to do. The mind of the Catholic is made up; his conscience is informed from the precepts and instructions of the church; and we have no desire to change his views or practice in the premises. And, in the case of his opponent, there are few tasks so hopelessly wanting in results as that of convincing a man against his will; as that of trying to surmount religious prejudice in the adult. But we put it to fair reason, to common sense, to the community (which has a manifest interest that its members shall be [Pg 565] under the influence of some religion, and not utter infidels), to answer: In which of the two families exists the stronger likelihood that the children will grow up stanch and ardent believers in religion? Will any one tell us that it will be in that in which a dark, overshadowing pall, under the name of piety, was made “to press the life from out young hearts”; in which every thoughtless, merry, or exuberant word or act of theirs was represented as sin “deserving God’s wrath and curse for ever”; in which no memory of youth connected with religion can be other than sombre, dismal, and remorseful? Or will it be in the Catholic family, where the child is taught, not merely in words, but in fact, that “my yoke is easy and my burden is light”; where, as he grows up, religious observance constantly appeals to him as a privilege, not as an infliction; where cheerfulness, mirth, and jollity are by no means considered hostile to, but rather the concomitants of, true religion; and where no day of the week is definitely consecrated to unnatural gloom and false (because enforced, and consequently hypocritical) devotion?

The answer is plain. Statistics of the result, with children brought up under each set of influences, bear us triumphantly out; and, in fine, thankful as we are for the daily and yearly decrease in numbers and influence of those who maintain this rigorous observance of the Sunday, we shall be still better pleased, and it will be a happy day for this and the other English-speaking peoples among whom they ever existed, when the quibbling, narrow-minded, and sophistical principles and practices represented by such persons shall have been entirely stamped out beneath the onward march of tolerance and Christian charity.

[152] Not having had an opportunity of extensive travel in Scotland, we cannot speak of anything but Edinburgh and Glasgow; but on the few Sundays that we passed there, if there was any more specific and noticeable observance of the day than by more copious drinking, we failed to see it.

THE ETERNAL YEARS.

BY THE AUTHOR OF “THE DIVINE SEQUENCE.”

CONSUMMATION.

We have spoken of the way in which the arch-enemy, the seducer of God’s children, is aping the mysteries of the still hidden future, according as his subtlety and his enmity direct him. But while his rage and cunning are devising new deceits for those who are not enlightened by divine truth, or who have hid their light under a bushel, our attention is called in a special manner to her whose office it is, and ever has been, to crush his head. Whenever and wherever the deceits of men and devils are putting out the light and wrapping the soul of man in darkness, there does the Virgin Mother come more openly and more directly to counteract the fatal influence. It has been reserved for the cold, matter-of-fact, utilitarian last half of the nineteenth century to see awakened in the multitude the simple and romantic faith in pilgrimages and in the childlike, pathetic histories of Mary’s appearances upon earth that lent such charm to the ages of faith. If the enemy of mankind seems to have more power allowed to him in the [Pg 566] evil days on which we have fallen, so the Mother of fair love, from whose pure hands the divine odyle streams, is deigning to speak to children and childlike souls, showing herself to be the great channel of special graces, the medium of divine communications, and the sure refuge against Satan’s acted prophecy and pantomime of God’s loving intentions. “We will come to him, and dwell with him”—and Mary is the precursor and the channel now as she was then to his first coming, when he took flesh in her womb. The promise to the individual soul is the promise to the church: and vice versa. The revelation of God in the church is also the life of God in the soul—the two are bound up in one. The life of the church is the guarantee of the life of the soul; it is the only sure foundation of such life; and the golden house, the domus aurea, of that life is devotion to the divine Mother. For as her presence, her sweet virginal life, was the necessary preliminary to the first coming of Christ, so will the Son of God not appear on his glorious second mission till Mary has come in the hearts of her people as an army with banners; all her prerogatives known and worshipped, all her position, flowing from her rights as the mother of the God-man, acknowledged and understood, and her court of angels following in her mystic footsteps upon earth, even as the bees follow their queen wherever she may choose to alight; and so preceding the second coming of our dearest Lord and ushering in the new glories of the kingdom of God upon earth.

The Holy Ghost could only be sent by Jesus glorified. The sacrifice of the cross needed to be accomplished and the precious blood shed, before the promised Paraclete could come. And thus between the one stupendous event and the other there lies an epoch of forty days, when he had not yet ascended into heaven, and when therefore his risen glory was in a measure incomplete. At the beginning of that dread time, full of the deepest mystery, of which we but imperfectly comprehend the meaning, he was seen first by Mary Magdalene in the garden. And as she fell at his feet with extended hands, he said, “Touch me not.” We have probably all of us at some time meditated sadly on those repelling words.

Time was when she might touch those blessed feet, not with her hands only but with her lips. Does he love her less now that her repentance is complete, and her salvation accomplished? Do not her rapid thoughts go back in one rush to the time when she sat at his feet unrebuked, whiling away the contemplative hours as she listened to his words and heard him say she had chosen “the better part”? Does she not with a pang of wounded love recall the moment when she wiped the precious ointment with her hair from the feet she had bathed with it and with her tears? But now he says, “Touch me not!” Yes, there is a change. But, O loving heart! it is not a change of loss but of gain. It is true there is an interim in which our beloved Lord is shrouded from us in too much glory for our human sense. The cradle-time of his sweet infancy is past, the grace of his youth, the glory of his manhood, and all the bitter-sweet ignominies of his cross. He has passed somewhat beyond our ken. He is risen, but not yet ascended. The first Mass [153] had not [Pg 567] then been offered. The bloody sacrifice was over; the Eucharistic Sacrifice had not been celebrated by mere priestly hands, only by his own divine hands on Holy Thursday. Until Mass had once been said, there was something as it were incomplete in the condition of the church. The next touch, the only touch possible for us (save by a special command to St. Thomas and his faltering disciples), was in the Blessed Sacrament.[154] Now we touch him daily, and fear no rebuke. Jesus is ascended, and the Paraclete has come, and is ever coming more and more; and as the Holy Dove sheds the light of his wings upon the church and speaks through her utterance, so the privileges and the status of Mary are more revealed and more developed. We know more of our queen, and we are learning more of her court, and when both have taken their place in the hearts of men and have prepared for the reign of the Holy Ghost, when the angels have accomplished their mission, the far-off glories of which are hardly dawning on us, then will he make us know all that lies hidden in the deep mystery of his second coming, and God and man and angels will be united in the sweet bonds of Jesus, and through the mediation of her who is clothed with the sun, with the moon beneath her feet, and a crown of twelve stars on her virgin head.

This is the divine progression, and this is leading to the divine consummation.

* * * * *

Our task is drawing to a close. It has been our endeavor to encircle the whole creation with the chain of faith, and to bind each to all in endless links of the divine love. We have dared to glance back before time into the bosom of eternity. We have beheld time, as it appears to our human ken, in a manner detach itself from eternity, and seem to become an entity—which indeed it is in a certain sense. We have marvelled at its slow-flowing course and its distant results, as compared with our own rapidity of thought and grasp of imagination. And we have seen that time is patient because it is the offspring of eternity, and because it is the mode and vehicle of God’s revelation of himself to us. God is patient because he is almighty and omniscient. For a little space we have strained our endeavors to look upon the flowing stream as God sees it, and not as we break it up into moments and hours. Our motive for doing this has been to realize so far as is possible the continuousness of God’s action with the indivisibility of his being as he is in himself, and to prove that this indivisibility and intrinsic unchangeableness lie at the root of all his manifestations of himself through the nunc fluens of time. Wherever we have fancied a contradiction to exist, or even a disparity, the error has lain in our partial vision and not in any shadow of change in the great God. He meant always what he means now, but mankind could not always equally bear that meaning. Therefore, as pitying his creation, he has condescended in past ages to pour the divine waters of revelation in diverse colored vessels; so that at one time the limpid liquid seemed to us of a different hue from what it assumed subsequently, until at last the waters of life were held in the crystal vases of the church, [Pg 568] pure and white as they. We perceive and understand that the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob is the same God as our God of Bethlehem and Calvary. And the unity of God’s nature becomes ever more and more obvious to us as we study the characteristics of his government. At no period and in no place has the loving Creator forgotten the work of his own hands. And lest we could not find him, he has adapted the light he poured upon us to the weakness of our sight. In the unity of God and in his unchangeableness we find our own link to the past, and discover how we are the inheritors of former ages and the heirs of the years to come. We have indicated (we could do no more) the great fact that all is because God is; that he has and can have no other end than himself; and that it is exactly in that great truth that lies all our hope and all our salvation. For he is absolute goodness as certainly and as necessarily as he is absolute being. This being so, it is impossible for us to wish anything that he has made not to be. Dreadful as is the thought of hell, we could not wish hell were not—we cannot wish evil to exist. But we find it there, and we are silent because he has permitted it. We hate it, because, though he permits it, he hates it. But we see how it grows out of the free will of men and angels; and that, as all merit lies in deliberate choice, there could be no choice if virtue were a necessity. Evil is not, like good, an original and universal principle. It is the negation of that; and required, to give it an actual existence, the free power of deliberate selection, like that of the devils when they fell. We see as we read the history of the world, in the light thrown by the knowledge of God, that evil works greater good. And as we can see this in part, we believe that it exists in the whole, though our perception is limited. We know that good must triumph in the end. If we thought otherwise, we should make the devil stronger than God, and the scheme of redemption a comparative failure.

As we enumerate all these things, what is the result we arrive at except one of illimitable joy and confidence—exultation beyond all expression in the might and majesty of our God—a hopefulness that exceeds language—a courage too large for a narrow heart, and a boundless, passionate yearning towards all living souls, that they may learn how great a God is our God, and how good and grand a thing it is to be alive and to serve him?

We can only measure life with any accuracy by the amount of thought which has filled it—that is, by the quantity of our intellectual and spiritual powers which we have been able to bring to the small aperture in the camera obscura by which to contemplate the ever-flowing eternity that lies beyond, and cut it up into the sections we call time.

Another example will show us how plastic is the nature of time. Take the life of an animal. We are inclined to give the largest possible and reasonable importance to the brute creation. It is an open question in which we see great seeds of future development, all tending to increased glory to the Creator and to further elucidation of creative love. Nevertheless it is obvious that brutes perceive only, or chiefly, by moments. There is, as compared with ourselves, little or no sequence in their perceptions. [Pg 569] There is no cumulative knowledge. They are without deliberate reflection, even where they are not without perceptions of relations and circumstances, past or future. Consequently, they are more rigorously subjected to time than ourselves. Therefore, when we deprive an animal of life we deprive him of a remainder of time that is equal to little more than no time, in proportion to the degree in which his power of filling time with perception is less than our own.[155] All we have said tends to prove that time has in itself only a relative existence; it is a form or phase of our own being.[156] It is an aspect of eternity; the aspect which is consistent with our present condition.

From the way in which we have seen that God has made use of different races to work for the establishment and development of his church, we have opened a glorious vista of hope in the future, and we have rejoiced over the work to be done, and the laborers who at the eleventh hour shall be called into the vineyard, until even the fragments that remain shall be gathered up, so that nothing may be lost. We have dared to maintain, against all those who cavil at the evil days on which we have fallen, that Christianity has infiltrated its influence in regions where it is blasphemed, or, as in the past Roman Empire, where it was denied. We have endeavored to impress on our readers the importance, and in a certain sense the sacredness, of matter, as the vehicle of God’s demonstration of himself. For, as Fénelon says, “God has established the general laws of nature (which involve all the laws of matter) to hide under the veil of the regulated and uniform course of nature his perpetual operation from the eyes of proud and corrupt men, while on the other hand he gives to pure and docile souls something which they may admire in all his works.” In proportion as we honor God’s laws, so should we honor the means of their manifestation, the substance through and in which they work, and without which they would fall back into the abstract and have no existence outside God himself. We say in proportion, because the manifestation is second to the principle manifested, and the modus operandi is inferior to him who employs it. We have as much difficulty in conceiving of God apart from his operations as we have in realizing eternity apart from time. And therefore is all honor due to the vast creation whereby we see the evidence of things not seen, and everything becomes to us “holy to the Lord.” It is for this reason that the true and intelligent love of nature is essentially the offspring of the Christian faith. The ancients cannot be said to have had it in any degree beyond a remote possibility in their intellectual nature. To them nature was a weird enchantress, hiding her terrible secrets with a jealous care. The silence [Pg 570] and solitude of the forests and the mountains were full of a sense of horror. The separate trees held a lamenting and imprisoned spirit; the gay, sparkling streams were a transmuted nymph, which, like the perfumed shrubs and flowers, told some tale of the anger of the gods and their swift revenge. All that was inanimate inspired sadness. And when their pastoral tales rose into cheerfulness, it was that the lowing herds and bleating sheep formed a part. The sounds and motion of at least animal life were essential. The solitudes of nature were simply awful and terrific; for nature was then only a mystery to unredeemed humanity. She held deep secrets in her bosom, but the curse had set its seal upon them all, and she waited in long mournful silence for the hour when the human feet of the Creator should press her varied fields, and by his thrilling touch break the iron bars of her captivity, and teach her to tell of him in the whispered music of her thousand voices. In truth, her secrets were his, nor dared she break silence until he had come to set free the mystery of love for which she was created and instituted. But when Love himself had walked the earth, and mingled his tears—ay, and his precious blood—with the dews of his own creation, then the dark melancholy of nature grew into sweet pathos, and her solitudes were filled with secrets of his presence.

But what was then hidden from the pagan world could hardly be so to the first father of our race, he who out of the vast stores of his infused science named all created beings. When Adam saw the corn growing bright in thick array, and the vine bending down with purple fruit, surely he understood, as in a prophecy, the great symbol of the bread of life and of the Holy Eucharist. The body and blood of the Incarnate God, albeit unbroken and unshed, must have been present to his ardent expectation as he beheld their antitype in the garden of Paradise. The rose with her mystic bosom deep enfolded must ever have awakened some passing thought of the Rosa mystica. And when to sad Eve, after her exile beyond the gates guarded by the flaming sword of the cherubim, the rose appeared bearing thorns among her five or seven leaved foliage, she guessed at the sacred crown and the divine wounds of the God-man, and at the sevenfold desolation of the mother who bore him. And what to us are the bright autumn hedgerow leaves dabbed with blood, not red now but tawny? Are they not tokens that he has trod that way and left the traces of his past glorious passion—past, because that blood was shed once for all, but still and for ever remaining; while the scarlet poppy takes up the theme, and in every corn-field, on barren tracks, and meeting the way-worn traveller by the road’s dusty side, reminds him that the sacrifice is renewed hour by hour the wide world over, fresh and life-giving as ever? Can the rich woodlands fail to bring before us the thought of him who gathered from the forests of his own creation the wood for his own cross? Can we sit beneath the dappled sunshine of the flickering boughs without remembering how it dared to lay its quick vibrating touch upon his sacred head, as he walked amid the olive groves of Gethsemane, but withdrew itself, and gave place to the cold moon before the scene of his great agony?

[Pg 571] Surely these shadows are full of uncreated light; and from time to time the church retrims her lamps of dogmatic theology, and each time the light streams further down into the still, dim, uncertain regions of natural science, another precious secret is revealed, another ancient doubt dispelled; and matter and natural laws prove themselves each more and more to be the depositories of divine truth and the faithful creatures of the omnipresent Creator.

While acknowledging the force of law, we have denied that law can have an independent existence apart from a self-existing, self-conscious lawgiver, of whom it is the exponent. We have asserted the same as regards force, which is but another name for law, or, rather, which is law in posse. And we have stated that as science proves the absence of all direct contact in the material world, the world of atoms, so the only real contact is that of spirit on matter, of the divine Creator on his own creation. For he is nearer to us than we are to ourselves. All forces, all active powers, emanate from God. They are the evidences to us of his existence. They could as little exist without him as a shadow can exist without light. They are one in their nature, though they are diverse in their effects, because they are God’s constant touch on his own creation. He exists formally in all space and beyond all space. And everywhere he is the same: the immutable and absolute Ens. In his touch on his creation he gives rise to the active forces which virtually declare his being, and which are extended throughout space, but under a million varied degrees of being and a million varied forms. They are virtually everywhere equally. But their manifestation in mind and degree is as diverse as all that exists in the vast cosmos, inside and outside of which God is, infinite and entire.

We have not enlarged upon this theme as we might have done. We have only pointed out to our readers how God’s touch on his creation is the only absolute contact that exists, and that science goes to prove the absence of all other, that is, of all material contact. We have abstained from trying to demonstrate how this truth sweeps away a hundred doubts respecting God’s ways towards man, and a thousand difficulties that might prove stumbling-blocks to our faith. We have desired no more than to put the thought, nay, we might say the fact, before them, and leave them to work out all its corollaries in love and devotion. We are not writing for sceptics but for those who believe, and would fain believe yet more surely, giving a reason for the faith that is in them, and dwelling in prayer on thoughts which reveal more of God’s character to the soul. We are to be perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect. That is, in our measure and degree, we are to aim at a faint reflection of the harmony, the proportion, the justice of God. To do this, and to aim at doing it, we need to form in our own minds an accurate though but a limited view of the character of God. And to effect this, we must as it were look at his character all round—for which purpose the past, the present, and the future are all-important to us; and we have to view him as he reveals himself to us in his creation, in his government, and in his promises. We have ventured to maintain that the whole of his [Pg 572] creation is with a view to his Incarnation; that the Incarnation of the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity is enhanced by his glorious passion and most precious death working our redemption; that it is glorified by his resurrection and ascension; and only completed in his sacramental presence; that as this sacramental presence is the one great fact virtually enclosing in itself all the others, as it is the coping-stone of the great mystery of the Incarnation, its lowest depth and greatest height, so is it the link that rivets the creation to the God-man, and the keystone to all the science of matter and dynamic force. For it is the divine epitome of all the laws that govern both, the reason of their being, and the last exponent of their rootedness in God. It completes the circle within whose bounds lies the entire cosmos as a globe environed by the serpent. It is the golden ring with which the divine Spouse has wedded himself to his church and to all the world, if they but know it. Words fail us. We cannot say enough; for these are thoughts too deep for words, and which seem to be rather darkened than expressed by language. And, like all that is greatest, they come to us from that which seems most simple and most hidden of all—a silken-curtained Tabernacle; and behind the little closed door lies all; every secret has its solution within the round white limits of the Host, for that Host is the great ultimatum of the creation, and the absolute consummation of God’s giving himself to man, while the latter is in the condition of viator.

We have entreated our readers not to be deluded by the dimness of the present times, but by prayer and solitary thought to strain their spiritual vision to behold the brightness of the future which is coming upon us like the rays of the sun behind a mist; the reign of the Holy Ghost—the enlargement of the church’s border, and the spreading of the cords of her tent; the devotion to the Mother of God taking root in an honorable people; and thus, through the mediation of her who is the first among all created beings, bringing the whole outer world nearer to the spiritual world. This, and the future mission, may be a very distant one, of her messengers the angels, are all certain because they are written, and even now the signs of the times indicate their advent. In whatever form they may come, whatever may be the details filling up the wonderful picture of the future, whatever, in short, may be the literal working-out of the wonderful promises of the Gospel, one thing at least is certain: they mean peace to men of good-will. We may be quite unable to define or explain them; we are waiting for the hour when the church shall teach us more. But we cannot exaggerate their importance, nor can we deny that our blessed Lord has left a rebuke on those who make no attempt to discern the signs of the times. There are souls among his special servants who are the men of the future. They are those who are called to stand on the watch-towers of prayer, and to hear the cry, “Watchman, what of the night?”

The time of figs was not yet. Nevertheless, he in his eternal justice cursed the fig-tree that yielded him no fruit, when he deigned to look up among the broad, scented leaves of its knotted branches. There are souls who are called to bear fruit out of season as well as in season, and woe to them if they fail in their higher and exceptional [Pg 573] spiritual vocation. They are to be beforehand with time; they are to be, though in a silent, hidden way, the spiritual heralds of the future, the harbingers of God’s coming spring, the pioneers of prayer. They are the human messengers that are to prepare his way before him, in those never-ceasing conquests which multiply in proportion as our hearts are ready to receive him. They are to live, as all the great saints have done, in advance of their age. St. Francis was centuries before his time in the refinements of his exquisitely spiritualized nature; St. Vincent of Paul was the same in the creations of his charity; and St. Francis of Sales like St. Philip Neri in the blending of deep piety with the exigencies of modern life. The nearer we approach to the consummation, the more numerous will become the watchers of the night, the souls that are looking out for a new dawn, and who meanwhile are leading an inner life in advance of the present. God alone can know them, and those on whom he has bestowed the gift, though but partially, of the discernment of spirits. To others they will appear as men walking in a dream, visionary and unpractical. It matters not to them. Even here they have in a measure their great reward, for they can say, with their divine Master, “I have meat to eat which you know not.”

We are often tempted to complain that we have fallen upon evil times. The past seems to us to have been more full of heroism, the future we believe will be richer in knowledge. We have slid into a period of prosaic piety mingled with many doubts. Without pausing to argue how much of this is false, we would remark that the present is an epoch which may yield a larger amount of merit to those who know how to profit by it than perhaps any other—we may make a rich harvest of faith and hope. And we must bear in mind that both these are virtues that will ultimately be swallowed up in the greater and crowning virtue of perfect charity. When we see, there will be an end of faith; when we know, hope will expire in certainty. “There remain now faith, hope, and charity; but the greatest of these is charity.” In proportion to the extension of our knowledge, the area of our blind faith is diminished. “Because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed. Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.” There is a special grace attending these twilight days, when a larger demand is made upon our faith. The light will gradually increase unto the perfect day—not only the real absolute perfect day of heaven, but in a measure here upon earth. The merit of faith will be less, when the angels are obviously carrying out their mission upon earth, than it is now, when the good lies so hidden, and the evil is so rampant and open. We are foolish not more truly to value the advantages of our own time, and to rejoice that we are called upon to have a greater and a stronger faith than may be possible in those who will, as it were, put their hand into the wounded side where beats the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Whatever has an appearance of discouragement about it is in fact a fresh demand from God upon our larger faith and deeper trust. It is as if he said to us, “You are my friends, and therefore I can count upon you.” We should make haste to lay up a larger harvest of meritorious faith from every [Pg 574] doubt that falls across our path and every cloud that veils the sunshine, and by this very act we shall hasten the dawn and bring on the joyous fruition of our prayer. “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven”—for surely this prayer is intended to be granted in a far greater degree than anything the world has ever seen from the creation to the present hour. Remember who taught us that prayer; and remember the centuries that it has been breathed by all the church of God from infancy to age. It is not a poetic phrase. It is not a hyperbole. It is God’s word, expressive of God’s will and God’s intention; and, therefore, has he made it the universal petition of all his children. It is the epitome of all he demands in every separate soul, until the many units have become a large multitude of the faithful, greater than any man can number.

It is the strenuousness of our faith which will give a greater distinctness, a more delineated and chiselled clearness, to our convictions, and even to our opinions. At present they hang loose on too many of us, and flap about in the high wind of the world’s contempt and impudent indifference, blinding our sight and hindering our steps. A firmer, steadier faith will gather tight across our bosom all our outstanding notions and ideas, bringing them into subjection to the faith which teaches us to see all things as God sees them—that is, according to our degree, but in the same light that he sees them, which is the light of eternity and of his own being. He has bidden us open our mouth wide that he may fill it. Can, we, then hope too largely or too earnestly? Can we assign any limits to the grace of sanctification in its continuous progression, or to the advance of love in the ever-enduring reign of the Holy Ghost? The God towards whom we are being so sweetly drawn is infinite, and though each individual must reach his own appointed measure and degree, yet who can dare put a limit even in thought to the plenitude of that future? But for our great and exceeding hope, how barren would our present life appear! Like Rachel, the church cries incessantly to her Lord, “Give me children, or I die.” Let us repeat the prayer, and re-echo in every act of our lives the passionate desire for the spread of truth and the increase of light; for it is hardly less difficult to guess at the beautiful and glorious future which God reserves for his cherished creations—the garment that he has woven for his only-begotten Son—than it is to form an opinion of the possible glorious future of some souls as compared with others. And is this all? Have we by any unguarded expression left on our reader’s mind a notion that we are anticipating the perfectibility of mankind upon earth, the absence of evil, and a sort of pious utopia, as the sum and substance of our expectations—a deifying of the system of nature, a glorification in some distant future of all the natural laws, as ultimate and final, and which, because of the beauty of creation, are to content us and be in some form or other our higher destiny? Not so. The end is not in that, neither is it here. Were Satan bound now, as one day he will be, we still should as now carry about with us the concupiscence which has tainted the nature of every human being, save only the Mother of God. Alas! we need no devil to prompt us to sin, for we carry an enemy [Pg 575] within us. Even mortal sin can be committed without his assistance; and we are but too apt to paint him blacker by thrusting upon him a responsibility which is too often all our own. We believe in no absolutely sinless existence this side the gates of death, except that of the God-man and his immaculate Mother. But this we do believe, that “wisdom is justified by her children,”[157] and we venture to anticipate that all that is holy, beautiful, and fitting in nature will shine with a renewed glory upon earth as the dawn grows to the perfect day, before the temporal gives place to the eternal, and the Son of Man shall have delivered up the kingdom to the Father. “And when all things shall be subdued unto him, then the Son also himself shall be subject unto him that put all things under him, that God may be all in all.”[158] We have borne the image of the earthly, we must also bear the image of the heavenly—when God shall be all in all, when we shall have ascended by the ladder of the sacred humanity to the mystery of the Holy Trinity, when we shall look on the Triune God and be satisfied. Before the immensity of that thought there falls a veil of light more impenetrable than the thickest darkness. We cease to think. Our whole being becomes as it were detached from our human consciousness, and for one moment, one awful, never-to-be-forgotten moment, we hang over the abyss which is the eternity and the infinity of God. Towards that we yearn, for it is our last end. Even the immaculate heart of Mary; even the unutterable endearments of the sacred humanity; even that which in its mystery and its hiddenness is the nearest approach to the undivided thought of God—the Blessed Eucharist—become to us but parts of a whole which must be ours, if we are to be content. The cosmos rolls away from our sight like a scorched parchment before that living heat. The history of Bethlehem and Calvary are manifestations limited in themselves, and indicative of more. The Blessed Paraclete, whose personality we perhaps sometimes find it hard to individualize (though we do not say with the Ephesian disciples that “we have not so much as heard whether there be a Holy Ghost”), becomes in our thoughts a more intense and absolute idea, less vague than in the past, and how inscrutably attractive! We have reached the thought of the Holy Ghost through Jesus. And now we seem to sink into the bosom of the Father through the Holy Ghost; and, in a way too deep for words, to be conscious of ourselves only through our perception of the great God, and to have lost everything save the immensity and the unity, the eternal being and the eternal love, of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost—the three Persons we have dimly known on earth; and the one God, whom we shall only fully know in heaven, when we shall have entered on the eternal years.

THE END.

[153] By this is meant the first Mass celebrated by a mere man.

[154] With ever-yearning love he calls us in the dear Sacrament of the Altar and before the doors of his tabernacle that we may touch not only his sacred feet as Mary Magdalene pressed them to her lips, but his whole self, his humanity and his divinity in one.

[155] In other words, there is a more imperfect being than ours. Though whether its imperfection is to exclude all idea of their having a future fuller development, whereby and in which they will be indemnified for their sinless share in guilty man’s punishment, is still an open question.

[156] Time is the measure of successive existence in created and finite beings. As a finite spirit cannot escape from this limit of successive existence, any more than a body can escape from the limit of locality and finite movement in space, it is evident that this statement is not correct in a literal and strictly metaphysical sense. Eternal existence is the entire possession of life which is illimitable in such a perfect manner that all succession in duration is excluded. It is possible only in God, who is alone most pure and perfect act, and therefore is at once all he can be, without change or movement. The created spirit must ever live by a perpetual movement or increase in its duration, because it is on every side finite. It is impossible, therefore, that time should cease while creatures continue to exist.—Ed. C. W.

[157] Matt. xi. 19.

[158] 1 Cor. xv.

[Pg 576]

NEW PUBLICATIONS.

The Glories of the Sacred Heart. By Henry Edward, Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster. New York: The Catholic Publication Society. 1876. [Republished by special permission of his Eminence.]

There are many excellent works on the Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. The new one whose title is given above is not a mere repetition in a new form of the substance of any of these preceding treatises. It is different from all of them, and quite peculiar in its scope, as well as in its style, as might be expected from its eminent author. Its basis is strictly theological. With his usual and characteristic accuracy of doctrine and lucidity of style, the cardinal makes an exposition of the mystery of the Incarnation and its consequences, especially in respect to the deification and adoration of the sacred humanity of Jesus Christ. The special cultus of the Sacred Heart is explained in its relation to the deified humanity, to the Blessed Sacrament, to the sanctification of men, and to the eternal glory of the elect. This is a book to enlighten the mind of a sincere and devout reader, and, through the illumination of the understanding, to awaken a solid, rational, and ardent devotion.

* * * * *

We have received the following books, but in consequence of the unusually crowded state of our columns must defer notice of them until later.

Terra Incognita; or, the Convents of the United Kingdom. By John Nicholas Murphy. Popular Edition. London: Burns & Oates. New York: The Catholic Publication Society.

Souvenirs of Notre Dame: A Collection of Poems and Dramas. By Mrs. Mary T. Monroe. New York: The Catholic Publication Society.

Julian the Apostate, and the Duke of Mercia: Historical Dramas. By the late Sir Aubrey de Vere. London: Pickering.

Margaret Roper; or, the Chancellor and his Daughter. By Agnes M. Stewart. Baltimore: Kelly, Piet & Co.

Real Life. By Mathilde Froment. Translated from the French by Miss Newlin. Kelly, Piet & Co.

The Wise Nun of Eastonmere, and other Tales. By Miss Taylor. Kelly, Piet & Co. Saint Elizabeth, the Lily of Portugal; Saint Elizabeth, the Matron of Israel; Saint Elizabeth, the Queen of Hungary. By the author of “Life in the Cloister.” Kelly, Piet & Co.

Meditations and Considerations for a Retreat of one Day in each Month. Kelly, Piet & Co.

Bertha: A Historical Romance. By Conrad von Bolanden. Translated by S. B. A. Harper. New York: D. & J. Sadlier & Co.

The New Month of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. From the original French. B. S. P. Philadelphia: Peter F. Cunningham’s Son.

Science and Religion. A Lecture delivered at Leeds, England. By Cardinal Wiseman. St. Louis: Patrick Fox.

Little Catechism of the Infallibility of the Sovereign Pontiff. New York: Benziger Bros.

Spiritualism and Nervous Derangement. By William A. Hammond, M. D. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons.

The Physical Basis of Immortality. By Antoinette Brown Blackwell. G. P. Putnam’s Sons.

Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land. By Herman Melville. Two vols. G. P. Putnam’s Sons.

The Greeks and the Persians. By the Rev. G. W. Cox, M.A. New York: Scribner, Armstrong & Co.

The Fall of the Stuarts and Western Europe. By the Rev. E. Hale, M.A. Scribner, Armstrong & Co.

The Age of Elizabeth. By Mandell Creighton, M.A. Scribner, Armstrong & Co.

The Life, Letters, and Table-Talk of Benjamin Robert Haydon. Edited by Richard Henry Stoddard. Scribner, Armstrong & Co.

Poems. By Christina G. Rossetti. Boston: Roberts Bros.

Revolutionary Times. By Edward Abbott. Roberts Bros.

Achsah: A New England Study. By Rev. Peter Pennot. Boston: Lee & Shepard.

A Question of Honor. By Christian Reid. New York: Appleton & Co.

Spirit Invocations. Compiled by Allen Putnam, M.A. Boston: Colby & Rich.

In the next number of The Catholic World will be begun a new serial entitled “Six Sunny Months,” by the author of The House of Yorke, Grapes and Thorns, etc.

[Pg 577]

THE

CATHOLIC WORLD.

VOL. XXIII., No. 137.—AUGUST, 1876.

THE NEXT PHASE OF CATHOLICITY IN THE UNITED STATES.

The history of the universal church, replete as it is with miraculous conversions and great moral revolutions, presents no parallel to the growth and spread of the Catholic faith in this republic; and if we be allowed to forecast the future by the light of the past, we may without presumption predict for Catholicity a career of usefulness and glory, an influence far-reaching and all-pervading, on American soil, hitherto unequalled, even in the most triumphant days of our holy and venerable mother.

In the early ages of Christianity whole tribes and nations were won over bodily to the Gospel, not alone by the superhuman efforts of a comparatively small number of apostolic men, but incidentally by the attractions of the purer and higher order of civilization which everywhere followed their footsteps and resulted naturally from their teachings. The primitive missionaries were reformers of manners and governments, advocates of mercy and equity, promoters of peace, industry, and education, as well as expounders of divine law. They indeed realized the fabled power of Orpheus, and tamed the brute passions of paganism by the harmony of their lives and the melody of their doctrines.

Far different have been the circumstances which surrounded the first permanent introduction of Catholicity into what is now the United States. Though we can dwell with commendable pride on the devotion and self-sacrifice which characterized the Spanish and French Dominicans, Franciscans, and Jesuits in their arduous labors among the aborigines; and recall with deep gratitude the beneficent and indefatigable exertions of the zealous pioneers of our present hierarchy and priesthood, we cannot help feeling that we have had no national inheritance in the merits of those extraordinary men of the Old World, those confessors and martyrs, whose names shine forth with such resplendent lustre in the calendar of the saints of God.

We look in vain, also, for any great name, distinguished for political [Pg 578] power or intellectual supremacy, among the humble immigrants who first raised the standard of the cross in the hostile atmosphere of colonial Protestantism. As in the crumbling yet still luxurious Roman Empire, the foundations of our infant church were laid on what, in a worldly sense, may be called the lowest class in the social scale, the poor, the simple, the neglected and despised. Wealth, fashion, and self-interest were opposed to it. A people shrewd, intelligent, and in their own way religious, were in possession of the country, and had neither the will nor the disposition to yield one jot to the professors of a faith which they had been taught to regard as debasing and idolatrous. Only a hundred years ago the Catholics of the United Colonies consisted of a few isolated groups, principally in Maryland and Pennsylvania, without influence, authority, or legal recognition. In the aggregate they counted about one in every thousand of the population, and, save some descendants of the original Maryland settlers, and a few private gentlemen who afterwards rose to eminence in the Revolutionary War, they were alike devoid of wealth and social standing.

Still, this very obscurity was their safeguard and defence. Though soon declared free by the fundamental law of the new confederacy, public opinion, or rather popular prejudice, was against them, and for many years after the achievement of our independence their numbers increased with more steadiness than rapidity. Recruits came from all quarters. Attracted by the guarantees presented by the Constitution, Catholics of various nationalities hastened to place themselves under its protecting ægis. The hurricane of revolution which swept over France and the greater part of Europe, and reached even the West Indies, drove many pious priests and exemplary laymen to our shores. On the north the French Canadian crossed the frontier, while as our southern boundaries were enlarged so as to embrace the valley of the Lower Mississippi, the inhabitants of that large region, who were nearly all of one faith, helped materially to swell the Catholic population of the Union. At that period Ireland had not begun to pour in her myriads, but a small, steady stream of emigrants was setting in from other ports as soon as it was ascertained that the new nation of the west had discarded the penal code of England when it had thrown off her authority.

In 1810 the Catholics within the limits of the United States were estimated at upwards of one hundred and fifty thousand, and the clergy numbered eighty, or double the number reported in 1800. Twenty years afterwards the laity had increased to 450,000 and the clergy to 232. The hierarchy, which only dated from 1789, at this time reckoned thirteen bishops.

From 1830 may be dated the extraordinary growth in numbers, influence, and activity of the Catholic Church in this country. The tide of European immigration, which has flowed on with undiminished volume till within a year or two, then fairly began. Between that year and 1840 over 300,000 arrivals were reported from Ireland, 58,000 from France, Spain, and other Catholic countries, and 150,000 from Germany, a strong minority of whom may also be credited to the church. All these accessions, added to the native-born and already adopted element, brought the Catholic [Pg 579] strength in the latter year to over one million, and swelled the ranks of the priesthood to 482, or one for every 2,000 souls.

Satisfactory as were these results, the next decade was destined to witness an advance much more magnificent as to numerical strength, and infinitely more salutary when we reflect on the quarter from which some of that strength was drawn.

The Oxford movement, as it was called, had already spread consternation among the Anglicans. Many of the ablest and most erudite scholars of Oxford University, wearied and dissatisfied with the contradictions and pretensions of English Protestantism, had sought peace and rest in the bosom of the church. Their writings and example produced a profound sensation wherever the English language was spoken, and nowhere a more decided one than in this country. Men who had formerly exhibited nothing but contempt or indifference for Catholicity, and some even who had displayed a marked hostility to the faith, eagerly read the works of such thinkers as Newman, and, as a consequence, guided by Providence, abandoned their favorite heretical notions and became reconciled to the church. This spirit of investigation and submission pervaded all classes, particularly the more studious, conscientious, and influential. Judges, journalists, artists, authors, physicians, ministers, and doctors of divinity openly declared their adhesion to the Catholic faith, and arrayed themselves beside the contemned and obscure Irish immigrant and his children. Many of the ablest publicists of to-day, not a few of the most energetic of the clergy, and at least one illustrious member of the hierarchy are the fruits of this sympathetic movement which had its origin in the cloisters of the once Catholic university.

Another cause which helped to swell the Catholic census about the same time was the annexation of Texas, which eventually led to the acquisition of New Mexico and California. The population of those Territories could have scarcely numbered less than two hundred thousand, nearly all of whom were Catholics. By a strange coincidence the sons of the Puritans, who claimed the land and the fulness thereof as theirs, were brought into the same fold and under the same jurisdiction simultaneously with the native Mexican, whose ancestors were Catholics before the keel of the Mayflower was laid.

German immigration, also, had assumed large proportions. From 1840 to 1850 the arrivals were 440,000, of whom it may be safely said one-fourth, or 110,000, were Catholics. This stalwart element sought what was then considered the far West-Ohio, Wisconsin, Iowa, and the Territories—where to-day we find them and their descendants among the most devoted children of the church.

But all these influences combined did not equal in effect that produced by the tremendous exodus of the Irish people—a spontaneous movement of population unexampled in modern times. Though immigration from Ireland had steadily increased from the beginning of the century, it was only during the latter half of the decade of 1840-50 that it assumed its phenomenal proportions. Notwithstanding its political servitude, that remarkable island in 1845 presented the spectacle of a population as happy, moral, and law-abiding as any in Christendom. Her people had increased from year to year in a ratio unknown to less [Pg 580] virtuous and more pampered lands. The voice of her great leader could at any time call together hundreds of thousands of her enthusiastic sons to listen to the story of their wrongs or to descant on the near approach of legislative independence, and dismiss them to their homes with the promptitude of a general and the authority of a parent. Father Mathew, of blessed memory, had exorcised the demon of intemperance, and counted his followers by millions. Agrarian crime and faction fights, those twin children of misgovernment, were almost unknown, and the soil, as if in unison with the general spirit of peace and harmony, never put forth such an abundance of agricultural wealth. In one night, it may be said, a blight came over all those fond hopes and bright anticipations. The food upon which three-fourths of the people mainly subsisted was destroyed, and Famine, gaunt and lean, suddenly usurped the place of generous abundance.

The destruction of the potato crop of Ireland in 1846-7-8 was undoubtedly the act of an inscrutable Providence; the misery, suffering, and wholesale sacrifice of human life which followed were the work of man. At the worst times of the famine there was always more than enough cattle and grain in the country to feed the entire population. Under a wise or just government a sufficiency of these would have been retained to supply the primary wants of the people; as it was, they were exported and sold in foreign markets to satisfy that most insensate and insatiable of all human beings, the Irish landlord.

Appalled by the suddenness and extent of the calamity, the peasantry at first stood mute, and before assistance could reach them many hundreds had actually lain down and died of starvation. Then, when public and private charity was exhausted; when pestilence was superadded to want, and all earthly succor seemed to have failed; when nothing but death or the poorhouse threatened even the best of the middle class, the people, with, it would appear, one accord, resolved to give up home and kindred, rushed like a broken and routed army to the nearest sea-ports, and abandoned a country apparently doomed to destruction. Many crossed to England and Scotland, others fled even to the Antipodes, but the great mass looked to the United States as their haven of refuge. Thenceforth every day witnessed the arrival of crowded immigrant ships in our harbors, while the streets of our large cities were literally thronged with swarms of strange and emaciated figures. From 1840 to 1850 over one million Irish immigrants arrived in the United States, one-fourth of whom landed at New York during the last three years of that period.

Never were a people less prepared to encounter the difficulties and dangers which necessarily beset strangers coming into a strange land and among a community so different from themselves in manners, habits, and methods of living. Unlike the Germans and other Europeans, who had had leisure and means to organize emigration, the Irish of that memorable epoch acted without concert and without forethought. They had fled precipitately from worse than death, and brought with them little save the imperishable jewel of their [Pg 581] faith. Fortunately, this proved to be for them even better than worldly store; it was their bond of unity and best solace in the hour of trial and disappointment which awaits most of those who come among us with exaggerated ideas of the wealth and resources of this country. Numbers of those helpless strangers paused upon the threshold of their new home, and helped materially to swell the already overcrowded population of the large towns and cities; but very many, the majority perhaps, sought the manufacturing villages of New England, the mineral regions of Pennsylvania, and the Western prairies.

Then began in earnest the labors of the resident priesthood, which, though reinforced by numbers of their brethren from abroad, were still hardly equal to the herculean task of providing for the spiritual wants of so vast a mass of people scattered in every direction. Some means, however, had to be found to reach and minister to those faithful though helpless outcasts; some roof under which the holy sacrifice of the Mass might be occasionally offered up and the essential sacraments of the church administered. The churches already built scarcely sufficed for the Catholics settled in the country, yet here was a new congregation arriving in every ship. In the large centres of population the difficulty was not so great; for with the increase of priests the number of Masses said in each church was multiplied, while the sick and the penitent seldom went unattended or unshriven. In the smaller towns and remote settlements the case was far different. Private houses, “shanties,” barns, ball-rooms, court-houses, lecture-halls, markets, and even sectarian meeting-houses were brought into requisition. Yet, with all these appliances, there were hundreds of small, isolated congregations who seldom were enabled to hear Mass oftener than once a month, and in many cases less often, one priest having to attend four or five such missions in rotation.

But the clergy had other and scarcely less sacred duties to perform. Such heterogeneous masses of humanity huddled together for weeks in the foul holds of rotten emigrant vessels, where was germinated the seeds of disease sown by famine and pestilence, could not but bring infection to our shores. From Gros Isle in the St. Lawrence, and along the Atlantic seaboard to New Orleans, the deadly ship-fever polluted the atmosphere, and hundreds who, flying from starvation, had braved the dangers of the ocean, found that they had endured those hardships only to die within sight of the promised land. One prelate and several heroic priests fell victims to the dire pestilence, but others were found equally zealous, not only to soothe the last moments of the dying with the consolations of religion, but to comfort and care for the helpless survivors.

At the beginning of the second half of the century we find the Catholic population of the country estimated at two and a quarter millions, the clergy at eighteen hundred, or one to every thirteen hundred of the laity, while the number of dioceses had increased to thirty-three.

Had immigration entirely ceased at that time, and the growth of the Catholic population been limited to its natural increase, the labors of the priesthood in ministering to the spiritual wants of so large and scattered a body would have more than [Pg 582] taxed the energies of a less devoted class of men; while the pecuniary resources of the laity, always so generously expended in the building of churches and asylums, could have to a certain extent borne the unusual draft on their means which the exigencies of the times demanded. But it did not cease. On the contrary, it continued for many years with augmented volume. The causes which had impelled such vast multitudes to renounce home and country for ever were still active. From 1850 to 1860 the immigration from Europe was reported as follows:

From Germany, 950,000; ¼ Catholic,	237,000 [159]
From France and other Catholic countries, 105,000; ¾ Catholic,	78,750
From Ireland, 1,088,000; ⁹⁄₁₀ Catholic,	979,200
Total in ten years,	1,294,950

Thus another million and a quarter were added to the church in America, making a grand total at the end of this decade of four and a half millions of souls under the charge of 2,235 priests, or one for every 2,000 persons. Thus we see that, though the priesthood had received an accession of 435 members in ten years, the labors of each individual had been almost doubled.

Incredible as these figures may seem, the next decade showed little diminution in amount. From 1860 to 1870 the Catholic immigration, calculating on the above basis, may be set down as follows:

From Germany,	268,000
“ France, etc.,	51,000
“ Ireland,	841,000
Total in ten years,	1,160,000

If to this reinforcement be added those who have come among us since 1870, we find that the past fifteen years have increased the Catholic census by about one and a half millions from abroad, and materially helped to bring it up to what, on the best authority, it is said to be in this year of grace, 1876—seven millions, or about one-sixth of the entire population.

Fortunately for the interests of religion, the increase in the number of priests kept pace with the wonderful augmentation of the laity. In 1785 there was one priest to every 1,000 laymen; in 1808, one to every 1,500; in 1830, one to every 1,900; in 1840, one to 2,000; 1850, one to 1,200; 1860, one to 2,000; and in 1875, one to every 1,300, or 5,074 priests of all ranks.

Yet, numerous as had been the accessions to the priesthood in those years, the duties and responsibilities of the clerical order increased in greater proportion. The millions of strangers who had sought homes among us, while they preserved their faith and brought with them the grand moral lessons learned in the Old World, could not bring their churches, schools, and asylums. These had to be provided here, and the American priest thus became from necessity a builder and a financier, as well as a teacher and instructor of his people. When the abnormal Irish immigration began in 1847, we had but 812 churches, several of which were small frame buildings, hastily constructed and totally inadequate to the wants even of those who erected them. Many of those have since been pulled down, reconstructed, [Pg 583] or rebuilt, and replaced by substantial brick or stone edifices. This in itself was a work of considerable merit; but when we reflect that since then no less than four thousand three hundred new churches have been added to this number, we are lost in astonishment at the magnitude of the work performed in so short a space of time. Nor are those modern buildings generally of that rude and fragile class which were so common fifty years ago, but, on the contrary, most of them are excellent specimens of solid masonry and architectural skill. The noble cathedrals especially which adorn Baltimore, Albany, Buffalo, Philadelphia, Pittsburg, Cincinnati, Boston, and other sees, are models of design, durability, and grandeur of which any country or age might be proud. The same may be said, but with greater emphasis, of the Cathedral of St. Patrick now nearly completed in New York—that grand epic in marble, from the tall spire of which the glittering emblem of our salvation is destined at no far distant day to shine down upon a million faithful followers of the cross.

Thus it may be well said that the past quarter of a century was the era of church-building as well as of increase. But the vast energy so displayed was not employed solely in one direction. While thousands of temples have arisen to the honor and glory of God, his afflicted creatures, the sick, unfortunate, and helpless; the foundling infant and decrepit grandsire; the orphan bereft of its natural protectors, and the worse than orphaned—the pariah of her sex—all have been cared for, fed, clothed, consoled, and housed. Eighty-seven hospitals and two hundred and twenty asylums of various kinds attest the practical charity and active benevolence of the Catholics of America.

It was formerly said that the Catholic Church could not prosper under a free government; that it needed the help of kingcraft and despotic laws to enforce its decrees and sustain its authority. We have proved the fallacy of this calumny pretty thoroughly—so conclusively, indeed, as to excite real or pretended alarm among bigots of all sects and of no sect at all. No people are more at home and thrive better in all respects in this land of liberty than Catholics.

It has also been asserted that we are the enemies of enlightenment. Our hundreds of convents and academies, and thousands of parochial schools, might be considered a sufficient answer to this falsehood. But, in the providence of God, the time has come when we are called upon to take a further step and demonstrate that in the domain of the highest intellectual studies we are a match for the best of our opponents.

We have no means of ascertaining the exact number of schoolhouses which have been built during this period; probably one thousand would not be too high an estimate, and we are inclined to think that there are even more. In the large cities most of the churches have a building for educational purposes attached; in the rural districts the basement is generally used. There are also a number of what are called charity schools, generally under the charge of some of the teaching orders, of which New York alone boasts twenty-four, erected at a cost of four million dollars. There are six hundred and forty academies and select [Pg 584] schools for females, with an average attendance of sixty thousand pupils, for whose accommodation, as well as for the nuns and sisters who watch over them, an equal number of buildings, some very extensive and costly, have been provided.

Though our seminaries and colleges do not show a proportionate ratio of increase, either in numbers or attendance, the result, if taken by itself, is highly satisfactory. In the last century only two of them existed in the United States; up to 1850 ten more were added; in 1874 we had eighteen theological seminaries, attended by 1,375 students, and sixty-eight colleges with over ten thousand pupils and about six hundred professors and teachers.

With all this it must be confessed that, as far as human knowledge is concerned, the Catholics of the United States are as a body behind their non-Catholic fellow-citizens. We acknowledge this inferiority, and can satisfactorily account for it. Under the peculiar difficulties of our position it became a matter of primary necessity that our co-religionists should first have churches wherein to worship God, asylums and hospitals to shelter and succor the weak and afflicted, and free schools for the training of the children of the poor, whose faith and morals were endangered by the plan of instruction pursued in the schools of the state. But now that all these wants have been supplied as far as practicable, and that we may safely confide to posterity the task of completing the work already so far advanced, our next duty plainly is to provide for the generation growing up around us facilities for a higher and more thorough system of education than has yet been attempted in our colleges and academies, equal in all respects, if not superior, to that so liberally afforded by the sectarian and secular seats of learning which so plentifully besprinkle the land.

Remembering what has been already wrought by the zeal and unswerving perseverance of the Catholic body in other directions in the past, we should look forward with undiminished courage and confidence to the future. If with a disorganized, unsettled people like ours, generally poor in the world’s goods, and with never-ending personal demands on their limited resources, we have been able to build and maintain so many churches, institutions, convents, and schools in so short a time, what may not be expected from the same class, now that they are regularly domiciled, and a portion, at least, of the wealth that ever rewards industry and application is fast becoming theirs?

What is wanted in the first instance, in order to give tone and direction to the young Catholic mind, is a Catholic national university, one on a scale comprehensive enough to include the study of all branches of secular knowledge—law, physics, medicine, languages, art, science, literature, and political economy. Such an institution, properly founded and conducted, would find no lack of public patronage. We are satisfied that American parents, whether the descendants of the old Catholic settlers or those who have embraced the faith in later years, instead of sending their sons to Yale or Harvard, to France or Germany, would much prefer to have them educated at home in a university where their religion would be neither a scoff nor an obstacle in the way of their preferment, and where they would grow up American citizens, in fact as well as in name. The German element, [Pg 585] also, which constitutes so large a portion of the Catholics of the West, would find in it an adequate substitute for those celebrated homes of learning they left behind in Fatherland, and, under its fostering care, would continue to develop that spirit of profound thought and critical investigation so characteristic of the Teutonic genius.

But the Irish and their descendants, who will long continue to form the majority of the Catholic population of this republic, would derive most benefit from such an establishment. That subtle Celtic intellect, so acute yet so versatile; fully capable of grappling with the most difficult problems of human existence and social responsibility, yet so replete with poetry, romance, and enthusiasm; so long repressed, yet never dimmed, would, we feel assured, spring into life and activity beyond the conception of most men, were such an opportunity presented. In the three centuries following the conversion of the Irish their schools were unsurpassed throughout Christendom in extent, numbers, and attendance. The whole island, in fact, seemed to be turned into one vast reservoir of learning, from which flowed perennial streams of Christian knowledge over the then sterile wastes of semi-civilized Europe. The number of missionaries and teachers which Ireland produced in that most brilliant epoch of her history is almost incredible, and her zeal and energy in the dissemination of Catholic doctrine, even in the most remote parts of the Continent, became proverbial.

Civil wars, long, bloody, and desolating, destroyed her institutions and scattered her libraries, while penal laws of preternatural ingenuity and cruelty completed the work of desolation by denying her even the commonest rudiments of instruction. But as she kept the faith pure and undefiled throughout the long night of slavery, so she has preserved the moral tone and vigor of thought which ever follow a strict observance of the divine code. One generation alone, removed from the barriers and devices of the oppressor, has been enough to show that, in mind as well as in body, the Irish race is at least the equal of even the most favored nations of the globe. In the strength of pure religious conviction lies the greatness of a people.

Perhaps now is the most fitting time for the beginning of a work such as we have endeavored briefly to intimate. From all appearances the flood of immigration which, for twenty or thirty years, has flowed so steadily yet strongly, is fast receding into its former narrow channels. We shall have still, we trust, many foreign Catholics coming among us each year to help to develop the resources of our immense country, and to find peace and freedom under our Constitution; but we need not expect, during this century at least, such an influx as was precipitated upon us by the dreadful Irish famine. The Catholic population henceforth will present a more stable and homogeneous character, and will have more leisure to devote a portion of its wealth and energy to purposes other than erecting buildings and providing for the necessities of homeless and churchless millions. Churches and charitable institutions will, of course, continue to be built to meet the wants of our ever-increasing numbers, but their augmentation, being the result of a normal growth, will be more gradual and natural. We will, in other words, have more time to devote [Pg 586] to education and the cultivation of the refinements and accomplishments of life, without in any wise neglecting the primary duties of Christians.

We have had our epochs of immigration and church-building, of extraordinary growth in popular education and incredible effort to supply the wants of the poor and friendless. We are now entering upon an era of mental culture, higher, more elaborate, and more general in its application than it was possible, or even desirable, to initiate amid the distractions and occupations of the busy past. But, ardent as is our desire to see such an important step taken in a direction which we feel would lead to certain success, we only look on it as a means to definite and ennobling ends, and not as the end itself. Mere mental training, dissociated from moral tuition and habits of manly thought and action, would be worse than useless; it would be dangerous alike to the student, to society, and to the cause of morality and religion. To develop the intellect merely at the expense of those greater attributes of the soul in the proper cultivation of which consists the real ostensible difference between man and the brute creation, would be to multiply infinitely the number of educated imbeciles of which the world has already too many.

It cannot be denied that the object of all education ought to be truth, a knowledge of God and of his works, that in the study of them we may learn to love and worship his holy name. Though the custodians of the divine gift of Pentecost are few, as children of the church we may all become sharers in the ineffable benefaction conferred on the apostles. Truth is one and indivisible, It is found not only in the doctrines and discipline of the church, but in every department of life—in every pursuit, study, and calling incidental to the existence of accountable beings. The nearer we come to the apprehension of this truth, the more we are disposed to seek and treasure it when found, no matter in what sphere of life our lot may be cast.

Unfortunately for religion and civilization, the last three centuries have been remarkable more for confusion of ideas on this important subject, and utter perversion of the natural laws, than any other period in the whole Christian era. The war engendered by the Protestant Reformation, the atheistic philosophy of the Encyclopedists, the destructive dogmas of the secret societies, and, in our own day, the gross materialism of the new school of scientists, have so clouded and bewildered, so perverted and debased, the human understanding that the world has come to look upon mere brilliancy of diction, novelty of opinion, and audacity of assertion as the highest evidences of intellectual superiority. Modern Europe, from end to end, is the victim of this lamentable delusion, and our own otherwise favored country is rapidly falling under its malign influence. Shall this foul plague be allowed to enshroud us all, and blight with its deadly breath the future of our young republic?

If such is to be the case, we may read our fate in the past decadence of the most enlightened nations of the Old World. From the outbreak of the Protestant Reformation they have gone steadily, almost blindly downwards, until, as to-day we see, they have ended in blank infidelity. The favored intellectual lights of the last three centuries in Protestant [Pg 587] Europe have been men without faith and without conscience, who, with the help of Protestant governments, have sapped and undermined and utterly destroyed even the remnants of the faith in Christianity and a divine Creator of this world that still lingered here and there about the old homes of Christian learning; and literature may be said to have been given over to the service of the enemies of Christ and of his church.

If we contemplate the condition of modern art, we witness degeneracy almost as lamentable. Men wonder that no great sculptors and painters have arisen since the Italian, Spanish, and Flemish schools of the middle ages ceased to exist. Since then we have had artists who draw as well as, and who understood anatomy better than, the best of the old masters; but the inspiration, the spirit that made the figure on the canvas seem to live, is wanting.

The best of our modern painters are but copyists of nature, of landscape, man, or animals. They display no creative power; they are incapable of producing anything original, anything like the least of those historic pieces, those almost superhuman groups, which illustrate in a thousand varieties the incidents in the earthly career of our Redeemer and his holy Mother. Why? Because the mind must first be able to conceive in all its integrity and beauty what the hand is designed to execute. No matter how exact the eye or how deft the touch, if the imagination be not purified by religion and guided by truth, it is vain to attempt to represent on canvas or in marble pure, exalted types of excellence of which we are incapable of forming within ourselves more than an indefinite conception.

It is thus that the Reformers in England, Germany, and the north of Europe, and the Revolutionists in France and the southern part of the Continent, conspired to paralyze, what they could not wholly annihilate, that splendid fabric of Christian thought and genius reared by the church after many centuries of toil and anxiety. In this hemisphere we have suffered from the same malign causes, but our affection is more accidental and sympathetic than chronic. There is nothing in the mental condition of this new and cosmopolitan people to discourage or repel the efforts of those who would earnestly strive after a higher, purer, and more Christian mental development. But such efforts, to be successful, must be made within the bosom of the church. The Protestant sects are incapable of any combined movement in that direction; for they have neither unity of action or thought, nor a common standard by which to measure mental excellence and moral soundness. Clearly the change must originate in the Catholic body.

When we assert this we are well aware of the magnitude of the work to be accomplished and the apparent paucity of the laborers to execute it. But our confidence in the future is sustained by experience. Whoever would have said at the beginning of this century that this hundredth year of our independence would find the Catholics of the United States counted by millions, and their priests, churches, and schools by thousands, would have been looked upon as a dreamer or a rash enthusiast. Who shall say what the beginning of the next century may not be destined to usher in?

As the church is the divinely-commissioned [Pg 588] teacher of the world, we desire to see our young Catholic men, the flower of her children, whether they be destined for the liberal professions or otherwise, sent forth into society armed at all points, prepared not only to sustain and defend the faith that is in them, but to demonstrate in their own persons and by their individual conduct how infinitely superior is secular knowledge even when based on eternal truth, to the vague theories and absurd speculations of those who foolishly seek to fathom the designs and comprehend the laws of God while denying the very existence of the Creator of all things.

Any system of education which falls short of this would be worse than none at all. To confer a degree on a student, and allow him to enter the world with the éclat of a university course to give his opinions a certain intellectual character, without qualifying him to uphold the honor of his Alma Mater and the integrity of his creed, would of course be an act of egregious folly. As well might we uniform a soldier and send him into action without arms, or entrust our lives and liberties to the keeping of a statesman of whose loyalty and fidelity we were not fully assured.

Years ago it was confidently asserted by a prominent dissenting minister of this city that the United States would eventually become the battle-field upon which the contest for permanent supremacy between Protestantism and Catholicity would be waged. We agreed with his views then, and everything that has happened in the religious world since confirms the sagacity of the remark. We desire nothing better than that this struggle, if it have to come, shall take place here, where both parties are equally free and well matched, though each has peculiar advantages not enjoyed by the other. The sects, on their side, have numbers, wealth, social position, political influence, and possession not only of the public schools and institutions of the state, but of all the old colleges and universities. On the other hand, the church in America has all the energy, hopefulness, and enthusiasm of youth united to the mature judgment of advanced years; thorough unanimity; and, above and beyond all, a creed and a doctrine founded on eternal truth, fortified by tradition, upheld by divine assistance, and guarded by an infallible authority. The impending conflict will not be one of arms nor of words, but of works and brains; and as the superiority of our opponents is material, not spiritual, it is not difficult to foresee to which side victory would incline.

Since rebellion against God’s law first raised its crest at Worms in 1521, the church has never had so favorable an opportunity of exposing the hollowness, rottenness, and insincerity of the leaders of dissent in all its forms as that presented in this country and generation. In older nations where Protestantism still flourishes it is as the mere tool of the state, the plaything of royalty, without the support of which it could not subsist. Supposing the British Parliament, in the plenitude of its power, should disestablish the Anglican Church, confiscate its property, and imprison its prelates, as Bismarck has done to the Catholics of Germany; how long would that luxurious Establishment remain in existence? The same may be said of Lutheranism in Prussia and Calvinism [Pg 589] in other parts of Europe. They are of the earth, earthy, and require the aid of the temporal arm to protect them against their more logical though more destructive offshoots, the free-thinkers and revolutionists. Here, on the contrary, though the sects have through their politico-religious combinations an undue influence in public affairs, they have no appreciable direct state patronage, and must stand or fall by their own merits.

Now, it is well known and pretty generally acknowledged that sooner or later the Catholic Church has always suffered from its connection with the state, even when the alliance seemed to be more than favorable to her. From the very nature of her organization she cannot long be made an instrument of despotism or of selfish ambition. In non-Catholic countries she has generally been persecuted and proscribed: in others she has been as often the victim of impertinent interference and injudicious patronage on the part of temporal rulers. In none has she been free to carry out her divine mission; and, sad to relate but true nevertheless, on all the broad and fair earth the only spot where the church of Christ may be said to be unshackled and disenthralled is this young republic of the West.

This fact is in itself a great gain for us in view of the opposition we may expect in the time to come; but there are others which, though less apparent, are well worthy of consideration. Few persons who have not devoted special attention to the matter can form an estimate of the radical change which has been taking place, gradually but surely, in the American mind regarding Catholicity. Fifty years ago there were hundreds of towns and villages where the professors of our faith, few and obscure, were looked upon with downright contempt, while a Catholic priest, because unknown, was regarded as little less than a monster of iniquity. This gross prejudice, the result more of ignorance than badness of heart, was stimulated and fostered by local ministers and itinerant preachers, who, having neither fixed principles in religion nor definite notions of right and wrong upon which to descant, have been too much in the habit of entertaining their hearers with denunciations of the church and her priesthood. In nearly all those places where formerly so little was known about our faith are now to be found substantial churches, large and respectable congregations, zealous and respected priests, and perhaps one or more educational and charitable institutions.

The rural American, who, with all his deficiencies, is usually a fair-minded and reflective man, being thus brought face to face with the things he had been taught to loath, begins to feel the mists of prejudice lifted from his judgment, and ends by respecting the devotion and unaffected piety of those he lately contemned. Many other causes have likewise contributed to this desirable revolution in popular feeling, such as the annual visit of so many of our wealthy and influential citizens to Europe, where the ancient splendor of the church may be seen in all its perfection; while the conduct of the dissenting ministers, their perpetual quarrels among themselves, and the open disregard shown by them in so many instances for public decency, have disgusted many of their most attached followers, and set them [Pg 590] groping after truth and spiritual rest in the direction of the church.

It may now be justly said that bigotry of the former malignant type which affected all classes can at present only be found among the lowest and most ignorant, and that Protestants of a higher grade in society, convinced of their errors, have gracefully abandoned them. So far have they advanced in charity that they are now willing to admit that Catholics may be good citizens, agreeable neighbors, and honest dealers; but still they cannot be persuaded but that mentally, if not morally, they are inferior in natural capacity and acquired information to their own co-religionists. There only remains one thing more to be done to make persons who think thus sincere friends and possible allies, and that is to demonstrate to their satisfaction that there is nothing in the teachings or practices of our religion tending to dwarf the intellect or weaken the understanding; but, on the contrary, that the more closely we assimilate human knowledge to the revealed law of God as expounded by the church, and the more we are governed by the rules which she has laid down for our mental conduct, the better qualified we become to stand in the front rank of the highest social and intellectual movements of the age. This accomplished, as we fondly hope it soon will be, the future destiny of our half-converted brethren lies in the hands of a power superior to that of man.

Every indication of the popular desire for such an educational establishment as we have foreshadowed points out the present as the most propitious time for its foundation. By and by it may be too late. The national character of our people, though not yet definitely formed, is fast crystallizing, and whatever impress is made on it now will be defined and permanent. We do not aim to distort or subdue the intellect of our young men, but to captivate and to cultivate it by holding up for its ambition the noblest of careers—the pursuit of virtue and the study of the great truths of religion and of nature. We would make, if we could, the Catholic laymen of the next generation, each in his own sphere, leaders in a new crusade against error, not through the use of force or legal compulsion, but by the greater purity of their lives and the superiority of their genius.

Herein lies the great future of the Catholic layman. Never before did such a career open before him. His sires of past ages met the infidel with sword and spear and the weapons of the flesh, and beat him back from the then hallowed soil of Christendom. To-day he faces a subtler, fiercer, and more resolute infidel than the Turk. As the flower of the Turkish hordes was composed of the janissaries, the perverted children of Christian parents, so to-day the standard-bearers of infidelity are the lost children of the cross. The weapons with which this new crusade is to be fought out are the moral and intellectual forces. Every portion of the civilized world is a battle-field. All must not be left to the pulpit, the confessional, the priest. The layman moves where the priest never penetrates, where the confessional is unknown, the pulpit mocked. Let him bear his faith with him, and its influence will tell. Let his wit be keener, his temper cooler, his knowledge wider and deeper than that of his foe, and infidelity, that brawls to-day with [Pg 591] braggart tongue, will soon learn, if not to repent, at least to dread an encounter where there can be no doubt as to the issue.

We cannot have a healthy Catholic literature and a correct standard of public taste without lay aid any more than we can fill our colleges, schools of art and science, conservatories and gymnasiums, without such cordial assistance. Catholic laymen have to a great extent the destiny of their children and of the church in America in their keeping; and as their responsibility is heavy, so will be their reward or condemnation signal, according as they use or abuse the trust reposed in them by an all-wise Providence.

So far they have shown every indication of a willingness to make all possible sacrifices for the education of their children, and a reasonable desire to encourage Catholic literature, much more so than those can appreciate who do not know our country and the peculiar difficulties we have had to overcome. Some of our foreign contemporaries, in England especially, are in the habit once in a while of drawing pleasing distinctions between the state of Catholic literature abroad and in this country. In this comparison we naturally appear to no very great advantage. We are frequently reminded of the lamentable condition of things that compels us to draw on foreign sources for our literary stores, while it is hinted that it is almost time we looked to ourselves for intellectual support. All this, of course, we take placidly enough, while thoroughly understanding the spirit that gives rise to it. We are proud to concede the superiority of the great body of English and other Catholic writers who have done such service to the church and conferred such honor on the Catholic name. Still, we do not feel so utterly hopeless of future success in this line, nor even despondent as to the degree of success to which we have already attained. And considering the means at our disposal, glancing back at the century behind us and its fruits, the 25,000 swelled to 7,000,000, the solitary bishop to a great hierarchy, the few scattered priests to a valiant army, the little out-of-the-way chapels to a multitude of massive churches and towering cathedrals, the communities of religious of both sexes, the asylums for the waifs and strays, the deserted and sorrowing, the maimed, the halt, and the blind of the world—glancing at all this, we are in a fair position to say to literary critics: Gentlemen, thus far our hands have been pretty full. We grant you all the culture you please; may it increase a hundred-fold! We have not had much time to sit down and study. From the beginning we have been in the thick of a fierce fight. Peace is at last coming; the smoke of battle is clearing away; the heavens are opening and smiling above us. Our dead are buried; our wounded are gathered in; the prisoners taken from us are being sullenly but surely returned; our frontier is guarded and respected. Now we turn to the arts of peace. All that has been accomplished thus far has been done without any abundance of fine writing. This has been mainly the work of our faithful Catholic laity under the guidance of a loyal clergy and episcopacy. To that same laity we look for greater triumphs to come.

As a people we have no long line of princes and statesmen to defend, no schism to apologize for, no national outrages against God’s church [Pg 592] to explain away or palliate. We have every confidence in the Catholics of this country to accomplish, under Providence, whatever they undertake for the benefit of religion and the spread of Christian enlightenment. The future of America is for us. While the professors of the sectarian creeds, in their efforts to force on the public and on each other their peculiar views, have reached their climax and are descending into the depths of nihilism and refined paganism, the church in this republic enjoys the pristine vigor of youth and an unexampled unanimity both in spirit and in action. In her organization there is a vast amount of latent force yet undeveloped, a mine of intellectual wealth that awaits but the master hand of the explorer to bring it to the surface. Great indeed will be the reward, high the fame, of him who will help us to utilize this unsuspected and unused treasure.

[159] The figures showing the gross immigration are taken from official returns, mainly from the Reports of the Bureau of Statistics on the Commerce and Navigation of the U.S.; the Reports of the Commissioners of Emigration, New York; and Thom’s Irish Almanac and Official Directory, Dublin. The approximate number of Catholics is our own calculation. Though the population of Germany is more than one-third Catholic, we consider it safer to set down the proportion of Catholic emigrants from that country at one-fourth of the whole. When the famine began in Ireland, ninety-two per cent. of the population was Catholic; and as it was from this portion that our immigration has since been principally drawn, ninety per cent. is not considered too much to credit to Catholicity.

THE LIFE AND WORK OF MADAME BARAT.[160]

Madeleine-Louise-Sophie Barat was born on the 12th of December, 1779, in the little village of Joigny, in Burgundy. Her father was a cooper and the owner of a small vineyard, a very worthy and sensible man and an excellent Christian. Her mother was remarkably intelligent and quite well educated, far superior in personal character to her humble station, very religious, and endowed with an exquisite sensibility of temperament, controlled by a solid virtue which made her worthy to be the mother of two such children as her son Louis and her daughter Sophie. The birth of Sophie, who was the youngest of her three children, was hastened, and her own life endangered, by the fright which she suffered from a fire very near her house during the night of the 12th of December. The little Sophie was so frail and feeble at her birth that her baptism was hurried as much as possible, and the tenure of her life was very fragile during infancy. As a child she was diminutive and delicate, but precocious, quick-witted, and very playful. The parish priest used to put her upon a stool at catechism, that the little fairy might be better seen and heard; and at her first communion she was rejected by the vicar as too small to know what she was about to do, but triumphantly vindicated in a thorough examination by M. le Curé, and allowed to receive the most Holy Sacrament. She was then ten years old, and it was the dreadful year 1789. Until this time she had been her mother’s constant companion in the vineyard, occupied with light work and play, and learning by intuition, without much effort of study. At this time her brother Louis, an ecclesiastical student eleven years older than herself, was obliged to remain at home for a time, and, being very much struck with the noble and charming qualities which he discerned in his little sister, he devoted [Pg 593] himself with singular veneration, assiduity, and tenderness to the work of her education. This episode in the history of two great servants of God, one of whom was an apostle, the other the St. Teresa of her century, is unique in its beauty.

The vocation of the sister dated from her infancy, and was announced in prophetic dreams, which she related with childish naïveté like the little Joseph, foretelling that she was destined to be a great queen. When Sophie was eight years old, Suzanne Geoffroy—who was then twenty-six, and who entered the Society of the Sacred Heart twenty-one years afterwards, in which she held the offices of superior at Niort and Lyons, and of assistant general—was seeking her vocation. Her director told her to wait for the institution of a new order whose future foundress was still occupied in taking care of her dolls.

Louis Barat divined obscurely the extraordinary designs of Almighty God in regard to his little sister, and, faithful to the divine impulse, he made the education and formation of her mind and character the principal work of the next ten years of his life—a work certainly the best and most advantageous to the church of all the good works of a career full of apostolic labors. He was a poet, a mathematician, well versed in several languages and in natural science, very kind and loving to his little sister, but inflexibly strict in his discipline, and in some things too severe, especially in his spiritual direction. In a small attic chamber of his father’s cottage he established the novitiate and school composed of little Sophie Barat as novice and scholar, with brother Louis as the master. The preparatory studies were soon absolved by his apt pupil, and succeeded by a course of higher instruction, embracing Latin, Greek, Italian, and Spanish. Sophie was particularly enchanted with Virgil, and even able to translate and appreciate Homer. The mother grumbled at this seemingly useless education, but the uneducated father was delighted, and the will of Louis made the law for the household. During seventeen months he was in the prisons of Paris, saved from the guillotine only by the connivance of his former schoolmaster, who was a clerk in the prison department, and released by the fall of Robespierre. Sophie went on bravely by herself during this time, and continued her life of study and prayer in the attic, consoling her father and mother, who idolized her, during those dreadful days, and persevered in the same course after her brother’s release and ordination, under his direction, until she was sixteen. At this period her brother, who had taken up his abode in Paris, determined to take his sister to live with himself and complete her education. Father, mother, and daughter alike resisted this determination, until the stronger will of the young priest overcame, with some delay and difficulty, their opposition, and the weeping little Sophie was carried off in the coach to Paris, to live in the humble house of Father Louis, and, in conjunction with her domestic labors, to study the sciences, the Holy Scriptures in the Latin Vulgate, and the fathers and doctors of the church. She had several companions, and the little group was thus formed and trained, not only in knowledge but in the most austere religious virtues and practices, under the hand of their kind but stern master, for more than four years. During the [Pg 594] vintage Sophie was allowed to take a short vacation at home, of which she availed herself gladly; for she was still a gay and playful girl, submitting with cheerful courage to her brother’s severe discipline, yet not without a conflict or without some secret tears. She was a timid little creature, and the injudicious severity of her brother’s direction made her scrupulous. Often she was afraid to receive communion; but she was obedient, and when her brother would call her from the altar of their little chapel, saying, “Come here, Sophie, and receive communion,” she would go up trembling and do as she was bidden. Her great desire was to become a lay sister among the Carmelites, and her companions were also waiting the opportunity to enter some religious order. Father Barat did not doubt her religious vocation, but he wanted to find out more precisely how it could be fulfilled. Her divine Spouse was himself preparing her for the exalted destination of a foundress and spiritual mother in his church; and when she had attained her twentieth year, this vocation was made known to her and accepted with a docility like that of the Blessed Virgin Mary to the angel’s message.

The history of the origin of the Society of the Sacred Heart of Jesus requires us to go back some years and relate some events which prepared the way for it. Four young priests, Léonor and Xavier de Tournély, Pierre Charles Leblanc, and Charles de Broglie, had formed a society under the name of the Sacred Heart, intended as a nucleus for the re-establishment of the Society of Jesus. The superior was Father Léonor de Tournély, a young man of angelic sanctity, and a favorite pupil of the saintly Sulpician, M. l’Abbé Emery. This young priest received an inspiration to form a congregation of women specially devoted to the propagation of the devotion of the Sacred Heart and the higher education of girls. The first woman selected by him as the foundress of the new society was the Princess de Condé, under whom a small community was formed at Vienna, but soon dispersed by the departure of the princess to join the Trappistines. Soon after Father de Tournély died, having scarcely attained his thirtieth year, leaving in his last moments the care of carrying out his project to Father Varin. Joseph Varin d’Ainville was a young man of good family, who, after passing some time in a seminary, had left it to join the army of the Prince de Condé, with whom he made several campaigns. He had been won back to his first vocation through the prayers of his mother, offered for this purpose on the eve of ascending the scaffold at Paris, and the influence of his former companions, the four young fathers of the Sacred Heart above named. On the very day of the prayer offered by his heroic mother he was determined to return back to the ecclesiastical life on receiving communion at Vanloo, in Belgium, when he had met his four saintly friends, whose society he immediately joined. Having been elected superior of the society after the death of Father de Tournély in 1797, Father Varin was persuaded to merge it in another society formed by a certain Father Passanari under the title of the Fathers of the Holy Faith, which was also intended as a nucleus for the revival of the Order of Jesuits. The Archduchess Maria Anna, sister of the Emperor of Germany, was selected [Pg 595] to form in Rome, under the direction of Father Passanari, a society of religious women according to the plan of De Tournély, and she went there for that purpose, accompanied by two of her maids of honor, Leopoldina and Louisa Naudet. Early in the year 1800 Father Varin returned to Paris with some companions, and Father Barat was received into his society. In this way he became acquainted with Sophie, and her direction was confided to him, to her great spiritual solace and advantage; for he guided her with suavity and prudence in a way which gave her heart liberty to expand, and infused into it that generosity and confidence which became the characteristic traits of her piety, and were transmitted as a precious legacy by her to her daughters in religion. As soon as Father Varin had learned the secrets of the interior life of his precious disciple, and had determined her vocation to the same work which had been already begun in Rome by the three ladies above mentioned, three others were admitted to share with her in the formation of the little Society of the Sacred Heart. One of these was Mlle. Octavie Bailly, another was Mlle. Loquet, the third was a pious servant-girl named Marguérite, who became the first lay sister of the society. On the 21st of November, the Feast of Our Lady’s Presentation, the little chapel was decorated in a modest and simple way. Father Varin said Mass. After the Elevation the four aspirants pronounced the act of consecration to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and afterwards they received communion.

This was the true inauguration of the Society of the Ladies of the Sacred Heart, for the attempt made at Rome by the archduchess proved a failure; the intriguing, ambitious character of Father Passanari was detected, and Father Varin renounced all connection with him and his projects. These events occurred, however, at a later period, and for some time yet to come the little community in France remained affiliated to the mother-house in Rome.

The first house of the Ladies of the Sacred Heart, the one which has always been called the cradle of the society, was founded at Amiens one year after the consecration of the postulants in the little chapel of the Rue Touraine. A college was established in that city by the Fathers of the Holy Faith, and a visit which Father Varin made there early in the year 1801, for the purpose of giving a mission and preparing for the opening of the college, led to an arrangement with some zealous priests and pious ladies of Amiens for transferring a small school of young ladies to the care of Sophie Barat and her companions. Two of these ladies of Amiens, Mlle. Geneviève Deshayes and Mlle. Henriette Grosier, joined the community, of which Mlle. Loquet was appointed the superior. This lady proved to be entirely unfit for her position, and after some months returned to her former useful and pious life in Paris. Mlle. Bailly, after waiting for a considerable time to test her vocation, at length followed her first attraction and left her dear friend Sophie for the Carmelites. Sophie Barat, with the consent of her companions, was appointed by Father Varin to the office of superior, much to her own surprise and terror, for she was the youngest and the most humble of her sisters; and from this moment until her death, in the year 1865, she continued to be the Reverend [Pg 596] Mother of the Society of the Ladies of the Sacred Heart, through all its periods of successive development and extension. It was on the 21st of December, 1802, soon after her twenty-third birthday, that she was definitively placed in this her true position, for which divine Providence had so wonderfully prepared her. She had been admitted to make the simple vows of religion on the 7th of June preceding, in company with Madame Deshayes. The community and school increased and prospered, and on the Feast of St. Michael the Archangel, Sept. 29, 1804, they were installed in their permanent residence, one of the former houses of the Oratory of Cardinal de Berulle. The community at this date comprised twelve members, including postulants. Their names were Madeleine-Sophie Barat, Geneviève Deshayes, Henriette Grosier, Rosalie-Marguérite Debrosse, Marie du Terrail, Catharine-Emilie de Charbonnel, Adèle Bardot, Felicité Desmarquest, Henriette Ducis, Thérèse Duchâtel, Madame Baudemont, and Madame Coppina. The two last-mentioned ladies afterwards brought the society into a crisis of the gravest peril, and finally withdrew from it, as we shall see later. Of the others, Mesdames Deshayes, Grosier, de Charbonnel, Desmarquest, and Ducis were among the most eminent and efficient of the first set of co-workers with the holy foundress herself in the formation and government of the society and its great schools and novitiates. The final rupture with Father Passanari had already been effected, and Madame Barat was therefore the sole head of the society, under the direction of Father Varin. Twelve years elapsed before the constitutions of the society were drawn up and adopted, and during this period the first foundations were made, a most dangerous and well-nigh fatal crisis was safely passed, the spirit and methods of the new institute were definitely formed; thus laying the basis for the subsequent increase and perfection of the vast edifice of religion and instruction whose corner-stone was laid by the humble and gracious little maiden of Joigny in the depths of her own pure and capacious heart. St. John of the Cross says that “God bestows on the founder such gifts and graces as shall be proportionate to the succession of the order, as the first fruits of the Spirit.” The whole subsequent history of the Society of the Sacred Heart shows that this was fulfilled in the person of Sophie Barat. After the second foundation had been made in an old convent of the Visitation at Grenoble, Madame Baudemont was made superior at Amiens, and the first council was held for the election of a superior-general. Madame Barat was elected by a bare majority of one; for a party had already been formed under sinister influences which was working against her and in opposition to Father Varin, and seeking to change altogether the spirit of the new institute. From this time until the year 1816 Madame Barat was merely a superior in name and by courtesy at Amiens, and she was chiefly employed in founding new houses, forming the young communities, and acquiring sanctity by the exercise of patience and humility. The new foundations were at Poitiers, Cuignières, Niort, and Dooresele near Ghent; and of course the society received a great number of new subjects, some of whom became its most distinguished members—as, for instance, Madame Duchesne, [Pg 597] the pioneer of the mission to America, Madame de Gramont d’Aster and her two daughters, Madame Thérèse Maillucheau, Madame Bigeu, Madame Prévost, Madame Giraud, and the angelic counterpart of St. Aloysius, Madame Aloysia Jouve. We must not pass over in silence the benediction given on two occasions by the august pontiff Pius VII. to Madame Barat and her daughters. At Lyons she had a long conversation with him, in which she explained to his great satisfaction the nature and objects of her holy work, and she also received from his hands Holy Communion. At Grenoble all the community and pupils received his benediction, and of these pupils eleven, upon whose heads his trembling hands were observed to rest with a certain special insistance, received the grace of a religious vocation. Another incident which deserves mention is the last visit of Madame Barat to her father. The strict rules of a later period not having been as yet enacted, she never failed, when passing near Joigny on her visitations, to stay for a short time with her parents, often taking with her some of the ladies of her society who were of noble or wealthy families, that she might testify before them how much she honored and loved the father and mother to whom she owed so great a debt of gratitude. On her annual fête she used to send them the bouquets which were presented to her. During her father’s last illness she came expressly to see and assist him in preparing for death, and, though obliged to bid him adieu before he had departed this life, she left him consoled and fortified by her last acts of filial affection, and he peacefully expired soon after her departure from Joigny, on the 25th of June 1809.

At the first council the spirit of disunion already alluded to prevented Father Varin and Madame Barat from undertaking the work of preparing constitutions for the society. A brief and simple programme of a rule was drawn up and approved by the bishops under whose jurisdiction the houses were placed, and Madame Barat became herself the living rule and model, on which her subjects and novices were formed. Father Varin had resigned his office of superior when Madame Barat was formally elected by the council of professed members their superior-general. Another ecclesiastic of very different spirit, who was the confessor of the community and the school at Amiens, M. l’Abbé de St. Estéve, was ambitious of the honor and influence which justly belonged to Father Varin. He obtained a complete dominion at Amiens by means of Madame de Baudemont, a former Clarissine, who was gained over by his adroit flattery and artful encouragement of the love of sway and pre-eminence which her commanding talents, her former conventual experience, and her mature age, together with the advantage of her position as local superior, entrusted to her against Father Varin’s advice, gave a too favorable opportunity of development. M. de St. Estéve arrogated to himself the title of founder of the society, and planned an entire reconstitution of the same under the bizarre title of Apostolines, and with a set of rules which would have made an essential alteration of the institute established by Father Varin. All the other houses besides Amiens were in dismay and alarm. Madame Penaranda, a lady of Spanish extraction, descended [Pg 598] from the family of St. Francis Borgia, who was superior at Ghent, separated her house from the society by the authority of the bishop of the diocese. She returned, however, some years later, with seventeen of her companions, to the Society of the Sacred Heart.

In the meantime the Society of Jesus had been re-established and the Society of the Fathers of the Holy Faith was dissolved, most of its members entering the Jesuit Order as novices. Father de Clorivière was provincial in France, and Madame Barat, encouraged by the advice and sympathy of wise and holy men, waited patiently and meekly for the time of her liberation from the schemes of a plausible and designing enemy who had crept under a false guise into her fold. This was accomplished through a most singular act of criminal and audacious folly on the part of M. de St. Estéve. Having gone to Rome as secretary to the French Legation, in order to further his intrigue by false representations at the Papal Court, he was led by his insane ambition, in default of any other means of success, to forge a letter from the provincial of the Jesuits of Italy to Madame Barat, instructing her to submit herself to the new arrangements of M. de St. Estéve, which he declared had been approved by the Holy See. In this crisis Madame Barat submitted with perfect obedience to what she supposed was an order from the supreme authority in the church, and counselled her daughters to imitate her example. Very soon the imposture was discovered. Mesdames de Baudemont, de Sambucy, and Coppina left the society and went to join another in Rome, and the rest of the disaffected members of the community at Amiens, although not immediately pacified, made no serious opposition to Madame Barat, and not long after were so completely reconciled to her that all trace of disunion vanished. There being now no obstacle in the way of forming the constitutions, a council was summoned to meet in Paris, at a suitable place provided by Madame de Gramont d’Aster, and its issue was most successful. It assembled on the Feast of All Saints, 1815, and in the chapel which was used for the occasion was placed the statue of Our Lady before which St. Francis de Sales, when a young student, had been delivered from the terrible temptation to despair which is related in his biography. It was composed of the Reverend Mothers Barat, Desmarquest, Deshayes, Bigeu, Duchesne, Geoffroy, Giraud, Girard, and Eugénie de Gramont. Father de Clorivière presided over it, and Fathers Varin and Druilhet, previously appointed by him to draw up the constitutions, were present to read, explain, and propose them to the discussion and vote of the council. The whole work was completed in six weeks. The Reverend Mothers Bigeu, de Charbonnel, Grosier, Desmarquest, Geoffroy, and Eugénie de Gramont were elected as the six members of the permanent council of the superior-general, arrangements were made for establishing a general novitiate in Paris, the society was placed under the government of the Archbishop of Rheims as ecclesiastical superior, who delegated his functions to the Abbé Pereau, a solemn ceremony closed the sessions on the 16th of December, and early in January the reverend mothers returned to their respective residences. The constitutions were received with unanimous contentment [Pg 599] in all the houses, including Amiens, approved by the bishops in whose dioceses these houses existed, and, finally, a letter of congratulation, expressed in the most kind and paternal terms, was received from his Holiness Pope Pius VII. From this period the authority of Madame Barat was fully established and recognized, harmony and peace reigned within the society, and a new era of extension began which has continued to the present time. The society with its constitutions was solemnly approved by Leo XII. in a brief dated December 22, 1826, which was received at Paris in February, 1827, during a session of the council. By the authority of the Holy See an additional vow of stability was prescribed for the professed, and the dispensation from this vow reserved to the pope. The rules were made more strict in several respects, and a cardinal protector was substituted for the ecclesiastical superior. The royal approbation for France was at this time also solicited, and granted by Charles X., then reigning. In 1839 another effort was made to give a still greater perfection to the statutes and to provide for the more efficacious government of the institute, now become too great for the immediate government of the superior-general, by a division into provinces under provincial superiors.

At this time the society passed through another dangerous crisis, and for four years was in a disturbed state which gave great anxiety to the Rev. Mother Barat, diminished seriously her influence over her subjects, and even occasioned a menace of suppression in France to be intimated by the government. The cause of this trouble was an effort made by a number of persons both within and without the society to transfer the residence of the superior-general to Rome, and to modify the rules in a way to make the society as far as possible a complete counterpart of the Society of Jesus. In 1843 this difficulty was finally settled by the authority of the Sovereign Pontiff, who annulled all the acts and decrees which had been passed in the councils of the society looking towards innovation, and determined that the residence of the superior-general should not be removed from France. Happily, not a house, or even a single member, was separated from the society by this disturbance, and when it passed by the venerable and holy foundress was more revered and loved than ever before, and her gentle but strong sway over the vast family which she governed was confirmed for ever, never again to suffer diminution. Some of the proposed changes were, however, absolutely necessary for the order and well-being of the society, and were provided for in the year 1850 by Pius IX., who decreed the establishment of provinces under the name of vicariates, each one to be governed by the superior of its mother-house with the rank and title of superior-vicar, subject to the supreme authority of the superior-general. At the close of Madame Barat’s administration, which ended only with her life, on Ascension Thursday, 1865, there were fifteen vicariates. Since then the number has been increased. There are three in the United States, one in British America, one in Spanish America; and in these five vicariates there are about eleven hundred religious of the first and second profession, including lay sisters. The number of houses in various parts of the world is about one hundred, and the total number [Pg 600] of members four thousand. Madame Barat herself founded one hundred and fifteen houses, and many others have been established since her death. But of these some have been suppressed in Italy and Germany, and others were given up or transferred by the superiors of the order. Madame Goëtz, who was vicar-general to Madame Barat during the last year of her life, succeeded her as superior-general, and was succeeded after her own death, in 1874, by Madame Lehon, the present superior-general.

Our limits will not permit even a succinct narrative of the events which filled up the half-century during which Madame Barat governed the Society of the Sacred Heart, from the memorable council of 1815 until 1865. We cannot omit, however, some brief notice of the foundation of the American mission and the ladies who were sent over to establish it. The first American colony was composed of three ladies and two lay sisters: Madame Duchesne, Madame Audé, Madame Berthold, Sister Catharine Lamarre, and Sister Marguérite Manteau. Madame Philippine Duchesne was a native of Grenoble, where she received an accomplished education, first at the Visitation convent of Sainte-Marie-d’en-Haut, and afterwards under private tutors in the same class with her cousins, Augustin and Casimir Périer. At the age of eighteen she entered the Visitation convent as a novice, but was prevented by the suppression of the religious orders in France from making her vows. During the dark days of the Revolution her conduct was that of a heroine. After the end of the Reign of Terror she rented the ancient convent above mentioned, and for several years maintained there an asylum for religious women with a small boarding-school for girls, waiting for an opportunity to establish a regular religious house. Her desire was accomplished when Madame Barat accepted the offer which was made to her to receive Madame Duchesne and her companions into the Society of the Sacred Heart, and to found the second house of her society in the old monastery of Ste.-Marie-d’en-Haut. Madame Duchesne had felt an impulse for the arduous vocation of a missionary since the time when she was eight years old, and this desire had continually increased, notwithstanding the apparent improbability of its ever finding scope within the limits of her vocation. She was about forty-eight years of age when she was entrusted with the American mission, and lived for thirty-four years in this country, leaving after her the reputation of exalted and really apostolic sanctity. Madame Eugénie Audé had been much fascinated by the gay world in her early youth, and her conversion was remarkable. Returning one evening from a soirée, as she went before a mirror in her boudoir, she saw there, instead of her own graceful and richly-attired figure, the face of Jesus Christ as represented in the Ecce Homo. From that moment she renounced her worldly life, and soon entered the novitiate at Grenoble as a postulant. Even there, her historian relates, “on souriait de ses manières mondaines, de ses belles salutations, de ses trois toilettes par jour! Même sous le voile de novice qu’elle portait maintenant, elle laissait voir encore, pas sans complaisance, l’élégance de sa taille et les avantages de sa personne. On ne tardera pas à voir ce que cette âme de jeune fille changée en âme d’apôtre était capable d’entreprendre pour Dieu et le [Pg 601] prochain.” This great change was wrought in her soul during a retreat given by Père Roger on the opening of the general novitiate at Paris during November, 1816. When called to join Madame Duchesne two years later, she was twenty-four years of age, and, after a long period of service in the United States, was finally elected an assistant general and recalled to France. Madame Octavie Berthold was the daughter of an infidel philosopher who had been Voltaire’s secretary. She was herself educated as a Protestant, was converted to the faith when about twenty years of age, and soon after entered the novitiate at Grenoble. She volunteered for the American mission, animated by a desire to prove her gratitude to our Lord for the grace of conversion, and was at this time about thirty years of age. “Caractère sympathique, cœur profondément devouée, intelligence ornée, spécialement versée dans la connaissance des langues étrangères, Mme Octavie était fort aimée au pensionnat de Paris.”

Mgr. Dubourg, Bishop of New Orleans, was the prelate who introduced the Ladies of the Sacred Heart into the United States. It was during the year 1817 that the arrangements were completed at Paris. On the 21st of March, 1818, the five religious above mentioned embarked at Bordeaux on the Rebecca, and on the 29th of May, which was that year the Feast of the Sacred Heart, they landed at New Orleans, where they were received as the guests of the Ursulines in their magnificent convent. Their own first residence at St. Charles, in the present diocese of St. Louis, was as different as possible from this noble religious house, and from those which have since that time been founded by the successors of these first colonists. Madame Duchesne, in her visions of missionary and apostolic life, never dreamed of those religious houses, novitiates, and pensionates, rivalling the splendid establishments of Europe, which we now see at St. Louis, Manhattanville, Kenwood, and Eden Hall. Her aspirations were entirely for labor among the Indians and negroes, and, to a considerable extent, they were satisfied. She began with the most arduous and self-sacrificing labors upon the roughest and most untilled soil of Bishop Dubourg’s diocese, and one of her last acts was to go on a mission among the Pottawattomies, from which she was only taken by the force of Archbishop Kenrick’s authority a little before her death. The present flourishing condition of the two vicariates of New Orleans and St. Louis is well known to all our readers. The foundation at New York was due to the enlightened zeal of the late illustrious Archbishop Hughes, although the first idea originated in the mind of Madame Barat many years before. In the year 1840 the celebrated Russian convert, Madame Elizabeth Gallitzin, a cousin of Prince Gallitzin the priest of Loretto, and assistant general for America to Madame Barat, was sent over to establish this foundation and to make a general visitation, in the course of which she died suddenly of yellow fever at St. Michel, on the 14th of November, 1842.

The first residence in New York was the present convent of the Sisters of Mercy in Houston Street, from which it was removed, first to Astoria, and afterwards to the Lorillard estate in Manhattanville, where is now the centre of an extensive vicariate comprising eight [Pg 602] houses in the States of New York, Rhode Island, Ohio, and Michigan, about five hundred religious, a novitiate containing at this moment forty-eight novices exclusive of postulants, and flourishing schools both for the education of young ladies and the instruction of the children of those parishes which are adjacent to the several convents. It is not necessary to describe for the benefit of our American readers with more detail the history and present condition of the Society of the Sacred Heart in this country. Our European readers would no doubt be interested by such a history; but, besides the imperative reason of a want of space in the present article, there is another which imposes on us the obligation of reserve in respect to works accomplished by the living, to whom has been transmitted the humility as well as the other virtues of their holy foundress. There is one venerable lady especially, now withdrawn from the sphere of her long and active administration to a higher position in the society, who is remembered with too much gratitude by her children, and honor by all classes of Catholics in her native land, to require from our pen more than the expression of a wish and prayer, on the part of thousands whose hearts will echo our words as they read them, that she may resemble the holy mother who loved her and all her American children so tenderly, as “sa plus chère famille,” in length of days, and in the peace which closed her last evening.

We have already alluded briefly to the blessed departure of Madame Barat from the scene of labor to the glory which awaits the saints, in the eighty-sixth year of her age and the sixty-sixth of her religious life, on the Feast of the Ascension, 1865. The narrative of a few salient events in her life, and of the principal facts in the history of the foundation of the Sacred Heart, which we have thought best to present, meagre as it is, in lieu of more general observations on her character and that of her great works, for the benefit of those who cannot, at least for the present, peruse the history of M. Baunard, leaves us but little room for any such remarks. The character of this saintly woman must be studied in the details of her private and public life, and in the expression she has given to her interior spirit in the extracts from her vast correspondence published by her biographer. No one could ever take her portrait; and we are assured by one who knew her long and intimately that the one placed in front of the second volume of her life is not at all satisfactory. How can we describe, then, such a delicate, hidden, retiring, subtile essence as the soul of Sophie Barat in a few words, or give name to that which fascinated every one, from the little nephew Louis Dusaussoy to Frayssinous, Montalembert, and Gregory XVI..? Extreme gentleness and modesty, which, with the continual increase of grace, become the most perfect and admirable humility, were the basis of her natural character and of her acquired sanctity. In the beginning her modesty was attended by an excessive timidity, so that Father Varin gave her the name of “trembleuse perpetuelle.” This was supplanted by that generous, affectionate confidence in God which shone out so luminously in the great trials of her career. In all things, and always, Madame Barat was exquisitely feminine. She conquered and ruled by love, and this sway extended over all, from [Pg 603] the smallest children to the most energetic, commanding, impetuous, and able of the highly-born, accomplished, and in every sense remarkable women who were under her government in the society, to women of the world, to old men and young men, to servants, the poor, fierce soldiers and revolutionists, and even to irrational creatures. With this feminine delicacy and gentleness there was a virile force and administrative ability, a firmness and intrepidity, which made her capable of everything and afraid of nothing. Her writings display a fire of eloquence which may be truly called apostolic, and would be admired in the mouth of an apostolic preacher. Besides the great labors that she accomplished in the foundation and visitation of her numerous houses, and in the government of her vast society, Madame Barat went through several most severe and dangerous illnesses, beginning with one which threatened her life in the first years at Amiens; and was frequently brought, to all appearance, to the very gates of death. Besides these sufferings, and the great privations which were often endured during the first period of new foundations, she practised austerities and penances of great severity, to the utmost limit permitted by obedience to her directors. With her wonderful activity she united the spirit of a contemplative; and there are not wanting many evidences of supernatural gifts of an extraordinary kind, or proofs of her power with God after her death. Mgr. Parisis has publicly declared that her life was one of the great events of this century, and comparable to those of St. Dominic, St. Francis of Assisi, St. Catharine of Siena, and St. Teresa. There is but one, universal sentiment in respect of her sanctity, and one, unanimous desire that the seal of canonization may be placed upon it by the successor of St. Peter. A prayer under her invocation has been already sanctioned by Pius IX., and the cause of her beatification has been introduced, the issue of which we await, in the hope that we may one day be permitted and commanded to honor the modest little Sophie Barat of Joigny—who went away weeping in the coach to Paris at sixteen to found one of the greatest orders of the world—under the most beautiful and appropriate title of Sancta Sophia.

When we consider the work of Madame Barat as distinct from her personal history, we observe some peculiar and remarkable features marking its rise and growth. It came forth from the fiery, bloody baptism of the French Revolution as a work of regeneration and restoration. Many of its first members had been through an experience of danger, suffering, and heroic adventure which had given them an intrepidity of character proof against every kind of trial. The stamp thus given to the society at the outset was that of generous loyalty to the Holy See, and uncompromising hostility to the spirit and maxims of the Revolution.

Another fact worthy of notice is that so many small communities, private institutes for education, and persons living a very devout and zealous life in the world, were scattered about the territory over which the destructive tornado of revolution had passed, ready to be incorporated into the Society of the Sacred Heart, and furnishing the means of a rapid growth and extension.

New orders are not absolutely [Pg 604] new creations. They spring from those previously existing, and are affiliated with each other more or less closely, notwithstanding their differences. Many of the first members of the Society of the Sacred Heart had been previously inclined to the orders of Mt. Carmel and the Visitation. The spirit of the Carmelite Order was largely inherited by the new society, and from the Order of the Visitation the special devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus was received by the same transmission of mystic life. The organization was produced by the engrafting of the principles of the constitutions of St. Ignatius on the new and vigorous stock. From this blending and composition sprang forth the new essence with its own special notes, its original force, and its distinct sphere of operation. Cardinal Racanati thus expresses his judgment of its excellence: “My duty has obliged me to read the constitutions of almost all ancient and modern orders. All are beautiful, admirable, marked with the signet of God. But this one appears to me to excel among all the others, because it contains the essence of religious perfection, and is at the same time a masterpiece of unity. The Sacred Heart of Jesus is at once the pivot around which everything moves, and the end in which everything results.” Pope Gregory XVI.. said that the Rule of the Sacred Heart was in every part the work of God. Although not an exact counterpart of the Society of Jesus, the Society of the Sacred Heart is nevertheless, in its government and method of discipline, modelled after a similar type, with equally efficacious means for producing in its subjects, in a manner proportionate to their feminine character, all the highest religious virtues of the mixed state of action and contemplation. The only important differences between the Society of the Sacred Heart and the older orders of women are the absence of the interior cloister and of the solemn vows. The first, which is obviously an advantage considering the nature of the occupations in which the Ladies of the Sacred Heart are engaged, is compensated for by the extreme strictness of the rules governing their conduct in regard to intercourse with the world, and the obligation of going at a moment’s warning to any house, in any part of the world, where they may be ordered by the superiors. In respect to the second, as the final vows can only be dispensed by the pope, the completeness and sacredness of the oblation for life are not diminished, but only a prudent provision for extraordinary cases secured by the wisdom of the Holy See, which is beneficial both to the order and its individual members. In respect to poverty, self-denial, regularity, and all that belongs to the beautiful order of conventual life, the written rule of the Sacred Heart, which is actually observed in practice, is not behind those of the more ancient orders. In respect to the extent and strictness of the law of obedience, it is pre-eminent among all, and its admirable organization may justly be compared to that acknowledged masterpiece of religious polity, the Institute of St. Ignatius. The more humble occupations to which so many admirable religious women in various orders and congregations devote themselves form an integral part of the active duties of the society. A large portion of its members are lay sisters, and a great number of the religious of the choir are engaged in the instruction of [Pg 605] poor children or domestic duties which have no exterior éclat. The specific work of the society is of course the education of young ladies, with the ulterior end of diffusing and sustaining Catholic principles and Catholic piety, through the instrumentality of the élèves of the Sacred Heart, among the higher classes of society. There cannot be a nobler work than this, or a more truly apostolic vocation, within the sphere to which woman is limited by the law of God, human nature, and the constitution of Christian society. What an immense power has been exerted by the daughters of Madame Barat in this way as the auxiliaries of the hierarchy and the sacerdotal order in the church, is best proved by the persecutions they have sustained from the anti-Catholic party in Europe, and the fear they have inspired in the bosoms of tyrannical statesmen like Prince Bismarck, who tremble with apprehension before the banner of the Sacred Heart, though followed only by a troop of modest virgins. It is after all not strange. The women of the revolution are more terrible than furies led on by Alecto and Tisiphone. Why should not the virgins of the Catholic army resemble their Queen, who is “terrible as an army set in array”?

It is with great regret that we abstain from setting forth the enlightened, sound, and thoroughly Christian ideas of Madame Barat, and the various councils over which she presided, in respect to the education of Catholic girls in our age. We are obliged also to omit noticing the charming sketches given in the book before us of the first pupils of the Sacred Heart, and the noble part which so many of them played afterwards in the world. We must close with a few words on the merit of the Abbé Baunard’s work, and an expression of gratitude to the distinguished ecclesiastic who has furnished us so much pleasure and edification at a cost of such very great labor to himself. He has been fortunate in his subject and the wealth of authentic materials furnished him for fulfilling his honorable and arduous task. His illustrious subject has been fortunate in her biographer. The History of Madame Barat deserves to be ranked with Mother Chauguy’s Life of St. Frances de Chantal and M. Hamon’s Life of St. Francis de Sales. We trust that an abridged life by a competent hand may furnish those who cannot afford so costly a book, or read one so large, with the means of knowing the character and history of the Teresa of our century. There are also materials for other histories and biographies of great interest and utility in the rich, varied contents of this most admirable and charming work, which we hope may not be neglected.

[160] Histoire de Madame Barat, Fondatrice de la Société du Sacré-Cœur de Jésus. Par M. l’Abbé Baunard, Aumonier du Lycée d’Orleans, Docteur en Théologie, Docteur es Lettres. Paris: Poussielgue Frères. 1876.

[Pg 606]

SIX SUNNY MONTHS.

BY THE AUTHOR OF “THE HOUSE OF YORKE,” “GRAPES AND THORNS,” ETC.

CHAPTER I.

“CITTÀ VECCHIA!”

A comfortable family party came Romeward one May morning from Turin. They had the railway carriage quite to themselves, and occupied it fully. Mr. Vane lay stretched at length on the front seat, with a travelling-bag and two shawls under his head. It was his first visit to Italy, consequently his first approach to Rome, but he declined his daughters’ invitation to look out. He would prefer, he said, to admire the country when he should feel more in the mood. “Besides,” he said, “to look at scenery when one is going through it behind a locomotive irritates both the eyes and the temper. If you wish to see a near object, no sooner have you fixed your eyes upon it than it is whisked out of sight, and your pupils contract with a snap; if a distant one, the moment you perceive that it is worth seeing, some sharp bit of foreground starts up and enters like a bramble between your eyelids. It’s a Sancho Panza feast, and I’ll none of it. You children can look out and tantalize your tempers, if it please you.”

“Oh! thank you,” his daughter Isabel said dryly, availing herself of the permission.

Presently she addressed him again: “Papa, if I could find a fault in you, it would be that you are such a very unreasonably reasonable man. You have always so many arguments in favor of every proposition you lay down, there isn’t a handle left to take it up by.”

“Thank you!” the gentleman echoed. And then there was silence for a little while—a silence of tongues; but, with a ceaseless whirr and buzz, the flying train was casting the north behind, and plunging into the south like a bee into a flower.

Mr. Vane’s two daughters, twenty and twenty-two years of age, sat opposite him, each at a window, Isabel moving frequently, glancing here and there, and speaking whenever the spirit was stirred; Bianca, the younger, seeming to be in a trance. These two girls were as unlike in appearance as it is possible for two persons to be who have many points of resemblance. Both had fine dark eyes, dark hair, complexions of a clear, pale olive, and features sufficiently regular. Bianca was a trifle taller and finer in shape, and her manner had a gentle dignity, while her sister’s was lively and positive. Bianca’s mouth was fuller, sweeter, and more silent, and her voice softer. She had a more penetrating mind than most persons were aware of, and thought and observed more than she said. Isabel caught quickly at the surfaces of things, and had a clever way of weaving other people’s ideas into her talk that sometimes made her appear brilliant. It might be said that the impressions of the elder were cameo, those of the [Pg 607] younger intaglio. For the rest, let their story speak for them.

The father was a large, leisurely, middle-aged gentleman, whom critical people like to call indolent. He certainly had, as his elder daughter intimated, the faculty of finding a great many excellent reasons why he should not exert himself unnecessarily, and it is probable that he might never have been brought to the pitch of a trans-atlantic voyage but for Miss Isabel’s politic arguments in urging the matter.

“In Europe one can be so quiet,” she said. “One can live there without being tormented by the idea that one should be doing something for somebody. It isn’t considered necessary to have a mission. Everything happens half an hour or so after time, and everybody goes to sleep in the middle of the day—in the middle of the street, too, if they like. I’ve heard people say that it’s just delicious the way the clergy take their promenade there. Two of them will walk slowly along a few minutes, then stop and carry on their conversation a little while, as if they were in the Elysian Fields, then resume their walk, and so on, walking and pausing, in the most delightfully leisurely way. Fancy that in New York! Why, our idea of walking is to get one foot before the other as quickly as we can. Going out, we see only the spot we start from and the spot we arrive at, and we shoot from the one to the other as if we wore percussion-caps on our heads. Marion says that Italy is the fabled lotos, and that all the dust and dirt people talk so about is nothing but pollen.”

Mr. Vane, who in America felt himself like a drone in the midst of bees, could not resist this charming picture, and we accordingly find him in the land of the lotos.

“Bianca,” her sister said presently, “do you remember the Goldsmith’s history of Rome we studied at school? I’ve forgotten every bit of it but the title, and an impression of great uncomfortable doings, and haranguing and attitudinizing, and killing. I recollect it was always a wonder to me when I found there were people enough left to begin a new chapter with. Now we are going to see the places. How glad I am we shall not see any of the tremendous people!”

She put her head out of the window and added: “I don’t find that the country looks any better than Massachusetts. But, for all that, I am enchanted to be here. How I have longed to come!”

“Indeed!” her father said, staring a little. “Why, then, did you not let us come six months ago, instead of clinging to London and Paris?”

She smiled indulgently on him. “Perhaps you’ve forgotten how, when I was a child, and when I had mince-pie for dinner, I used to slyly pick out the large raisins and put them under the edge of my plate to eat afterward. I recollect your finding me out once, and asking me if I didn’t like raisins, and I was in terror lest you were going to take them away from me. I’ve been doing the same thing now—saving the best for the last. I wished to dispose of everything else first, so that, when I return to America, I can shut my eyes in Rome, and not open them again till they see the shores of the New World. And, between ourselves, papa, isn’t it a dreadfully new world? I wouldn’t own it to a foreigner, of course; but you’re such a dear, stanch old Yankee!” And she leaned forward [Pg 608] and gave him an affectionate pinch in the cheek.

The younger sister turned quickly at that. “O Bell! don’t turn traitor,” she exclaimed. “Newness is not a disadvantage always. When the world was new the Creator praised it, but there is no record of his ever having praised it after.”

Mr. Vane looked at his younger daughter with a wistful, lingering smile. He always looked attentively at Bianca when she spoke.

Isabel lifted her hands in wonder. “Well, really, she is playing patriot! Who have I heard say that her body was born in America, but her soul in Italy? Who have I heard say that the children of Israel were not Egyptians, though they were born by the Nile?”

Bianca smiled to herself softly, and looked out of the window as she answered: “I am not playing patriot. The feeling was always in my mind, hanging there silent like a bell in its tower; and now and then it rang. It always rang when struck.”

“That’s my darling!” her father exclaimed. “Keep your sweet-toned patriotism in its bell-tower. I don’t like the sort that is always firing india-crackers under everybody’s nose. By the way,” he added after a while, rousing again, rather unaccountably, “what an absurdity it is in us, this coming to Rome in May! To-day is the second of the month. We should have come in December. I wonder I allowed myself to be so persuaded. I have a mind to go back at once.”

His elder daughter regarded him tranquilly. “Don’t excite yourself unnecessarily, papa,” she said; “we are behind a coachman who never turns back. By the time we reach Rome you will be as contented as a lamb. Do not you perceive something beautiful in our coming at this season, with the orange-flowers and the jasmines? We do not arrive, we simply bloom. Even dear old papa will put on a film of tender green over his sombreness, like a patriarchal spruce-tree; and as to Bianca and me—”

She sang:

“Two half-open roses on one twig grew,

Sweet is the summer.

A nightingale sang there the whole night through

Sweet is the summer.”

“Here we are! What a comfort that we have not to go to a hotel nor search for lodgings! It is very nice to have a friend to prepare everything.”

In fact, a friend of the family, resident in Rome, who had written and received a score or so of letters on the subject of this journey, was waiting outside the barrier at that moment. They saw her a little apart from the crowd, looking for them as they gave up their tickets; then a servant took their packages, and they were cordially welcomed to Rome. This lady has so long been accustomed to hearing herself announced by the maid-servants of the friends she visits as the “Signora Ottant’-otto,” from the number of her house, that she will not be displeased if we continue the title.

A carriage was called, and in a few minutes they had reached the home prepared for their reception. It was an old-fashioned Roman house, situated on a high slope of the Viminal where it meets the Esquiline in a scarcely perceptible dent. The portone, entrance, and stairs were palatial in size, the latter having broad landings lighted by double windows in the middle of each story; and instead of a mere passage or small waiting-room, the door of the apartment [Pg 609] opened at once into a noble sala. Large chambers surrounded this sala, and a backward-extending wing held smaller rooms and a kitchen. All this part of the house looked into a garden, where orange-trees stood with their sprinkle of fragrant snow, and jasmines reared their solid cones of flowery gold, perfuming every breeze that entered. Beyond the garden extended an orchard and vineyard, hiding all that part of the city except the long roof and façade of the church of St. Catherine of Siena, and the grand old tower that Vittoria Colonna built her convent walls about. These looked over the rich verdure, standing out dark and massive against the clear western sky.

“The front rooms are town, the back rooms country,” the Signora said. “In the front rooms we have the ‘dim, religious light’ that Italians love; here are silence, except for the birds, sunshine, and flowers.”

The front drawing-rooms were conventional, but the sala and dining-room had a character quite new to the travellers. The uncovered brick floors, freshly sprinkled and swept; the faded old screens of green silk or embroidered satin, set in carved frames; the tarnished gilt chairs with scarlet velvet cushions; the large sofas, and tables, and cases of drawers, all finely carved; the walls almost entirely covered with old oil-paintings of every size, some without frames, some so dim that amid the haze of faded color a face would look forth, or an arm be thrust out as from a cloud—all these made up a picture very different from the rich, toned-down freshness of their New England home, where they trod on velvet, and would no more have admitted a chair of scarlet and gold than they would have allowed a curtain to hang after the sun had made a streak in it.

The girls were enchanted. “How delightfully dingy everything is!” Isabel cried. “It’s like grandmother’s beautiful cashmere shawl that is a hundred years old.”

And then the travellers were good enough to say that they were hungry, and would not be displeased if luncheon should be very prompt at the hour of noon.

“After this, you see, we shall sail right into your track without a break,” Mr. Vane said. “Your hours suit me perfectly; and whether it should be luncheon or dinner at noon does not make the least difference to me at this season. In cold weather I like a late dinner.”

“I think you will find the early dinner pleasanter in summer,” the Signora said; “that is, if you rise early. You will soon learn, if you have not learned already, to give up the heavy American breakfast, and so will be hungry by noon. That gives you the fresh of the morning free, with little digestive work to dull your activity, and the lovely evenings from five to eight or nine. If you wish to go out romancing by moonlight, the supper is just enough to content, without clogging. The next best plan is, coffee on waking, breakfast at ten, and dinner at four or five after your nap. I have tried all ways, and settled on the first for this country. Of course it wouldn’t answer for our indoor, chilly life at the other side of the world.”

“I do not like a four or five o’clock dinner,” Mr. Vane said with decision. “It is neither one thing nor the other; and I hate to go from the bed to the dinner-table.”

[Pg 610] It was the Signora’s first house-keeping for any one but herself, and she was full of a pleasant anxiety. What solemn conferences she had with the donna, what explanations, what charges she gave! And how learned she became in matters to which before she had not given a thought! In such a dark and narrow street, in a dingy little shop, was to be found the best chocolate in Rome. In such another place, where you would least expect, they sold coffee of unimpeachable excellence, which, of course, one had roasted and ground in one’s own house. Another journey was made for tea. She became an object of terror to sellers of meat and vegetables, and fruit-venders trembled before her. To witness the scorn with which she rejected apricots that had not the precise cloudless sunset tint, peaches that were of a vulgar red and green complexion or too pale in hue, mandarins not sufficiently loose of skin and flattened at the poles, and grapes and figs that could not answer in the affirmative at least six stern questions, one would have supposed that she must have been accustomed to such fruits as grew in the Garden of Eden. As to wine, the story of its getting was an admirable illustration of moral pulley-power. A friend’s friend’s, etc., friend had two friends who owned vineyards and made wine, and one was famous for his white and another for his red. The first power in this machinery was a semi-weekly cup of tea which a certain respectable, antique bachelor had taken regularly with the Signora time out of mind, and, losing which, his life would have been quite disjointed. The flavor of the tea did not, of course, extend beyond him, but it influenced certain favors in his power to grant, which, in turn, moved the next wheel; and so on, quite in order, till a way was made from certain cool grottos, where the hoarded wines sparkled to themselves in the dark, to the small dinner-table where our friends in the old Roman house sat and sipped liquid rubies or sunshine for an absurdly small price considering the result.

“But you are giving us too much of your time,” the Vanes expostulated. “We cannot permit you to turn housekeeper for us. How will you be able to write?”

For the Signora Ottant’-otto was an authoress. “In the first flush of seeing you I could not content myself to write a line,” she said; “and by the time I shall have become calm my machinery will be in working order. After that nothing will be necessary but an occasional warning word or glance.”

This conversation did not, however, take place till the end of the first week. The first day the house-keeping seemed to have arranged itself without human intervention.

As they seated themselves at the luncheon-table the soft boom of the gun from St. Angelo proclaimed the hour of noon, and immediately another booming, as soft, but more musical, came from the near campanile of the Liberian basilica, where the great bell struck the Angelus, followed by all the bells in the tower in a festa ringing.

“That is Maria Assunta and her four ladies of honor,” the Signora said, with all the pride of a proprietor. “I may as well tell you that they and the church they belong to are my one weakness in Rome. I have been up the campanile to visit those bells, have read their inscriptions and touched their embossed sides, even while [Pg 611] they were being rung. An Italian boy who was with me exclaimed when I put my hand to the ringing rim of the great bell: ‘E un peccato! Ha fatto tacere Maria Santissima!’”

They smiled and listened. It pleased them to know what the Signora liked and how she liked.

“I remember the first time I saw that church,” she said, pleased to go on. “It was my first Christmas in Rome, and, after having heard a Mass at Aurora, I went out alone later, to lose myself and see what I would come to. I wandered into the long street that is now so familiar, and saw the tip of a campanile peeping at me over the hill in front like a beckoning finger. I followed, and presently knew where I must be, though I had carefully refrained from reading descriptions of anything. The morning was fresh and clear, but inside the church was quite dim, except that the round window high up the eastern end of the nave was thrust through by a long bar of sunshine that looked as though it might make a hole for itself out the other end, it was so live and solid. I recollected pictures I had seen of the Jewish tabernacle, with the two bars by which it was carried, or lifted, and I said to myself, Suppose another gold bar should be put in, and the whole church, and all who are in it, carried off over hill and dale, and through the air to some Promised Land fairer than Italy. There was a man up outside who seemed to be afraid of such a catastrophe; for he was struggling to draw together the two halves of a red curtain over the window. It was not easy to do—I presume he was resisted—but finally everything was shut out but a blush. All that upper end of the nave was rosy, and pink reflections ran along the inner sides of the two rows of white columns, like ripples in water, and faded at the grand altar they had strained to reach. You could fancy they sighed with contentment when they did reach it. The sacristy-bell rang for a Mass beginning just as I entered, and I took that as an indication that I was to go no further till I had heard it. So I knelt close to the door in a little nook by the tribune. The priest stopped at the altar in the very farthest corner. I could see him between the columns, and so far away that I could hardly know when he knelt or rose. When the Mass was over, I seated myself where the bases of two columns before the Borghese Chapel form a grand marble throne, and there I stayed the whole forenoon.”

“Nothing strikes me more in Catholic churches,” Mr. Vane said, “than to see a worshipper attending to the service from some far nook or corner, with a crowd of people walking about between him and the altar. You do not seem to think it necessary to be near the priest or hear what he is saying. That is one great difference between you and Protestants. What their minister says is all. Though, to be sure,” he added, “one wouldn’t always know what the priest were saying, if one were close to him.”

“It isn’t necessary as long as we know what he is doing,” the Signora replied rather quickly. “Besides, Catholics, even uneducated ones, do know very nearly the words he is speaking, without hearing them. It is a mistake constantly made by Protestants to think that Catholics do not understand, because they themselves do not. They forget that there is little variety in the service, and that in all essential [Pg 612] parts one Mass is like all other Masses. An intelligent Catholic, whether he can read or not, can tell you just what the priest is doing as far off as he can see him, and knows just what prayers he should offer at the moment. As for the priest or his assistant not speaking distinctly, they often do, oftener than not; and when they do not, it is not strange. The same words, repeated over and over again, even when repeated with the whole heart, have a tendency to become indistinct, and to drop the consonants and keep only the vowels. The torso of sound is all right.”

“Like the foot of your bronze St. Peter, worn smooth with oft-repeated, fervent kisses,” the gentleman said, with a gravity that hid a smile.” You may say that it has only the vowel shape of a foot, the consonant angles quite kissed away.”

The Signora lifted her head a little, and immediately changed the subject. Decidedly, she thought, it would be necessary to correct Mr. Vane’s conversation. But it would not be pleasant to do so the first day.

They lingered at the table nearly an hour, talking over old times and friends, and who were dead and who were married; till presently, it having got buzzed about among the select number of flies in the room that there was fruit at hand, they reminded the company to retire.

“Tea at five and supper at nine,” was the Signora’s parting reminder. “And now, a pleasant rest to you!”

CHAPTER II.

“AY DE MI, ALHAMA!”

Those who knew little or nothing of Mr. Vane usually fancied that they knew him perfectly, and were in the habit of describing him with epigrammatic brevity: A kind, honorable man, indolent of mind and body, very tolerant, has no strong convictions, and seems, not so much to live, as to be waiting to live, and waiting quite comfortably—as if a fish out of water should find itself for a few days in wine and water.

Those who knew him best hesitated to describe him; but all agreed that he was kind and honorable. We will not attempt any dissection of his character.

Twenty-three years before we find him in Rome he married a beautiful girl born in New Orleans of Spanish parents. He had long admired her, but had been kept at a distance by her coldness; and when, quite suddenly, she consented to be his wife, he could scarcely have told if his delight were greater than his surprise.

“I do not love you,” she said with gentle calmness, “but I esteem you, and am prepared to do my duty as a wife. I should have preferred not to marry; but my parents desire that I should, and, as I am their only child, I do not think it right to oppose their wishes.”

It was scarcely an explanation to satisfy even an accepted lover, and Mr. Vane could not help asking if there were any one whom she preferred to him.

The answer was not prompt in coming, and was given with great reserve, though the lady showed neither confusion nor unwillingness to give it. She thought gravely for a minute before speaking, her fair, [Pg 613] quiet face all the time open to his study. “I have never had a lover,” she said then, “and I have never wished to marry any one. I have nothing to confess nor to repent of in this regard.”

With this he had been obliged to content himself. What unacknowledged maiden preference, untouched by passion, her words might have concealed, if any such had been, he could not ask and he never knew; but gentle, faithful, prompt in every duty, and sincerely desirous to render him happy as she was, he always felt that there was an inner chamber in her heart where he had never penetrated, and which she had even closed to her own eyes. There was no appearance of concealment or conscious reserve, no hidden pain, but only a something wanting, as if some delicate spring in her soul had been broken. He had hoped to make her forget whatever shadow of regret her life might have known, and to restore her to an elastic joyousness more suited to her age; and, in the earlier months of their married life, finding his efforts vain, he had broken out in some slight reproaches now and then. But the blush of pain and alarm, the anxious inquiries, “In what have I failed?” “What have I done to displease you?” and the gayety she strove to assume for his pleasure, made him regret his impatience. Tacitly he allowed her to renounce an affectation which was the first she had ever stooped to, and, as time passed on, they settled into a friendly and undemonstrative intercourse. Isabel seemed to have drawn her disposition from this lively surface of her mother’s briefly-troubled life; but the younger showed something of that quiet melancholy which had succeeded. Mrs. Vane died when Bianca was but six years old, and her husband had never manifested any disposition to marry again, seeming to be satisfied with the society of his children.

In religion the daughters followed their mother, who had been a Catholic. The father was still Protestant.

“Poor papa!” Isabel said when speaking to a friend on the subject, “he never will be persuaded to study theology. The only way to attract him to a religion would be by the excellence of its professors; and he protests that he sees no difference in people in general, that he has no doubt the Chinese have amiable qualities, and that, if he lived among the Turks, he should probably become very fond of them. What can one do with such a man? Bring out all your hard little arguments and lay them down before him, showing how perfectly they fit into the most beautiful mosaic for your side, and he listens with the greatest attention, then mixes them all up, and rearranges them into an entirely different pattern for the opposite side, and ends by declaring that both are true as far as they go. You see, he has spent his life with two excellent women, one Protestant and the other Catholic—his mother and our mamma—and that has spoiled him for conversion. I’ve often wished that dear grand-mamma had been the least bit of a vixen, or had even taken snuff in her old age; but she never did a thing to spoil the beautiful white halo about her, and died at last as she had lived. Mamma went as the moon goes, waning, growing dimmer every day, till you see it like a little silver cloud in the sky, and then it is gone. But grand-mamma seemed to look up suddenly, [Pg 614] and smile, and disappear, as if some one she thought the world of, and hadn’t seen for a long time, had come and called her out of the room for a minute.”

“You ask what you are to do with such a man as your father,” her friend said. “I answer, you can let him alone, and I strongly advise you to do so. He is quite capable of thinking and observing without being teased. He leaves you free; do the same by him.”

“I suppose I must,” the girl sighed unwillingly.

Bianca, who remembered her mother only as the little silver cloud fading in the sky, had also her pretty tribute to pay to the grandmother, who had not been many years dead.

“Of course we wished her to be a Catholic,” she said; “but no one could know her and doubt that she was good. She did not believe our dogmas because she did not understand them, but she never spoke an uncharitable word of us. Indeed, I used to think that unconsciously she believed everything. Her religion was like a rose-bush on which only one rose bloomed out, and that rose was Christ. All the rest were just buds with the smallest pink tips showing. She was so dazzled and wondering over her wonderful one rose that she could not think of the others. What a blossoming out there will be when she reaches heaven, if she is not there already!”

While we have been giving this little history, casa Ottant’-otto has been as tranquil as if it were mid-night instead of mid-day. The rooms were perfectly dark, except where a chink in the shutter or a loose hasp let in here and there a light too small to be called a ray, which made a pale glow in one spot, showing like a blotch on the darkness. Not a sound was heard within, and scarcely a sound from without; for, early as it was in the season, the street had its quiet hour, and the birds, the only noisy people on the garden side, would no more have thought of singing at noon than of remaining silent in the morning.

But, as the afternoon wore on, something stirred on a red cushion in a corner of the dining-room. It was a black cat, called, from its color, the abate. This member of the family rose, stretched himself slowly, first one side, then the other, opened his mouth in a portentous yawn, and seemed to utter an inquiring “Mew!” but, what with sleepiness, warmth, and languor, the sound was very nearly inaudible. Looking about, he saw Adriano, the man-servant, asleep in an arm-chair, his head, in a little scarlet cap with a tassel, dropped on one shoulder, his arms hanging down over the arms of the chair. Wakened, perhaps, by the glance, the man opened his eyes, gathered up his head and arms, and began, in turn, to stretch himself out of sleep, giving an audible yawn instead of a “Mew.” The abate then exerted himself so far as to saunter to the threshold of the door looking into the kitchen. Annunciata, who had placed her chair in a corner of the room in such a manner that the walls supported her while she slept, was just stretching out one foot to pick up the sandal that had dropped off during her nap. All this the cat saw, doubtless. It was too dark for any one else to see.

Presently Adriano opened a half shutter in the dining-room, admitting a faint light; then, passing, with slip-shod feet, into the sala, [Pg 615] threw the windows wide open. Instantly all the bright out-doors, which had been waiting to enter—sunshine, perfume, and west wind—rushed in together, lit the gilding in a new glitter, reddened the velvet again, whitened the curtains and set them blowing about, roused a hundred little winking mischiefs in the carvings, and almost brought a smile into the many pictured faces on the walls that had been waiting so long in the dark with their eyes wide open.

After a little interval, the Signora came out of her room; then Isabel’s bright face appeared.

“I didn’t believe I should sleep a wink on this first day,” she said; “but I have slept the whole time. One becomes accustomed to everything. But where can Bianca be? I’m not at all sure she did right to go out alone, and at this hour. That girl does the most extraordinary things sometimes, quiet as she seems. I sometimes think, Signora, that Bianca has great force of will.”

Uttering this last remark, the young woman looked at her friend as if she expected an astonished denial. The Signora, on the contrary, replied with a rather significant smile: “Only ‘sometimes,’ my dear? If your sister had a motive worthy, her will would be strong enough to oppose the whole world.”

“Bianca!” cried Isabel in astonishment. “Why, she is the softest creature alive.”

The Signora was arranging tea-cups on a table drawn up before one of the large sofas, and waited until her hands were free of them before replying, as she wished to speak with emphasis. “Do you think,” she said then, “that it is only the positive, opinionated women who have firmness of character? My experience is that your women who are constantly driving and directing people in small things can almost always be themselves driven in great things, while those who do not like to make a fuss about trifles will stand their ground when it comes to a matter of importance. If the truth could be known, I believe it would be found that the world’s heroines of action and of suffering have been those same soft creatures in ordinary circumstances. And here’s the child now.”

In fact, the entrance-door opened at that moment from without, and Bianca Vane came in with cheeks as red as roses. She had begged the Signora’s permission to go out instead of going to bed, promising to go no farther than Santa Maria Maggiore, which was but five minutes’ walk from the house.

Isabel looked at her sister very gravely while she stood pulling the great key out of the lock, smiling to herself, and tugging away with the softest, prettiest hands in the world. The elder sister had been accustomed to be called, and to consider herself, the stronger of the two, and she was not altogether certain now that the Signora had not been jesting.

The great Italian key, large enough for a prison, was got out of the lock, the door shut, half by the wind and half by the lady, with a force that made its three little bells and its two immense iron bolts rattle and ring, and Bianca went straight to the Signora and kissed her—a somewhat unusual demonstration. “I’ve been so happy!” she whispered close to the cheek her lips had touched. “How beautiful it is! You must let me have a ‘weakness’ for your church and its bells, and all that belongs to it.”

A nod and glance of intelligence [Pg 616] were exchanged between the two, and the girl went to take off her bonnet.

Mr. Vane appeared at the same moment, looking as if he had enjoyed a most satisfying nap, and tea was prepared. The Signora and the two girls occupied the long red sofa, over which, on the wall, a stately Penelope, seated among her maidens, laid aside her often-ravelled web, and earnestly regarded the Ulysses whom she had not yet recognized, but could not remove her eyes from. At the other side of the table, opposite them, a high-backed, ample chair had been placed for the gentleman of the family, who seemed to feel himself very much at home.

“Has my little girl been asleep?” he asked, looking at his younger daughter.

“Well, no, papa,” was the reply, “but she has been dreaming.”

No more questions were asked then. Mr. Vane was looking at the picture opposite him, which had a very pleasant suggestion of perils and journeys over, and happy reunion after long separation. Suddenly his glance dropped to the lady beneath, went back to the picture, and a second time sought the Signora’s face.

“Why,” he said, “that Penelope looks as though you had sat for her to a not very good artist.”

The Signora gave him his tea. “I assure you,” she said, “that I never posed for that nor any other Penelope during the whole course of my life. The character doesn’t suit me.”

Mr. Vane took his cup, and studied over this little speech while he slowly stirred in his tea two cubes of sugar. He had been quite correct in his remark. The two faces were strikingly alike—fine in their oval shape, with dark-blue eyes, and a hint of yellow in the thick flaxen hair.

Presently he looked up. “I can’t guess,” he said.

The lady laughed. “When it is so plain? Well, in the first place, I am not so industrious; in the next place, I shouldn’t have let Ulysses go away without me; in the third place, I haven’t the suitors; and, in the fourth place, if I had had them, I should have kept them in better order. I think the places are all taken. And now, Bianca has for a long time had something on her mind to say. You have the floor, my dear.”

“Oh! it’s nothing,” Bianca said; “only if you are done talking about Penelope, I should like to give you all a piece of advice.”

The company were unanimously anxious to hear. Gentle suggestions they often heard from this young lady; but it was perhaps the first time they had ever heard her propose deliberately to give advice to any one, and still less to a company of elders.

“My advice is this,” she said: “whenever any of you take your first walk in a strange city, look at the house you live in before you go away from it, and see how it is made, and what number it is, and make sure of the name of the street; otherwise, though you may find every place you do not want, you may never find your own house again. That’s all I have to say.”

“Excellent advice!” Mr. Vane said. “But may I ask what made you think of it just now?”

“First let me tell you a little story,” said Bianca. “Once upon a time a young woman I know went to live in a strange city where they spoke a language she did not understand. The very first day, almost [Pg 617] the first hour, she went out for a walk, and went alone; but her mind was so full of the place she was going to that she took no note of the place she was leaving. No matter what a nice time she had before she started to return; that doesn’t belong to the story, which is entirely tragical. Her troubles began when she thought that in two minutes she would be at her own door. Come to think about it, she had no idea where her own door was, in which of three or four radiating streets it was to be found, or what the number of it was, nor how it looked. So she wandered up and down, and to and fro, in the hot sun, and passed her home without recognizing it any more than the Signora’s portrait up there recognizes her husband; and at last, when she was just ready to cry, and to believe that the house and everybody in it had been bewitched and whisked off to some other continent, and that she had to go blowing about for ever in that lost way, what do you think happened?”

The story-teller had reason to be gratified by the expression of intense interest with which her audience waited for the catastrophe.

“Well,” she continued, “this poor wanderer happened to glance up a house-front as she was passing, and she saw out of a window a hand laid on the frame—just the hand of some one who stood inside. It was very handsome and white, and on one finger of it was a ring that she recognized. And then the tears of sorrow that she was about to shed changed to tears of joy, and she said: ‘O darling hand of my papa, with my own good-for-nothing cameo face on it—’”

And Bianca finished her story by flying up out of her chair, and rushing to hang on her father’s shoulder, and kiss the hand that had found her.

“You don’t mean to say that you have been out wandering about Rome all alone!” Mr. Vane exclaimed, reddening.

“I only went up to the Liberian basilica,” she said; “and it was an absurd thing in me, getting lost. You didn’t imagine I was going properly to sleep my first day in Rome, did you? You might as well have put a flame to bed, and told it to shut its eyes.”

As she spoke, a dash of clear crimson stained her cheeks, as if the juice of a ripe pomegranate had been flung over them, and her head was raised quickly and with an air that was almost defiant, though unconsciously so.

The Signora had seen this gesture and blush once or twice before, and thought she understood the meaning of them; how the impassioned and enthusiastic nature hidden under that pensive softness and silence resented now and then the languid indifference of the father and the superficial positiveness of the sister, and proudly asserted its own claim to an individual and untrammelled existence.

Mr. Vane dropped his eyes, and an expression of pain passed momentarily over his face. He also had seen the look before—seen it in his wife’s face as well as in his daughter’s. “I do not mean to shut you up, my dear,” he said gravely. “I only wish that you should come to no harm. If you like to go about freely, the Signora can, perhaps, recommend a good, trusty servant, who will protect you without being intrusive.”

She did not say a word, only leaned close to him, and laid her cheek, still glowing red, on his hair.

[Pg 618] He smiled, and spoke more lightly. “But I should like to have you go with me sometimes, and kindle my fuel with your fires.”

She embraced him silently and went back to her seat.

The Signora smiled into her teacup over this little scene, in which nothing had pleased her more than the sweet readiness of the father to be reconciled, and his quick comprehension of the meaning of his daughter’s mute caress. “He has certainly great delicacy and sensitiveness,” she thought. “I wonder if Bianca and he may not be very much alike!”

“The chief danger in walking out in Rome,” she said, “is from the public carriages. The traditions are evidently all in favor of those who drive, not of those who walk, and pedestrians have no rights which quadrupeds and the bipeds who drive them are bound to respect. For the rest, I have gone about a good deal alone, and have had no more annoyance than I should have had in any other large city in the world. Of course young Italian women have not so much liberty as we take; but all sensible and honest people here understand that foreigners do not cross land and sea, and come to the most famous city in the world, in order to shut themselves up in houses; and, moreover, that it may well be inconvenient sometimes to find an escort. I told Bianca that she could go up to the church as well as not, but must go no further. It was stupid of me not to warn her of losing her way back. And,” she added, with a sudden change, “it was still more stupid of me not to recollect the difference between American and Italian bread. You poor child!” For she had caught sight of Isabel getting quite red in the face over a roll she was trying to break.

“They do bake their bread so hard here and in France,” the girl sighed, giving up the attempt in despair. “In Paris I could throw our rolls all about the room without injuring anything but the furniture. I didn’t make the smallest dent in the bread.”

The Signora promised them the most American of bread for the future, but added: “I have become so accustomed to this hard baking that I had forgotten all about the difference. In time you will come to prefer it, and to find that the lighter baking will taste raw to you. Indeed, you will adopt a good many Italian customs in regard to eating, which, so far as concerns health, I think they understand better than any other nation. Their prohibitions you must certainly attend to, however unreasonable they may seem to you; but you are not obliged to eat what they like. The first year I came here I broke a tooth trying to eat a piece of cake they brought me on Christmas Eve. They said it was their custom to eat it at that season, and I obeyed dutifully. It is dark, a caricature of our fruit-cake, and seems to be made of nuts and raisins, held together by a tough, dry paste. It was like a piece out of a badly-macadamized street. Fortunately, I broke only one tooth, and that saved my stomach; for I do not know what would have become of me if I had swallowed the stuff.”

Mr. Vane gave a significant “Ahem!” “I should have supposed,” he remarked, “that any one who had swallowed the Infalli—”

“Papa!” cried Isabel, making a peremptory gesture to silence him.

“—bility—” he pursued calmly.

“O papa!” said Bianca, with soft [Pg 619] entreaty. He winced, but finished—“ought to be able to digest anything that Rome can offer.”

The two girls looked at the Signora. They knew her rather better than their father did. She was folding her napkin up very carefully, and considering. After a minute, still smoothing the damask folds, she spoke. “I have always thought it wrong to ridicule even a false religion. When I think that on the poor crumbling mythologies of the world the souls of men have tried to climb to such a heaven as they had glimpses of, or were capable of imagining, their mistakes become to me sad, or terrible—anything but laughable. One doesn’t laugh at sight of a rotten plank that broke in the hands of a drowning man. And if falsehood, when human prayers have been breathed on it, and human tears shed on it, and human hearts have clung to it, believing it to be truth, is something no longer to be ridiculed, how much more should we treat the truth seriously! The dogma of Infallibility was the anchor the church dropped when she saw the storm coming, and it is probable that before we shall have peace again we may hang for a time on that one rope. Nothing in revelation is more serious to me.”

She rose, without giving any opportunity for reply, and without looking at any one. “If you like, we will prepare for a drive,” she added, and left the room quietly.

But in spite of the calmness with which she spoke the Signora was much agitated, and scarcely refrained from tears when she was alone. To give such a reproof was only less difficult than to suffer an affront to the church to pass unreproved; and it was with a little nervousness that she went out to meet her guest again.

He was in the drawing-room alone, evidently waiting for her, and the first glance in his face entirely reassured her, so sweet and untroubled was his expression.

“I am like a great rough elephant who has stepped on the kind lady who was feeding him with sugarplums,” he said, and offered his hand to her with a confidence in her good-will which was almost more pleasing than her confidence in his.

And so ended their first and last quarrel.

The girls, who came presently, with a little timidity, beamed when they saw the two standing by a window and watching the work going on across the street. All the space there had once been a palace-garden, but now nearly every flowery thing had disappeared, and in their place the foundations of a large building were being laid in a superbly solid way. Wide walls of stone, on which three men could walk abreast, had in some places risen a few feet above the outer level, their bases sunk ten feet, perhaps, below the deep cellar bottom, and the trenches for founding the partition-walls were being dug in the same manner. They could see, too, the beginning of the grand stone arches which were to support the floors. An Italian would have passed all this without notice; but to one accustomed to the flimsy style of American architecture the sight was refreshing. In the centre of the space the building was to occupy still remained a fountain-basin from which the water had been drawn away, exposing a circle of beautiful round arches of gray stone. Under these arches the workmen were accustomed to take refuge when a shower came up, crouching there contentedly, and [Pg 620] looking out at the bright drops as they fell, like swallows out of a row of nests under the barn-eaves.

“I have wondered whether there ever before was a house on this spot,” the Signora said. “If there were, a garden has bloomed over it for centuries, as, perhaps, at some future time, another garden will cover the ruins of this work of to-day. A few months ago some flowers still lingered here, but they were trampled or dug away, till at last only one red poppy was left at the edge of the cellar-wall. I watched it day after day, blazing there like a heart on fire. Every morning I looked out I feared to miss it; but there it clung among trampling feet of men and beasts, with stone-work being built almost over it, and every sort of destruction threatening, but never falling. When nearly a week had passed, I could bear it no longer. If at that time I had seen a foot set upon, or a rock crushing, the flower, I should have cried out as though I were myself being crushed. I sent Adriano out to get it for me, and pressed it carefully in the prettiest book I have—the brave little blossom! Here it is, see! The thin petals are like faded blood-stains, but the seed-vessel in the centre is firm, and precisely like a little marble urn with a mossy vine wreathing its base and running up one side. In that urn repose the dust and the hope of a long line of scarlet poppies.”

The gentleman listened indulgently to the Signora’s story, and watched her with interest as she put the relic carefully away.

And then they went down to the carriage that was waiting for them, and drove through the long street that stretches over hill and valley from the Esquiline to the Pincio, so that one looks, as through a telescope, from the sunny brow of the former to the campanile where Maria Assunta and her maidens

“Sprinkle with holy sounds the air, as the priest with the hyssop

Sprinkles the congregation, and scatters blessings upon them.”

Some one has said of this street that it is like a boa-constrictor after it has swallowed an ox and stretched itself out to digest him, and the Quirinal Hill is the ox.

All the world was out that evening, and even the most insensible promenader spared a glance for the sky. It was Roman form with Gothic colors, the round arch of the heavens a pale, pure gold, bright, yet tender as a flower, and against that background, less like a city than like an embossed picture, Rome, with its great cupola, its crowded beauties of architecture, its pines and its cypresses. Of the personages, more or less distinguished, in the circle of carriages behind them, the new-comers took but little note. The old papal picture, with its cardinals’ coaches and its prelates’ costumes, was effaced, and there was nothing in the human part of the scene more striking than the last Paris fashions—as if some tyro with his coarse brush should paint over a Titian. If one should seek for royalty in that crowd, he would not find the angelic old king, clothed in white, as if already among the blest, beaming on all the faces turned toward him, and giving benediction right and left as he went. In place of that might be seen to pass a brutal face, with the color of one half-strangled, with upturned nose and curled-up moustache, and with eyes whose glances no respectable woman would encounter. The Roman people used to say, “When the pope comes out, [Pg 621] the sun comes out”; but no such shining proverb was suggested by this dark and forbidding face.

The Signora, looking with her friends, seemed herself to behold Rome for the first time, and to see in swift contrast both present and past. Was it past, indeed, and for ever, that dominion of centuries, around which had gathered a glory so unique? She stretched her hands out involuntarily, and sighed in the song of the vanquished Moors:

“Ay de mi, Alhama!”

Mr. Vane turned to her rather suddenly. “I have great confidence in your sincerity,” he said, “and I believe that you who know the truth need not fear. Now, setting aside the questions of the right of the church to possess Rome, and the need she has of it as a base of operations, and the fact that the great functions are no longer performed, tell me, do you really regret the old time?”

“You are setting aside a great deal,” she said smilingly; “but I answer you yes with all my heart. Rome has lost in every way. There seems no longer in the world a place for tired people to come to. All is hurry, and fret, and fuss; and comfort is gone. Has it ever occurred to you to think that many people, especially in progressive countries, inflict an immense deal of discomfort on themselves and others in striving for what they call the comforts of life, losing with one hand what they gain with the other? The contented spirit is gone, the quiet, the patience, the simplicity, the charity. Poverty was never before unpitied in Rome, and now the poor not only beg, they starve. They never starved in the old time. I would not undervalue the improvements of modern science—I am proud of them; but they are not all, nor the greatest, glories of life. Such of them as suited the place would have come in gently and gradually, without disturbing anything. They have been brought in at the point of the bayonet, and the bayonet-point has been left in them. We still feel it. I sometimes pity these progressionists, who are often, no doubt, sincere in their hopes and aspirations, as well as immensely conceited at the same time. They feel the pains of life for themselves and for others, and they fancy that they have found a new solution for the problem that the church solved centuries ago, and that they can have heaven let down to them, instead of having the trouble of climbing to it. It’s a pitiful thing to dedicate one’s life to a great mistake. Yes, Rome is spoilt, looking at it from a philanthropic as well as from an artistic and a religious point of view.”

“It was here Lucullus gave his famous supper,” Isabel said, glancing back at the gardens. “Was that what is called the most costly supper ever given? I forget.”

Bianca clasped the Signora’s arm and whispered against her shoulder: “We know a costlier one, don’t we?”

“Speak, darling!” was the answering whisper.

“Where the Host gave himself, and made the feast eternal.”

After a few minutes they looked round to find the drive almost deserted, and, entering their carriage, drove slowly homeward, making a few little turns in the neighborhood to familiarize the new-comers with the location of the house. The Ave Maria was ringing from all the belfries, great and small, from [Pg 622] storied campanile, and little arches set against the sky; workmen and workwomen were going homeward, and windows were everywhere being shut on the beautiful twilight, whose air the Italians so fear.

They went up to the sala, and, albeit with a sigh, shut out the west with its crescent now triumphant, and all the sweetness of orange and jasmine flowers, and all the twitter of subsiding birds.

“I think,” the Signora said, “that the Roman past wishes, to monopolize the Roman nights, and that the unhealthy air we fear is nothing but the breath of ghosts who do not desire our company out of doors. But it’s a pity, besides being very disagreeable of them.”

Annunciata brought in a lamp, and said “Buona sera!” in setting it down.

“They always wish you buona sera when they bring the lamp, and felice or felicissima notte when they leave you for the night,” the Signora said. “Impatient as I am with them sometimes, they constantly conciliate me by some pretty custom. I followed one of these customs this morning—a beautiful one, too. It is this: When a priest says his first Mass, any one who will may follow him to the sacristy, and kiss his hand in the palm and at the back. Isn’t it beautiful? A young priest from one of the colleges said his first Mass in the Borghese chapel this morning. An elder priest, whom they call in such cases the padrino or god-father, stood by him, and two young fellow-students served the Mass, one of them receiving Holy Communion. When it was over, I begged and received permission to kiss the sacred hand that had just consecrated and touched the Holy Eucharist for the first time.”

They were a little tired that evening, and separated very soon after supper. The father went to his room, Isabel to hers, and, after their doors had closed, the Signora stole to Bianca’s to give her one good-night kiss, and found her just kneeling by her bedside.

The girl gave a tearful smile over her shoulder, but did not rise.

“Felicissima notte!” said her friend, and, embracing, left her to the care of the angels.

TO BE CONTINUED.

[Pg 623]

THE IRISH HOME-RULE MOVEMENT.

II.

Whatever the ultimate fate and fortunes of the Irish Home-Rule movement may be, it must be conceded that the projectors of no other political endeavor witnessed in Ireland for a century past took greater pains than did its founders to constitute the undertaking as the work, not of a party or a section or a class, but of the whole nation.

For three years, from 1870 to 1873, the organization had existed in the precursory or preliminary character described in the last number of The Catholic World. Signs which could not be misread had, with increasing frequency and force, proclaimed that even already it might well, without presumption, adopt a more authoritative tone; but to the men who guided its counsels, these things spoke only of the moment come at last for submitting their work to formal ratification or rejection by the country.

In what manner, or by what means, could the opinions of the Irish people best be collected or ascertained for such a purpose? By the formal and regular, open, public, and free election of parochial, baronial, or county delegates to a national convention, of course. But there is a law which forbids such a proceeding in Ireland. Delegates may be elected, and may sit, deliberate, vote, and act, in convention assembled, in England, Scotland, or Wales; but if such a proceeding were attempted in Ireland the parties would be liable to imprisonment.[161] A formal election of delegates to a national convention being therefore impracticable, what course would be deemed next best? Only by indirect means could the results which such a convention would directly supply be replaced. The votes of the parliamentary representatives would have been an excellent test of the public feeling, had those representatives been elected by such free choice as the present system of vote by ballot secures in Ireland. But in 1873 it was only at desperate cost the Irish constituencies could venture to exercise the franchise as conscience dictated. The votes of municipal representatives, and other popularly elected public bodies, would come next in importance, yet these were amenable to a similar objection; although, as a matter of fact, a vast proportion (probably a large majority) of those representatives, even in 1873, would vote a protest against the rule of the English Parliament. Summoning classes, as classes, to sit in Dublin as a national council was not to be listened to. For a long period these were the questions, the perplexing problems, which, adjourned from meeting to meeting, occupied the Home Government Council. At length they decided [Pg 624] that there was nothing for it but to convene by a great National Requisition, which should be a sort of plébiscite or declaration in itself, an aggregate conference of delegates or “deputations” from every county in Ireland. It was urged by some that the requisition should be an “open” one—merely calling upon the conference to discuss the Irish situation; but this view gave way before the advantage of making the requisition itself a more or less decisive pronouncement from the thousands of influential and patriotic Irishmen who could not, from one reason or another, be actually present in Dublin. The form of the document was, in fact, decided only after consultation with at least a few of the most prominent men in each of the various sections of national politicians: Repealers, Conservative Nationalists, “Forty-eight-men,” O’Connellites, Mitchelites, Fenians, Liberals, etc. The well-known veteran Repealer, O’Neill Daunt, proceeded to Tuam specially charged to seek the counsel and co-operation of the great man whose name alone it was felt would be equivalent to national approval—the illustrious Dr. McHale, “Archbishop of the West.” If any one living could be fairly assumed to speak as O’Connell himself would speak if now alive, “John McHale” was the man. He was the old Repeal cause personified.[162]

Mr. Daunt returned to Dublin bearing the news that not only did the archbishop approve, but that he would himself head the requisition. The announcement was hailed with cheers, like the tidings of some great victory. A few days later, accordingly, the following form of requisition was circulated for signature:

“We, the undersigned, feel bound to declare our conviction that it is necessary to the peace and prosperity of Ireland, and would be conducive to the strength and stability of the United Kingdom, that the right of domestic legislation on all Irish affairs should be restored to our country; and that it is desirable that Irishmen should unite to obtain that restoration upon the following principles:

“To obtain for our country the right and privilege of managing our own affairs, by a Parliament assembled in Ireland, composed of Her Majesty the Sovereign, and the lords and commons of Ireland.

“To secure for that Parliament, under a federal arrangement, the right of legislating for and regulating all matters relating to the internal affairs of Ireland, and control over Irish resources and revenues, subject to the obligation of contributing our just proportion of the imperial expenditure.

“To leave to an Imperial Parliament the power of dealing with all questions affecting the imperial crown and government, legislation regarding the colonies and other dependencies of the crown, the relation of the united empire with foreign states, and all matters appertaining to the defence and the stability of the empire at large.

“To obtain such an adjustment of the relations between the two countries without any interference with the prerogatives of the crown, or any disturbance of the principles of the constitution.

“And we hereby invite a conference, to be held at such time and place as may be found generally most convenient, of all those favorable to the above principles, to consider the best and most expedient means of carrying them into practical effect.”

It was expected that probably between five and ten thousand signatures might be obtained to this document among the influential political classes in Ireland, rendering [Pg 625] it the largest and most notable array of the kind ever seen in the country. In a few weeks, however, nearly twenty-five thousand names of what may truly be called “representative men” were appended to it! Only those who were in Ireland at the time can know what a sensation was created by the appearance of the leading Dublin newspapers one day with four or five pages of each devoted to what could be after all only a portion of this monster requisition. Not only was every county represented, nearly every barony had sent its best and worthiest men. Although most amazement was at the time created by the array of what was termed “men of position,” the promoters of the movement valued even more the names of certain men in middle and humble life, town traders, tenant-farmers, artisans, and others, who were well known to be the men in each locality most trusted by their own class. Of magistrates, members of Parliament, peers (a few), bishops, clergymen (Protestant as well as Catholic), mayors, sheriffs, municipal representatives, town-commissioners, poor-law guardians, there were altogether literally thousands. So general a mingling of classes and creeds and political sections had never before been known (on a scale of such magnitude) in Ireland. Yet no effort had been made to collect signatures after the fashion of petition-signing. The object was to seek a half-dozen names of really representative men from each district, and these were applied for through the post-office. In nearly every case the document, when returned signed by a score or two, was accompanied by a letter stating that as many thousands of signatures from that district would have been forwarded if necessary.

Tuesday, the 18th of November, 1873, was the date publicly fixed for the conference, which was convened “to meet from day to day until its proceedings are concluded.” As the day approached, the most intense interest and curiosity were excited by the event, not merely in Dublin and throughout Ireland, but all over Great Britain. The great circular hall of the Rotunda was transformed into the semblance of a legislative chamber, the attendant suite of apartments being converted into division lobbies,[163] dining-rooms, writing-rooms, etc., while the handsome gallery which sweeps around the hall was set apart for spectators.

The English newspapers seemed much troubled by all this. They did not like that Ireland should in any shape or form take to “playing at parliament,” as they sneeringly expressed it; and this conference affair was vividly, dangerously suggestive to the “too imaginative” Irish. There was, however, they declared, one consolation for them: out of evil would come good; this same conference would effectually cure the Irish of any desire for a native parliament, and show the world how unfit were Hibernians for a separate legislature. Because (so declared and prophesied the English papers from day to day) before the conference would be three hours in session, there would be a “Donnybrook row”; fists would be flourished and heads broken; Old Irelanders and Young Irelanders, Repealers and Federalists, Fenians and Home-Rulers, would, it was declared, “fly at one another’s throats.” At least a dozen English editors simultaneously hit [Pg 626] upon the witty joke about “the Kilkenny cats.”

This sort of “prophesying” went on with such suspicious energy, as the day neared for the meeting of the conference, that it began to be surmised the government party was meditating an attempt to verify it. Signs were not wanting that wily and dexterous, as well as pecuniary, efforts were being made to incite dissent and disturbance. Admittance to the conference was obtainable by any one who had signed the requisition, on recording his name and address; and it was quite practicable for a few government emissaries, by pretending to be very “advanced” Nationalists, uncompromising Repealers or anti-tory Catholics, to get up flourishing disputations and “rows.” Indeed, anxiety, if not apprehension, on this score seemed to prevail to some degree on the eve of the 18th. Would there be “splits,” would there be discord and turbulence and impossibility of reconcilement, or would there be order and decorum, earnest debate, but harmonious spirit and action? All felt that the event at hand was one of critical importance to Ireland.

For four days—the 18th, 19th, 20th, and 21st of November, 1873—the conference continued in session, sitting each day at eleven o’clock in the morning, and adjourning at six o’clock in the afternoon. The number of “delegates” was 947;[164] and the daily attendance at each sitting averaged about six hundred. Fortunately, an authentic record was taken of the composition of the assembly; and it is only on glancing over the names and addresses of those nine hundred gentlemen that a full conception of its character can be formed. One of the most notable features in the scene, one that called forth much public comment as an indication of the deep public interest felt in the proceedings, was the crowded gallery of ladies and gentlemen who, having succeeded in obtaining admission-cards, day by day sat out the debates, listening with eager attention to all that went forward. The pressure for these admission-cards increased each day, and at the final sitting, on the 21st, it was found impossible to seat the hundreds of visitors who filled the avenues to the gallery.

There was much speculation as to who would be selected as chairman of the convention. The choice when made known called forth universal approbation. It was Mr. William Shaw, Member of Parliament for the borough of Bandon,[165] a Protestant gentleman of the highest position and reputation, a banker (president of the Munster Bank), a man of large wealth, of grave and undemonstrative manner, but of great depth and quiet force of character. He was one of the last men in Ireland who would answer the description of an “Irish agitator” as English artists draw the sketch. He was one who had everything to lose and nothing to gain by “revolution,” yet he had early joined the movement for Irish self-government, declaring that he did so as a business man having a large stake in the prosperity of the country, and because he saw that the present system was only the “pretence of a government” for Ireland.

Naturally the chief event of the [Pg 627] first day’s sitting was Mr. Butt’s great speech or opening statement on the whole case. It was a masterly review of the question of Irish legislative independence, and a powerful vindication of the federal adjustment now under consideration. He went minutely and historically into every fact and circumstance and every element of consideration, making his address rather a great argument than an oratorical display. At the close, however, when he came to tell how he himself had been led into this movement—how it began, how it had grown, till now he surrendered it into their keeping—his voice trembled with emotion. “State trials were not new to me,” he exclaimed:

“Twenty years before I stood near Smith O’Brien when he braved the sentence of death which the law pronounced upon him. I saw Meagher meet the same, and I then asked myself this: ‘Surely the state is out of joint, surely all our social system is unhinged, when men like O’Brien and Meagher are condemned to a traitor’s doom?’ Years passed away, and once more I stood by men who had dared the desperate enterprise of freeing their country by revolt.… I heard their words of devotion to their country as with firm step and unyielding heart they left the dock, and went down the dark passage that led them to the place where all hope closed upon them, and I asked myself again: ‘Is there no way to arrest this? Are our best and bravest spirits ever to be carried away under this system of constantly-resisted oppression and constantly-defeated revolt? Can we find no means by which the national quarrel that has led to all these terrible results may be set right?’ I believe, in my conscience, we have found it. I believe that England has now the opportunity of adjusting the quarrel of centuries. Let me say it—I do so proudly—that I was one of those who did something in this cause. Over a torn and distracted country—a country agitated by dissension, weakened by distrust—we raised the banner on which we emblazoned the magic words, ‘Home Rule.’ We raised it with feeble hand. Tremblingly, with hesitation, almost stealthily, we unfurled that banner to the breeze. But wherever the legend we had emblazoned on its folds was seen the heart of the people moved to its words, and the soul of the nation felt their power and their spell. Those words were passed from man to man along the valley and the hillside. Everywhere men, even those who had been despairing, turned to that banner with confidence and hope. Thus far we have borne it. It is for you now to bear it on with more energy, with more strength, and with renewed vigor. We hand it over to you in this gathering of the nation. But, oh! let no unholy hands approach it. Let no one come to the help of our country,

“‘Or dare to lay his hand upon the ark

Of her magnificent and awful cause’

who is not prepared never, never to desert that banner till it flies proudly over the portals of that ‘old house at home’—that old house which is associated with memories of great Irishmen, and has been the scene of many glorious triumphs. Even while the blaze of those glories is at this moment throwing its splendor over the memory of us all, I believe in my soul that the parliament of regenerated Ireland will achieve triumphs more glorious, more lasting, more sanctified and holy, than any by which her old parliament illumined the annals of our country and our race.

As his last words died away the assemblage, rising as one man, burst into cheers long protracted, and it was only after several minutes that order was restored.

Mr. Butt had spoken to a complete series of resolutions, which he now submitted to the conference; he concluded by formally moving the first of them:

“I. That, as the basis of the proceedings of this conference, we declare our conviction that it is essentially necessary to the peace and prosperity of Ireland that the right of domestic legislation on all Irish affairs should be restored to our country.”

[Pg 628] It was seconded by Mr. Joseph P. Ronayne, M.P. for Cork City, a man as honest and as just as Aristides; an “advanced Nationalist,” one in whose honor, sincerity, and earnestness Fenians and non-Fenians alike implicitly confided. “I did not take part,” he said, “in public life for the last twenty years, and I hesitated a long time before joining the Home-Rule movement. I was a simple Repealer, when simple Repeal was the form in which Ireland demanded the restitution of her nationality. I was a rebel in ’48.” After this manly avowal of his position Mr. Ronayne closed a brief but forcible speech as follows:

“I have no quarrel with the English people; their sins against Ireland are sins of ignorance, not of intention. Our quarrel is with the government, and against the system which has prevailed ever since England claimed possession of this country. The measure of Mr. Butt will solve the difficulties of the situation. I think we will maintain what is the sentiment of the Irish people—what they contended for with England when England and Ireland were Catholic, as well as when England and Ireland were Protestant and Catholic—that is, the nationality of Ireland. And I see no way but that proposed by Mr. Butt by which this great end can be obtained, consistently with the maintenance of friendly relations between the two countries.”

A still more important announcement, from what is called the “Nationalist” as well as the Repeal point of view, was made by the next speaker, Mr. John Martin, M.P., who moved the second resolution. He, too, avowed himself by preference a Repealer, and every one knew he had been a martyr, prisoner, and exile for his share in the events of ’48. But in language strong, clear, and decisive he gave his approval to the Home-Rule scheme:

“Because I believe that this measure of home government, this new arrangement of the relations between the two countries, will operate sufficiently for the interests—for all the interests—of the Irish people; because I think, if carried into effect according to the principles enunciated in these resolutions, it will be honorable to the Irish nation, it will be consistent with the dignity of the Irish nation, and it will be safe for all its interests; and also because, as to so much of the rights and prerogatives of the Irish nation as are by this scheme of Home Rule to be left under the jurisdiction of an imperial parliament, in which we shall be represented, I consider that those are only the same rights and attributes that, under the old system, were practically left together to the control of the English Parliament and the English Privy Council and ministry.”

The full report of the proceedings at this conference, compiled from the daily newspapers and published by the Home-Rule League, is one of the most interesting publications of a political character issued in Ireland for many years. The speakers exhibited marked ability, and they represented every phase of Irish national opinion. There was very earnest debate; amendments were moved and discussed; points were raised, contested, decided. But the great fact that astounded the outside public, and utterly confounded the prophetic English journalists, was that, warm, protracted, and severe as were some of the discussions, free and full interchange of opinion in every instance sufficed to bring about conviction, and settled every issue without resort to a poll of votes. Every resolution was carried unanimously,[166] and on no question, from first to last, was there need to take a division. “It is not like Ireland at all,” said an astonished critic. “What on earth has become of our traditional contentiousness and discord?”

[Pg 629] The following were the principal resolutions of the conference, besides the first, already quoted above:

Moved by Mr. John Martin, M.P. (Meath), and seconded by Mr. Roland Ponsonby Blennerhassett, M.P. (Kerry):

“That, solemnly reasserting the inalienable right of the Irish people to self-government, we declare that the time, in our opinion, has come when a combined and energetic effort should be made to obtain the restoration of that right.”

Moved by the Mayor of Cork (Mr. John Daly), seconded by the Hon. Charles French, M.P. (Roscommon, brother of Lord de Freyne):

“That, in accordance with the ancient and constitutional rights of the Irish nation, we claim the privilege of managing our own affairs by a parliament assembled in Ireland, and composed of the sovereign, the lords, and the commons of Ireland.”

Moved by the Rev. Joseph A. Galbraith, F.T.C.D., Trinity College,[167] and seconded by the Rev. Thomas O’Shea, P.P. (the celebrated “Father Tom O’Shea,” of the Tenant League):

“That, in claiming these rights and privileges for our country, we adopt the principle of a federal arrangement, which would secure to the Irish parliament the right of legislating for, and regulating all matters relating to, the internal affairs of Ireland, while leaving to the imperial Parliament the power of dealing with all questions affecting the imperial crown and government, legislation regarding the colonies and other dependencies of the crown, the relations of the empire with foreign states, and all matters appertaining to the defence and stability of the empire at large, as well as the power of granting and providing the supplies necessary for imperial purposes.”

Moved by Sir Joseph Neale McKenna, and seconded by Mr. McCarthy Downing, M.P. (Cork County):

“That such an arrangement does not involve any change in the existing constitution of the imperial Parliament or any interference with the prerogatives of the crown or disturbance of the principles of the constitution.”

Moved by Sir John Gray, M.P. (Kilkenny), and seconded by Mr. D. M. O’Conor, M.P. (Roscommon, brother of the O’Conor Don):

“That, to secure to the Irish people the advantages of constitutional government, it is essential that there should be in Ireland an administration of Irish affairs, controlled, according to constitutional principles, by the Irish parliament, and conducted by ministers constitutionally responsible to that Parliament.”

Moved by Mr. Mitchell Henry, M.P. (Galway), and seconded by Mr. W. J. O’Neill Daunt, Kilcaskan Castle, County Cork:

“That, in the opinion of this conference, a federal arrangement, based upon these principles, would consolidate the strength and maintain the integrity of the empire, and add to the dignity and power of the imperial crown.”

Moved by Mr. W. A. Redmond, M.P. (Wexford), and seconded by Mr. Edmond Dease, M.P. (Queen’s County):

“That, while we believe that in an Irish parliament the rights and liberties of all classes of our countrymen would find their best and surest protection, we are willing that there should be incorporated in the federal constitution articles supplying the amplest guarantees that no change shall be made by that parliament [Pg 630] in the present settlement of property in Ireland, and that no legislation shall be adopted to establish any religious ascendency in Ireland, or to subject any person to disabilities on account of his religious opinions.”

Moved by Mr. C. G. Doran, T.C. (Queenstown), and seconded by Mr. John O’Connor Power (Tuam):

“That this conference cannot separate without calling on the Irish constituencies at the next general election to return men earnestly and truly devoted to the great cause which this conference has been called to promote, and who, in any emergency that may arise, will be ready to take counsel with a great national conference, to be called in such a manner as to represent the opinions and feelings of the Irish nation; and that, with a view of rendering members of Parliament and their constituencies more in accord on all questions affecting the welfare of the country, it is recommended by this conference that at the close of each session of Parliament the representatives should render to their constituents an account of their stewardship.”

Moved by Mr. George L. Bryan, M.P. (Kilkenny), and seconded by Mr. P. Callan, M.P. (Dundalk):

“That, in order to carry these objects into practical effect, an association be now formed, to be called ‘The Irish Home-Rule League,’ of which the essential and fundamental principles shall be those declared in the resolutions adopted at this conference, and of which the object, and only object, shall be to obtain for Ireland, by peaceable and constitutional means, the self-government claimed in these resolutions.”

The remaining resolutions dealt with the constitution of the new organization thus founded, and decreed an appeal “to the Irish race all over the world” for funds to assist them in the great struggle now entered upon.

Thus was established the “Irish Home-Rule League” which to-day holds so prominent a position in Ireland.

American readers, familiar enough with O’Connell’s demand for Repeal, will naturally be anxious to learn in what precisely does the above programme differ from that of the great Liberator. O’Connell, who had himself seen the Irish Parliament, and, young as he was, sought to resist its overthrow, grew into life with the simple idea of undoing the evil which yesterday had wrought; in other words, restoring the state of things which existed before the “Union.” This was known as “simple Repeal”—Repeal and nothing more. Such a demand, arising almost on the instant, or out of the evil act complained of, was quite natural; but when time had elapsed, and when serious changes and alterations in the circumstances and relations of the countries had come about, men had to perceive that simple Repeal would land them, in some respects, in an antiquated and impossible state of things. Thus in the Irish Parliament no Catholic could sit, while the act of 1829 admitted Catholics to the imperial Parliament. Again, the franchise and the “pocket” constituencies that had returned the Irish House of Commons could not be restored without throwing the country into the hands of a Protestant minority. Numerous other absurdities and anomalies—things which existed in 1799, but that would be quite out of all sense in 1844—might be pointed out. O’Connell saw this, but relied upon the hope of obtaining not only simple Repeal, but also such improvements as the lapse of time had rendered necessary; and he relied further on the necessity which there would be for Ireland and England, after Repeal, agreeing upon some scheme for the joint government of the countries; in other words, some shape or degree of federalism.

[Pg 631] But the great blot upon the old system was that, although under it Ireland had a totally separate legislature and exchequer, she never had (or under it had the right to have) a separate responsible administration or cabinet. The cabinet or administration that ruled Ireland was formed by, and solely responsible to, the English Parliament. The Irish Parliament had not the right or power to remove a minister; was not able, no matter by what majority, to displace even an administration actually conspiring against Irish liberties. Without a separate Irish administration, responsible to the Irish Parliament, removable by its vote, and liable to its impeachment, it may be said that the legislative independence of Ireland was a frail possession. Events showed this to be so.

The Home-Rule scheme has been concisely described by some of its advocates as offering beforehand the arrangements between the two countries which under the Repeal plan would have to be laid down afterwards. Instead of first simply severing the Union, and then going to work to reconstruct everything, the Home-Rulers project their reconstruction beforehand, and claim that one advantage of this is in a large degree to allay alarms and avert hostility. Their plan proposes to secure for Ireland the great advantage of a separate responsible Irish ministry; offering, in exchange for this, to give up to the imperial executive such powers as the States in America give to the Washington Congress and executive, as distinguished from the powers and functions reserved to the State legislatures and governments. In fine, the Home-Rule scheme has been borrowed largely, though not altogether, from the United States of America: Ireland to rule and legislate, finally and supremely, on all domestic affairs; all affairs common to England, Ireland, and Scotland to be ruled and legislated for by an administration and parliament in which all three will be represented. There are, no doubt, in America many patriotic Irishmen who think this far too little for Ireland to demand; who contend she should seek nothing less than total separation and independence; the price, undisguisedly, being civil war with its lottery of risks and chances. However this may be, the Irish people, if ever their voice has been heard for a century, on the 18th of November, 1873, solemnly and publicly spoke for themselves, and their demand so formulated is now before the world.

There can be no doubt—it is now very well known—that the proceedings at the Irish National Conference, especially the unanimity, power, and influence there displayed, had been keenly watched by the London government. Mr. Gladstone had been losing ground in the English by-elections for a year past; but as long as there was a hope of the Irish Liberal vote remaining he had no need to fear yet awhile. The conference, however, was read by him as a declaration of war. The Home-Rule leaders themselves realized the critical state of affairs; they were confident Mr. Gladstone would dissolve Parliament and strike at them in the approaching summer; and accordingly they set themselves to prepare for the conflict. The “Christmas holidays” intervening, it was the first or second week in January before the newly-formed Home-Rule League had fully constituted itself and elected its council. Its leaders, however, scenting danger, went [Pg 632] quickly to work, and arranged for beginning in February a thorough organization of the constituencies. In February! They were dealing with a man who had no idea of giving his adversaries six months, or even six weeks, to prepare. They were doomed to be taken unawares and nearly swept off their feet by a surprise as sudden and complete as the springing of a mine.

On the morning of Saturday, January 24, 1874, the people of the British Islands woke to find Parliament dissolved. No surprise could be more complete; for Parliament had stood summoned for the first week in February. At midnight on the 23d Mr. Gladstone sprang this grand surprise on his foes, English Conservative and Irish Home-Ruler, hoping to overwhelm both by the secrecy and suddenness of the attack. And for a while it quite seemed as if he had correctly calculated and would succeed. The wildest confusion and dismay prevailed. There was no time to do anything but simply rush out and fight helter-skelter. In Ireland the first momentary feeling seemed to be one almost of despair. “Oh! had we but even another month.” Yet no cowardly despair; only the first gasp of a brave people taken at utter disadvantage.

For the Home-Rule leaders it was a moment of almost sad and certainly oppressive responsibility and anxiety. They knew how little allowance would be made for the mere dexterity whereby they had been thus outwitted, if they should lose the campaign, as it seemed to many they must. But not a moment did they waste in sighing for what might have been. There was an instantaneous rush to the council-rooms, and before the tidings from London were twenty-four hours old there had begun what may be called a three weeks’ sitting en permanence of the Home-Rule executive. It is almost literally true that it sat night and day throughout that time, receiving and forwarding despatches from and to all parts of the country, by telegraph, by mail, and by special messenger. The Home-Rulers had always held forth as an object which they could achieve, or were determined to achieve, in fair time, and after necessary preparations, the conquest of some seventy seats out of the Irish one hundred and three. To secure even thirty just now in this rush was deemed a daring hope. But it seemed as if enthusiasm and popular indignation at the Gladstonian coup compensated for lack of preparation or organization. It was a great national uprising. North, south, east, and west the constituencies themselves set the Home-Rule flag flying. Ireland was aflame.

This was the first general election under the free and fearless voting of the ballot.[168] No more complaints by voters of “coercion” or “intimidation” by “landlord” or “clergy” or “mob.” Neither bullying nor bribing would any more be of use. At last, for the first time, the mind of the elector himself would prevail, and the constituencies of Ireland were free to pass a verdict on the Act of Union.

One drawback, however, threatened to baffle their purpose. Candidates! [Pg 633] Where were trustworthy candidates to be found? The Home-Rule council had gone upon the plan of refusing to provide or recommend candidates, thinking to force upon the constituencies themselves the responsibility of such selection. “We will set up no candidate-factory here in Dublin,” they said; “it might lead to intrigue. We’ll keep clear of it; let each county and borough choose for itself.” But this had to be given up. The cry from the constituencies showed its folly: “Candidates, candidates! For the love of God send us a candidate, and we’ll sweep this county for Home-Rule.” As a matter of fact, owing to the dearth of suitable candidates, no less than a dozen seats had to be let go by default without any contest at all; while in as many more cases converts from mere liberalism to Home Rule, whose sincerity was hardly acceptable, had, from the same cause, to be let pass in “on good behavior.”

There was, there could be, but little of general plan over the whole field; it was fight all round, the whole island being simultaneously engaged. This was Mr. Gladstone’s able generalship: to prevent the Home-Rule leaders from being able to concentrate their resources on one place at a time. Nevertheless, they were his inferiors neither in ability nor in strategy, as the event proved. Upon the vantage points which he deemed most precious they delivered their heaviest fire, and in no case unsuccessfully.[169] The contests that, each in some peculiar way, most forcibly demonstrated the determination of the people, their intense devotion to the Home-Rule cause, were: Cavan, an Ulster county, where for the first time since the reign of James II. a Catholic (one of two Home-Rulers) was returned; Louth, where the utmost power of the government was concentrated, all in vain, to secure Mr. Fortescue’s seat; Drogheda, where Mr. Whitworth, a princely benefactor to the town, and an estimable Protestant gentleman, was rejected because he was not a Home-Ruler; Wexford, where the son of Sir James Power, a munificent patron of Catholic charities, was rejected by priests and people for the same reason; Limerick County, where a young Whig Catholic squire, whose hoisting of Home Rule was disbelieved in by the electors, received only about one vote to eight cast for a more trustworthy man chosen from the ranks of the people, although the former gentleman was believed in and strenuously supported by the Catholic clergy; and Kildare, where the son of the Duke of Leinster, who owned nearly every acre in the county, was utterly routed!

At length the last gun was fired, the last seat had been lost and won, and as the smoke of battle lifted from the scene men gazed eagerly to see how the campaign had gone. The Home-Rulers had triumphed all along the line! Strictly speaking, they failed as to one, and only one, of the seats which they contested—namely, Tralee, where the O’Donoghue (a former National [Pg 634] leader, now an anti-Home-Ruler) succeeded against them by three votes. They had returned sixty [170] men pledged to their programme, in the late Parliament the Irish representation stood 55 Liberals, 38 Conservatives, and 10 Home-Rulers. It now stood 12 Liberals, 31 Conservatives, and 60 Home-Rulers. The national party thus outnumbered all others, Whig and Tory, combined; and, for the first time since the Union, that measure stood condemned by a majority of the parliamentary representatives of the Irish nation.

Not in Ireland alone was Mr. Gladstone overwhelmed by defeat, his clever stroke of the midnight dissolution notwithstanding. The English elections also went bodily against him. In the middle of the fight he resigned, and the minister who met the new Parliament with the seals of office in his hand and the smile of victory on his countenance was Benjamin Disraeli, the Conservative leader.

There was considerable uneasiness in England when the Irish elections were found to be going for the Home-Rulers, until it turned out that the Disraeli party had a hundred majority on the British vote. “The empire is saved,” gasped the alarmed Englishmen; “we were lost if such a Home-Rule phalanx found parties nearly equal in the House of Commons. They would hold the balance of power and dictate terms. Let us give thanks for so providential a Tory majority.” There was much writing in the English newspapers in this strain. They took it for granted that the Home-Rulers were “balked” or checkmated, for a time at least, by this unexpected Tory preponderance. It cost them over a year to find out that no one rejoiced more than did the Home-Rule leaders in secret over this same state of things; that it was a crowning advantage to the Home-Rulers as a party to have the Liberals in opposition for four or five years.

Returning a number of men as Home-Rulers did not necessarily constitute them a political party. Neither would a resolution on their part so to act altogether carry out such a purpose. The discipline, the unity, the homogeneity, which constitute the real power of a party come not by mere resolving; they may begin by resolution, but they grow by custom and practice. Men behind the scenes in the Home-Rule councils knew that serious uneasiness prevailed amongst the leaders lest their ranks might be broken up or shaken by the prospect or reality of a return of the Liberals to power too soon—i.e., before they, the Home-Rulers, had had time to settle down or solidify into a thoroughly compact body, and before discipline and habit had accustomed them to move and act together. Four or five years training in opposition was the opportunity they most wanted and desired. From a dozen to a score of their rank and file were men who had been Gladstonian Liberals, and whose fealty would be doubtful if in 1875 the disestablisher of the Irish Church called upon them to follow him rather than Mr. Butt. These men would at that time have felt themselves “Liberals first, and Home-Rulers after.” Even in any case, and as it is, there are six or seven of these former Liberals among the Home-Rule fifty-nine who are looked upon as certain to [Pg 635] “cross the house” with their former chief whenever he returns to office. In 1875 these men would have carried a dozen lukewarm waverers along with them; in 1877 they will not carry one, and their own action, discounted beforehand, will disconcert or surprise no one, and will merely cause them to lose their seats on the first opportunity afterwards.

Quickly following upon the general election, the members returned on Home-Rule principles assembled in Dublin, 3d of March, 1874 (the Council Chamber of the city hall being lent to them for that purpose by the municipal authorities), and, without a dissentient voice, passed a series of resolutions constituting themselves a separate and distinct political party for parliamentary purposes. Whigs and Tories, Trojans and Tyrians, were henceforth to be alike to them. The next step was to elect a sort of “cabinet” of nine members, called the Parliamentary Committee, to act as an executive; while the appointment of two of their body most trusted for vigilance, tact, and fidelity, to act as “whips,”[171] completed the formal organization of the Home-Rule members as a party.

Not an hour too soon had they perfected their arrangements. The new Parliament, after a technical opening a fortnight previously, assembled for the real despatch of business on Thursday, the 19th of March, 1874, and next day (on the debate on the Queen’s speech), in the very first hour of their parliamentary life, the Home-Rulers found themselves in the thick of battle. Mr. Butt had taken the field at once with an amendment raising the Irish question. The house was full of curiosity to hear “the Irish Home-Rulers” and see what they were like. It was struck with their combative audacity. It frankly confessed they stood fire “like men,” and that they acquitted themselves on the whole with astonishing ability. From that night forward the British House of Commons realized that it had for the first time a “third party” within its walls. How utterly opposed this is to Englishmen’s ideas of things proper or possible will be gathered from the fact that they construct or seat the chamber for two, and only two, parties; and that they even still make a great struggle to have it regarded as a “constitutional theory” that there must be two, and can be no more than two, parties in the house—namely, “Her Majesty’s Government” and “Her Majesty’s Opposition.” American legislative chambers, as well as French, German, Italian, Austrian, are constructed and seated in a semicircle or amphitheatre. The British, on the contrary, is an oblong hall or short parallelogram, divided right and left by a wide central avenue running its full length from the entrance door to the “table of the House” fronting [Pg 636] the speaker’s chair. There are, therefore, no middle seats; everyone must sit on one side or another—with the ministerialists or Tories on the right of the chair, or with the opposition or Liberals on the left. Half-way up the floor there runs (right and left to each side of the chamber), at right angles to the wide central avenue above referred to, a narrow passage often mentioned in newspaper reports as “the gangway.” “Above the gangway” (or nearest the chair) on each side sit respectively the thick and thin followers of the present or late ministry. “Below the gangway” (or farthest from the chair) sit on each side men who would occupy some section of the middle seats, if the house possessed any—the right and left centres, so to speak. The Home-Rulers sit in a compact body “below the gangway” on the opposition side.

In their third session public opinion has now pretty well gauged and measured the ability and resources of the Home-Rule party. In their first campaign, 1874, though much praised because they were infinitely better in every respect than most people expected, they exhibited plentifully the faults and shortcomings of “raw levies.” Their formal debate on Home Rule, on the 30th of June and 2d of July, was utterly wanting in system and management, and would have been a failure had not the anti-Home-Rule side of the discussion been incontestably much worse handled. But never, probably, in parliamentary history has another body of men learned so quickly, and so rapidly attained a high position, as they have done. By the concurrent testimony of their adversaries themselves the Home-Rule members are the best disciplined and best guided and, in proportion to their numbers, the most able and powerful party in the British House of Commons. In order to have a complete and accurate conception of all that relates to the Irish Home-Rule movement, there remains only to be considered the policy or line of action on which its leaders propose to operate. How do they expect to carry Home Rule?

At no time have the criticisms of the English press on the subject of Home Rule exhibited anything but the shallowest intelligence; and many of the Home-Rule victories have been won because of the stolid ignorance prevailing in the English camp. The English journalists disliking the Irish government, believe and proclaim to their readers only what accords with their prejudices; and accordingly upon them has fallen the fate of the general who refuses to reconnoitre the enemy and accurately estimate his strength. On this subject the British journalist will have it that he “knows all about it,” and has no need to investigate things seriously. From the first hour of the Home-Rule movement he has declared it to be “breaking up,” “failing,” “going down the hill.” It has been so constantly going down that hill in his story that one never can find out when or how it got up there, or whether there is any bottom to the declivity which it can ever reach in such a rapid and persistent downward motion. On no feature of the Home-Rule question has there been more affectation of knowing all about it, and more complacent dogmatism as to its inevitable fate, than this of the Home-Rule plan of action. The way these people look at the matter explains their consolatory conclusions. They view the Home-Rulers simply as sixty members [Pg 637] in a house of six hundred and fifty-eight. “Six hundred to sixty—surely it is absurd! Are the Irish demented, to think their sixty will convert our six hundred?”

This mistake of viewing Mr. Butt and Home Rule just as they view Sir Wilfrid Lawson and prohibition is just where the English show their unpardonable and fatuous want of intelligence. Indeed, others besides English commentators fall into this error. They imagine the Home-Rulers contemplate working Home Rule through the House of Commons by bringing in a “Bill” and having an annual “vote” upon it, as if it were the Permissive bill, or the Woman’s Suffrage, or the Game Law Bill. The Home-Rulers laugh heartily over all this sort of criticism. They dream of nothing of the kind. There is another way of looking at the Home-Rule party and the Home-Rule question in the House of Commons.

Six hundred men can indeed very easily vote down sixty, and make short work of their opposition; always supposing these latter to be units from places wide apart, representing scattered interests or speculative opinions. The House of Commons deals every year, session after session, with several such sixties and seventies and eighties and nineties. But it would be a woful apology for “statesmanship” to regard the Home-Rule sixty in this light. In their case the government have to do, not with sixty of their own general body of British members, but with the Irish representation. The question is not with sixty members of the House, but with Ireland. In any crisis of the empire, as the English Chancellor of the Exchequer said recently about the British representatives on the Suez Canal Board, “their votes would be weighed, not counted.”

The purpose of the Home-Rulers, for the present at all events, is much less with the House of Commons than with the country; they operate on the country through that house. They want to get Ireland into their hands; and even already they have very substantially done so. They want to convince and conciliate and enlist the English democracy; and they have very largely succeeded. With this key to their movements, the supreme ability and wisdom which they have displayed will be better recognized. They have taken the whole of the public affairs of Ireland into their charge. They have taken every public interest in the country under their protection. Whoever wants anything done or attended to, whether he be Catholic, Protestant, or dissenter, now looks to the Home-Rulers, and to them alone. Not the humblest peasant in the land but feels that, if a petty village tyrant has wronged him, the Irish party in the House of Commons will “know the reason why.” They have seized upon every subject deeply affecting the people as a whole, or important classes among them, and showered bills dealing with these subjects on the table of the House of Commons. The distracted premier knows what is beneath all this; he detects the master-hand of Isaac Butt in this deep strategy. These are not sham bills, merely to take up time. They are genuine bills, ably and carefully drawn, and every one of them dealing with a really important and pressing matter for Ireland. Every one of them hits a blot; they are nearly all such bills as our Irish Parliament would pass. Some of the subjects (such as the “Fisheries Bill”) are popular [Pg 638] with very nearly all classes in Ireland; then there are the University Education Bill, the Land-Tenure Bill, the Grand Jury Bill, the Municipal Privileges Bill, the Franchise Hill, the Registration Bill, besides a host of others. Suppose the government give way, and accept one; there is a shout of triumph in Ireland: “The Home-Rulers have forced their hand!” and a cry of dismay and rage from the irreconcilable Orangemen: “The government have succumbed to the Jesuits!” Suppose they resist and vote down the bill; matters are worse. The Irish people are inflamed, and even ministerialists sulk and say: “This is bad policy; ‘tis playing the Home-Rule game.” Suppose, again, Mr. Disraeli adopts a middle course and says: “This is an excellent bill in many respects, but really we have not time to consider it this year.” A louder shout than ever greets such a statement: “There is no room for Irish business. Then let us transact it here at home.”

It is a matter of notoriety that there is growing up among Englishmen, within and without the House of Commons, a feeling that, even apart from all political considerations, something must be done to lighten the work, and remit to other assemblies a large portion of the legislative business now attempted there. The house is breaking down under the load laid upon or undertaken by it. So would Congress, if, in addition to its own functions, it attempted to do the work of the State legislatures besides. There are hundreds, it may be said thousands, of influential English politicians who, seeing this, regard as simply inevitable something in the direction of the Home-Rule scheme, only, of course “not so extreme,” as they call it. Nothing but the bugbear of “dismembering the empire” prevents an English cry for lightening the ship. The Home-Rulers watch all this, and take very good care that the load which the house prefers to retain shall press heavily on it. Not that they pursue or contemplate a policy of mere obstruction, which many persons, friends and foes, thought they would. Mr. Butt has again and again repudiated this. He knows that such a course would only put the house on its mettle, and would defeat his scheme of silently sapping the convictions of the more fairly disposed Englishmen. He knows that the present system cannot last many years. He knows that the English people, once their convictions are affected, soon give way before public exigency. To affect those convictions and to create that exigency is the Home-Rule policy. It is all very well, while the skies are clear and tranquil, for English ministers, past and present, to bluster greatly about the impossibility of entertaining the Irish demand. It is all very well, while the present Tory majority is so strong, for both parties to protest their hostility to Home-Rule. Opinions change wondrously in these cases. When the Disraelian majority has in the course of nature dropped down to forty, thirty, twenty, and ten; when the Liberal leaders find they can attain to office with the Home-Rule vote, and cannot retain office without it, they will—offer Home Rule? No. Offer palliatives—good places for Home-Rulers, and “good measures” for Ireland? Probably. But when these offers are found to be vain; are found to strengthen the power and intensify the resolution of the Home-Rule party, the transformation [Pg 639] which England went through on so many great questions—Catholic Emancipation, Church Disestablishment, etc. (each in its day just as solemnly sworn to be “impossible”)—will begin to set in; and—all the more loudly if such a moment should happen to synchronize with deadlock in the legislature, peril abroad, and popular resentment at home—from England itself will arise the cry that “Ireland must be fairly dealt with.” At such a moment a British minister will easily be found to “discover,” as it were most fortunately, that “the question has hitherto been misunderstood,” and that it is England’s interest not less than Ireland’s to have it satisfactorily adjusted.

For it is not with Ireland alone British ministers will have to settle. Although no reference has previously been made here to the fact, the strongest arm of the Home-Rule party is in England itself. Within the past thirty years there has grown up there, silently and unnoticed, a new political power—hundreds of thousands of Irishmen who, having settled in the large labor marts, have grown to citizenship, power, and influence. From Bristol to Dundee there is not a large city that has not now on its electoral roll Irish voters whose action can decide the fate of candidates. Coincidently with the establishment of the “Home Government Association” in Ireland there arose in England, as a co-operative but independent organization, the “Home-Rule Confederation of Great Britain.” This body has organized the Irish vote all over England and Scotland, and holds virtually in its hands all the vast centres of political thought and action. Reflecting their sentiments and their influence, Dundee, Newcastle, Durham, Tynemouth, Cardiff, and more than a dozen other important English and Scotch constituencies returned English friends of Home Rule to Parliament. It was not the mere matter of so many votes that lent such value to this fact; it was the incentive which it gave to the growing feeling (amongst the English working-classes especially) that the Irish question was one to be sympathized with. An event which occurred in England barely a few weeks ago was, however, beyond all precedent in the sensation which it created. This was the recent Manchester election. A week previously in Burnley it was found impossible to return any but a Home-Rule Liberal, and such a man accordingly headed the poll. In Manchester Mr. Jacob Bright (son of Mr. John Bright) was the Liberal, and a Mr. Powell the Conservative, candidate. It became clear that the Irish vote would decide the issue. One morning the news was flashed through England that both candidates, Liberal and Conservative, had undertaken to vote for Mr. Butt’s motion on Home Rule! What! Manchester, the political capital of England, gone for Home Rule? It was even so, and Mr. Bright, being preferred of the two, was triumphantly returned by the Irish Home-Rule vote.

All this means that on English ground Ireland now has hostages—hostages of security that no daring act of armed violence shall be attempted against her; hostages of friendship, too, as well as of safety; centres of a propagandism, of conciliation; citadels of political power. The growth of feeling in England in favor of the concession of Ireland’s national autonomy is simply incontestable. It may well be that, as many Irish politicians declare, “the battle of Home Rule for Ireland [Pg 640] will be fought and won on British soil.”

And this is how Ireland stands in 1876—erect, powerful, resolute, united. What the future may have in store for her, victory or defeat, is beyond human ken. This effort too may fail, as many a gallant endeavor in her behalf has failed before. All that can be said is that so far it has progressed with a success unparalleled in Irish political annals; that it is wisely guided, boldly animated, faithfully upheld. Much depends on her own children, at home and in foreign lands; on their devotion, their prudence, their courage, their perseverance. May this new dawn of unity, of concord of conciliation herald the day they have so long hoped to see!

And thou, O mighty Lord! whose ways

Are far above our feeble minds

To understand,

Sustain us in these doubtful days,

And render light the chain that binds

Our fallen land!

Look down upon our dreary state

And, through the ages that may still

Roll sadly on,

Watch thou o’er hapless Erin’s fate,

And shield at least from darker ill

The blood of Conn.

[161] This odious law, known as the “Irish Convention Act,” was passed by the Irish Parliament in order to forbid the Volunteers and other friends of Parliamentary Reform from “overawing the legislature.” Its repeal has been steadily resisted by the British Parliament, which finds the restriction now as invaluable as the Irish people find it oppressive.

[162] Some time previously he had publicly said that Repeal he understood, but the new programme he did not. Since that time, however, he gave ample proof that he had come to understand it clearly.

The clergy of his diocese, the archbishop himself in one instance presiding at their meeting, had sent in their formal adhesion, accompanied by large contributions of money, to the association.

[163] Almost incredible as it may seem to some readers, this was the only portion of the arrangements never once required. Throughout the four days of protracted and earnest debate, as will be detailed further on, no occasion arose for taking a division.

[164] List of Conference Ticket-holders—names and addresses—National Conference, November, 1873. Dublin: Home-Rule League Publications. 1874.

[165] Since elected (1874) for the county of Cork, along with Mr. McCarthy Downing. He had been at one time a Protestant dissenting minister.

[166] There was one dissentient to one of the resolutions—a gentleman named Thomas Mooney, late of California and other places.

[167] It is impossible to treat of the Irish Home-Rule movement without a special reference to this reverend gentleman, who is one of the most prominent figures in the group of Home-Rule leaders. He is a man of European reputation in science, and of the most upright and noble character. He is greatly loved and universally respected. Scarcely has Mr. Butt himself been more instrumental in the success of the movement; and there are now few names in Ireland more popular than that of “Professor Galbraith.”

[168] The ballot-voting in Ireland under the act of 1873, unlike that in America, is strictly secret: there being no “ticket” to be seen by outsiders. Only on entering the booth, where the few persons necessarily present are sworn to secrecy, the voter receives a paper on which the names of the candidates are printed. In a secret compartment of the booth the voter marks a cross alongside the name of the man for whom he wishes to vote, folds up the paper so as to conceal the mark which he has made, brings it forward, and drops it through a slit into a sealed box. He then quits the booth, and no one, inside or outside (but himself), knows for whom he has voted.

[169] The defeat of his Irish cabinet minister and former chief secretary, the Right Hon Chichester Fortescue, in Louth County, was generally regarded as the crushing blow of the whole campaign, as Mr. Fortescue was Mr. Gladstone’s official representative in Ireland. He was deemed invulnerable in Louth, having sat for it twenty-seven years, and being brother of Lord Claremont, one of the largest and best landlords in the county. The government laughed to scorn the idea of disturbing him. The Home-Rulers selected for this critical fight Mr. A. M. Sullivan, editor of the Nation. It was a desperate struggle: but not only was the Home-Ruler returned at the head of the poll, but he polled two to one against the cabinet minister.

[170] One of them, in Leitrim, subsequently lost his return, though in a majority, by a stupid mistake of one of his agents.

[171] It may be doubted whether there is any man amongst the Home-Rule members better entitled than their senior “whip,” Captain J. P. Nolan, to be ranked as next to Mr. Butt himself in importance and in service. On him it rests to keep the party on the alert; to note and advise with his chief upon every move of the enemy; to have his own men always “on hand,” so that they may never be caught napping; to keep his colleagues informed by circular (or “whip”) of all forthcoming bills or motions of importance; and finally, to act as “teller” or counter on a division. In fact, if Mr. Butt is the head or brain of the Home-Rule party, Captain Nolan is its right hand. He belongs to an old Catholic family, the O’Nolans of Leix, who in 1645 were put upon allotments beyond the Shannon in return for their estates in fertile Leix, which were handed over to Cromwell’s troopers. Captain Nolan is a man of considerable literary ability. He is a captain in the Royal Artillery and as a scientific and practical artillerist stands in the highest repute. He is the inventor of “Nolan’s Range-finder,” adopted in the Russian, French, and Austrian armies.

THE VALLEY OF THE AUDE

The Aude is a rambling, capricious river of ancient Languedoc that rises on the confines of Spain, among the oriental Pyrenees, five thousand feet above the level of the sea. At first, imprisoned and half-stifled among the narrow gorges of the mountains, its waters, clear and sparkling, rush noisily and impetuously along, struggling for room; but as soon as they find space in the sunny valleys they slacken their speed as if to enjoy the very verdure they create; they grow turbid, sometimes the current dwindles away to a mere thread among poor barren hills, and again at the first storm spreads wide its course through the rich vine-bordered plain. At Carcassonne it becomes languid, and, turned eastward by the Montagne Noire, passes along beneath the sombre line of the oaks, beeches, and chestnuts that cover the mountains, and when, after being fed by thirty-six tributaries, it falls wearily into the sea a little above Narbonne, it is no longer the limpid, dashing stream we met in the mountains, but troubled in its waters and indolent in flow.

We came first upon the Aude at Carcassonne, where it takes a bend towards the sea—the Ville-basse, a thriving town in the plain that dates from the time of St. Louis; the old fortified city on the height above, historic, legendary, and picturesque. And ancient too, for it was, according to some ambitious writers, founded by the fugitive Trojans, or, what is better still, by one of the grandsons of Noe, and prosperous in the time of the Pharaos. Be that as it may, it was in the possession of the Romans before the coming of Cæsar. In the fifth century after Christ it fell into the hands of the Visigoths, who are said to have brought hither from the sack [Pg 641] of Rome jewelled utensils that came from the palace of King Solomon and the vessels of gold that belonged to the Temple of Jerusalem, carried away by Titus and Vespasian. These treasures were long believed hidden in a deep well still to be seen in the upper city, but during a dry season a few years ago it was explored without any discovery to confirm the tradition. They were probably taken to Spain, or carried to Ravenna by Theodoric the Great, to whom several of the towers of Carcassonne are attributed. There are two walls around the old city: the inner ones, with their circular towers of the time of the Visigoths; the outer, with fortified gateways that date at least from the time of Louis IX. And then there is a venerable quadrangular castle, with five towers and a moat that bears the marks of many a hard assault, but now serves chiefly to give a picturesque look and a pleasing air of antiquity to the landscape. The square tower next the Aude, if not all five, is said to have bowed down before the great Emperor of the West. But we are anticipating.

After the Ostrogoths came the Saracens, flushed with victory, from Spain, and they had possession of Carcassonne when Charlemagne came into Gaule Narbonnaise and laid siege to the city, determined to drive them beyond the Pyrenees. The delightful old traditions of that day, which are so much better than history, say it then bore the name of Atax. According to them, the emperor remained beneath the walls five long years without the slightest success, notwithstanding the valor of his peerless knights. So astonishing a resistance was solely owing to Dame Carcas, a mere woman, and a Moor at that, who not only possessed remarkable courage, but was shrewd to the last degree, as we are prepared to show. Of course, after a five years’ siege the provisions had dwindled away to a very low ebb, and the inhabitants had naturally diminished in proportion. In fact, everybody was at length dead in the city except stout Dame Carcas, who seemed to have lived on her wits. This wonderful woman was not discouraged. She acted on the principle of the inscription over the gates of Busyrane—“Be bold, be bold, and evermore be bold.” She garnished the walls with effigies in armor—mere scarecrows—and, making the round of the rampart, she kept up such a hail of arrows on the enemy, as if she had the arms of Briareus, that they marvelled, as well they might, at the resources of so well-supplied and vigilant a garrison. Wishing to convince Charlemagne that there was no possibility of his reducing the city by famine, she gorged her very last pig with her last bushel of wheat, and threw it over the ramparts. It was naturally dashed to pieces, and its internal economy fully displayed, as shrewd Dame Carcas intended. The besiegers, astonished to see the very lowest of animals fed on the purest of wheat, now supposed the supplies quite inexhaustible, and Charlemagne, as sensible as he was great, at once raised the siege. Not without regret, however, and, as he turned back to take a last look at the walls before which he had spent in vain so much time and labor, wondrous to relate, one of the mighty towers of the Goths bowed down before him in reverence, and never regained its perpendicular, as may be seen to this day by any one who goes to Carcassonne.

Dame Carcas, you may be sure, was on the lookout. Satisfied with [Pg 642] having got the better of the mighty emperor, she called him back, opened the ponderous gates, and acknowledged his sovereignty. Charlemagne, full of admiration at her courage and wit, determined the city should be called after her. Hence the name of Carcassonne. It is a pity any doubt should be cast over so pleasing a tradition, but some do say, let us hope without proof, that it bore this name in the time of the Romans. We do not feel obliged to believe it. People who are historically as well as religiously “convinced against their will, are of the same opinion still.” We stick to the Middle Ages, when the tradition was so fully credited that a bas-relief, a kind of emblazonry, of the bust of an Amazon was placed over the principal gate of the city, with the words below: Carcas sum—I am Carcas.

According to a popular legend, Charlemagne besieged Carcassonne twice. The second time it was defended by Anchises, King of the Saracens, who was aided by Satan himself and an efficient corps of African sorcerers. However, the demons were routed, and the pious emperor set up a fortress of the faith, known to us as the cathedral of St. Nazaire, which is in the southeast corner of the city, built into the very walls forming a part of the old fortifications. This church is still the jewel of the place. The crypt alone is of the Carlovingian age. The nave and aisles of the upper church are of the eleventh century, in the Roman style, grave and sombre, with small windows, massive pillars, and thick walls capable of resisting the enemy. These were blessed by Pope Urban II. in 1096. The present choir was built in St. Louis’ time, and forms a striking contrast to the heavy gloomy nave, for it is of the pointed style, light and elegant, with seven stained glass windows of wonderful beauty, and so close together as to leave no wall. The arches seem to rest on the eight colonnettes that frame the windows. In one of them may be read the whole legend of SS. Nazarius and Celsus, celebrated in Italian art. Titian has painted them in armor in a beautiful altarpiece of the church that bears their name at Brescia. St. Saturnin, however, the apostle of Toulouse, first announced the faith in this region. St. Nazaire is reputed to have arrived soon after. His mother was a Roman matron converted by St. Peter, and he himself was baptized by the apostle, who commissioned him to preach the Gospel. At Milan he exhorted and comforted SS. Gervasius and Protasius in prison, and was beaten with staves by order of the governor. Celsus was his spiritual child and co-laborer. At Genoa they were cast into the sea, which refused to drown them, and they walked back over the angry billows to land. After their apostolic journey to Southern Gaul, they were beheaded at Milan just without the Porta Romana, where a beautiful church still stands to perpetuate their memory. But it is inferior to St. Nazaire of Carcassonne, which is at once antique and poetic. What deep shadows in its venerable aisles! What rainbow lights in its jewelled windows! The rose of the north transept is composed of twelve lobes, in six of which blue predominates; in the other six, green—very beautiful in the sunset light. In the window of the south transept the lobes are in two rows, so disposed that green is under cramoisie, and [Pg 643] cramoisie under green, producing quite a magical effect.

North of the cathedral, just beyond its ruined cloister, is a donjon of the thirteenth century, called the Tour de l’Evêque, which contains a well, an oven, and everything necessary to sustain a regular siege. Here, through the vines, figs, and almond-trees, is the best view of the church, with its time-stained turrets, its buttressed walls, and the fine tracery of its windows. The old city is before us with its towers and antique walls, on which every storm that has swept over Southern France has left its trace. Simon de Montfort scaled them early in the thirteenth century. In the fourteenth, they braved the Black Prince, who contented himself with feasting on the well-stocked larders of the Basse Ville and drinking its rich wines, and afterwards setting fire to the place. In the sixteenth century the city was invaded by the Huguenots, who tore a statue of the Blessed Virgin from its niche and dragged it through the streets, which so enraged the Catholics that they rose in their fury and slaughtered all the offenders on whom they could lay hands. Then they carried the statue back to its place in solemn procession. And, when a royal edict of 1562 assigned the Calvinists a meeting-house just out of the city, the people barred the gates against the returning assembly, and drove them into the very Aude.

But let us leave these historic details, and, turning back into the pleasanter paths of old romance, follow the Emperor Charlemagne along the valley of the Aude. A little south of the direct road from Carcassonne to Narbonne, we come to the village of La Grasse, of a thousand souls, in a deep valley of the Orbieu, surrounded by the rocky heights of the Corbières. This village grew up around a celebrated Benedictine Abbey that flourished here for more than a thousand years—one of the most important in Occitania. Its foundation is so remote that it has become the theme of many popular traditions. These are embodied in an old romance, said to have been written by Philomène, secretary of Charlemagne, by the emperor’s order, and under his inspection, and translated in the thirteenth century by William of Padua, a monk of La Grasse.

Charlemagne had just taken Carcassonne, where five towers bowed down before him. He founded several churches, such as St. Nazaire and St. Saturnin, and appointed Roger, a clerk of noble family, bishop of the place. Then he marched towards Narbonne, which was in possession of the Saracens, intending to besiege it. He had with him Pope Leo III., most of the cardinals, the patriarch of Jerusalem, Turpin, archbishop of Reims, and an infinite number of other prelates, abbots, and priests, together with Roland, Oliver, Oger the Dane, Solomon of Britanny, and Count Florestan his brother, and other famous paladins, with dukes, counts, and barons too many to enumerate. While traversing the valley of the Orbieu, one of the principal tributaries of the Aude, Archbishop Turpin came across seven hermits, viz., Thomas of Rouen, Richard of Pavia, Robert Prince of Hungary, Germain of Scotland, Alayran of Flanders, Philip of Cologne, and Bartholomew, son of the King of Egypt, who, after completing their studies at Paris, left the world in search of Christ [Pg 644] and were led by angels to this solitary valley, where they built an oratory in honor of St. Mary the Virgin. Here they had lived for twenty years on herbs, roots, and wild fruit, and the people, in view of their thin, wasted aspect, as well as the arid country, called the place of their retreat the Vallée Maigre.

When Archbishop Turpin brought the emperor and Pope Leo III. to see these holy eremites, they shed an abundance of tears and rendered thanks unto God. Charlemagne resolved to erect a superb abbey in the place of their modest oratory, and so well did he endow it that the monks he established here were soon able to fertilize the wild valley to such a degree that its name, at the suggestion of Turpin and the Earl of Flanders, was appropriately changed to that of La Vallée Grasse.

During the erection of this monastery a series of combats took place between the Moors and the Christians, each one more marvellous than the other. First, Matrandus, King of Narbonne, suddenly came upon the encampment of the valley with a numerous army, but he was defeated by Charlemagne and pursued to the point where the Niel empties into the Orbieu. There he heard the sound of a mighty horn. It was the olifant of Roland, who was coming to his aid. He made the Saracens bite the dust by thousands, and Matrandus had barely time to take refuge in Narbonne and close the gates behind him.

Then an enemy far more redoubtable made his appearance. It was Marcilion, King of all Spain, accompanied by sixteen other kings, with seven hundred thousand men. Charlemagne had two hundred and forty thousand. The battle lasted five days. At length the Saracens were vanquished. Five hundred thousand of their number were slain, together with the sixteen kings, whereas the Christians only lost thirty-seven thousand, among whom, however, were five bishops, fourteen abbots, seven counts, eight hundred barons, and the Abbot of St. Denis, who, as he was breathing his last, besought the emperor to complete the abbey and bury him in it. His wishes were not disregarded. The abbey was completed. A church was built. In the church were many chapels, and in each chapel Archbishop Turpin, accompanied by many bishops and abbots, solemnly deposited sacred relics. It was now time to consider the appointment of the abbot, and while they were discussing the subject Marcilion reappeared, this time with only three hundred thousand horsemen, but Roland drove them before him into Roussillon, where he slew more than one hundred and seventy thousand men.

Then took place a fresh battle with Matrandus, and Roland, in a hand-to-hand encounter with Tamise, brother of the King of Narbonne, clove him in two like an acorn with Durandal, his unerring sword. In vain did the kings of Catalonia league together to avenge the death of Tamise. They slaughtered, it is true, the seven holy hermits, who, weary of the tumult in the valley of the Orbieu, had imprudently betaken themselves to another solitude, but they were repulsed by the abbot of La Grasse and his sixty monks with considerable loss. And yet they would rather, they said, have demolished the abbey than taken ten cities.

Several battles ensued beneath the walls of Narbonne before Charlemagne took that city, and after, in the course of which Roland clove in [Pg 645] two Borrel de la Combe; Oliver clove in two Justeamundus, the brother-in-law of Matrandus; and Charlemagne himself performed the like exploit on Almanzor, King of Cordova. Durandal, Hauteclair, Joyeuse, and other famous swords mowed down the Saracens like ripe grain, cutting off heads and arms and legs, and causing such torrents of blood to flow that the infidels finally renounced all hostilities against the abbey of La Grasse.

During the night before the consecration of the abbatial church was to be made by the Pope, the Divine Redeemer, so runs the legend, himself vouchsafed to come down from heaven in person, accompanied by a multitude of angels, to consecrate the edifice. The following morning, when the Pope and Charlemagne and Archbishop Turpin saw the marks of divine consecration, they, as well as Roland and Oliver and the rest, shed tears of joy, and blessed God, and, while still weeping, took leave of the monks, begging to be remembered in their daily orisons.

Charlemagne now departed for Spain, to carry war in his turn into the country of the infidel, and with what prodigies of valor is known to all men. The memory of his passage through the valley of the Aude has never been effaced from the popular mind. The name of Roland, too, echoes all through this region, like the horn he won from the giant Jatmund. Not far from La Grasse is a cliff that still bears his name. It was here the great paladin, when weary of hewing in pieces the Saracens, used to come to take breath and whet his sword. The iron ring to which he fastened his steed Brigliadoro is still in its place, and no hand in these degenerate days is strong enough to wrench it from the rock. The people of this region, great lovers of the marvellous, tell how he used to gallop over the Montagne Noire on so fiery a steed that its feet shook the very mountains beneath them and left their imprint on the rocks, as may be seen to this day on the old road between Ilhes and Lastours. And a little higher up is a dolmen that bears the marks of his sword and the print of his hands. This dolmen is on a slight eminence near a little stream. The table is in the form of a disc about seven feet in diameter and one foot thick. It must weigh several hundred tons, and would require a great number of men of ordinary strength to place it on its present supports. The people say Roland, by way of amusement in his moments of leisure, hewed out this rock with his sword, and then used it as a quoit, which he threw with careless ease from La Valdous to Narbonne, and from Narbonne back to La Valdous. The prints of his mighty fingers are still clearly perceptible. It was he who set this light plaything up on its huge pillars, and not the Druids, and to this day it is called the Palet de Roland. Near by is a mysterious hole called Roland’s tomb, where the people insist he was buried, according to his express wish that he might repose in the place of his innocent amusements.

There are many of these Celtic monuments in this vicinity, the object of great conjecture among archæologists. The popular imagination is not so embarrassed, as we have seen. A legend is generally attached to them, often picturesque and dramatic. At Carnac, every one knows, it was St. Corneille who changed his pagan pursuers into monumental rocks by the petrifying influence of his wrathful visage.

[Pg 646] On the banks of the Lamouse, a little creek in this region, is a tall colossus of a rock called the peulvan, that stands quite solitary on a little hill. It is, or was, fifteen feet high, a yard and a half broad, and not more than half a yard thick. The people say it descends to an inaccessible depth in the earth. If we may believe them, forty years ago it was no taller than a man, but it has grown higher and higher every year from some magic subterranean influence.

People who live among lofty mountains and dark forests, by noisy streams and waterfalls, or even on the borders of peaceful, dormant lakes whose mists fill the valleys and shroud the neighboring hills, are apt to be imaginative and dreamy. Here fairies and Undines have their origin. Here White Ladies, such as Scott has described in the valley of Glendearg, come forth in floating vapory robes to flit about the melancholy vales and fade away with the dawn. Such is the legend of Lake Puivert, according to which Reine Blanche, a princess of Aragon, issues every evening from her ancestral towers, and descends into the valley to breathe the freshness of the air. This legendary queen was no fair young princess who had become an untimely victim to melancholy—“sweetest melancholy”—but a dethroned queen, so infirm and decrepit as to have lost the very use of her limbs, and had come to end her days in the old manor-house of Puivert, where she had been born. A crowd of servants surrounded her day and night, attentive to her slightest caprice. Every evening at set of sun a herald ascended to the battlements of the tower to proclaim the coming forth of Lady Blanche. No sooner had the echoes of his horn died away than she appeared at the principal gate, borne on a litter by four stout men. If the weather was calm and the sky clear, she was taken to a huge block of marble that rose out of the edge of the lake, where she loved to breathe the freshness of the night air and the resinous odor of the old pines that grew on the mountain above. Two pages in purple waved great fans to keep off the insects. There was nothing to disturb the delicious solitude but the swallows that skimmed over the surface of the lake and the murmuring rivulets that came down from the hills, and here she would remain in silent reverie till the light faded completely away, when she was borne back to her tower by the light of torches. It frequently happened, however, that the lake was so swollen by storms that her marble throne was entirely submerged. Then she went to the chapel of Our Lady of Bon-Secours to pray the wrath of the threatening waters might be stayed. One day she conceived the idea of piercing an immense rock that closed the entrance to the valley, hoping by this means to let off the surplus waters and keep the lake always at the same level, but, alas! at the very moment when she thought her wishes were to be crowned with success, the pressure of the waters against the weakened base of the rock overthrew it, and, rushing through the narrow gorge, overwhelmed serfs, pages, and La Reine Blanche herself. Such is the legendary cause assigned for the rupture of Lake Puivert in 1279, which destroyed the neighboring town of Mirepoix. The feudal manor-house, so well known in the history of the country, escaped, being on an elevation. It is still haunted by the troubled [Pg 647] spirit of Queen Blanche, who, in misty white garments, may be seen at nightfall flitting about the low valley, wringing her pale hands over the ruin she caused.

Nor is this Queen of Aragon the only White Lady of the land. The old people of Limoux tell of women in white who once a year come forth by night from a crystal palace in the bowels of the neighboring hill of Taich, and go to the fountain of Las Encantados—the fairies—where with a golden spatula they beat their linen, after the fashion of the country, till the dawn of day. These ghostly laundresses are not confined to the valley of the Aude. In Brittany and Normandy they likewise haunt many regions, but they beat their linen with an iron hand, which they do not hesitate to apply to the ear of the curious intruder.

On the side of a steep hill that descends to the Rebenty, another branch of the Aude, are three narrow arches to the cave of Las Encantados—the grotto of the fairies—where, in the depths, the noise of the turbulent stream is repeated by subterranean echoes, and changed, now into a soft harmonious murmur and now into a solemn roar, giving the effect of an organ in a cathedral. Nothing could be more impressive by night than this mysterious music, which the people formerly ascribed to some weird influence.

But to return to the royal foundation of La Vallée Grasse. That this abbey was really founded under the patronage of Charlemagne is proved by a charter of the year 778, still preserved in the prefecture at Carcassonne, signed with his own imperial monogram. According to this, the name of the first abbot was Nimphridius; and the house appears to have been so well endowed that it held lands and livings and seigneuries, not only throughout the province, but on the other side of the Pyrenees. Louis le Débonnaire took it under his special protection, together with three cells dependent thereon, to wit: St. Cucufat on the banks of the Aude, St. Pierre on the Clamoux, and La Palme on the seashore. In fact, favor towards it seemed hereditary in the Carlovingian race. Louis IX. kept up the tradition, and when in Palestine wrote to his mother and the sénéchal of Carcassonne, recommending the abbey of La Grasse to their protection. The kings of Aragon, too, respected its extensive domains in their realm.

The grateful abbey never forgot its illustrious founder. Every morning at the conventual Mass the bread and wine were offered by the lord abbot, or his representative, at the Offertory, for the repose of Charlemagne’s soul, till authorized to render him the cultus due to a saint, from which time the twenty-eighth of January was kept in his honor as a festival of the first class.

It is one of the traditions of this monastery that, when Pope Leo III. was about to dedicate the church, he received a supernatural warning that it had been miraculously consecrated, and on approaching the altar he discovered the marks of the divine hand, which remained visible till the end of the fourteenth century, when the greater part of the church was consumed by fire. It was then rebuilt in a style corresponding to the wealth of the abbey, with numerous chapels, a choir with rare carvings, and a silver retablo with twelve silver statues in the niches, all plated with pure gold. The monastic [Pg 648] buildings were surrounded by fortified walls of vast circuit. They were grouped around an immense cloister, the arcades of which were supported by marble columns. On the east side were the church, dormitories, infirmary, and rooms for visitors. At the north were the abbot’s spacious residence, the granary, bakery, stables, etc. South and west were the chapterhouse, the large refectory, and houses appropriated to the aged monks. A hospital, where the poor were fed and sick strangers received gratuitous care, was further off, near the principal gate. There was an extensive park, with avenues of chestnut-trees, watered by the Orbieu, which also turned the grist-mills, oil-mills, and cloth-mills. The water was also brought into the abbey. The library now forms part of the public library of Carcassonne.

The abbey of La Grasse was immediately dependent on the Holy See, in acknowledgment of which it paid an annual tribute of five gold florins. And the Bishop of Carcassonne, and the Archbishop of Narbonne, though the primate, were obliged to recognize its independence of their jurisdiction before they could obtain admittance to the abbey. The abbot from the time of Abbot Nicolas Roger, the uncle of Pope Clement VI., had the right of wearing pontifical vestments. He held legal jurisdiction over eighty-three towns, besides which, three other abbeys, three monasteries, twenty-four priories, and sixty-seven parish churches were dependent on the house of La Grasse.

This great abbey was suppressed in 1790, after existing over a thousand years, and before long was transformed into barracks and manufactories. The church became a melancholy ruin, with its columns lying among the tall grass, the capitals covered with lichens, bushes growing in among the crumbling walls, and here and there scattered mutilated escutcheons of the old lords of the land and the very bones from their sepulchres.

But the town of La Grasse, that sprang up under the mild sway of the old abbots, is still queen of the lower Corbières by its population and historic interest. It is noted for its blanquette—a sparkling white wine, which rivals that of Limoux.

As to the battles in the valley of the Orbieu, it is more certain that the Saracens, on their way to attack Carcassonne, were met by William, Duke of Aquitaine, in this valley, where, though defeated, he performed prodigies of valor, and made the followers of Mahound buy their victory dearly. They soon withdrew into Spain, carrying with them rich spoils from Narbonne, among which were seven statues of silver, long famous in Andalusia, and many marble columns, still to be seen in the famous mosque of Cordova, on which they forced the vast number of prisoners they carried with them to labor.

Nor was the abbey of La Grasse the only famous monastery of this region. There was the Cistercian abbey of Fonfroide, founded in the twelfth century by Ermengarde, Vicomtesse of Narbonne, to whom Pierre Roger, the troubadour, gave the mystic name of Tort n’avez, and so well known from the permanent Court of Love she held in her gay capital. This abbey at one time contained two hundred monks, who were great agriculturists, and understood drainage and all the improvements we regard as modern. They [Pg 649] brought vast tracts of land under cultivation, and, by their industry and economy, became wealthy and powerful. In 1341, this abbey had nineteen thousand two hundred and thirty-four animals, including sheep, cattle, mules, swine, etc.

Among the celebrated monks of Fonfroide was Peter of Castelnau, whom the Holy See appointed one of the legates to suppress the heresy of the Albigenses, and who acquired so melancholy a celebrity by his conflicts with Count Raymond of Toulouse and his tragical end. Another member, eminent for his knowledge and piety, of this house was Arnaud de Novelli, uncle of Pope Benedict XII. He was made cardinal by Pope Clement V., and sent as one of the legates to England to make peace between Edward II. and his barons. He died in 1317, and lies buried under the high altar of the abbey church. Pope Benedict XII. himself was a monk at Fonfroide, and succeeded his uncle as abbot of the house. As pope, he is specially celebrated for the part he took among the theologians of the day in discussing the question of the immediate state of the righteous after death, and the decretal which he finally issued in 1355—Benedictus Dominus in sanctis suis—in which he declares that the souls of the justified, on leaving their bodies, are at once admitted to behold the Divine Essence face to face without intermediary; that by this vision they are rendered truly happy, and in enjoyment of everlasting repose; whereas those who die in the state of mortal sin descend immediately into hell.

The abbey of Fonfroide, after seven hundred years’ existence, was closed in 1790, but, more fortunate than La Grasse, it is now inhabited by Bernardins, who seem to have inherited the virtues and spirit of the early Cistercians.

The tombs of the old vicomtes of Narbonne, who were mostly buried here, are no longer to be seen. William II., by an act of May 25, 1424, ordered his remains to be taken to Fonfroide, wherever he might die. He left two thousand livres for his tomb, which was to be of stone and magnificently adorned, and an annuity of twenty-five livres as a foundation for a daily Mass for the repose of his soul. He was killed by the English at the battle of Verneuil, the following August; his body was fastened to a gibbet, and had to be ransomed before it could be brought to Fonfroide.

Another noted abbey of the country was that of St. Hilaire, built over the tomb of its patron saint—not St. Hilary of Arles, who walked all the way to Rome in the dead of winter, but the first bishop of Carcassonne, who never walked anywhere, dead or alive—at least, out of his own diocese. This abbey was built in the good old days of Charlemagne, who seems to have never missed an opportunity of building a church or endowing a monastery—if we are to believe all the traditions of France—and of course endowed this one. However, Roger I., Count of Carcassonne, enriched it still more. He never went into battle without invoking St. Hilaire, and to him he ascribed the success of his arms. In his gratitude, he had the body of the saint exhumed and placed in a beautiful tomb of sculptured marble, and promised to furnish the twelve monks—all there were at that time—with suitable clothing during the remainder of his life, which says very little in favor of Charlemagne’s endowment. The abbey ultimately became very [Pg 650] prosperous, and, among other possessions, owned the most of Limoux. It lost its importance, however, in the sixteenth century, and was finally secularized. In one of the rooms may still be seen the names of its fifty abbots. The beautiful cloister of the fourteenth century is well preserved, and the tomb of St. Hilaire, with its sculptures of the tenth century, representing the legend of St. Saturnin, still serves as the altar of the church. The abbey stands in a bend of the Lauquet, that has escaped from the Aude, with its little village around it, among low hills covered with excellent vineyards. Here blow alternately the Cers and the Marin, the only two winds known in the valley of the Aude, shut in as it is between the Montagne Noire on the north and the Corbières on the south. These winds blow with alternate violence, like two great guns, the greater part of the year, and when one dies away the other generally takes up the blast. The very trees are planted with reference to them. People who would live according to the Delphic principle of “not too much of anything,” should not come to the valley of the Aude. The Cers increases in violence as it approaches the sea, where it seems to put on the very airs of the great planet Jupiter itself, noted for the violence of its winds; whereas the Marin waits till it gets away from the sound of “the jawing wave” before it ventures to come out in its full strength. However, as people often take pride in displaying their very infirmities, as if desirous of being noted for something, so the inhabitants of this valley boast of their winds. They did the same in the days of Seneca the philosopher, who says that though the Circius, or Cers, overthrew the very buildings, the people of Gaul still praised it, and thought they were indebted to it for the salubrity of their climate. Perhaps they acted on the principle of Augustus Cæsar, who erected an altar to propitiate the Circius when he was in Gaul, so much did he dread it.

The canal of Languedoc passes through the valley of the Aude. Of course the grand idea of uniting the two seas could have originated with no less a person than Charlemagne himself. Francis the First also agitated the question. The principle on which canals are constructed was known in the Middle Ages. That universal genius, Leonardo da Vinci, was the first to make a practical application of it. In spite of this, the canal of Languedoc required a century and a half of profound study on the part of men of talent before it was decided on. The difficulty of its construction can hardly be realized in these days. It was not till the time of Louis XIV. the work was undertaken by M. de Riquet, who brought down waters from the Montagne Noire to feed the basins in the valley of the Aude. The whole canal was built in seventeen years, and cost about seventeen millions of livres. He did not live to see it opened. That satisfaction was reserved for his sons. The people awaited the day with impatience, and when it was opened, May 15, 1681, there was one great outburst of joy and admiration all the way from the Garonne to the Mediterranean. The intendant of the province, and all the capitouls of Toulouse, assembled in the morning in the cathedral of that city. The archbishop officiated. Nor was M. Riquet forgotten amid the thanksgiving. His sons were present. And [Pg 651] at the close of Mass, the archbishop turned and said: Brethren, let us pray for the repose of the soul of Pierre Paul de Riquet. Every head bent a few moments in silent prayer for the benefactor of the country.

A richly carpeted bark, from which floated the national colors, had been prepared. The Abbot of St. Jernin solemnly blessed the waters of the canal, and the dignitaries set out amid the applause of the multitude, followed by two other barks filled with musicians. At Castelnaudary, Cardinal de Bonzi, with several other prelates and lords, joined them in a magnificent galley, amid the noise of cannon and the peal of trumpets, followed by twenty barks full of merchandise. It was not till May 24 this flotilla arrived at Béziers, where it was hailed, as all along the way, with salutes and cries of joy. These demonstrations were warranted by the immense benefit of the canal to the country, and though now in a great measure superseded by the railway, it is still of the greatest utility.

Before the Aude reaches Carcassonne, it flows directly through the pretty, industrious town of Limoux, where the shores are connected by an old Roman bridge. Four hills enclose the charming valley, on the sides of which grow the vines that yield the blanquette of Limoux, which is famous in the wine market. On one of these hills stands a rural chapel held in great veneration by the people around—that of Notre Dame de Marceille, one of the most frequented places of pilgrimage in southern France, which has been sung by poets, studied by archæologists, and sketched by artists. Nothing could be lovelier than its situation. From the plateau around the chapel you look down on the Flacian valley, watered by the Aude. To the west are the walls of Limoux in the midst of its vineyards and manufactories. Further off are bare cliffs and wooded hills, while on the very edge of the horizon rise, like an army of giants, the summits of the Pyrenees, almost always covered with snow or shrouded in mist. What a variety of temperature and products this landscape embraces—the cold mountain summit and the heat of the plain, verdant heights and naked rocks, the frowning hills and joyous valleys, gloomy forests of pines and frolicsome vines, fresh meadows and fields of golden grain! Through all this flows the Aude, past old legendary castles now in ruins, along marvellous grottoes a sibyl might envy, its current spanned by bridges with their tutelar Madonnas, but not disdaining to turn the wheels of the petty industries below us, though it has its source amid impassable gulfs among yonder peaks lost in the clouds.

A paved rampe leads up the hillside to Notre Dame de Marceille, more than six hundred feet long, which the pilgrims ascend on their knees, praying as they go. Half-way up, they stop to rest beside a trickling fountain and drink of the water that falls drop by drop. On the arch above is the inscription in letters of gold:

“Mille mali species Virgo levavit aqua.”[172]

The present church dates from 1488, but a sanctuary is known to have existed here as early as 1011. From age to age it has been the object of ever increasing veneration among the people. It belonged at one time to the abbey of St. [Pg 652] Hilaire, but in 1207 passed into the hands of the Dominicans of Prouilhe. You enter by a porch, which is supported by slender columns that give it an air of elegance. On the front is inscribed:

“Stay, traveller: adore God, invoke Mary.”

And on the sides:

“O Jesus, we have merited thy wrath. Efface from our hearts every stain of sin, that they may be rendered worthy to become thy dwelling-place!”

“Spotless Maid, Virgin Mother, on whom the Almighty lavishes the gifts of his love, with him, with thee, bring us by thy prayers to dwell for ever in the celestial abode.”

Another fountain near the porch bears also its inscription:

Hic putens fons signatus. Parit unda salutem.

Aeger junge fidem. Sic bibe, sarnus eris.

During the cholera of 1855 more than sixty thousand pilgrims flocked to this chapel in the space of three weeks. All the priests of the diocese come here annually to celebrate the mysteries of religion, especially in the month of September when it is most frequented. Then the holy hill is covered by the ascending pilgrims, the chapel is illuminated, the bells are rung, and group after group from different villages enter to pray and sing their pious hymns, which have a certain wild flavor that is delightful. Their varied attitudes and costumes, the rude melody of their voices, the numerous bas-reliefs and paintings on the walls, the altar of the Virgin hung with ex-votos, and the robes of the Madonna herself, overloaded with ornaments of gold and silver which sparkle in the countless tapers, make up a picture one is never weary of studying.

It was on descending from this consecrated hill we stopped to look back at the sanctuary whence streamed still the soul-stirring hymns. A group was gathered about the archway of the fountain. The base was aflush with the vines. From Limoux came the sound of earthly cares. Harvests covered the plain. The heavens aglow crowned all. It was here we took leave of the Valley of the Aude.

[172] By this water the Virgin has cured a thousand ills.

[Pg 653]

FREE TRANSLATION OF A CHORUS IN THE “HECUBA” OF EURIPIDES.

BY AUBREY DE VERE.

Thou of the ten years’ war!

City of marble palaces—no more

Hard by the mountains art thou throned a Queen,

Beside the sounding shore.

Where is thy crown of olives ever-green?

How is thy regal head with anguish bowed!

Ah! woe is me, enveloped in a cloud

Of leaguering foemen are thy smoking walls,

Blood-stained and desolate thy halls.

In the deep hush of night

Fate fell upon us … in the hour of joy;

In the first flush of our triumphant might,

Glory, and Victory.

The bowl was circling, and the festive floor

With wild flowers sprinkled o’er.

We wove the mazy dance in choral bands,

With eyes responsive and united hands

And thrilling melodies.

My husband on the bed,

Warrior out-worn, was lying; and his breast

Filled with the dewy rest:

For thou, O raven-plumed power,

Wert o’er him waving thy Lethean wings,

Flinging thy poppied odors o’er

His languid breast and eyes;

All grateful rites complete, and pious sacrifice.

But I my ringlets dark

(A young and happy bride)

Was braiding, not unconscious of my charms,

Before the mirror wide:

Now for the first time freed from war’s alarms

To lay me by his side

Whose breast was filled with dreams of peace:—but hush!

A long and piercing cry

Comes ringing thro’ the sky,

A sound of struggling men and clashing arms.

[Pg 654]

With robe unbound—with hair

Streaming upon the air;

Zoneless as Spartan maid, Pallas, to thee;

O Virgin Deity!

I rush in tearless agony—I bear

The maids’ and matrons’ prayer.

In vain—ah! what availed

Those wild embraces or that mute despair?

Ah! what availed? These eyes, these eyes beheld

The husband slaughtered on the household hearth

In sight of all his gods; but when the wave

With its unheeding rave,

Was bearing me from thee, my place of birth,

As from mine eye down sank high tower and gate,

Ruined and desolate.…

At last my agony

Burst forth into one long and fainting cry—

I fell upon my face—I knew myself a slave.

LETTERS OF A YOUNG IRISHWOMAN TO HER SISTER

(FROM THE FRENCH.)

April 22.

Yesterday was the day which the Lord hath made, the day of happiness and of rejoicing in God. Rose at half-past three, and was at Ste. Croix before the time. Kneeling by René, my heart overflowing with felicity, I enjoyed during those too rapid moments all the delights of the Christian life. The procession and Benediction were magnificent; everything that has relation to worship, here possesses a unique and impressive solemnity. Heard two Masses, and then that of the Paschal Communion of the men. I love this spectacle—these long files of communicants, so eloquent a protest against the impieties of the age! Was present at High Mass. Dear Kate! congratulate your Georgina: taking all together, I spent nine hours yesterday in church. But my day was much less sanctified in reality than in appearance; I am so easily distracted. The music transported and the crowds bewildered me. Monseigneur officiated pontifically at the High Mass, after which we had the Papal Benediction. The sermon pleased me much. “When Christ shall be glorified, you also shall be glorified with him.” It was sweet and comforting to hear, and I was greatly touched. “The measure of your sufferings here below is the measure of the happiness which God has in store for you. Our body will be glorified by the absence of all suffering; our understanding, by the Beatific Vision; our heart, by the possession of every possible happiness and felicity; our will, by the accomplishment of its desires. [Pg 655] God will to all eternity do the will of his saints.” Then the Benediction, the procession chanting the Laudate Pueri and the In exitu Israël, the hymn of deliverance—what splendor! O festival of Easter! so solemn and so beautiful, how dear thou art to me.

And so Lent is over, and, to indemnify me for my long fast, here is a letter from my Kate. I read it on my knees, like a prayer, and afterwards aloud to the assembled family (except, of course, the private details). It is settled that we are all to be present when you take the veil. Kate dearest! my elder sister, my second mother, who have imparted to me so much of your own soul, the blessed thought of you follows me at every step.

Mme. de T—— has made splendid presents to all her children. I like this fraternal custom. We had been secretly preparing the prettiest surprises imaginable, and in the morning saluted each other as they do in Poland: “Christ is risen!” René has presented me with two beautiful volumes, a novelty, a marvel—the Récit d’une Sœur, by Mrs. Craven, née de la Ferronays. Call to your remembrance one of our loveliest days in Italy, at the Palazzo Borghese, where this family long remained; we have often spoken of it since. This is such attractive reading that it costs me a great effort to tear myself from the book. The weather is glorious; we take long walks through gardens full of lilacs in blossom. O spring! the renewal, the awakening of nature, how sweet and fair it is, and with what joy I have hailed its coming! The children are not to be kept within the house any longer; they are caged birds prettily fluttering their wings against the bars until they are free in the fields.[173] Little whisperings are made to Aunt Georgina to receive into her coupé these darling nightingales. Excursions are to be the order of the week.

Our poor have largely shared in our Paschal rejoicings. I took Picciola with me to see Benoni. What a festival it was to her kind heart! She had laden herself with playthings, cakes, and bonbons, and, in a spirit of heroic sacrifice, with a pretty cage which she sat great store by, in which sang two canaries. The joy of the poor family was surpassed by the sweet child’s delight. I watched her with admiration as she went to and fro in the lowly abode, warbling with the brother of the little Jesus, as she calls the darling. What a sunbeam in this dwelling! I wish Madeleine were my daughter. Kate dearest, pray that my wishes may be realized. I am writing to you in my room, near the open window. A delicious perfume of lilac fills the air; I love nothing in the world so much as children and flowers. Lately I have frequently made Alix play. My sister-in-law Johanna has had a severe cold, and I have laid claim to her pretty family during their recreations. Marguerite, the eldest of the little girls, is not more than eight years old, and is always called Lady Sensible, which makes her cheeks glow with pleasure. Alix is four; she is fresh as a rose of May. I love to press my lips against her pure forehead, and imbue myself with the soft innocence which exhales from this young soul. With her deep-blue eyes, her thick, fair hair, and her angel-look, Alix is really charming, and it seems to me that if she [Pg 656] were mine I should have floods of tenderness to shed upon her.

Monseigneur is about to leave for Rome. I shall be presented to him before his departure. Au revoir, dear Kate! May God protect us! When shall I see Ireland again? When shall I return to the land from whence my ancestors, those sons of a royal race, were banished? The faith is worth more than a throne.

April 29.

René has undertaken to give you an account of my presentation, dearest Kate, so I need not say anything about it. Nothing is spoken of here but the dead and dying. Mme. de St. M—— has lost her two little girls in two days; it makes one tremble. I have sent Fanny your letter of Wednesday; it seemed as if I should profane your holy pages by transcribing them. Our friends wrote to me yesterday; you ought to have read their letters before I did. Lady W—— tells me that she shall treasure like a relic the consolations of Kate. Dearest, you say well that this world could not be fit for our sweet Mary; but your aspirations after eternity alarm your earthly Georgina. Live to love me, to be my guardian angel!

You will not read Le Récit d’une Sœur, dear, busy one? This book contains beauties of the highest order; it is like the expression of the splendor of the beautiful. How those hearts loved, and how much they suffered! But love like theirs must give strength to bear such sufferings. How can I describe to you these incomparable volumes? Your faithful memory has well recalled to you all the personages; imagine, then, the mutual outpourings of those great souls, the marriage of Albert and Alexandrine, so closely followed by so much heart-rending anguish; that family, so numerous and so united, and which appeared to have so many titles to happiness, seeing death descend upon their happy home, gradually destroying and pitilessly mowing down those fair lives. Albert first of all—the gentle, tender, pious, poetic Albert—dying on the 29th of June, 1836, after two years of married life and four years of the most pure and sanctified love; then the Count de la Ferronays, that noble figure, that grand character, a soul of antiquity moulded in a Christian heart, who died at Rome on the 17th of January, 1842, and obtained immediately a miraculous conversion—an endless consolation for those who wept for him; Eugénie, so saintly, so detached from the world, the most loving and devoted of sisters, died next, far from all her own people, at Palermo, whose mild climate had failed to restore strength to that fading flower; a year after, at Brussels, on the 10th of February, the pure and beautiful Olga; in 1848, on the 9th of February, Alexandrine, the most attractive heroine of this narrative, the inconsolable widow, mounting to such heights in the love of God that she would have refused to live over again the happiness of her union with Albert—an exceptionally saintly soul, full of heroic devotion, since she offered her life to God—who accepted the offering—for that of the Père de Ravignan; and, lastly, Mme. de la Ferronays, the mother, the wife who had been, as it were, on the cross for so many years, and always serene, always generous, dying in the arms of her Pauline on the 14th of November, 1848, the same year as her daughter-in-law. By the side of these souls who have passed away figure several personages of the time: M. de [Pg 657] Montalembert, the intimate friend of Albert, and the ever-faithful friend of Alexandrine, whom he called his “sister”; M. Gerbet, the author of L’Esquisse de Rome Chrétienne;[174] Père Lacordaire, Mme. Swetchine, Père de Ravignan, Confalonieri, the learned M. Rio—all this related by a sister, Mrs. Craven, of whom Mme. —— spoke to us so much. Remark these two thoughts from St. Augustine: one, the motto, is, “We never lose those whom we love in him whom we can never lose”; the other, written by Albert in his journal and several times underlined: “All which ends is not long.” There is also this other, of Alexandrine’s: “I do not believe that affections are injurious to affections. Our soul is made in the image of God, and in her power of loving she possesses something of the infinite.” What a family!—an assembly of chosen souls, all of them winning and sympathetic, all knowing how to love as those souls only know who love God above all things. I should like to know Mrs. Craven. I pity and admire her: I pity her for having seen all those die whom she so loved, for having witnessed the departure of souls so intimately united that they were as if melted into one alone; I admire her for having had the power of retracing so many memories at the same time sweet and distressing, and which at every page must have renewed her grief. Is not Albert’s offering of his life for the conversion of Alexandrine the most admirable type of Christian love?

We are going to eternize ourselves at Orleans, dear Kate. My mother-in-law finds the Rue Jeanne d’Arc very agreeable; the children attend some of the cours.[175] We are not too far from the capital; all say in chorus, It is good to be here! When I say all, I except the gentlemen, who, in their hearts, prefer the country, but do not say a word to that effect.

A letter from Margaret, charmed to be at Rome, “that fatherland of sorrow.” Amid the ruins of the queen of cities she walks with her immense disappointment. Oh! what trial. No woman better deserves to be loved. Do you remember Mère Athanase saying of Margaret: “Beautiful as Eve in Paradise, attractive as Rachel, a musician like Miriam the sister of Moses, she is also learned as Anna Comnena, and a poetess like Marie de France”? I answered: “May I be the good Samaritan to this wounded soul!”

Duchesse is much afflicted; a new frock quite untakable, as she says, is the cause. On Marguerite’s gravely asking, “Is not Thérèse going out again? what misfortune has happened to her?” Arthur replied: “Lady Sensible, look well at Thérèse; there is a wrinkle on her forehead. She has lost … her toilette.” And the giddy boy twirled Marguerite round and round, who cannot understand, serious little thing that she is, how any one should be in trouble for so small a matter. This reminds me of the following verses, copied by Hélène in her journal:

“Un frais cottage anglais, voilà sa Thébaïde

Et si son front de nacre est marqué d’une ridé,

Ce n’est pas, croyez moi, qu’elle songe à la mort;

Pour craindre quelque chose, elle est trop esprit fort.

Mais c’est que de Paris une robe attendue,

Arrive chiffonnée et de taches perdue.”[176]

A thousand kisses to my Kate.

May 3.[Pg 658]

O month of graces and of heavenly favors, how I welcome your return! To-day, my beloved Kate, René and I have piously celebrated the anniversary of your birth. May God bless you, my very dear one, and may he bless all that you do! Oh! how many times have I thanked God that he has granted me to receive the love that Joseph had for Benjamin. Kate, I am too happy. Ask our Lord that I may not lose the fragrance of these days of peace and gladness; that I may not be an unprofitable servant; that I may do good, much good; that I may labor for the salvation of souls. O souls, souls! You know how, when a child, I cried when I found that I could not be a missionary. I wanted to be one of the laborers among the whitening harvests. I have kept my desire, and René shares my aspirations. Adrien, who heard us yesterday talking together, called out: “Quick, quick! a professor of Hindostani and Chinese for these two apostles.” My mother-in-law was very much amused by this sally, and the conversation became general. A good work has come out of it: there were in the house only four associates of the Propagation of the Faith, and now there are thirty, and I am chief of the dizaines, or sets of ten, by unanimous vote. It is not to Asiatic idolaters that I am desirous of preaching the Gospel, but, wherever my duty shall place me, to those who are ignorant of it; and by way of a beginning I have this winter been teaching the catechism to three little children, beggars by profession. I shall continue the same thing in Brittany. Dearest, can I do too much for Him who overwhelms me with such magnificent profusion?

The opening of the month of Mary has been very beautiful; the altar splendidly lighted; lovely hymns. Noted an enchanting voice of a young girl, which caused me some distractions.… Kate, where is our dear oratory in Ireland, and my place close to yours? My country, my country! Some one has said, Our country is the place where we love. The true country and fatherland of the Christian is heaven. René speaks like an angel of the love of heaven, and this, too, makes me afraid. Oh! how well I understand the saying of Eugénie de Guérin, ‘The heart so longs to immortalize what it loves’—that is to say, the heart would fain have no separation, but life or death with the object of its love. Dear Kate, to whom I owe my happiness, may this day be always blest!

I leave you now, as my mother-in-law sends Picciola to request my company. “If,” says the gentle little ambassadress, “it is to Madame Kate that you are writing, tell her especially that I love her with all my heart; and let me put a kiss upon the page.”

By the side of this sweet, pure kiss I place my tender messages, or rather ours, loving you as we both do.

May 6.

The spiritual enjoyments of this fairest of months are infinitely sweet to me, my sister. I had minutely described your oratory to Lucy and Hélène, and these two affectionate girls have prepared me a heartfelt enjoyment. In a small, unoccupied drawing-room I found all my souvenirs of Ireland, … all … excepting only your dear presence, my devoted Kate. Tell me how it is that so many hearts agree together in strewing with flowers the path of your Georgina.

The Odeurs de Paris, by Louis [Pg 659] Veuillot, is much spoken of. This book is a sequel to the Parfum de Rome—a sort of set-off or contrast between the unseemliness of Babylon and the beauties of Sion. I wanted to read it, but Adrien dissuaded me, and René read me the preface, which contains some remarkable thoughts. The modern Juvenal says of Paris: “A city without a past, full of minds without memories, of hearts without tears, of souls without love”; and elsewhere: “To paint Paris, Rousseau discovered the suitable expression of ‘a desert of men.’” There is also a touching complaint respecting the continual confusion and, as it were, overturning of this city, which Gabourd calls the city of the Sovereign People: “Who will dwell in the paternal house? Who will find again the roof which sheltered his earliest years?…” Read the Souvenirs of Mme. Récamier, and Marie-Thérèse, by Nettement. The latter is written with a royalist and Christian enthusiasm which delighted me. My mother-in-law is passionately fond of poetry, and has selected me as reader. I am gradually becoming her pet bird; she is so kind and good in her continual solicitude for her youngest daughter! Master Arthur, l’enfant terrible, confided to Picciola that I was grandmamma’s spoiled child. The fact is that, having my time more free than my sisters-in-law, who are absorbed by their maternal cares, I can occupy myself more in anything which may please Mme. de T——, whose innate refinement knows how to appreciate the smallest attentions. Then, yesterday my mother-in-law sent me a nice little packet, carefully sealed; guess what I found in it? A Shakspere and a Lamartine, bound with my monogram, and a choice little volume by Marie Jenna, a name which pleases me. This is full of heavenly poetry. There are pieces which are worth their weight in gold, if gold could pay for this delicious efflorescence of the poet’s soul. How I love Lamartine when he says:

“Moi-même, plein des biens dont l’opulence abonde,

Que j’échangerais volontiers

Cet or dont la fortune avec dédain m’inonde

Pour une heure du temps où je n’avais au monde

Que ma vigne et que mon figuier!

Pour ces songes divins qui chantaient en mon âme

Et que nul or ne peut payer!”[177]

Ah! yes; no happiness is worth the happiness of loving and praising God.

Hélène waited for the month of Mary to reveal her beautiful vocation to her mother—this choice of heaven which will necessarily be at the same time the glory and the martyrdom of our hearts. None of the austerities of her future life will take by surprise the newly-chosen one; she has prepared herself for everything. It is on the 10th, four days hence, that she will speak.… Help us with your prayers, my dearest Kate!…

I am hastening off with René to Sainte Croix. A thousand loving messages.

May 9.

The evening of the day before yesterday was a beautiful triumph: the festival of Joan of Arc had begun. All day long the belfry resounded; a touching and patriotic as well as Christian idea seemed, as it were, to call back the past to life; and in the evening a large crowd followed in the torch-light procession, which was beautiful to see from the memories which are attached to it. With more than [Pg 660] four centuries between, these souvenirs are still living with an imperishable life. O pure and fair Joan of Arc! my chosen heroine, how I love the fidelity of Orleans to thy dear memory! Scarcely had the cortège reached the cathedral when … but let me transcribe for you the description of these splendors by a more skilful hand than mine—by the pencil of an artist, and an artist of genius. This is what was spoken by Mgr. Mermillod, on the 8th of May, 1863: “Yesterday evening, gentlemen, under the vaulted roof of your basilica, I followed your priests and your pontiff, who were proceeding towards the portico. The interior of your church was in silence and obscurity; one little light alone was gleaming before the tabernacle, announcing the Master’s presence. When I reached the threshold, tears filled my eyes, while my heart beat with an indescribable emotion. I had before me, in an incomparable scene, a vision of your history, of your heroic splendors, of your providential destinies. You, gentlemen, were there, ranged in this place; your children, your wives, your aged men, the great ones and the lowly ones of your city, were present at this solemn assembly. Suddenly the clarions sound, bands of inspiriting music fill the air, drums beat, the artillery thunders, the bells fling into space their triumphant clangor, and the choir of Levites raises on high the hymn of victory. The standard of Joan of Arc is advancing, borne by the magistrates of the city, hailed by all the united voices of the army and the church. Is not this the most eloquent address, the most moving panegyric, the living incarnation of an undying remembrance?… Your cathedral becomes radiant; these grand, sculptured masses light up with sparkling brightness, pennons, armorial bearings, and banners glitter like stars. Your bishop descends the steps, the first magistrate advances, and each gives the other the kiss of peace: I there beheld an apparition of religion and our country.

“The pontiff invokes the name of the Lord, the multitude answers; soldiers, priests, and people bend the knee; the benediction falls upon these souls.… My gaze mounted from earth towards heaven, and it seemed as if I could perceive above the towers of your basilica forms more luminous than earthly fires, the ancient witnesses and workers of the greatness of your France—Ste. Geneviève, Ste. Clotilde, St. Rémy, St. Michael, Ste. Catherine, Ste. Margaret, Joan of Arc; your own saints, St. Aignan and St. Euvertus, blessing you by the hand of their worthy successor. Clergy and people intoned the psalm of thanksgiving: ‘Praise the Lord, ye peoples: praise him, O ye nations! for God hath remembered his goodness; he hath confirmed his loving-kindness towards us. The truth of the Lord endureth for ever. Praise the Lord.’

“I seemed to hear the stones of your cathedral, the ramparts of your city, your own souls, the saints of heaven, the past, the present, all your centuries, unite in one immense acclamation, and repeat the song of gladness: ‘Glory to the Father, who is strength; glory to the Son, who is sacrifice; glory to the Holy Spirit, who is light; glory to God, who made worlds for himself, the church for eternity; France for the church, and Joan of Arc for France!’”

Dear Kate, what can I say to you after this? Who would venture to [Pg 661] speak after Mgr. Mermillod, “write after Châteaubriand, or paint after Raphael”? Yesterday the town was rejoicing; it was the anniversary of the deliverance. Was present at the panegyric by M. l’Abbé Freppel, professor of sacred eloquence at the Sorbonne. He asks for the canonization of Joan of Arc. His text was a sentence out of the Book of the Machabees. Divisions: 1. The life of Joan of Arc was marked by all the virtues which characterize sanctity. 2. She uttered prophecies and performed miracles. It was very fine and elevated. There was an imposing assemblage. At half-past twelve we went out and hurried to the hotel to see the procession pass by. What a cortège! All the parishes, each headed by its banner; the court, the authorities, the troops, the corporations, and I know not what. It was indeed a day of excitement. Dearest Kate, in the midst of this encombrement[178] I thought of you. Our drawing-rooms were overflowing with people; from time to time I went noiselessly away to Hélène, whom a headache excused from appearing, and we spoke of God and the sweetness of his service. I am so fond of these conversations. In the evening, Month of Mary: I would not dispense myself from this for anything in the world.

I am going to read Sainte Cécile, by Dom Guéranger. Letter from Lizzy, who announces a most joyful piece of news: all the M——s are abjuring Protestantism. “Make haste and sing the hymn of St. Ambrose and St. Augustine; Ellen consents to say the Lætatus; it is Mary who has obtained this miracle.” When I told you, dear Kate, that one ought to sing alleluia over her tomb, it was truly a prophetic saying. What consolation for Fanny and her mother!

I am sending to the post; I wish not to delay your happiness.

May 11.

To write to my Kate is the condition sine quâ non of my existence. A beautiful sermon yesterday by M. Baunard, a young and eloquent curate of Sainte Croix, on visits and conversations, “in which the Christian ought always to have three charming companions—Charity, Humility, and Piety.” Went to the museum with René and Adrien, the most learned and agreeable of ciceroni. I was captivated by the hall of zoölogy, and that of botany also.

To-morrow Hélène will have with her mother the conversation which I dread. René proposed to his niece to select this day, which will recall to Gertrude (Mme. Adrien) a remarkable favor due to the protection of Our Lady of Deliverance. Pray for all these hearts which are about to suffer, dear Kate. We set out for Paris on the 1st of June; my mother has taken an entire house there. We are going to breathe the burning atmosphere of the capital, as Paul says, wiping his forehead; and your Georgina adds: We are going to see Kate. All the beauties of the much-vaunted Exposition would affect me little if you were not in Paris, dear sister of my soul. What gladness to embrace you, to speak to you! This paper irritates me; it answers me nothing. It is you, you that I need; I thirst for your presence. And then a new separation, a new rending away—you will take the veil, and be no more of this world. Kate, I want not to think of it.

Could you to-morrow have several [Pg 662] Masses said at Notre Dame des Victoires? Hélène begs that you will; there she is, near my bureau, leaning her pretty, pensive head against an arm-chair. Ah! we understand each other so well; I love her so much, and am scarcely older than she is. I was mistaken as to her age; she is not yet eighteen, and was like a sister given me by God to console me for having my Kate no longer; and she also is now to go away.

May all the angels of Paradise be with you, and may they be to-morrow with Hélène!

May 13.

Thanks, dear Kate! The heavenly spirits were almost visible in our home during the eventful day. Adrien and Gertrude received, with a profound faith, the confidences of Hélène, and I know not whether to admire most the heroism of the parents or that of the young virgin. Her father’s grief is inexpressible; he had formed the brightest projects for the future of his daughter. She was his especial darling; … but he is a Christian of the ancient days, and says with Job: “The Lord gave and the Lord taketh away …” Gertrude is like Mary at the foot of the cross, mute and immovable, with death in the heart, and yet happy at the divine choice. Adrien undertakes to prepare his mother; … it is for her that I fear most.

“This is my Calvary,” said Hélène to me this morning. “To see them suffer through me! And I cannot hesitate!…” I have read Sainte Cécile, and I made Gertrude read it, who thanked me with a smile that went to my heart. René is afflicted. “This,” he says, “is the first bird that leaves the nest, to reenter it no more. There will be from this time a great void in our réunions, a source of distress to my brother—a subject we shall fear to touch upon. Georgina, you were saying that we had not a single shadow in our sky!” Alas! I feel only too keenly how painful it is, but also how happy Hélène will be! Thanks for having made me understand this, dear Kate. Gertrude, the wounded eagle, takes refuge with me to speak about her daughter.

Good-by for a short time, carissima sorella.

May 15.

A splendid benediction yesterday, on account of the Perpetual Adoration. The sanctuary was enkindled with light. Behind the altar, a cathedral of lighted tapers—yes, dear, the towers of Sainte Croix in miniature; all around it pyramids of lights, clusters of flowers with long, luminous stems, lustres hanging at an infinite height, the arches and smaller arcades, etc., illuminated. An O Salutaris and a Regina Cœli were sung that seemed to carry one away. I stood on the earth, but my heart was in heaven; and near to me René, absorbed in God, brothers and sisters, Hélène, Thérèse, Madeleine, and grandmother, who was in tears.… How touched I was! Adrien had spoken.… It was a thunder-clap! And the choir chanted the glories of the King of Virgins, and all those beloved countenances beamed with fervor, as we bent our heads beneath the benediction of the Almighty!…

This morning Mme. de T—— asked for Hélène. Their conversation lasted two hours. After déjeuner[179] my mother said, smiling: “It is decided we have a Carmelite!” [Pg 663] The children opened their eyes in wonder. Lucie began to sob; Picciola, pale and trembling, kissed the happy Hélène a hundred and a hundred times over. The sacrifice is, as it were, accomplished.

Johanna, the dear Creole, is astonished at the promptitude of this decision. The babies will no more be persuaded to leave the side of the tall cousin “who did not know that she was so much loved,” she says. This morning she received a long, beautiful letter from an intimate friend inviting her to a marriage. It is impossible to refuse; this will be the last worldly festivity at which that sweet face, made to delight the angels, will be seen. The word marriage made Mme. de T—— start, and she afterwards said to me: “I had planned a brilliant earthly alliance for Hélène; how much there is of human and material within us that I should still regret it when a divine alliance is secured to her! Here, Georgina, read me again the chapter on abandonment to God.” I read, and, seeing her meditative afterwards, I opened a book of Ozanam which Lucy lent me. I will give you the Christian theory of marriage from this great mind, who too soon disappeared from a world that wondered at his works: “In marriage there is more than a contract; above all, there is a sacrifice, or rather two sacrifices: the woman sacrifices that which God has given her of irreparable, that which causes the solicitude of her mother—her first beauty, often her health, and that power of loving which women only once possess; the man on his part sacrifices the liberty of his youth, the incomparable years which will return no more, the power of devoting himself for her whom he loves which is only to be found at the beginning of his life, and the effort of a first love to make himself a lot both sweet and glorious. That is what a man can do but once, between the age of twenty and thirty years, a little sooner or a little later, perhaps never! Therefore is it that I speak of Christian marriage as a double sacrifice. There are two cups: in one is found beauty, modesty, and innocence; in the other, love intact, devotedness, the immortal consecration of the man to her who is weaker than himself, whom yesterday he knew not, and with whom to-day he finds himself happy to spend his days; and it is needful that these cups should be equally full if the union is to be happy and deserving of the blessing of Heaven.” Is not this an admirable page? While reading it I thought of Albert and Alexandrine, those two immortal types of Christian marriage. What a life was theirs, what happiness, so short but perfect, and which made the poor widow say, “I have memories of happiness which seem to me as if they could not be surpassed”!

Good-night, dearest Kate!

May 20.

The house is transformed into a convent, dear Kate; so, at least, Arthur declares, finding in this fact an excellent reason for Hélène’s being detained in it. Since her departure has been seriously thought of, every one is wanting to have the enjoyment of her company, and she is literally torn away first by one and then by another; and if you could see her lending herself with her bright smile to all the exactions of this affection, tyrannical as it has become!

We took a long excursion yesterday [Pg 664] into the open country, among the wheat; the rustling of the ears of corn, the charm of the sunny solitude, the verdure with its soft lights and shadows, all the renewal of the spring, the beauty of the landscape, which showed in the far distance the fine towers of the cathedral—all this smiled upon us; and yet sadly, like an adieu, we shall return, we shall look again next year upon this same picture, but without Hélène.… Why is she so engaging, so sympathetic?

Letter from Margaret, who will be at Paris in June. What joy, dear Kate! It seems to me that our friend is more tranquil; she describes like a poet her enthusiasm for Italy and for the Pope. At Florence she met with our poor mistress Annah, who had some trouble to recognize in this brilliant lady the pale little girl of former times. Annah is giving English lessons. Lord William, seeing Margaret’s affectionate demonstrations, proposed to her to secure the independence of the aged mistress, which he has done, to the great satisfaction of the two persons interested. I like that, and am convinced that Margaret deceives herself.

Another happiness, darling Kate: here is your letter, in the joyful hands of Picciola, who recognizes your handwriting. Five days without saying a word to you! René sends you quite a volume. Love always your Georgina.

May 26.

Was present at the ordination. What an imposing ceremony! I had never seen one, and I followed all the details with the greatest interest. Sixty young men giving themselves to God, devoting themselves to a life of sacrifice! I prayed for and envied them: how much good will they not be able to do! What life is so full as that of a holy priest? That which most moved me was the moment when priests, deacons, and subdeacons fell prostrate; then the imposition of hands, the Mass said by all these voices, which must have trembled with emotion and with happiness, the kiss of peace, the communion, and, lastly, the Te Deum, that heavenly song. Oh! that all these souls to-day consecrated to the Lord may one day sing the Sanctus and Hosanna before the throne of the Lamb.

On arriving yesterday at Sainte Croix (the weather was splendid) I saw myriads of swallows joyously flying about and warbling among the towers. René began to hum, “Oh! that I had wings, to fly away to God.” You dear swallows who have made your nests on the roof of the temple of the Lord, in the bell-turrets, and among the towers; ye swallows, my sisters, as said the Seraph of Assisi, you who fly so high, have you seen heaven? You who in sweet warblings sing the praises of the Eternal, have you touched with your wing the portals of the celestial Eden? Sing, and cease not, O gentle swallows! who know not what it is to offend God.

Gertrude has confided to me that for some time past she had divined Hélène, and, as she treats me entirely as a sister, she has given me the journal to read which she wrote whilst her daughter was at the convent. Observe this passage: “My beloved girl is seventeen years old to-day; her father and I have duly observed this anniversary as a festival. Poor dear child! What will be thy will for her, my God? One of these pure creatures, seraphs left upon earth to sanctify it, whose life is spent beneath thy watchful eye, in the shade of the sanctuary? [Pg 665] … O my God! Once I thought not that it would be possible for me to live far from her, no more to rest my gaze on her fresh countenance, so bright and open. Thou hadst, O Lord! united us so closely that it seemed as if my soul had passed into hers. Sweet angel, return to spread your white wings over the maternal nest! Oh! I fear lest you should be the first of all to leave it; but if you leave us for God, may you be blessed, my well-beloved!”

O ye mothers! who may sound the depths of your sorrows? Happy as mothers are in their enchanted life of love and innocence, yet they are also martyrs, and who knows whether the gall in their chalice does not absorb the honey?

Beloved, in a few days I shall embrace you.

May 29.

God be praised, who is about to bring us together again, dear sister of my soul! It is settled that we are to return on the 1st of July, once more to salute Orleans. Hélène will at this date enter the novitiate at ——. The town is beginning to lose its inhabitants. Hélène and I traverse it in all directions to have another look at its curiosities: the fine old houses richly and deeply sculptured, historic dwellings, which remain standing after their inmates have disappeared. We are shown the house of Joan of Arc, of Francis I., of Agnes Sorel, of Diana of Poitiers—names with very dissimilar associations. One more visit to Benoni, a pilgrimage to Our Lady of Miracles, a halt at my bookseller’s, and my preparations will be ended.

Wrote to Sister Louise. I like to return to her twice in the year, to pay her this tribute of the heart with my tenderest affection. What a fine nature—an ideal! A soul whom the world never touched who had no sooner finished her education than she gave herself to God, sacrificing even her last vacations. A nature so poetic, so rich and pure, that God reserved it for himself, and at the same time so charming and devoted that she spent herself wholly in affection upon those around her. Thus have I known and loved her, like an apparition from another world.

Good-by for the present, dear Kate. René, my so dear and gentle René, is more happy because of my happiness than I am myself—happiness moistened with tears, the tears of sacrifice. “What matters it where one weeps, or wherefore, since tears buy heaven?”

Hélène has given me a share of her heritage—a paralytic old woman whose succoring angel she has been. Every morning she went to the lowly room of the poor invalid, whom she dressed, and then with her patrician hands she made the bed, swept the room, and prepared the repast. After this she read to her out of some pious book, conversed with her a few minutes, and on leaving called a little girl of ten years old, who was charged to keep the poor woman company. I shall continue Hélène’s work.… In summer it is a neighbor who, for a slight remuneration, does all that is necessary; but Mariette, the femme de chambre, who is often employed to carry little comforts to the invalid, said to me with tears: “Nothing replaces mademoiselle, and the old woman says, ‘Summer is winter to me, for it takes away my sunshine!’” What praise, Kate, is it not? Can you not understand how Gertrude may well be proud of the treasure which is about to be taken from her? Cannot you understand also how much I [Pg 666] sympathize with her?—for my heart is bleeding from the same wound. Be happy, beloved Kate; we shall meet again where there are no separations to be feared, in our true fatherland.

May 31.

Our departure is postponed; my mother being unwell, enough so to keep her bed, and the doctor does not yet know what to say about her. Pray for us, my sister. René fears inflammation of the lungs. Mme. de T——, who is very austere with herself, never complains until the last extremity.

O my sweet Mother in heaven! your beloved month is drawing to its close, and these lines are the last which I shall trace before the latest hours of May have fallen into eternity. Oh! I entreat you, you who are all-powerful with the Heart of your Divine Son, Our Lady of the Sacred Heart, hear our prayers!

A thousand kisses, dear Kate.

June 3.

A mucous fever has declared itself; the danger is imminent; we are scarcely alive. Never was mother more adored. She has been delirious; her wanderings were those of a saint. God, the angels, her dear ones, both living and dead, pass in turn before her mind; when she recovers her sense of the reality, she finds the most consoling and heavenly words wherewith to comfort us. Her room, now haunted by the shadow of death, is become our universe, and we fraternally share amongst us the sorrowful sweetness of attending upon this beloved sick one. All our poor are in prayer; two tapers are continually burning before the black Virgin. Thanks, beloved! I have read your letter to my mother, who said to me:

Dear Georgina, I am happy to possess the affection of your good sister. I feel myself in reality your mother.…” To tell you René’s distress would be impossible; as for me, I have in the depth of my heart an unconquerable confidence God will spare her to us!

June 4.

She is as ill as she can be. René proposed to make a vow. Kneeling all together around this dying bed, with one voice and one heart we have promised to go to Notre Dame de la Salette. Now we wait.… Unite your vows to ours, we love her so much! Oh! if you could see her, so weakened, and with only a breath of life, and yet in possession of all her presence of mind, all her attentive solicitude, thinking of everything and everybody, pressing me to take a little rest! This scene reminds me of my mother, her peaceful death, whilst she commended us to the Father of orphans. Will not God spare her to us? One cannot lose a mother twice! Picciola has assembled all the babies for a perpetual Rosary.

Tears choke me; and yet I still have hope. She has received the Holy Viaticum, and Extreme Unction; it seems as if she were already in heaven.

June 5.

Always the same hopeless state; extreme weakness, and no life left but in the look, which beams with love. We are all here, more silent than shadows, starting at the slightest sound. I did not know that I loved so strongly this mother worthy of my René. Yesterday evening, seeing me leaning over her bed, she made a supreme effort to say to me: “You will comfort him!” O my God, my God! can it be that mourning is about to darken our youth, and that this first year of [Pg 667] marriage should contain so great a sorrow?

June 7.

Nothing but a breath, … yet I hope still. Something tells me that she must live.

June 9.

Yes, dearest, she will live; let us thank God. A reaction has taken place; it is now a resurrection. How happy I am! You would scarcely recognize René, so greatly is he altered; but he smiles now, recovering with our beloved sufferer. Your letter of yesterday brought balm to my heart; and an hour afterwards the good doctor assured us that all danger was over, though the recovery will be very gradual. And so this beautiful and glorious Feast of Pentecost finds us all radiant. My mother has insisted on sending us to the services, but the others could not refuse to let me remain. “Grandmother and Aunt Georgina are Ruth and Noemi,” observed Arthur. My mother heard him, and sighed at the thought of her dear ones dead; and now having cheered, comforted, and attended to her, I see that she has sunk into a quiet sleep, and so begin to write to you. My darling Kate, a Te Deum!

They are returned. I went to the door with my finger on my lips, and now I am alone again.… No, René is by me, light as a sylph, and together we watch the blessed slumber which will not be the last. Kate, I am going to pray with my brother, who invites me to do so, and at the same time sends his love to you.

June 11.

What a new and delightful aspect everything has regained! We are now longing to accomplish our vow. Why are you not here, my sweet one, at my side, by this beloved invalid, who so touchingly thanks me for having made my sister love her? You recollect her handsome countenance, so admirable and harmonious in its lines and contours; it has become fearfully pale and thin, but what we were dreading was so terrible that we rejoice without troubling ourselves about anything. I am writing to you by the side of the reclining chair on which my mother is at this moment reposing; I do not leave her, but have made myself her shadow. René is gone to the flower-market; since the harbingers of summer have made their appearance my room has never been wanting in decorations and perfumes. Oh! this intimate life together, the quiet chats in the evenings, the reading, all this richness of youth and happiness—how fair is earth with all these things!

Picciola enters; my pretty fairy whispers in my ear that she would very much like to look at grandmamma asleep. She is now kneeling at her feet, saying her Rosary with the fervor of an angel.

A well-known step, although it makes itself aërial in order not to disturb this restoring sleep: it is René! He smiles and retires: he knows that I am writing to Kate. Dear sister of my soul, my better self, it is to your prayers that we are indebted for this cure! Lucy is anxious. The pretty baby is cutting his teeth; he cries and screams, so they are obliged to keep him at a distance from Mme. de T——‘s rooms; and Lucy is not fond of solitude.

Hélène is impatient to know you. How useful she has made herself to every one during these sad days! Kate, dearest, may God be our guard.

[173] “Jusqu’à ce qu’ils aient la clé des champs”—the key of the fields.

[174] Sketch of Christian Rome.

[175] Courses of instruction on various subjects.

[176]

“An English cottage is her hermitage;

And if a wrinkle marks her pearly brow,

‘Tis not, believe me, that she thinks on death—

She’s too strong-minded to have fear of aught—

But that, from Paris, an expected dress

Crumpled arrives, and spoiled with grievous stains.”

[177] As for myself, abounding in the good things with which opulence overflows, how willingly would I exchange this gold which fortune disdainfully lavishes upon me for one hour of the time when I had nothing in the world but my vine and my fig-tree—for those divine dreams which sang within my soul, and for which no gold can pay.”

[178] The obstructions or impediments attendant upon crowding together.

[179] Déjeuner, late breakfast, is taken about eleven or twelve o’clock. The early breakfast is simply a cup of coffee or chocolate.

TO BE CONTINUED.

[Pg 668]

WAS MILES STANDISH A CATHOLIC?

In the quaint old town of Leyden, somewhere in the year 1619, an English soldier, who had seen service on the battle-fields of the Continent, came in contact with a little community of men of his own country, hard-working, unhappy people, who had left England to enjoy greater freedom in the practice of their religious ideas than they could expect at home. But if the people of the United Provinces harmonized with them in doctrinal standards and principles, their lives and practice were far from unison with the English refugees, and these last were planning a settlement beyond the Atlantic.

The soldier did not share their religious views. He did not join the church at Leyden or swell the number of the worshippers in the church of the Beguines, which, on the principle of religious liberty as they understood it, the Dutch had wrested from the Sisters to give to the strangers. But, how or why no one knows, the hot-tempered, good-hearted soldier contracted a strong friendship for Robinson, the pastor of the English flock, and that sturdy upholder of Puritan views seems to have entertained a warm affection for the soldier.

When the Mayflower, after breasting the waves of the Atlantic, neared at last the shore on which the colony proposed to begin a settlement in midwinter, daring in the worst season of the year what many had failed to effect with all the advantages of the balmiest spring, a compact for civil government was drawn up and signed by the chief men of the expedition. On the list is the name of Miles Standish. He landed with them; became their military leader; his exploits as an Indian fighter are known to all the children in our schools. He is the type of those who from the beginning of the seventeenth century have done battle with the red man. He died at last, at a ripe old age, in the colony he helped to found, but died without joining the church established by the pilgrims of Plymouth Rock, though conformity was as a rule required from all.

New England historians and scholars seem puzzled to account for the fact of his never having joined the church. His life was beyond reproach. He brought from his experience of camp and garrison no habits to shock the sober, rigid men with whom his career was cast. It could not be, they admit, that the Pilgrims found any objection to his admission. He evidently never sought it. He was no hypocrite to seek admission as a church-member like Captain Underhill, whose life set morality at defiance, or like Mayor Gibbons, whose questionable dealings with pirates show his unworthiness. Contrasted with these men, Standish stands out as a noble, consistent figure. As Dr. Ellis remarks: “Of the two captains in the early Indian warfare, and in the straits of dangerous enterprise, the uncovenanted Standish is to be preferred.” He is comparing him with Underhill; the comparison will still hold good in regard to Gibbons or Patrick.

Some years since, the writer threw [Pg 669] out in our American Notes and Queries the suggestion that Miles Standish, the military hero of the Mayflower, of the Pilgrims, and of Plymouth Rock, was a Catholic. A correspondent, using the initials J. W. T., which seem to denote an historical scholar of no mean repute in New England, one who has shown real research and sound judgment, lost all self-command at the suggestion, and raved in this style: “If Miles Standish was a Roman Catholic, he was also a hypocrite; till proof of the latter, he must be considered what the Pilgrims believed him to be—and never before doubted—a Protestant and an honest man. Miles Standish was not the man to sail under false colors. He was bold, brave, impetuous, open as the day, and not double-faced. His memory should have been safe from insult.”

No distinct assertions are made, and the grave historical scholar forgot to cite authorities. The language infers that the Pilgrims believed Standish to be a Protestant, and that he professed to be one. But there is no evidence at all to sustain this. The late S. G. Drake, whose acquaintance with the sources of New England history was certainly very great, expressly says on this point: “I do not remember ever having seen it stated that he belonged to any church,” and no one has ever cited an authority that connects him with any Protestant church. Governor Hutchinson, in his History of Massachusetts (vol. ii., p. 411), says: “It seems Standish was not of their church at first, and Mr. Hubbard says he had more of his education in the school of Mars than in the school of Christ. He acquired, however, the esteem of the whole colony.” Baylies, in his History of Plymouth, says: “What induced him to connect himself with the Pilgrims does not appear. He took up his residence among them at Leyden, but never joined the church” (part ii., p. 21). Palfrey, the author of the History of New England, with all the researches of the present century, says of Standish: “He was not a member of the Leyden Church, nor subsequently of that of Plymouth, but appears to have been induced to join the emigrants by personal good-will, or by love of adventure, while to them his military knowledge and habits rendered his companionship of great value” (vol. i., p. 161). Later on in the same work, Palfrey reiterates the assertion: “Standish was no religious enthusiast. He never professed to care for, or so much as to understand, the system of doctrine of his friends, though he paid it all respect as being theirs. He never was a member of their church” (vol. ii., p. 407-8). At the laying of the corner-stone of the Standish monument on Captain’s Hill, Duxbury, Oct. 7, 1872, the Rev. Dr. Ellis, endeavoring as a clergyman on that day to say all that could be said, makes him only a sort of “proselyte of the gate,” but admits distinctly that “he was not a man of ‘professions,’ nor, so far as we know, of ‘confessions.’ He was never ‘sealed’ or ‘covenanted.’ We are at a loss for the explanation of this fact, considering the standard and the expectations of his associates.”[180] On the same occasion, Charles Deane, who certainly did not speak without examination of his subject, said: “He was not a member of Plymouth Church, and there are strong suspicions that the doctrine of the perseverance of the [Pg 670] saints had not taken strong hold of him.”[181]

It was not that Standish preferred the platform of Massachusetts Bay. He went to Boston, but never seemed to harmonize with them or relish their system of management. He was no adherent of Mrs. Hutchinson, Roger Williams, or the Baptists; no one ever claimed him as a disciple of Fox; no treasured Book of Common Prayer or any other proof of adherence to the Church of England has been preserved to justify Episcopalians in claiming him.

Where, then, is his Protestantism? He certainly avowed himself a member of no Protestant denomination whatever, and made no professions of the kind; so that, if he really was a Catholic, there can be no charge of hypocrisy, for there is not the slightest tittle of evidence that he ever pretended to be a Protestant. He was an extremely valuable man to the little community at Plymouth, and rendered important services. At that time, to have proclaimed himself a Catholic would have compelled the Pilgrims to exclude him, and exposed himself to annoyance when visiting other colonies or England. That the leaders knew him to be a Catholic, too firm in his faith to be shaken, would explain much that seems now inexplicable to New England writers.

The question, then, comes up, whether there is any direct ground for supposing the famous Captain of the Pilgrims to be a Catholic. In his will, he left to his eldest son, Alexander, “all my lands as heir aparent, by lawfull decent, in Ormistock, Boscouge, Wrightington, Maudsly, Newburrow, Crawston, and in the Isle of Man, and given to me as right heir by lawfull decent, but sereptuously detained from me, my grandfather being a second or younger brother from the house of Standish of Standish.”[182]

This gives a clue to his family, and another is found in the name of the town which he planted—Duxbury. Some of the earlier writers of this century made a fanciful derivation for this. Duxbury, according to them, was from Dux, captain; that Duxbury meant Captain’s town, and was an allusion to his position in the colony.[183] But turning to English authorities, we find at once in Lancashire an ancient family of Standish, of which there are two branches, Standish of Standish Hall, and Standish of Duxbury. Their arms—three silver plates on a field azure—meet you on tombs and on the churches erected by them centuries ago.

When the young king Richard II. rode out to meet Wat Tyler at the head of his rebels, John Standish was one of the king’s esquires—the very one who slew Tyler. A Sir John Standish won fame by his prowess at Agincourt, and the name occurs frequently during the French wars of Henry V. and Henry VI. When the eighth King Henry sought a divorce from his faithful wife, Queen Catharine, Henry Standish, a Franciscan, Bishop of St. Asaph’s (1519-1535), a most learned man, assisted the unhappy queen throughout the shameful trial. After the change of religion, the Standish family adhered to the old faith, one of them writing vigorously in its defence; and down to this day they are reckoned among the Catholic families of England. Standish Hall, the seat of the elder branch, is [Pg 671] close to Wigan, twenty miles northeast of Liverpool; and Duxbury Hall, the seat of the younger branch, is only two miles distant from Standish Hall. There have been frequent litigations between the two branches, and in one of these, doubtless, the immediate ancestor of the Plymouth soldier lost the property alluded to in his will.

The family remained Catholic, and after the fall of James II. was among his sturdy adherents. The famous Lancashire plot, formed in 1692 with the object of replacing James on the throne of England, was hatched in Standish Hall.

The wrong of which the gallant soldier of Plymouth complained was one that he could have had redressed promptly, even if not in accordance with the rules of justice. Had he appeared as a Protestant claimant for the broad acres of an old Catholic house, courts and juries would have bent law and fact to place him in possession. How the feeling operates we have seen by instances in our own day. The feeling in favor of the Tichborne claimant in England was deeply imbued with the desire to place the heritage of an old and well-known Catholic family in the hands of one who was to all intents and purposes a Protestant—one whose Catholicity, if he ever had any, had completely vanished in a brutalizing Australian life. In the claim of Earl Talbot, a Protestant, to the earldom of Shrewsbury, so long identified with the Catholic cause, we see what slight evidence, or show of evidence, satisfied the House of Peers. Had the circumstances been reversed, a Catholic claiming a Protestant peerage, the doubts of the tribunal would have required tenfold proof, and the investigation lasted a generation.

Miles Standish, by his own avowal, belonged to an ancient Catholic family, which has clung to the faith to this day. He evidently scorned to change his religion to enable him to recover what he deemed his just rights. Such seems to be a position that solves all difficulties. Among the old Catholic families of the British Isles, after the change of religion was completed, and the line of distinction between Protestant and Catholic sharply drawn, it became a matter of honor and pride to adhere, during the evil days of the penal laws and the butchery of the clergy, to the faith so heroically retained.

Here and there, one who gave the reins to his wild passions, some man sunk in vice like Mervyn, Lord Audley, or the Duke of Norfolk at the close of the last century, would conform to the state church, though every decent Protestant shrank from contact with them; or some nobleman deprived of his estates, like Lord Baltimore, would renounce his faith to recover a province like Maryland, wrongfully detained from him; or, like Lord Dunboyne, give up the faith, even after teaching it for years as an honored priest, in order to live as seemed to become his title; or, led by ambition, to rise at court like Waldegrave; but for one to join a body of dissenters there is on record scarcely an example.

Descendants of old Catholic families emigrating to America, like the Dongans, Townleys, and others, fell away; but in the Old World a sense of honor made them cling to the oppressed faith when to desert it seemed to imply cowardice or vice. The opening words of Moore’s Travels of an Irish Gentleman in Search of Religion embody this feeling.

As a necessary consequence, the [Pg 672] conversion of one of the members of an ancient Catholic house by the Protestant party was a triumph, and the new-comer was well rewarded. The conversion of one of the Standishes would have found mention somewhere among the events of the day, and there would be some trace of office or rank bestowed on the man who at last conformed. Yet the county annals of Lancashire and the memoirs of the time chronicle no such defection on the part of Miles Standish, and it is equally evident that no post was bestowed upon him as a reward.

That Miles Standish was one who, turning his thoughts to the great religious questions then rife, fell into doubts as to the solidity of the claims of the Catholic Church, and with all zeal and fervor embraced some form of Protestantism, is a theory too wild for consideration. The whole mass of Pilgrim testimony establishes the fact that he was one who took no interest in the religious systems of Protestantism; that he was utterly devoid of any such enthusiasm in them as would mark a convert from conviction.

From what we know of his origin, the presumption is strong that he was and always remained a Catholic, and we cannot shield his memory from insult except by adopting this presumption. Neither a life of vicious indulgence nor ambitious hopes, and certainly no conviction, led him to renounce the religion of his family and embrace Protestantism.

Let us, then, gather what is known of the life of this Catholic soldier of early New England annals.

He was born about 1584, at Duxbury, in Lancashire, England, as is supposed, from the fact that he preserved the name in the town he established; but was, as he claims in his will, great-grandson of a second or younger brother of the house of Standish of Standish. This is a well-known Catholic house in Lancashire, known as early as the reign of Edward I., the elder branch of two in that county, the other being the Standishes of Duxbury. With this last he claims no connection, although the inference is probable that he was born at that place. As his just inheritance at Standish was, he asserts, surreptitiously detained from him, it may be that his father, unjustly deprived of his patrimony, took refuge at Duxbury under the protection of the other branch. Both branches were Catholic, John Standish being a distinguished writer against the Reformation. A Robert Standish figures in Parliament in 1654; Captain Thomas Standish, of the Duxbury house, was killed at Manchester fighting bravely for the king. The Standishes of Duxbury, as their genealogy shows, intermarried with the old Catholic houses of Howard and Townley. Richard Standish was made a baronet after the Restoration, in 1676.

The estates to which he asserts his rights lay, as expressed in the will, in Ormistock, Bouscouge, Wrightington, Maudsley, Newburrow, Cranston, and in the Isle of Man.

The latest history of Lancashire, by Baines, unfortunately gives no detailed pedigree of the house of Standish of Standish, that of Duxbury being given to some extent, though not in the line of descent of the younger sons. As, however, he does not claim at all to have belonged to the Duxbury branch, it is useless to look there for him.

Standish Hall, the seat of the branch from which he was descended, “is a large brick house, irregular [Pg 673] in form, to which is attached an ancient Catholic chapel, still used for that purpose” (Baines, Hist. Lancashire, iii., p. 505). Standish forms a parish in the Hundred of Leyland. “The extensive and fertile township of Duxbury, at the northern extremity of the parish of Standish, stands on the banks of the Yarrow, by which the township and parish is divided from the parish of Chorley” (Ib., p. 517).

Ormistock is evidently Ormskirk, an adjoining parish, in which Baines mentions that there are two Catholic chapels (iv., p. 244). In the Buscouge of the Plymouth record we easily recognize Burscough, where once flourished a famous priory, suppressed by Henry VIII. The Lancashire historian notes that there was formerly a Catholic chapel at Burscough Hall (iv., p. 256). Of the next place mentioned in Standish’s will, Baines says: “Adjoining Wrightington Hall stands a small Catholic chapel for the use of the family” (iii., p. 481); Mawdsley or Mawdesley is an extensive flat and fertile township between Croston and Wrightington (iii., p. 404); Newbury and Croston are in the same Hundred (iii., 171, 391-5).

He was thus of Catholic stock, and born and brought up amid families where the old faith is still cherished to this day. Almost every place mentioned in his will is linked with Catholic life in his time and the present.

Of his early life not a tradition or trace has been preserved. In that day the younger men of Catholic families constantly went abroad to gain an education and to seek service in the Continental armies, many too to study for the priesthood, and return to England, unawed by the terrible fate that awaited them if they fell into the hands of the myrmidons of English law.

That Miles Standish should have sought service abroad is therefore natural. Ignoring his Catholic origin, New England writers have sought to explain his military career on the Continent. All seem to assume that he served in the Low Countries. Baylies, in his History of Plymouth (part ii., p. 21), says explicitly that “he served as an officer in the armies of Queen Elizabeth in the Low Countries, when commanded by her favorite, the Earl of Leicester.”

Captain Wyman, at the laying of the corner-stone in 1872, goes further: “In early life he was trained to the hardships and trials of war, having been commissioned at the age of twenty a lieutenant in the army serving in the Low Countries against the armies of the Inquisition.” The Rev. G. E. Ellis and Charles Deane on the same occasion limit themselves to the assertion that he served in the Low Countries (pp. 21, 24).

Palfrey is less positive, as he was writing history, not pronouncing eulogies. “The ‘cautionary towns’ of the Netherlands had been garrisoned by British regiments for thirty years, and Miles Standish had probably been employed on this service” (History of New England, i., p. 161). “Probably while serving in an English regiment in the Netherlands he fell in with the company of English peasants” (ii., pp. 407-8).

There seems to be no really authentic foundation for all this theory. Standish died in 1656, aged 72, and must have been born, according to this, in 1584. Leicester was sent to the Low Countries with eleven thousand men in 1585-7; but we can scarcely believe that this precocious [Pg 674] scion of a Catholic house served as an officer in this campaign when only one year old, or three at the most.

The assertion that the Catholic soldier was commissioned a lieutenant at the age of twenty, that is, in 1604, when James was ruining the Catholic families by extorting all the arrears of fines, and producing the spirit of exasperation which culminated in the Gunpowder Plot, can scarcely find any support in sober history. The armies of the Inquisition which James was fighting in 1604 elude research.

Savage, in his Genealogical Dictionary, though on what authority we know not, says that Standish had been at Leyden some years before 1620. All that is positively known is that he had seen military service on the Continent, and was living in Leyden with his wife Rose when the followers of Robinson proposed to emigrate. A strong friendship, not based on harmony of religious views, existed between Miles Standish and the pastor of the exiles. Writing subsequently to Plymouth after receiving tidings of Standish’s first Indian fight, Robinson says: “Let me be bould to exhorte you seriously to consider ye dispossition of your Captaine, whom I love, and am persuaded ye Lord in great mercie and for much good hath sent you him, if you use him aright. He is a man humble and meek amongst you; and towards all in ordinarie course.”[184] This strong feeling of personal friendship was reciprocal. In his will Standish writes: “Further, my will is that Marrye Robenson, whom I tenderly love for her grandfather’s sacke, shall have three pounds in som thing to goe forward for her two yeares after my decease.” Whether he had served in the Spanish armies or the Dutch, or in English garrison, he was to all appearance simply a resident of Leyden when this friendship grew up. It evidently led to the proposal or offer to accompany those of Robinson’s flock who were to venture to make the first attempt at colonization in North America.

His wife Rose, of whom we know only her name, agreed evidently to join him in the voyage. True wife of a brave man, she was ready to face all danger and to share all hardships with him. Nothing is recorded from which to glean whether she was some fair English girl from his own Lancashire, or some one whom he won on the Continent. Her name, her faith, and her country are alike unknown. We know that they embarked together at Delft Haven, and formed part of the memorable body on the Mayflower. Among them Miles Standish was a man of importance. When the compact for their government in America was drawn up, he signed it, and the place of his signature shows the esteem in which he was held and his recognized position among them.

That document is purely a civil one, and contains nothing that could not be signed by the strictest Catholic.

Reaching in November the poorest, sandy part of the coast, the little colony had a fearful career of hardship. Standish was one of the pioneers in exploring the land. After they landed at Plymouth Rock in December, he saw his companions sink under their hardships and breathe their last. Though his own rugged health triumphed over everything, his wife Rose sank beneath the unwonted trials, and died on the 29th day of January, 1621, leaving him alone in the diminishing [Pg 675] body of settlers, without a tie to bind him to them or the settlement which they had undertaken. But he was not one to falter or easily give up.

During that winter of terrible suffering so heroically borne he was one of the six or seven who were untouched by disease, and his care and devotion to the sick and afflicted are mentioned with gratitude. When spring at last gladdened them, and they resolutely set about the labors of building, cultivating, and otherwise preparing for a permanent residence, Miles Standish had been made the first military commander of the colony, and, as we may infer from some statements, he turned his engineering skill to a peaceful channel, laying out the lines of the new town and surveying the plots taken up by the settlers. The first military organization of Plymouth dates from February, 1621. It was not formidable in numbers, but it was necessary to make it as imposing as possible. Standish felt all this. He threw up defensive works, a little fort on the hill above the dwellings mounted with five guns, and prepared to make the Indians respect the power of the settlers.

As the best linguist, he was sent out to meet the deputations of Indians who came to observe the new-comers; and he was constantly sent to explore the country or test the feelings of the natives. It was doubtless a specimen of Standish’s style of correspondence with them that we find recorded in Governor Bradford’s reply to arrows hid in a snake-skin which Canonicus sent to the settlement. The snake-skin filled with powder and ball was an answer which announced to the savages that Standish was ready to meet them.

The settlements of Weston’s lawless people near them increased ill-feeling among the Indians, and apparently gave them a poor opinion of the courage and power of the Plymouth settlements. Standish in his excursions soon became aware of this, and felt convinced that a general conspiracy against the colonists was on foot. An attempt on his own life at Manomet, now Sandwich, confirmed this belief. A minister named Lyford, who came over, sought to have him superseded in office, declaring that he looked like a silly boy. And outside the little community of Plymouth slighting views prevailed of this offshoot of a fighting race.

From his slight frame, the Weston people at Wessagusset (now Weymouth) seem to have given Standish the nickname of Captain Shrimp, and the Indians had taken up the slighting tone and openly braved him. Feeling that the danger was imminent, Standish went in March, 1623, to Wessagusset with eight men, to suppress the plot by striking a blow that would convince the Indians of his prowess and of the force of the colony. He found the warrior who had attempted to take his life, and when the Indian taunted Standish, he with two of his men attacked the Indian party without firearms, and after a desperate struggle Standish despatched his antagonist with his own weapon wrested from his hand, and the whole band was cut off. This encounter established Standish’s reputation. The Weston colony broke up, and an ascendency was soon acquired over the Indians.

It was on receipt of the intelligence of this first collision with the natives that Robinson, after deploring the fact that they had not converted some Indians before killing [Pg 676] any, expressed his affection to Standish, and urged the leaders of the colony not to molest him, as though there were some ground, which he did not care to express, why he anticipated that in some way their military leader might not be altogether at ease in the place.

But Standish seems to have had no idea of abandoning his associates. The ship Anne, bearing the third body of emigrants, had among the number a young woman named Barbara, whom he subsequently married, and thus formed new ties in the land. He is said first to have sought the hand of Priscilla Mullins, but, having sent Alden to open the matter for him, found that he had acted unwisely, as the lady bade Alden speak for himself. Longfellow bases on this incident his “Courtship of Miles Standish.” He was elected one of the governor’s assistants, and for nineteen years held that responsible position. De Rasiere leaves us a pen-picture of the colony assembling by beat of drum at Standish’s door, “each with his musket or firelock. They had their cloaks on, and placed themselves in order three abreast, and were led by a sergeant. Behind came the governor in a long robe; beside him on the right hand came the preacher with his cloak on, and on the left hand the captain, with his side-arms and cloak on, and with a small cane in his hand; and so they march in good order, and each sets his arms down near him. Thus they are constantly on their guard night and day.” This military organization was Standish’s work.

But his labors were not confined to organizing the colony for military purposes, or maintaining peace with Indian neighbors or troublesome white neighbors. In 1625, he was despatched to England to obtain a supply of goods, and learn what terms could be made to obtain a release from the English merchants who had advanced money as partners in the undertaking. He reached London to find it ravaged by the plague. He negotiated with some advantage for the colony with the English partners, and in spite of the disordered condition of affairs he obtained advances, and brought over some goods for trading, and other most needful commodities as he knew requisite for their use. He heard, however, of the death of his old friend Robinson at Leyden, and was the bearer of that sad intelligence to the colony.

We next find him as a trader. To put the settlement on a better financial footing, after releasing themselves through his exertions from the London partners, Standish, with seven other settlers, in July, 1627, entered into an agreement with the colony to farm its trade for a term of six years. They assumed the debts of the colony, and agreed to bring over certain goods annually, in consideration of a small payment in corn or tobacco from each colonist. They put up a house on the Kennebec, and made it the centre of a prosperous trade.

In 1630, leaving Plymouth, he crossed to the north side of the harbor, and took up his residence on a spot still called Captain’s Hill, where his house has stood till our day, and the spring remains as kerbed with stone in his time. This place, probably after his birth-place in England, he called Duxbury, a name it still retains.

We find him reducing Morton; marching to defend the Pokanokets, allies of Plymouth, against the Narragansetts; going to Boston to maintain his colony’s rights to the [Pg 677] Kennebec trade after a collision there with a Boston trader; sent in 1635 to recover Penobscot from the French; commanding the Plymouth quota in the Pequot war; engaged against the Narragansetts in 1651, against the Mohawks and their allies in New York; and finally, in 1653, when very old, appointed to command the troops which Plymouth raised in anticipation of hostilities with the Dutch of New Netherland.

This was his last public service. He died in his house at Duxbury, October 3, 1656, leaving several sons, and his widow Barbara. His descendants at the present time must be many. “Nature endowing him with valor, quickness of apprehension, and good judgment, had qualified him for business or war. Of his other peculiarities, nothing has been recorded except that he was of small stature and of hasty temper. He had no ambition except to do for his friends whatever from time to time they thought fit to charge him with—whether it was to frighten the Narragansett or Massachusetts natives, to forage for provisions, or to hold a rod over disorderly English neighbors, or to treat with merchants on the London exchange. In the misery of the early settlement especially, the reader does not fail to reflect what relief must have been afforded by reliance on a guardian so vigilant and manful” (Palfrey).

On the 7th of October, 1872, the Standish Monument Association, incorporated by the State of Massachusetts, laid the corner-stone of a monument to this Catholic soldier, a round tower, to be surmounted by a bronze figure of the first captain of Plymouth colony. The Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company of Boston were there, Freemasons, Odd Fellows, Good Templars, military delegations, the governor, magistrates, Protestant clergymen, and citizens; but there is no record that any bishop or clergyman of the faith professed by the Standishes of Standish assisted at the ceremony. The Catholic element was ignored. It should have been safe from insult.

But it may be asked, how can we claim Miles Standish as a Catholic? He was of a known Catholic family, then, since, and now Catholic. Though associated with Robinson’s flock, he never became a member of their church in Leyden, Plymouth, or Duxbury. His Catholic convictions give the simplest reason for this, which one of the New England historians regards as “an anomaly in human nature” (Baylies). If amid all the temptations from the associations around him he thus persistently declined to connect himself even nominally with the Protestant Church, it shows that he still clung to that of his family.

But why should a Catholic thus isolate himself from all the ministrations of the church, and throw himself into a Protestant community? Deprived of the heritage he claimed, he had to seek his fortune elsewhere. In England, the number of Catholics in proportion to the population was less than in Holland; but he probably found life more congenial with these countrymen of another faith than with men of the same faith but of another country. Circumstances, too, control our paths in life. Catholics count in this country by millions, yet there is many a Catholic thrown almost entirely into Protestant circles.

But Standish, it may be said, [Pg 678] married out of the church, and allowed his children to be brought up as Protestants. So did Gerard, one of the founders of Maryland, although there were priests in the colony and no Protestant minister; so did Matthew Carey; so did Chief-Justice Taney—yet all are regarded as Catholics, though we regret their indifference to the salvation of their children. It will not do on these grounds to deny his Catholicity.

There was not, so far as we know, a single apostate Catholic in the community at Plymouth, not one who, having tasted the pure Gospel, known the divinely given faith and the divinely instituted worship, turned to wallow in the mire of man-made creeds and worship devised by shallow men. Standish cannot be accused of being in league with known apostates. Yet even had he been guilty of such a step, we cannot judge him too harshly, for even in our days one may address a notorious and scandalous apostate in terms of eloquent welcome, and yet be deemed Catholic enough to lecture before pre-eminently Catholic bodies, and address the young graduates of our literary institutions as one fit to guide their future career.

But, it may be said, he must have lived in utter neglect of his duties as a Catholic. Who can tell this? Like Le Baron, the French surgeon wrecked and captured on the coast, he may have clung to the faith to the end, performed his devotions as he might, and died with the crucifix over his heart. The opportunities for approaching the sacraments from time to time were given him, and his position gave him greater ease in embracing those opportunities. The trading-houses of Plymouth in Maine stood near similar French posts, where Capuchins and Recollects were maintained. The report of Mgr. Urban Cerri and the French colonial documents show that, for the benefit of Catholics in New England, English-speaking priests were sent to those points and maintained in Canada on the frontiers. Who can say that Standish, who was frequently in Maine on colonial matters and for trade, meeting these priests and speaking French, for his powers as a linguist are mentioned, did not avail himself of the opportunity of hearing Mass and approaching the sacraments. It is not likely that when he did he went with a file of soldiers and a drum-beating, or that he made a special report to the Plymouth government. It would be a fact of which evidence would not be heralded.

In his last days, 1651, Father Druillettes visited Boston and Plymouth with his Plymouth friend Winslow, where he must have met the aged Standish.

His library, it may be urged, as shown by the inventory, contains no Catholic works, and several devotional and doctrinal works of the Puritan school. As his wife was a Protestant, we may well suppose this part of the family library to have been her reading. Surely, when all New England authorities concur in admitting “that he never cherished any strong impressions of their religion,” or took any interest in it, we may put down Rogers’ Seaven Treatises, Wilcock’s works, Burrough’s Christian Contentment, Davenport’s Apology, and the Comentary on James Ball Catterkesmer, as her reading and not his; while we readily recognize the soldier’s taste in Cæser’s Comentaryes, Banft’s Artillery, the History of the World, Turkish History, Chronicle of England, [Pg 679] Ye History of Queen Elizabeth, The State of Europe, the Garmon (German) History, and Homer’s Iliad.

The whole case is now before the reader. Miles Standish has been always classed as a Protestant, but there is certainly grave doubt on the point. He never renounced the Catholic faith in which he was undoubtedly born; and therefore, we Catholics have some claim to his name and fame. No descendant of his, to the writer’s knowledge, is now a Catholic, but some have been in our day pupils of Catholic institutions. These will, we trust, follow up our labors, and bring from the records of the past more conclusive evidence of the lifelong Catholicity of Miles Standish.

[180] Historical Magazine, April, 1873, p. 251.

[181] Standish Monument, Boston, 1873, pp. 21, 25.

[182] Hist. Mag., March, 1871, pp. 273, 274.

[183] Howe’s Massachusetts Collections.

[184] Bradford’s History.

VITTORIA COLONNA

Lived in court—

Which rare it is to do—most praised, most loved,

A sample to the youngest, to the more mature

A glass that feated them, and to the graver

A child that guided dotards.

—Cymbeline.

Twelve miles from Rome, on an almost isolated knoll of the Alban range of hills, more than thirteen hundred feet above the sea, which glimmers in the distance beyond the Campagna, rises the picturesque, mediæval town of Marino. Many quiet Romans spend the villeggiatura there, to enjoy its pure air and the shady promenades and beautiful views around it; but few foreigners do more than visit, on the way, a classical spot, a deep and wooded glen at the foot of the hill, where the representatives of the Latin tribes used to meet for deliberation on public matters down to the year 340 B.C., and which is noted for the tragic end of Turnus Herdonius, an influential chief of the league, who was treacherously accused, condemned, and drowned, at the request of Tarquin the Proud, in the clear pool of water—called by Livy caput aquæ Ferentinæ—which wells up so innocently from under a moss-covered rock overspread by an ancient, crooked beech-tree at the head of the little valley.

We do not intend to sketch the history of Marino or describe its local monuments, however interesting, but will simply remark that during the middle ages it passed successively from the Counts of Tusculum to the Frangipanis, the Orsinis, and, under Pope Martin V., to the Colonnas, in whose favor it was erected into a dukedom in 1424. The large baronial palace of the sixteenth century which stands in the middle of the town is full of curiosities and ancestral portraits of this powerful family, although the rarer and more interesting ones have long since been removed to the princely headquarters near the Santi Apostoli, in Rome. The stone-work and towers which still surround Marino and add so much to its feudal aspect, were raised in the year 1480, and [Pg 680] the ruins of the castle, with its battlements and proud armorial signs upon the walls, are on the most precipitous side of the town, overlooking the noisy little stream of Aqua Ferentina. It was in this castle—which, having been made by the Colonnas their principal stronghold in that part of the Roman States, was then in the pride of all its freshness and strength of portals, merlons, and machicolations—that a daughter was born in the year 1490 to Don Fabrizio Colonna and his wife, the Lady Agnes of Montefeltro. As soon as possible she was held up at a window to be seen by her father’s retainers and saluted with the discharge of artillery, peal of trumpets, and shouts of men-at-arms.

This infant was Vittoria Colonna, who became one of the most celebrated women of the sixteenth century, and who is even remembered in Italy to this day for her learning, her poetry, beauty, conjugal affection, piety, and sorrows; and yet, strange as it may seem, although hardly singular—for illustrious names of the same period have fallen into a like obscurity—no date more precise than that of the year can be assigned to her birth; and certainly one of the benefits derived by biographers from the reforms which followed the Council of Trent is the better keeping of baptismal registers, by means of which—in countries, at least, where the church was not persecuted nor war made on parochial books—sometimes the very hour, often the day of the week, always that of the month, of an individual’s birth may be found.

Vittoria was the eldest, and only female, of six children. Her father was not only a great nobleman of the States of the Church, but the possessor of many Neapolitan fiefs; and soon after Charles VIII. of France, who had attempted the conquest of the kingdom of Naples, began to experience an evil turn of fortune, Don Fabrizio was detached from his service by Ferdinand of Spain, who succeeded in driving the French out of the southern part of Italy. Most of his life was spent in courts and camps, and but little time was passed in his castles, whither he went either to enjoy the chase or when called by domestic concerns, such as this one that gave a daughter to his house. Her mother was a child of Frederic, Duke of Urbino, head of an illustrious family which for three centuries had ranked among the lesser independent princes of Italy. Some of Vittoria’s ancestors of this line had figured in a conspicuous manner in history, especially as patrons of letters, and during a certain period the court of Urbino was the most refined and intellectual of the Italian peninsula. She felt its influence through her accomplished mother; but her father’s family was also remarkable for an hereditary genius and aptitude in every branch of learning; and a long list could be made of men of erudition, and of writers more or less distinguished, belonging to the Colonna lineage, at the head of which would stand Ægidius Romanus, or Giles of Rome, General of the Augustinians, and for his profound knowledge surnamed Doctor fundatissimus, whose work, De Regimine Principum, composed for his pupil, Philip the Fair of France, was the model in its general subject and didactic form, but without the immoral maxims, of Macchiavelli’s treatise, Del Principe.

According to the custom among [Pg 681] the great in that age, Vittoria, while a mere child, being only four years of age, was affianced to one not much older than herself. This was Ferdinand Francesco d’Avalos. His noble family, of Catalan origin, had come over to Italy with the Spanish invaders in 1442, and risen to considerable importance; Don Alonzo, son of Inigo, who accompanied Alphonsus I. in his expedition and died at Naples, having been created Marquis of Pescara, a fortified town of the Abruzzi at the mouth of a river that empties itself into the Adriatic. This very honorable betrothal was made at the suggestion of King Ferdinand, who hoped in this way to attach Fabrizio more strongly to himself. Except this affair, hardly anything is known of Vittoria’s early years, nor who were her instructors; but, judging from subsequent events, she must have been surrounded by whatever advantages wealth, social influence, and political position could procure; and the literary ardor which marked the fifteenth century having passed from colleges and universities into the ranks of private life, her education was such as to ensure her the highest mental culture, united with every accomplishment befitting her station. At the age of five she was transferred to the tutelage of her future husband’s family and placed in care of her sister-in-law, the Duchess of Francavila, who was castellan for the king of the fortress and island of Ischia, at the entrance of the Bay of Naples. This important charge could only have been entrusted to a woman of superior talents, and justifies the praises which Vittoria has given in several sonnets to the “magnanimous Costanza,” as she delights to call her. The duchess loved study, and cultivated the society of the learned, being herself well acquainted with Latin, Spanish, and Italian, in which last language she wrote a work on the misfortunes and trials of the world—Degli Infortuni e Travagli del Mondo. It was in the midst of enchanting scenery, of the fame of martial deeds, and of an elegant conversation that Vittoria’s youthful happiness was passed. She grew up beautiful in person, lovely in mind, and adorned with every grace of manners. She was tall and of an easy carriage, the blood in her veins forming over her white skin a delicate cerulean tracery, while her face was set in a mass of auburn hair which has been sung—such a color being rare in Italy—by some of the best writers of her day. Of her personal appearance, those who have mentioned it can never say enough. That her charms were not the poetical exaggerations of devoted admirers we know from several sources, and particularly from the very sober prose of a curious diary [185] kept by a certain Giuliano Casseri who had occasion to see Vittoria at Naples. She was considered by all—except, of course, by her own sex—the handsomest woman of the age:

Her ivory forehead, full of bounty brave,

Like a broad table did itself dispread,

For Love his lofty triumphs to engrave,

And write the battles of his great godhead:

All good and honor might therein be read;

For there their dwelling was. And, when she spake

Sweet words, like dropping honey, she did shed;

And ‘twixt the pearls and rubies softly brake

A silver sound that heavenly music seemed to make.

—Spenser.

After a few years passed in this family, Vittoria returned to Marino to prepare for her marriage, which took place at Ischia in 1507, with all the pomp and splendor [Pg 682] that the two great families and their numerous friends could command. The list of marriage gifts and the names of the personages who witnessed the matrimonial contract are interesting—apart from the subjects themselves—for the light they throw upon high society in Italy at a period when it easily surpassed, in the means of luxurious living and all the amenities of social intercourse, that of any other country in Europe.

The Avalos family, like that of Colonna and Montefeltro, was famous for its attention to classical literature and its patronage of learned men. Tiraboschi, in his History of Italian Literature, says of this young Marquis of Pescara that he was no less a diligent student himself than a munificent patron of learning in others. Tall, naturally of romantic ardor, he had moved among men who always inspired him with a taste for the profession of arms, and he rose to be one of the greatest captains of his age.

The first three years of their married life were spent very happily either at Ischia or at Naples. Their affection was mutual and tender. They had ratified the choice of their parents, and their marriage was one of those which are said to be made in heaven. In fact, between her betrothal and final engagement, when the brilliant qualities of her mind and the exquisite beauty of her features began to be the talk and admiration of every one, several great offers had been made to her father in hopes of detaching his daughter from Avalos, and among these suitors were the Dukes of Savoy and Braganza. But while a malicious pen has told us that the reason they were not accepted is that one was too old and the other too far away, the gentle maiden herself assures us that she remained firm to the first love from the purest sentiment of devotion:

A pena arean gli spiriti intiera vita,

Quando il mio cor proscrisse agni altro oggetto.

In 1512, when war broke out with France, the young Marquis of Pescara was summoned to serve his king, and accompanied his wife’s father, who was Grand Constable of Naples, her uncle, the renowned Prospero Colonna, and her five gallant brothers to the scene of action. Vittoria, meanwhile, remained at Ischia; but before many months had passed she had cause of grief far heavier than that of separation—her husband was wounded and a prisoner. It was at the battle of Ravenna (11th of April, 1512), which has been so tersely described by Macaulay as one of those tremendous days in which human folly and wickedness compress the whole devastation of a famine or a plague, that Fabrizio, who commanded the Spanish vanguard, and Pescara, who was master of the horse, surrendered their swords. The latter was carried to Milan and placed in the fortress of Porta Gobbia. When the news was brought to Ischia, Vittoria and Costanza gave way to their grief, but with a dignified moderation becoming their lofty ideals of sacrifice and duty, and without any of that wild emotion so common to the tender sentiment in the sex.

The illustrious prisoner consoled himself during confinement by composing for his wife a Dialogue on Love. His captivity did not last long, and he was liberated after paying a heavy ransom. He then returned to his beloved home, where he was welcomed by all classes as [Pg 683] a veritable hero, and a little of the fast-fading glamour of chivalry showed itself among the Italians in the attention which was directed to his scarred face, so much so that one of his fair admirers, the Duchess of Milan, exclaimed that she too would like to be a man, if only to receive a wound across the cheek, and see how it would add to a fine appearance. All this is very ridiculous, but that it had a hold upon certain minds at this age, and may therefore be noted, is shown from many other circumstances of the same kind; for instance, the delight of Francis of Guise in being surnamed Le Balafré, from a severe cut received at the siege of Bologna, in 1545.

When Pescara was again called (in 1513) to join the forces collected in Lombardy against the French, his wife returned to Ischia, where she continued a diligent course of reading. Besides studying the classics, she cultivated Italian poetry, from which her fame, in our day at least, has chiefly arisen, and in her graceful verses displayed a charm and musical rhythm not equalled since the strains of Petrarch’s muse were heard.

Her husband sometimes came to see her, but his visits from the camp could not be frequent, and most of the time she was left alone in the midst of the little court at Ischia, consumed by that species of domestic grief so poignant to a loving heart when the marital union has not been blessed by issue. Vittoria mentions this particular sorrow, this absence of maternal joy, in a very touching sonnet (No. 22). Finally, despairing of children of her own, she prevailed upon her husband in 1515 to adopt as his son and heir his young cousin, the Marquis del Vasto.

In 1521 we find Vittoria at home. The year before she lost her father, whom Italians delight to mention as having lived a life full of grandeur and glory; but more impartial writers dispute the intaminatis fulget honoribus, and assert that his desertion of the losing for the winning party, when he passed over from Charles to Ferdinand, was done without principle, and merely to save his Neapolitan fiefs. He was a great friend of Macchiavelli, and the well-known contempt and hatred of this political fiend for what he was pleased to call the barbarous domination of the foreigner probably influenced him to think that it mattered little whether he served Frenchman or Spaniard, since neither had a right to or deserved his services. It was to him that the subtle Florentine addressed his seven books on the Art of War. His wife, the lovely and pious Agnes, survived him only two years, dying after a pilgrimage to Our Lady of Loretto. One of Vittoria’s most beautiful sonnets is on her mother.

Pescara, being again called to arms, hurried to the north of Italy, and after the battle of Sessia behaved with exquisite courtesy towards the wounded and expiring Bayard. At the battle of Pavia, on Feb. 24, 1525, Pescara was grievously wounded. Although he greatly contributed by his skill and valor to the fortunes of that day, he could not conceal his disappointment at not being more generously rewarded by the emperor, and was soon afterwards approached by Morone, the experienced minister of the Duke of Milan, with an offer of the kingdom of Naples for himself if he would join a league which was being formed among the Italian princes to free Italy of foreign [Pg 684] rulers, whether French, Spanish, or German. Historians differ in their accounts of his conduct in this delicate affair. Writers in the imperial interest from that time to this assert that he indignantly rejected the proposal, which involved both treachery and ingratitude—even although he had not received the full measure of his merits—and Sandoval says that he showed himself among those double-dealing Italians “verdadero Español, Castellano viejo.” Certain it is that Pescara used to consider himself more a Spaniard than an Italian, was prouder of his Spanish blood than of his Neapolitan title, and often regretted that he was not born in the land of his ancestors. On the other hand, Italian writers say that he fully committed himself, and was perfectly willing to abandon and turn against his sovereign, but that at the last moment he quailed, and basely betrayed his companions to the vengeance of the emperor, for which reason the rancorous Guicciardini (xiv.. 189) calls him, with almost incredible insolence, “Capitano altiero, insidioso, maligno, senz’ alcuna sincerità.” More moderate historians say that he was merely dazzled by the prospect of a crown, perhaps even entertained the proposition, and would probably have thrown himself into the movement but for the protest and heroic abnegation of his wife. The truth seems to be, as Gregorovius remarks, that national antipathy has biassed the judgment of Italian writers. Immediately after the battle of Pavia, Charles V. wrote a most flattering autograph letter to Vittoria. Her answer from Ischia, May 1, 1525, is written in a fair hand, and preserved among the papers of the Gonzaga Archives at Mantua.

Pescara received three wounds, and lay for some months suffering from their effects, which he imprudently aggravated by copious draughts of ice-water. He was too weak to travel, and, growing worse, sent a hasty messenger to his wife to come to Milan and receive his last breath. She started immediately, but was met at Viterbo by the fatal intelligence that he had died on Nov. 25.[186] His funeral took place on the 30th, and the body was afterwards transported to Naples and buried in the church of St. Dominic. Paulus Jovius, a contemporary, wrote his life—Vita Ferdinandi Davali Pescarii—in elegant Latin. A literary memorial of Spanish domination in another extremity of Europe, and of the days when, the great school of war being transferred from classical Italy to the Netherlands, the gests of illustrious soldiers were eagerly studied by military men—although, as a rule, no longer in the learned language of Cæsar’s Commentaries—is preserved to us in the Historia del fortissimo y prudentissimo Capitan Don Hernando de Avalos, Marques de Pescara, published at Antwerp in 1570.

Vittoria’s first impulse, following this shock, was to take the religious habit, but she was prudently dissuaded by the learned Sadolet, Bishop of Carpentras, who was then in Rome, from a measure which would seem to proceed rather from overwhelming grief than mature deliberation. She did, however, retire for a time to the convent of San Silvestro in Capite, which was closely connected with the fortunes [Pg 685] of the Colonna family. It was during this pious retreat that she began that In Memoriam to her dead husband which we will mention a little further on.

The first seven years of her widowhood were passed in inconsolable grief. She resided at different periods either with her father’s family at Rome, Marino, or in some other of their castles, or at Naples and Ischia with the relatives of her late husband. Being still in the prime of life, in the bloom of beauty, and well provided for by Pescara’s will, her hand was sought in marriage by several distinguished suitors; but she turned a deaf ear to all proposals of this kind, vowing that her first love still reigned supreme.

Amor le faci spense ove l’accese.[187]
(Love lit his torch, and quenched it in the flame.)

When the Emperor Charles V. was in Rome in 1536, he made a ceremonious visit, the more honorable as his stay was so short in the Eternal City, to the widow of his faithful general. In 1537 she made a tour among several cities in northern Italy, and was everywhere received with the greatest distinction. We find her with the Ducal Estes at Ferrara, with the celebrated Veronica Gambara [188] at Bologna, and with the erudite Ghiberto, Bishop of Verona. From a letter of Pietro Aretino it appears that she was bent about this period on making a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, but was dissuaded by her adopted son and husband’s heir, Del Vastro, who feared that her health would very seriously suffer. During this time, also, she assisted Bernardo Tasso (father of the poet), who acknowledges the benefit he received from her religious sentiments.

In 1538 she was back again in Rome, and one of the most interesting episodes of her life—her friendship with Michael Angelo—was then begun. The austere artist, who was sixty-four years old, felt animated by a fervent but chaste affection, such as he had never before experienced. It brought him the poet’s crown to add to his other crowns of painter, architect, and sculptor; for it is chiefly upon his sonnets to Vittoria that his literary reputation rests. The few years of this sacred friendship were the happiest in his life; and it is no small part of our heroine’s reputation to have inspired in this wonderful man a muse so chaste and powerful. His poetic addresses to her, though marked, says Harford, by the highest admiration of her mind and heart, are throughout expressive of the most reverential respect. They gratefully acknowledge her condescending courtesy, and the beneficial influence of her piety and wisdom upon his own opinions, fluctuating between vice and virtue, but he never presumes even to refer to her personal attractions. It was only after her death, and then but in a single sonnet, that he relaxed in a slight degree his habitual reserve and sang of her earthly beauty. But the strain is still elevated far above the expressions of carnal love, and describes a celestial countenance not unworthy of the Beatrice of Dante.

How highly she was esteemed by all classes is shown, among many other sources, from the words of an unprejudiced foreigner then in [Pg 686] Rome, the Spanish artist d’Olanda, who says in his journal that she is one of the noblest and most famous women in Italy and in the whole world; beautiful, chaste, a Latin scholar; adorned with every grace that can redound to a woman’s praise; devoting herself since her husband’s death to thoughts of Christ and to study; supporting the needy; a model of genuine piety. From a letter of Cardinal Pole, dated April 2, 1541, we learn that she visited Ratisbon, but neither the motives nor any details of this long journey have been discovered; only it is known that she was received with honor by the emperor and by the citizens. Her fame, then, had already passed the Alps. On her return from Germany she rested for a while in the convent of San Paolo at Orvieto, whence she wrote to Cardinal Pole, expressing how much delight she found in the rules and society of the sisters, whom she calls “a company of angels.” It was while in this holy place that the apostate Ochino sent her a letter, in which he tried to explain and apologize for his conduct; but she indignantly forwarded it to Cervini at Rome, to be lodged with the ecclesiastical authorities, as it was unbecoming in her to receive any communication from such a reprobate. With fine womanly tact she had long before discovered the weak points in the character of this gifted but miserable man, consumed by pride and lust, and, after hearing him preach, she used often, as though struck by some vague apprehension of a hidden conflict in that eloquent soul, pray for his final perseverance.

And yet it is from her intercourse with several persons—Valdez, Ochhino, Vermigli (Peter Martyr), and some others, who afterwards became heretics, that her English biographers especially have striven to make her out a Protestant! There is not one sentence in her voluminous writings which can be honestly made to bear an uncatholic sense. But we perceive everywhere a love of the church, a respect for the pope—whom she styles, in the most orthodox language, “the Vicar of Christ”—an admiration for celibacy and the religious life,[189] and, finally, a tender devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary. If this be Protestantism, Protestants are welcome to it; and God grant they may make the most of it! Cardinal Pole, who was many years her junior, used to honor her as his mother, and assiduously cultivated her friendship. She left him a legacy of 10,000 scudi in her will, but he made it over to her niece. At Viterbo she displayed a lively interest in all matters of education, and took the greatest pleasure in teaching the pupils entrusted to the religious community of St. Catherine.

Vittoria returned to Rome at the beginning of the year 1547, and retired to the palace of Julian Cesarini, who was married to Julia Colonna. While here she fell very ill, and, feeling her end approach, she was filled with the pious sentiments of one of her own sonnets, composed but a short time before, and which will show her constant preparation for death and serve as a specimen of her style. The translation is by Harford:

“Would that a voice impressive might repeat,

In holiest accents to my inmost soul,

The name of Jesus; and my words and works

Attest true faith in him, and ardent hope;

The soul elect, which feels within itself

The seeds divine of this celestial love,

Hears, sees, attends on Jesus; grace from him

[Pg 687] Illumes, expands, fires, purifies the mind;

The habit bright of thus invoking him

Exalts our nature so that it appeals

Daily to him for its immortal food.

In the last conflict with our ancient foe.

So dire to nature, armed with Faith alone,

The heart, from usage long, on him will call.”

—Sonnet 29.

She died towards the end of February, 1547—the exact date is not known—in the odor of sanctity, as one of her Italian biographers says. By her will she made Ascanio Colonna her heir, left one thousand scudi to each of the four convents in which she had so often lived, provided for all her servants, and disposed of a large sum in charity, besides making other pious bequests. Her signature to this instrument is in Latin, in these words: Ita testavi ego Vitoria Columna.

Strange it is, perhaps, but yet a worthy ending of a life of humility and mortification, even in the midst of the glories of the world, that no monument is raised over her remains. In fact, her body cannot be identified; for having requested to be buried in the religious habit of the nuns of Sant’Anna de’ Funari, and in their midst, it was committed to the common vault of the community, where it lies undistinguished from the others that repose there.

Her poetry may be classified into a series composed during her husband’s life and the first years of her widowhood, and another written when she had devoted herself to a stricter manner of living. The former is taken up with conjugal love, descriptions of nature, and miscellaneous subjects; the latter is exclusively given up to religious ideas: one is the profane, the other the sacred, series. As an example of the lofty energy with which her mind poured its whole current of feeling into the channel of Christian devotion, we present her 28th sonnet in Harford’s translation:

“Deaf would I be to earthly sounds, to greet,

With thoughts intent and fixed on things above,

The high, angelic strains, the accents sweet,

In which true peace accords with perfect love;

Each living instrument the breath that plays

Upon its strings from chord to chord conveys,

And to one end so perfectly they move

That nothing jars the eternal harmony

Love melts each voice, Love lifts its accents high,

Love beats the time, presides o’er ev’ry string;

Th’ angelic orchestra one signal sways.

The sound becomes more sweet the more it strays

Through varying changes, in harmonious maze;

He who the song inspired prompts all who sing.”

As an impartial critic we must confess that, however refined the language, beautiful the sentiments, and learned the imagery, there is too much classical grandiloquence in her love-songs to permit us to forget the head that composed, and allow us to think only of the heart that inspired, them. When Pescara went forth on his first military expedition, she described her grief in a long rhymed letter of thirty-seven stanzas, in which all that is heroic in ancient Greece and Rome is summoned to witness her disconsolate state. The opening address—Eccelso Mio Signore! (My high-engendered Lord!)—while it shows the reverential homage which the wife in those days was expected to offer to her husband, and which, with all its formalism, was better than the disrespectful familiarity of a later age, is the prelude to a style altogether too much like that of the eccentric Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle, whose biography of her husband—her Julius Cæsar, her thrice noble, high, and puissant Prince, as she used to call him—is the acme of connubial admiration. After the death of Pescara, Vittoria depicted her own grief and his great, good qualities in a flow of verses full of beauty, dignity, and pathos. Upwards of one hundred sonnets are devoted to his memory. [Pg 688] Trollope, with the conceit of his class, calls these touching expressions of sorrow “the tuneful wailings of a young widow as lovely as inconsolable, as irreproachable as noble”; but the more generous feelings and, doubtless, the Catholic instincts of her French biographer discover in this exquisite threnody a form of prayer to God for peace to the living and eternal rest to the dead. After seven years of widowhood a great change took place in her nature. She gave herself up entirely to higher influences; and the difference of style is remarkable between her worldly and her religious poems. The first are, as we have said, devoted to the love of a mortal object; the second to a divine dilection. This series is entitled Rime Spirituali. She begins it:

“Since a chaste love my soul has long detained

In fond idolatry of earthly fame,

Now to the Lord, who only can supply

The remedy, I turn …”—Sonnet 1.

And again we observe in the following production her resolve to abandon pagan allusions and confine her poetry to sublimer subjects:

“Me it becomes not henceforth to invoke

Or Delos or Parnassus; other springs,

Far other mountain-tops, I now frequent,

Where human steps, unaided, cannot mount.”

All writers on Italian poetry are agreed that for delicacy and grace of style Vittoria ranks next to Petrarch.

Several medals and portraits have perpetuated her features at different periods of life. Of the former, two were made while her husband was living—both heads being represented—and two during her widowhood. A most beautiful medal was struck at Rome in 1840 on occasion of the marriage of Prince Torlonia to Donna Teresa Colonna, but the face is more or less ideal. Several portraits were painted during her lifetime, but it is difficult to trace them all. Some are lost, and others are doubtful originals. The thoroughly genuine one (say the Romans) is that in the Colonna Gallery. It is a fine type of chaste and patrician beauty. It was taken when she was about eighteen; although how it can in this case (and it certainly represents her still in her teens) be ascribed to Muziano, as it is by Mrs. Roscoe, we cannot understand, because this artist was born only in 1528, when Vittoria was already thirty-eight years old. The fact is that the artist is unknown; but there should be some acuteness even in conjecture. Although it would be highly flattering to the vanity of her race, and of the Romans in general, to believe that her portrait was sketched by Michael Angelo and painted by Sebastiano del Piombo, they reject with horror the celebrated picture by their hands in the Tribune at Florence in which others see her face and figure. The best judges, however, call it simply “A Lady, 1512”; and our ideal of Vittoria revolts from the voluptuous features and disgusting pectoral development of this portrait; but if it were possible to determine it in her favor (?) we should have to exclaim:

“Appena si può dir, questà furosa.”

All writers on Italian literature mention our heroine at considerable length; but of separate biographies the principal ones are the following: Gio. Batt. Rota, Rime e Vita di D. Vittoria Colonna, Marchesana di Pescara, 1 vol. 8vo, 1760; Isabella Teotochi Albizzi, Ritratti, etc., Pisa, 1826 (4th ed., copy in Astor Library); John S. Harford, Life of Michael Angelo Buonarotti … [Pg 689] with Memoirs of … Vittoria Colonna, 2 vols., London, 1857 (Astor Library); Cav. P. E. Visconti, Vita di Vittoria Colonna, Rome, 1840; Le Fèvre Deumier published a memoir of her in French in 1856; T. A. Trollope, A Decade of Italian Women; Mrs. Henry Roscoe, Vittoria Colonna, 1 vol., London, 1868. In 1844 the Accademia degli Arcadi at Rome decreed to have a bust of Vittoria made and placed in the museum of the Capitol. It was inaugurated with great pomp on May 12, 1845; and thirty-two poems in Latin and Italian were written to celebrate the event, and afterwards collected into a volume and published. The following is the simple inscription beneath the bust:

A. Vittoria Colonna.
N.MCCCCXC. M.MDXLVII.
Teresa. Colonna. Principessa. Romana.
Pose.
MDCCCXLV.

[185] Published only in 1785.

[186] Philippe Macquer, in his esteemed work, Abrégé Chronologique de l’Histoire d’Espagne et de Portugal (1759-65), 2 vols. 8vo, says that there is ground for believing that he was poisoned by his enemies, which we think is very likely to have been the case.

[187] 18th Sonnet.

[188] One of the most distinguished females of the age, and for love of letters and literary success ranking next to Vittoria. She was born in 1485; her father, the Count Gianfrancesco Gambara of Brescia; her mother, Alda Pia of Carpi; her husband was Ghiberto, Lord of Correggio. She died in 1550.

[189] Writing to Michael Angelo from the convent of St. Catherine at Viterbo, as late as 1543, she calls the nuns, her companions, “the spouses of Christ.”

ALLIES’ FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM [190]

The appearance of the third part of Mr. Allies’ great work offers an occasion for expressing the interest with which we have regarded it since the publication of the first volume in 1865. The author is well known on both sides of the Atlantic, and the present work has been noticed from time to time in this magazine.

It consists of a series of historical lectures grouping and classifying the leading features of that wonderful movement which began shortly after the foundation of the Roman Empire, and has survived its downfall more than a thousand years.

Mr. Allies proposes to examine minutely and accurately into these facts. Those who are familiar with his other works will fully appreciate his ability to cope with his present task, while the need of a calm and studious presentation of this period of history is sufficiently evident.

The religious movement of the sixteenth century boasts, and not without reason, of having been a radical departure from the spirit of the age which preceded it. It broke with the past; first, in regard to particular questions, concerning which it took issue with existing belief. But the separation which ensued in the religious sphere soon extended to the whole range of man’s spiritual faculties. The followers of the new prophets were associated together in communities and nations, and became entirely estranged from the ancient system.

This isolation was bound to produce in a short time wide divergence of sentiment, and an ever-increasing estrangement from the past.

Americans going abroad find themselves constantly misinterpreting and being misunderstood by foreigners.

[Pg 690] We live in another era, and under circumstances so different that it is only by earnest and thoughtful preparation that we can qualify ourselves to judge of other nations.

Any person who will pause for a moment will realize the difficulty of conceiving what the present state of the world would have been had the movement towards a high material development, which preceded Protestantism, been conducted under Catholic auspices alone. Of course, such a conception is impossible to the common ignorant Protestant; but even enlightened minds outside the Catholic Church must acknowledge that it is not easy to acquire a full sympathy with the intellectual epoch which preceded Protestantism. Wherever the new religion became dominant, a thorough break was effected between past and present. The American freeman resembles his English great-grandfather far more closely than the Protestant of the seventeenth resembles the Catholic of the fifteenth century. The French communist still speaks the language in which the feudal tenant addressed the seigneur of the last century; but it would be rash to affirm his capacity to understand the sentiments of his peasant grandfather.

The change wrought by the sixteenth century extends throughout the world, and affects the deepest, most powerful, and most mysterious range of sentiment. This change occurred just as the literature of modern times had begun to take shape and form. Everything has borne the stamp either of its action or of the reaction against it. It was a veritable Lethe; and those who passed through it forgot the images, expressions, and thoughts of preceding generations.

The results of this tendency were entirely overlooked by the partisans of Luther and Calvin. But the most superficial student of history nowadays perceives in them irrefragable proof of two things: first, that the movement of the sixteenth century was something altogether new in the world; and, secondly, that it was completely subversive of the entire order which preceded it. To deny either of these propositions is to bid defiance to truth and farewell to reason. And whereas Catholics have been abused for predicting these facts, there are not wanting Protestants who glory in acknowledging them, now that they can no longer be controverted.

However, we do not wish to bring them forward in our condemnation of Protestantism, but simply to illustrate another fact which is equally true.

Protestantism, amongst other evils, has brought a spirit of scepticism into historical research which is one of the most ghastly symptoms of its present stage of dissolution. We do not mean a spirit which demands proof, but a spirit which no amount of proof can satisfy—which denies facts unquestionably true, and endeavors to cast discredit upon the most authentic records.

It is not hard to perceive the cause or to trace the development of this spirit.

The cause is that Protestantism was in every sense a break in history. It was an abnormal and morbid occurrence. The consequences of its denial—its protest—extended into every order of truth. But nowhere was their influence more fatal than in the domain of history. It lost the thread of sacred history by denying the authority of the Roman Church. But the isolated position [Pg 691] into which it was thrown soon rendered it unfit to interpret any tradition. In fact, it had no tradition; it was obliged to make one in accordance with its own needs. At first its doubts were all directed against the Papacy, because the Papacy was irreconcilable with its existence. Then the histories of the saints were condemned, because Protestantism had nothing of the kind to show. But the irreverent critic of the claims of the Sovereign Pontiff at last attacked the Scripture, which was thrown to him as bearing its own credentials. Far worse than this—the Bible having been destroyed, the sacred person of the Author of Christianity has been exposed for dissection. Nothing is deemed too blasphemous either to deny or assert of him. But now that he has been judged by the high-priests of the new religion, and condemned as an impostor, something has to be done with that vast system which civilized the world and endured for sixteen centuries, on the theory that Christ was what he proclaimed himself to be—the Lord of all things, and that his revelation was true.

After practically demonstrating that Protestantism is a denial of Christianity, we might expect the age to pause in its career of denial. This, however, at present seems to be expecting too much. Having denied the authority which Christ has commissioned, the revolution soon came to deny Christ. Having denied him, it has proceeded to deny him from whom Jesus was sent.

It only remains to deny every other fact which conflicts with the negative theory. It is, therefore, considered necessary to express doubt with regard to every historical fact connected with Christianity. A notable instance of this is before our eyes in Mr. Hare’s Walks in Rome, a book quite free from the more offensive forms of Protestant vulgarity. Mr. Hare has spent many years in Rome, and learned from its antiquarians the history of its secular traditions. He knows that the scene of St. Peter’s imprisonment is as well attested as any other which he describes in his work. In the course of his remarks on the Mamertine Prison, he says:

“It was by this staircase that Cicero came forth and announced the execution of the Catiline conspirators to the people in the Forum by the single word Viverunt—‘they have ceased to live!’ Close to the exit of these stairs the Emperor Vitellius was murdered.”

He discusses the age of the structure, and cites Ampère to prove it to be the oldest building in Rome. The author further says: “It is described by Livy and by Sallust, who depicts its horrors in his account of the execution of the Catiline conspirators. The spot is shown to which these victims were attached and strangled in turn. In this dungeon, at an earlier period, Appius Claudius and Oppius the decemvirs committed suicide (B.C. 449). Here Jugurtha, king of Mauritania, was starved to death by Marius. Here Julius Cæsar, during his triumph for the conquest of Gaul, caused his gallant enemy Vercingetorix to be put to death. Here Sejanus, the friend and minister of Tiberius, disgraced too late, was executed for the murder of Drusus, son of the emperor, and for an intrigue with his daughter-in-law Livilla. Here, also, Simon Bar Givras, the last defender of Jerusalem, suffered during the triumph of Titus.”

[Pg 692] Thus far the writer is dealing with facts of pagan tradition, which has been dead for centuries. Observe the change of tone when he comes to facts of the living Christian tradition—facts which he is evidently inclined to believe, but which must not be spoken of with the confidence appropriate to pagan narrative:

“The spot is more interesting to the Christian world as the prison of SS Peter and Paul, who are said to have been bound for nine months to a pillar, which is shown here.” A little further on: “It is hence that the Roman Catholic Church believes that St. Peter and St. Paul addressed their farewells to the Christian world” (pp. 94-96).

The testimony of the Egyptian hieroglyphs is unquestioned. The most fabulous antiquity is readily admitted for Indian and Chinese history. It is gratuitously assumed that the time of stone implements was not coincident with the use of metals in other nations, though the contrary may be witnessed on our own frontiers. If human remains are found along with those of extinct animals, it is assumed that they died together. No demand upon belief is too great unless it be in connection with Christianity. This tendency is to make men imagine that the era of our Saviour’s advent was purely mythical, and that the events of his time are as obscure as those of the siege of Troy.

We think that we have accounted for the existence of this tendency in the nature of Protestantism, as developed in Strauss and the “more advanced” German speculators. But after having created this artificial cloud in history, the same parties seek to give the impression that Christianity was but a natural development out of the union of Eastern with Western thought. Having endeavored to reduce it to a myth by denying or questioning history, the process is reversed, and history is appealed to in order to prove that Christianity was a purely natural phenomenon which can be readily explained.

It is, according to these rash theorists, a syncretism of the best thoughts of Egypt, India, and Greece, produced principally by the agency of the Alexandrian schools. This explanation is mainly satisfactory to them because it would explain the rise and establishment of Christianity without a miracle.[191] The hypothesis was eagerly embraced for this reason. Just so Strauss leaped for joy at the hypothesis of Darwin, because it professed to account for the existence of men without creation. But just as Darwin, while able to produce both specimens and remains of man and ape, could never find the intermediate animal, or even any trace of him, so this forged account of the origin of Christianity breaks down in the very fact which is necessary to give it even the semblance of value, viz., the warrant of historical facts. In order still further to misrepresent the origin of Christianity, it is necessary to observe the testimony of history as to the moral condition of the pagan world. Tacitus and Suetonius are pagan authors, therefore it will not do to impeach their writings in the same manner as the Gospels and the Christian Fathers. Being heathens, their works are certainly genuine, [Pg 693] and they are to be held as truthful men—a presumption to which the Evangelists and Fathers are in no way entitled. But we notice the tendency to overlook the frightful picture presented by these historians, and the attempt, by a judicious comparison of the best specimens of paganism with the worst scandals or most austere characters of church history, to draw conclusions injurious to Christianity.

This whole process of doubting the records, misstating the origin, and denying the real nature of early Christianity, is a fraud which will not bear scrutiny; it is maintained by men who avow their willingness to accept any hypothesis which conflicts with the ancient faith, and to lend the prestige of their talents to any effort against it.

The historical warfare has been vigorously carried on in Germany by both sides. The movement has penetrated into the English universities. Its echoes have been heard in our own midst, in the utterances of certain writers who, being possessed by the spirit of snobbishness, cleave to outlandish modes of thought because of their foreign or novel character.

Mr. Allies’ work is a thoughtful and profound exposition of facts, and brushes away the cobwebs with which hostile criticism has sought to envelop the history of Christianity. The author does not aim at a connected narrative. The chapters of his work are lectures, each one of which is an essay, complete in itself. The reader is presumed to be acquainted with the general outlines of history, and the author directs his efforts to answer such questions as naturally arise with regard to the introduction of Christianity and the foundation of that order which appeared under the title of Christendom in the Middle Age.

Accordingly, after giving his idea of the philosophy of history, Mr. Allies draws a graphic picture of the state of the Roman world. The civil polity of the Augustan age, the majesty of the Pax Romana, appear in their splendid proportions. The reader is brought face to face with all that is known of that epoch. Its ideas of manhood and morality are set forth from the testimony of eye-witnesses. Then follows a sketch of the work to be accomplished by Christianity, entitled the New Creation of Individual Man. This is succeeded by a series of lectures viewing the results which were to be expected from the influence of Christianity upon human character. Here we find also the testimony of eye-witnesses of the growth of the new religion, and an instructive comparison between Cicero and St. Augustine, illustrative of two most important ages of history. The fifth lecture of this first volume is on the New Creation of the Primary Relation between Man and Woman; and the seventh lecture deals with an equally Christian doctrine, viz., the Creation of the Virginal Life.

A recent German writer, laboring under a delusion not uncommon in his country, doubts whether the improved morality which appeared after the introduction of Christianity was really due to that religion or to the German race. This characteristic doubt is left undecided by the writer, but will probably soon be settled adversely to Christianity by some more adventurous Teuton. The public, for whose benefit these speculations are likely to be extended, will do well to read a little history, [Pg 694] and will not find Mr. Allies’ chapters amiss.

The second volume, which appeared in 1869, treats of the developments of that spiritual society which sprang into existence with the original ideas of Christianity and from the same source. The peculiar characteristics are traced of that hierarchical order which, after three centuries of bloody persecution, came forth from its hiding-place in perfect organization, to receive at once the homage of Constantine and to become the guide of civilization and the supreme ruler of nations for more than a thousand years.

The position of the church at the time of Constantine was that of complete victory. The portent in the sky which appeared to that emperor was not more miraculous than the spectacle afforded by Christianity. Starting from a distant point in an obscure race, without means, without facilities of communication, it had not only revolutionized the pagan world but it had maintained its own unity as a corporate body in the face of wholesale treason from within, and intense intellectual opposition, accompanied with three centuries of proscription, from without. Three centuries ago another movement started in our modern world. It had all the prestige of the civilization which germinated along with it. It has had the support of the civil power. It has had the best blood and most vigorous races to work for it. No earthly element of success has been refused to it. What is the result? Where is its unity? The very idea is abandoned. Where are its original convictions? Not one remains. What is its present influence? It has none. What is its prospect in the future? Entire destruction.

Nothing is better calculated to give us a correct idea of the difference between Protestantism and Christianity than this sort of a comparison. Such, however, is not Mr. Allies’ design. He aims, in his second volume, to show that Christianity had a definite theory and constructive spirit with regard to society. As he contrasts in his first volume the pagan notion of individual man with the Christian ideal, and shows a creative power in the latter producing results undreamed of in the heathen character, so the author traces, in his second volume, the social ideas brought in by Christianity.

The unity of the church, as taught and described by the fathers, was an idea no less remarkable in its marvellous working than in its utter novelty. This conception was based on the fundamental principle of Christianity, that its divine Founder had authorized a corporate body to teach the world those truths which he came to bring, and that the power of God was pledged to the infallibility of his church. This doctrine is the only constructive idea that has ever been broached with regard to society. Protestantism was a direct assault upon the very nature of Christianity, and is to be held responsible for the absence of this idea in modern civilization.

Mr. Allies develops the history of this Christian idea with great accuracy, filling out his comparison between Christian and pagan thinkers in all departments of thought, and establishing the claims of the new faith to be a creation fresh from the Author of all things, and not a development out of the putrescent [Pg 695] civilization of the ancient world.

That Christianity produced a type of character wholly distinct and peculiar, is a fact of which there can be no doubt on the part of those who have the slightest disposition to consult authentic records. That it possessed a vitality and organizing power of which there is no other instance, is equally certain. But we often hear the sayings of Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, and the later Stoics quoted, as exhibiting a tone of thought almost equal to that of Christianity, and by the enemies of religion vaunted as something far above the morality of the Gospel. No reader of Plutarch can escape the impression of his gentle and refined philosophy. Though full of grievous errors, it has a flavor of truth, a respect for purity, and an appreciation of virtue which are not to be found in the earlier historians.

The great error of those who would make Christianity a development of heathen thought is simply, then, mistaking the cause for the effect. A great change was undoubtedly to be expected from the blending of Greek and Roman speculation with the Jewish and Egyptian religions. This change actually took place. But its product was acted upon by Christianity, and did not become a factor of the new religion. Mr. Allies gives us the summary of ancient philosophy, which he traces down to its contact with Christian truth. We are able to see the vanity of that false reading of history which seeks to represent Christianity as a mendicant receiving crumbs from Plato, Pythagoras, Philo, and the Stoics. We perceive from their writings and the tone of their disciples the barrenness and emptiness of Attic thought, up to the time when it received the few corrections and additions from Christian doctrine which enabled it to appear for a short time as a rival of heavenly truth.

The author goes with laborious scrutiny through that labyrinth of error which is included under the title of Neo-Platonism. Outside the Catholic Church, few scholars have read even the principal works of St. Thomas Aquinas. Charles Sumner was said to possess them; Disraeli the elder and George Eliot refer to them. But the former never showed that he understood their contents, and the last-named writers show that they have not. Although such a study is absolutely necessary towards acquiring a correct knowledge of the intellectual life of the Middle Age, it is rarely undertaken by non-Catholics. To study the remains of Neo-Platonism is a task of equal subtlety, and yet nothing is more common than to hear shallow speculators on history affirm that Christianity was greatly affected by the Alexandrian school. But the difference is no less marked when we come to find out what the views of the leading Neo-Platonist actually were. This “distracted chaos of hallucinations” was the highest effort of paganism. It was an attempt to reconcile and weld together all the elements of the old world, as a barrier to the new and irresistible power which was everywhere gaining ground. It was the development which was to have been expected. It was the fusion of East and West to which Christianity has been credited. But, instead of acting upon, it was radically affected by, Christianity; and, instead of bringing [Pg 696] forth Christianity, it was the deadliest foe of the Gospel. It is from this old armory of Alexandria that modern error draws and refurbishes the clumsy weapons which dropped thirteen centuries ago from the hands of the first opponents of Christianity. It is a good place to go for this sort of bric-à-brac. It contains a sum of all the aberrations of the human intellect. Here, stripped of its modern garb, we find the cosmic sentimentalism of Strauss. Here the absolute being of the German pantheists stares us in the face. Here, from Iamblichus and Porphyry, we hear the same mournful and unhealthy drivel which is printed and sewed up in gilt morocco by enterprising and philanthropic publishers of the present day. On rising from the perusal of Mr. Allies’ third volume, we see clearly the end of that wonderful and brilliant Hellenism which, while ever occupied “either in telling or in hearing something new,” slighted the real truth which had come into the world, and served but as a pit to its own pride.

Too much praise cannot be given to Mr. Allies for the labor bestowed upon his history of the actual development of the philosophy of Greece in the Roman Empire. He has traced each school of thought from year to year, and reproduced a correct summary of its beliefs. The Neo-Stoic philosophy, which is especially vaunted by the enemies of Christianity, is studiously delineated. The points of agreement and difference are clearly noted between its four great chiefs—Seneca, Musonius, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius. The analogies and contrasts between the developed Stoic school and the Christian teachers who were its contemporaries, are also brought into relief.

In order to portray the effect of the Neo-Pythagorean doctrines and the revived Platonism, the author gives a complete analysis of that most singular and interesting character, Philo the Jew—singular, in that he was the only one of the ancient Hebrew race who became a great philosopher; interesting, because he shows us the precise difference between Platonism and Jewish belief, and the immeasurable superiority of the unreasoning Jew, who believed only that which he had received by tradition, over the highest flight of heathen genius unaided by revelation. The lecture on Philo closes with a summary of the interval between his time and Plutarch’s, and the change during that epoch from the old Roman world of Cicero, together with the cause of this change.

Following this, another lecture presents the state of the pagan intellect and the common standing ground of philosophy, from the accession of Nero to that of Severus.

Towards the close of his reign, under the auspices of the Empress Julia and from the labors of Philostratus, came forth the new gospel of paganism in the life of Apollonius of Thyana. This work, upon the strength of which modern infidels have sought to attribute a mythical origin to the Gospels, was a counterfeit of the truth, in which paganism sought to construct an ideal teacher, to oppose to that Master who was now beginning to be known throughout the world. This sketch of Apollonius of Thyana is very complete, and shows a new phase of thought yet more strikingly affected by that hated and persecuted power which was daily growing in the midst of the Roman world. Having completed [Pg 697] his study of pagan belief and sentiments as far as the reign of Severus, the author is fully prepared for the difficult and thankless task of reviewing the struggle between Neo-Platonism, as represented by Iamblichus, Porphyry, and Plotinus, and their followers, against divine truth. The third volume closes with a graphic summary of the intellectual results from Claudius to Constantine, and a comparative glance at the relative power of the old order and the new to reconstruct a society in stable and harmonious proportions.

With this lecture, which seems to foreshadow the contents of a fourth volume, Mr. Allies’ work stops for the present. Its publication in parts has placed it at a great disadvantage, inasmuch as ten years have passed since the first volume appeared. It may seem premature to review a work not yet complete, but enough has been published to establish the claim of the author to a most useful and successful contribution to the needs of the time. He has grown into his task, and has accumulated both facts and reflections. There is little reason to fear that the remaining volume will not be equal to the three which have preceded it.

The style is unpretending, and the whole work extremely modest. In this respect, it will not meet the approval of those who prefer rhetoric to exact truthfulness. Historical works must be plentifully illustrated, either by the engraver or the imagination of the author, to make them popular nowadays.

But the intelligent reader who will take pains to examine carefully Mr. Allies’ volumes will be well repaid, and the author himself can rest in the conviction that he has written a solid and useful book, which deserves a place in every library.

[190] The Formation of Christendom. By T. W. Allies. Part Third. London: Longmans, Green, Reader & Dyer. 1875.

[191] It is also necessary on account of its vagueness, and eminently fits in or rather mixes with the confusion of mind which is so marked a characteristic in this school of speculators.

[Pg 698]

SIR THOMAS MORE.

A HISTORICAL ROMANCE.

FROM THE FRENCH OF THE PRINCESSE DE CRAON.

X.

In that portion of the attic of Whitehall Castle looking toward the west they had, according to the king’s orders, erected an altar in order to celebrate Mass. Three persons had assembled there, and were reflecting on the singularity of the hour and the choice of the place where they found themselves called by this religious ceremony.

Lady Berkley, seated upon a high cane chair, had carefully gathered about her feet the long train of her silk dress, to avoid having it sweep over the floor covered with dust, and she observed with great attention the old tapestries, which had been nailed all around the altar in order to conceal as far as possible the unsightly appearance of the rafters of the roof.

Heneage, with his arms crossed, not far from her, waited, having nothing to do, while Dr. Roland Lee, invested with the pontifical vestments, kneeled on the step of the altar, inwardly grieved at this new whim of the king, which he found as inconvenient as disrespectful; but being very pious, he endeavored to pray to God and occupy himself only with the holy sacrifice he was going to offer up.

They had waited very nearly an hour in this position, when Norris entered with a light in his hand.

“The king,” he said in a loud voice.

The assistants immediately arose to their feet, and the king appeared, followed by Lady Boleyn, with Anne Savage carrying her train, gleaming with embroidery.

On entering she cast a glance upon the surroundings of this improvised chapel, and she was far from finding them to her liking. But Henry VIII. gave her no time for reflection; he placed two chairs in front of the altar, and, putting himself in one, he made a sign to her to kneel upon the other; then, having called Sir Roland, he announced to him that he had to proceed with the marriage.

Although he had presaged nothing good from the singular preparations he had seen made in this attic chapel, yet poor Dr. Lee was far from anticipating such an order as he now received; he found himself in a horrible state of perplexity, and stood without making any reply.

“Come!” said the king after a moment’s silence, “commence the prayers.”

But Roland turned toward him, and still continued to stand on the step of the altar; he said with a great deal of dignity:

“No, your majesty cannot marry, the ecclesiastical authorities not having yet decided.…”

“What say you, Roland?” interrupted the king brusquely. “God alone has power to judge the conscience [Pg 699] of princes, and mine has decided that I should marry. Go on and do what I command you now.”

“Sire,” replied Roland, who feared that his days were numbered, “your majesty has all power over my poor body, and I am your very unworthy and very devoted subject; but I cannot solemnize your marriage without having proof that you are at liberty to contract it.”

Henry bit his lower lip.

“Roland!” he said.

“Sire,” replied the other, as if he thought the king had called him.

“The imbecile!” exclaimed Henry VIII. to himself; but he saw it would be better to dissimulate.

“Roland,” he replied, with an inflection of voice as different as his new intention, “do you think I would command you to do anything wrong? I have received from Rome the bulls of our Holy Father, who recognizes the nullity of my marriage with Catherine, the wife of my brother, and permits me to select for my spouse any other unmarried woman in my kingdom. However, in order to avoid scandal, he bound me to do it secretly.”

“Then I have nothing to say,” replied Roland Lee, relieved of an immense weight; “but your majesty will, of course, first show me the proofs.”

“Obstinacy!” thought the king. “How, Sir Roland,” he cried, assuming an air of extreme mortification, “the word of your king, then, is no longer sufficient? Is it necessary for me to go and bring you a thing which I affirm to have in my possession? Roland,” he added in a severe tone, “until now your conscience alone has spoken, therefore I have not been offended; but take care that, instead of commending your course, I no longer see in you other than an incredulous obstinacy. I pledge you my royal word on the truth of what I have stated.… But add not a word more.”

Roland dared not reply, and, unable to believe the king would dare to prevaricate in that manner before such a number of witnesses, he began, although much disturbed, to say the Mass.… But the quiet solemnity of prayer influences the most obdurate heart: man is so insignificant in the presence of God.

Henry felt more and more troubled. Queen Catherine’s letter, Norris’ description of her departure, the scene of the previous evening, passed one after another before his eyes and continued to torture his memory. The words of the holy daughter of Kent, “The woman you wish to marry will dishonor your couch and perish on the scaffold,” arose unconsciously to his lips, and aroused in his soul a gloomy jealousy. He cast a glance upon Anne Boleyn; their eyes met, and the miserable woman was terror-stricken at the expression of fury that gleamed from his eyes. Then he looked around him. The sun had arisen, and brought into bold relief the old and faded tapestries surrounding the altar.

“Is this place worthy of me?” he thought to himself. “Is it thus I have prayed with Thomas More?—that quiet, peace, order, and respect?… There one is happy; here they are consumed, devoured by remorse! Happiness of the just, I execrate thee, because I have not been able to attain thee!”… Thus all that was good excited his envy; even Catherine, whom he had driven from the door of his palace a wanderer on the earth, seemed to him happier than himself.

[Pg 700] But it was still worse when the venerable priest, turning towards him, began the ancient and solemn rites of marriage between the children of God, and came to these words: “You, Henry of Lancaster, do confess, acknowledge, and swear before God, and in presence of his holy church, that you now take for your wife and legitimate spouse Anne Boleyn, here present.”

“Ah!” said the king mentally, “hell would be better than the life that I lead.” He trembled, and answered in a loud voice:

“Yes!”

“You promise to keep to her faithfully in all things, as a faithful husband should his wife, according to the commandment of God?”

“Yes,” he answered again.

“And you, Anne Boleyn, you also confess, acknowledge, and swear before God, and in presence of his holy church, that you now take for your husband and legitimate spouse Henry of Lancaster, here present.”

“Yes,” stammered Anne Boleyn, who had no relatives, no friends around her—no one except two valets and a femme de chambre.

“You promise to keep to him faithfully in all things, as a faithful wife should her husband, according to the commandment of God?”

“Yes,” she answered more distinctly.

Then the priest took the nuptial ring, and, placing it in the hand of the king, made a sign to give it to his wife.

Henry VIII., leaning toward Anne Boleyn, gave it to her, seeming scarcely conscious that he did so. The sight of this ring recalled the one he had given Catherine on a former and similar occasion, the sanctity of the engagements he had contracted with her, the love he then bore her, her youth, her sincerity, her charms, her virtues, the tranquillity of his own conscience; now, he had dissipated all these blessings—dissipated them wilfully and through his own fault; he felt himself despised and despicable. His legitimate wife driven forth and discarded, while he took another by means of a disgraceful falsehood which must be very soon discovered. He no longer had children; he had renounced at the same time all the rights of a man, a father, a husband, in order to recommence, at his age, a new career, already branded with disgraceful recollections and shameful regrets.

“May the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob unite you, and may he shower his benedictions upon you! I now pronounce you man and wife, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost,” said the priest, making the sign of the cross over them.

“Amen!” responded the assistants.

“No benedictions! Don’t talk to me about benedictions, wretches!” replied Henry in a stifled voice.

“It is truly just and reasonable,” continued the priest, ascending the steps of the altar and extending his hands towards heaven, “it is right and salutary, that we return thee thanks at all times and in all places, O Lord, most holy Father, Almighty God eternal, who by thy power hast created the universe out of nothing; who in the beginning of the world, after having made man in thine image, gave him, to be his inseparable companion, the woman whom thou hast formed from thyself, in order to teach him that he is never permitted to put asunder those whom thou hast [Pg 701] united in the sacrament thou hast instituted. O God! thou who hast consecrated marriage by so excellent a mystery that the nuptial alliance is the figure of the sacred union of Jesus Christ and his church; O God! by whom the woman is united to the man, and who givest to this intimate union thy blessing, the only one which has not been taken away, neither by the punishment of original sin nor the sentence of the Deluge; O God! thou who alone hast dominion over the hearts of men, and who knowest and governest all things by thy providence, insomuch that no man can put asunder those whom thou hast joined together—”

“When shall I get out of this place?” murmured Henry VIII.

“Nor injure those whom thou hast blessed—unite, we pray thee, the souls of these thy servants, who belong to thee, and pour into their hearts a sincere friendship, to the end that they may become one in thee, as thou art the only true and all-powerful God. Regard with a favorable eye thy servant, who, before being united to her spouse, implores your protection. Grant that her yoke may be a yoke of love and peace; grant that, chaste and faithful, she may follow the example of the holy women of old; that she render herself amiable to her husband, like Rachel; that she may be wise as Rebecca; that she may enjoy a long life, and be faithful like Sara; that the author of prevarication may find nothing in her that proceeds from him; that she may abide firm in thy law and in the observance of thy commandments; that, at last, being attached only to her husband, she defile not the marriage-bed by any illicit connection.”

“Do you understand what the priest advises you?” said Henry VIII., angrily regarding Anne Boleyn, and speaking almost loud enough for her to hear him.

“That, in order to sustain her weakness, she may fortify herself by an exact and well-regulated life; that she may conduct herself with such proper modesty as will ensure respect; that she inform herself of her duties in the heavenly doctrines of Jesus Christ; that she may obtain from thee a happy fecundity; that she may lead a life pure and irreproachable—”

“I will not suffer her to do otherwise,” thought the king.

“That at length she may arrive at the rest of the saints in the kingdom of heaven. Grant, Lord, that they may both live to behold their children’s children until the third and fourth generation, and attain a happy old age, through Jesus Christ our Lord, thy Son, who liveth and reigneth with thee in the unity of the Holy Ghost, world without end.”

“Amen!” responded the assistants.

“It is over at last,” said the king, rising precipitately.

He motioned Anne Boleyn to follow him; but she made no reply, and he saw that she was weeping, and had put her hands over her eyes to conceal her tears.

He then left her, and immediately went out.

XI.

On returning to his apartments, the king found in his cabinet Cromwell and Cranmer, who, pompously invested with the garb of his new episcopal dignity, came with Cromwell to thank the king for having [Pg 702] conferred on him this exalted position.

The sight of these two intriguers produced a disagreeable impression on Henry. He was very wearied already by the scene through which he had just passed, and longed to be alone. Instead of that, he found himself face to face with two new instruments of torture.

Cromwell regarded the king attentively, and was astonished at the expression of dissatisfaction visible on every feature of his face.

“What does he want now?” mentally inquired this unprincipled man. “Have we not procured the accomplishment of all his desires? Is he not now the very legitimate spouse of the brilliant Anne Boleyn, Marchioness of Pembroke?” But he thought it advisable under existing circumstances to let the king speak first, and contented himself with a profound salutation.

“What more do you want of me?” asked the king very brusquely.

“He is not very approachable this morning,” thought Cromwell; “but never mind, he will not escape us for all that.”

“We come,” replied Cromwell, “to congratulate your majesty on the clemency and magnanimity you displayed yesterday evening towards that daughter of Kent; and Dr. Cranmer has come to lay at your feet the assurance of his gratitude and his entire devotion.”

“Yes,” replied the king, happy to attribute his anger to something he could confess; “you are clever men, and richly deserve to be driven from my presence for having risked compromising me with that fool to whom you have made me listen! I am beginning to get tired of your fooleries; Sir Cromwell, understand that well!” And he emphasized the last words with a marked intention and an expression of anger and scorn.

“The marriage has not improved matters much, it would seem,” said Cromwell to himself; but he considered it proper to display a little dignity. “I understand,” he replied immediately, “that your majesty may have at first taken some offence at the insolent audacity of that woman of Kent; but I am astonished that you should be so unjust as to think ill of your servants on account of it, and especially since nothing could have been more fortunate in putting us on the track of the infamous intrigues of the queen and her partisans.”

“Infamous intrigues! infamous intrigues!” cried the king. “That is a word which may be very readily applied, and often it is not to those who most deserve it.”

An angry flush mounted to Cromwell’s pale visage; he felt that it was time to calm the storm about to burst upon him.

“I implore your majesty to believe,” he replied in an extremely mortified tone, “that I advance nothing without proof; and I ask now what he will say when he shall know that the queen, Thomas More, and the Bishop of Rochester, concealed in the church, assisted with us at the examination of the holy daughter of Kent, in order to assure themselves that their instrument resounded loudly in the ears of your majesty.”

“What do you say, Cromwell? The queen was in the Abbey last night? And how did she gain admittance there? What! she has heard all? She has enjoyed my humiliation? Why have I not known it? I would have punished her audacity and wickedness on the spot; but I will surely have my revenge.”

“Sire,” replied Cromwell, “the [Pg 703] queen is but a woman, and you should pardon her. The real culprits are the Bishop of Rochester and More, whose ingratitude toward your majesty exceeds all conception. The queen’s partisans laud More above the clouds, and publish it abroad that he has retired from your majesty’s service because his conscience would no longer permit him to remain there. It is time to put an end to such excesses, and the honor of your majesty requires that they shall no longer go unpunished.”

Cromwell intended by this discourse to excite the king’s wrath and at the same time strike at his ruling passions—pride, and the fear of losing his authority. Thus he held him in his hands, and changed him from one to the other, like a piece of soft wax melted before a hot fire.

“Yes,” cried the king, “yes, I swear it, I will chastise them! The whole world shall learn what it is to try to resist me!” He was nearly stifled with rage, which entirely transported him and rendered him incapable of reflection.

“You will assist me, Cromwell,” he cried, “you will assist me! I shall have need of you to help me tame this insolent clergy, who will raise a loud howl when they hear I have banished Catherine and married Anne Boleyn without their participation.”

“He is caught,” thought Cromwell. “Poor fish! you have too many vices to hope to escape my nets! I am very happy to see,” he replied with a satisfied air, “that your majesty has not been cast down or discouraged by the trifling difficulties you have until the present encountered. It is time your courage got the better of your generosity, and that you should throw off the yoke which has been so long imposed on you.”

“Yes, that is just what I want!” cried the king; “but it is a very difficult question to deal with.”

“Not the least in the world,” replied Cromwell; “let your majesty continue as you have begun, and you will very soon see every obstacle fall before you. Not long since they declared your marriage was impossible; to-day it is accomplished.… The clergy will not recognize it!… Make Parliament proclaim it; then demand of them the oath of fidelity to the new queen, to her children, and to the supreme head of the church; because we must not lose sight,” continued Cromwell, “of the fact that there is no longer any necessity for discretion now; after the injury done to the Sovereign Pontiff of the church, there remains no other way to proceed than to cast off his authority at once and substitute another in his place.”

“Softly, softly,” said the king; “unless the necessity be forced upon me, I do not wish to go to such an extremity.”

“This is not an extremity,” replied Cromwell, who had the plan already perfectly arranged, and enjoyed in advance all the ecclesiastical benefits he counted on appropriating to himself; “it is a decisive victory, simple and easy to carry out. Is it not, Cranmer?”

“I think so,” said Cranmer, who had taken the habit of a bishop only that he might be better able to serve his ambition and avidity.

“Softly,” continued the king, with an air of importance; “it is very evident that neither of you are statesmen, and that you are not experienced in such matters, nor acquainted with their difficulties.”

“I think, however, I know very [Pg 704] well how to manage my own,” said Cromwell under his breath.

“We know quite as much about it as some others,” thought Cranmer.

“It will first be necessary,” continued Henry, “to see if there will be no means of arranging it otherwise. It is possible that Catherine may submit, that she may ask to become a religieuse, that they may decide at Rome that it is not necessary to enforce the law so urgently in my case. At any rate, I wish to try them,” he added in a determined voice, “by demanding, as is customary, Cranmer’s bulls of the pope. Afterward—ah! well, we will see.”

“Then, sire,” replied Cromwell, “consider well that, by this act of submission, you destroy all the terror you have inspired, and that if Cranmer holds his rank and powers as Archbishop-Primate of England from any other than yourself, he will be obliged to publicly acknowledge the supremacy of the Bishop of Rome, and to take from him, as usual, the oath of fidelity.”

“Oh!” hurriedly interrupted Cranmer, who feared that this remark of Cromwell would make the king hesitate, and retard his installation, “this oath is only a simple formality, … an ancient usage.… Nothing could prevent me later from taking another to the king in the form and tenor adopted.”

“Ah! well; yes, still—” said Cromwell, whose talent above all consisted in never finding, nor letting the king find, any difficulty in following his advice.

“These honest individuals!” thought the king; “an oath weighs no more on their conscience than a gnat on the back of a swallow.”

With this remark his patience was exhausted with them.

“Well, it is all right,” he said; “we will return to this subject after the council. Go now; I need rest; but keep an eye on Thomas More and the Bishop of Rochester,” he added, turning toward Cromwell.

They then had to retire, and leave the king by himself, a prey to his own reflections.

“They are gone at last!” cried Henry, throwing himself into a fauteuil. “I am rid of them! These are, then, the agents of hell with whom hereafter I must manage the affairs of my kingdom.”

And he angrily pushed from under his feet a footstool, which was hurled against a chair they called the “queen’s chair,” because she had shown a preference for it.

Henry recollected it; he arose abruptly, and changed his position in order to avoid seeing the vacant chair, that annoyed him.

“Always Catherine,” he cried; “nothing but Catherine! I cannot take a step without being reminded of her! So much trouble, and only to make myself so wretched!… That doll-baby, Anne Boleyn, was weeping!… A weak creature, and with no energy!… She is not equal to the position to which I have elevated her. To weep the day that I married her, when for her I have torn myself from the arms of the clergy, the people, the pope, and the emperor!… I shall not be happy with this woman;… she wearies me already!… It will be necessary to make all this known before the coronation; … otherwise there will be no time to recede.… To acknowledge that I have done wrong … it is impossible.… More, could you, then, have been right? Shall I always be more unhappy in following my own will than in conquering it?… That wretch! always calm, always [Pg 705] contented.… I see him now, down in his obscurity, seated quietly in his cabinet, working, loving God, not fearing death, … smiling at poverty and all the circumstances of life, which, as he says, have no power to annoy him.… And I—I roll here on these velvet cushions, with remorse in my heart, despair in my soul; and why, when I have obtained the object I wanted?… Hell has already begun for me!… If it is so, I should not, at least, be ashamed to acknowledge it!… March on!”

The king, rising then precipitately, left his cabinet, and ordered preparations for a grand hunting party, and for the assembling of the ladies for a ball and supper in the evening.

XII.

Whilst they were dancing at court, and sought, in dissipation of mind, to drown remorse of heart, a few leagues distant one of the victims of Henry VIII. lay on his death-bed, rapidly approaching his end.

The night before some travellers had knocked at the gate of Leicester Abbey. It was opened, and the Archbishop of York had alighted from his mule, on which he was no longer able to sustain himself. He was carried by the good monks to a chamber, and laid in bed, where he still remained confined and nigh unto death.

All was gloom around this bed; two wax lights only burned on a table at the extremity of the room, whilst several monks were on their knees praying for the dying. Not a sound disturbed the silence around them save the slight noise made by the rosary as they turned it in their hands, and the labored respiration of the sick man.

“Monsieur Kingston,” he suddenly cried in a broken voice, “I conjure you, say to the king that I have never betrayed him, that my enemies have misrepresented me, that I have always been faithful to him!… Tell him this, I conjure you!—ah! tell him this.”

But Sir William Kingston, lieutenant of the Tower, had left the room and returned to the lower hall among his guards, with whom he had been sent, by order of the king, to seek his prisoner at the castle of the Count of Shrewsbury, and bring him to the Tower.

Fatigued by the journey, some of them were stretched on the floor, while others slept on their arms, leaning against the wall, as if death still required them to guard their prey.

Wolsey receiving no reply, turned himself over with a groan, and saw the shadow of a man standing near his bed.

“Who is that?” he asked.

“It is I,” replied Cavendish, still remaining behind the curtain, and who endeavored in silence to conceal his tears.

“How are you now?” said Wolsey.

“Well, my dear lord, if your grace was well also,” responded the faithful servant.

“Ah! my dear friend,” replied the cardinal, “as for me, I am very sick. I am rapidly approaching my end; but what most distresses me is to have nothing to leave you, and not to be able to assure you of a subsistence.”

“Do not trouble yourself about that,” said this devoted servant, [Pg 706] who approached and took the trembling hand of the dying man; “in a few days you will be better, and we shall not lose you.”

“What time is it?” said Wolsey.

“Midnight.”

“Midnight!” replied the archbishop. “How short the time is! Before eight o’clock I shall have to leave this world. God calls me to himself, and I can remain no longer with you. Monsieur Vincent,” he continued after a moment’s silence—“Monsieur Vincent, say to the king that it was my intention to have left him all my property; but he has himself deprived me of that pleasure, since they have seized, by his orders, everything that I possessed.”

On hearing his name called, Monsieur Vincent hurried to the bedside; but at these last words he shook his head in token of incredulity and impatience. He was an employé of the king’s treasury, and his heart was as hard as the coin he had charge of.

Having learned that Wolsey was very sick when he left the castle of the Count of Shrewsbury, and fearing he might die on the road, the king had despatched this man in all haste to secure the money and valuables he supposed Wolsey might have concealed among his friends.

“I have told you the truth,” replied the archbishop, who remarked his movement. “I have nothing left in London, and but for the assistance of Monsieur Arundel I should have died of starvation at Asher. I implore you, then, that the king may have compassion on my poor servants, and allow them the wages now due them.”

“We will see, my lord,” said the dissatisfied scribe, who was waiting for an avowal which he had continued to solicit, without any consideration, ever since his arrival; “we will see. But the treasury is so very much impoverished at this time!… However, we will do what we can. We will ask the king, if it is convenient.”

“Monsieur Vincent, I implore you!” replied the cardinal.

“Master Vincent,” said Cavendish, “I beg you to leave the room; your presence annoys and excites him. Have mercy, then, and leave him in peace.”

The scribe hesitated, but he did not go; he returned to the corner of the chamber and began to write as before.

Cavendish followed him with a look of indignation. It seemed very hard that his master could not even be permitted to die without this avaricious surveillance.

“Cavendish,” asked the archbishop immediately, “do you think she will come?”

“They expect her every moment, my dear lord,” he replied; “she will remain three days here.”

“O Cavendish!”

“My dear master!”

And he fell on his knees by the bed. He bathed with tears the hand of the archbishop, which he held in his own.

“She will not see me, my son! She will not forgive me!”

“Ah! my dear, my beloved lord.” He could say no more, being entirely overcome by grief.

“Remember, my son, remember,” continued Wolsey, “that it was my infernal policy that persuaded the king of the possibility of his divorce! Is that she? I hear a noise. My God! I am dying. Spare me, that I may ask her forgiveness; yes, her forgiveness, even as God has forgiven me. O my God!” he cried suddenly, fixing his eyes on a crucifix he had [Pg 707] made them hang on the wall in front of him,” had I only served thee as faithfully as I have served this prince in whom I have placed all my hopes and centred all my affections! Weak mortal like myself, what had he to offer me that I should attach myself to him? Vain splendor of an ephemeral power, where have you led me? O man, crowned with a diadem! cast a glance upon the bed of a dying man, and reflect. Why have I not despised your favors and the gifts you have offered me? How fatal they have proved to me! To-day, solitary and alone, I must appear before my God, with hands empty and void of all those virtues and merits which you have prevented me from acquiring. Why have I not come here in my youth, among these humble monks, and learned to extinguish the pride that has governed my entire life? Listen, all you who are here present! Come and behold my emaciated limbs; see the flesh that covered them already destroyed by the breath of death, that has struck them! And my tongue that now speaks to you, and which was thought capable of dictating the decrees of conquerors, will soon be silenced for ever.”

But exhausted by so violent an effort, he sank into a state of insensibility.

Seized with terror, the monks gathered around his bed, recalling the power and éclat with which the name of Wolsey was surrounded, and which had so many times resounded even through the most remote walls of their solitude.…

Yes, it was she—it was indeed Queen Catherine. She had reached this monastery, where she intended remaining several days before deciding on the place of her retreat. Henry VIII., in order to entirely prove that she had become to him an object of perfect indifference, had not even offered her an asylum.

“She is free,” he said; “let her do what she pleases. That is the widow of my brother, the Princess Dowager of Wales. Hereafter she must bear no other name.”

However, they had opened all the gates, and the father abbot, preceded by the cross and followed by all his religieux carrying lighted torches, went before the queen and conducted her into the chapter-hall, which had been prepared for her reception.

There she found carpets, cushions, an arm-chair covered with velvet, and everything the good monks could imagine would be agreeable and testify their devotion.

Catherine felt touched to the heart by these testimonials of respect and affection.

She seated herself a moment in order to thank them; then, rising with that calm and majestic dignity which so eminently characterized her, she said:

“Good fathers, it is no more your queen whom you receive in your midst; it is a fugitive woman, an outraged mother, separated from all that she holds most dear in the world. Do not treat me, then, with so much honor. I have more need of your tears and prayers than of your respect and homage.”

“Alas! madam,” replied the father abbot, “life is very short, and the judgments of God are inscrutable. You come beneath the shadow of this sanctuary to seek an asylum, while the first author of all your woes, a man of whom you have had great cause to complain, has sought here a refuge to die.”

[Pg 708] “What!” said the queen. “Venerable father, explain yourself!”

“Yesterday, madam,” replied the abbot, “the Archbishop of York arrived here in a dying condition. He was accompanied by Cavendish, his servant, and the lieutenant of the Tower, who is conducting him to London, there to be tried on the charge of high treason.”

“He here!” cried the queen, overwhelmed with astonishment. And Catherine, a Spaniard and a mother, felt the hatred she had borne Wolsey revive in her soul with extreme violence. The feeling she had vainly sought to extinguish rekindled with renewed strength every time she received a new outrage, or when the name and conduct of the minister who had sacrificed her to his political views and interests was brought to her recollection.

A sudden tremor seized her.

“Wolsey here!” she repeated. “No matter where I go, this man follows me!… Here!” she said again.

“Yes, madam,” replied the father abbot, “here, dying, but more worthy of pity than hatred; he weeps, he bemoans his past life, he implores God’s mercy. It is sufficient to see him to be touched with compassion. For two days we have watched him by turns; he has not ceased to pray God, and I know that to see you will be a great consolation to him.”

“See him?” replied the queen. “No! oh! no, never. God forgive him the injury he has done me; but I will never see him.”

“Will Queen Catherine forget the charity of Jesus Christ?” replied the father abbot in a severe tone. “Can that virtue be more than a vain appearance which is stranded by coming in contact with a resentment, just, perhaps, but none the less criminal?… I conjure you, madam,” he continued, falling on his knees before the queen, “refuse not to see him. Already, without doubt, he knows that you are here. He desires to see you and ask your forgiveness. All of our brothers ask it with him.”

Catherine remained silent, but she advanced a step forward, which the father accepted as a mute consent; and passing immediately before her, he conducted her into the chamber where Wolsey was lying.

She advanced to the middle of the room, and was struck by the spectacle presented to her view. Cavendish supported the dying man in his arms, and wiped the cold sweat from his face, now as white as the sheet on which he lay. A convulsive movement agitated occasionally his extended limbs, and it was from that alone they saw that life was not yet extinct.

Catherine approached at once, and remained standing in silence, in the face of this enemy, heretofore so powerful and so formidable.

She made no movement, and her eyes only were fixed on the dying. “And I too will die!” she said in her heart. “The day will come when I shall cease to suffer. O material life which envelops me! cease also to burden my soul, and let it flee into eternity. Let me find a refuge even in the bosom of the tomb.”

* * * * *

“My daughter, my daughter!” she suddenly cried, as though beside herself; “give her back to me, you who have torn her from my arms!”

A shudder passed over the form of Wolsey; he had heard that voice. It seemed as though a burning fire had touched him. He rose up in his bed, and, gazing at [Pg 709] the queen with wildly staring eyes, “Your daughter, madam!” he cried, “your daughter!… Alas! it is I who have done all. You accuse me, and yet, as God is my judge, I threw myself at the feet of the king, and tried to turn him from his evil intention; but it was too late, and I had not foreseen the fatal consequences of a policy which I believed would be advantageous and beneficial. Alas! how differently I regard it at this terrible hour. Pardon me! pardon me!… I conjure you, that I may not bear to the foot of the throne of the Sovereign Judge the fearful weight of the malediction of the widow and the orphan!” And he stretched towards her his hands, which he was no longer able to raise.

“May God forgive you,” responded the queen, “may God forgive you! But what can there be in common between you and me, unless it is suffering? You will soon be delivered from your woes; but I—I must live!”

“Ah!” cried Woolsey with expressions of the most profound wretchedness, “you hear it, brothers, already the voice of God punishes me by the mouth of this woman. And thus,” he continued, fixing his terrified gaze on the queen, “I die at enmity with you, and you will not have compassion on the condition to which I am reduced! How can one human being call down upon another without trembling the vengeance of the Most High? Are we not all formed of the same flesh and blood? Are you not horror-stricken at the thought of the judgments I must suffer and the account I must render?”

Catherine felt her blood congealed by the frightful eloquence of this expiring man—this man whom but a moment separated from death and eternity.

At the thought of the nothingness of all created humanity, she felt the hatred she had borne Wolsey entirely effaced.

“Your reasoning enlightens me!” she cried. “Who are we that we should wish to be revenged?. Weak and blind, should we precipitate ourselves into the bottomless pit? We have received an injury, and shall we inflict one in return? Who are we, and what is our duty?”

She then advanced toward him, and, taking in her own the hands of her enemy, she said:

“I forgive you, I forgive you from the most profound depths of my heart.… May God, the sovereign Creator of all things, bless you, and blot out from the awful book of his justice your slightest fault! May he open to you the mansions of eternal bliss! Then remember me, and ask of him that my eyes also may soon be closed to the light of that day which you have rendered insupportable. Tell him that I want to die, and beg him to recall to himself the soul that he has given me; say that my eyes are weary with tears, and my heart worn with suffering; that sorrow has multiplied my days, and that I have lived during the night, keeping tearful vigils; that I have only enjoyed the blessings of life long enough to regret them; that I am ready, that I listen, I wait to hear his voice, in order that I may arise and depart.”

Wolsey drank in with avidity all of her words, and his eyes followed every movement of the queen’s lips; but suddenly the fire of his burning glance was extinguished, his head fell forward on his breast—he had ceased to breathe!…

What pen can describe, what pencil [Pg 710] portray, the terrible and solemn moment when a man is called to leave for ever the world that gave him birth—the moment when those who, having surrounded him with the most constant care, loving words, and affectionate attentions, fall prostrate around the silent couch, which now contains no more than the despoiled and lifeless clay which a beloved and cherished being seems to have cast aside like a soiled garment? Let the cold sceptic come, and, passing through that throng of afflicted friends, let him place his hand on the heart that has ceased to beat, and then turn and dare still to tell them that man has been created to die, and nothing more remains of him after death!… It is easy in the intoxication of joy, amid the false glare of vanity and of worldly dissipations, to put our trust in falsehood and array ourselves against the truth; but the day and the hour will come when she will appear clothed in dazzling robes of light, and the splendor of her irradiated countenance will strike with terror and annihilation the last one of her wretched and presumptuous enemies.

SOME ODD IDEAS.

“Our intelligence,” says the celebrated Montaigne, “is a kind of vagabond instrument, daring and dangerous, to which it is difficult to associate order or appoint limits. It is a hurtful weapon to its owner himself, if he does not know how to use it discreetly.”

No one can doubt the truth of this observation who has ever studied the workings of his own individual mind with some little attention. And even when we cannot perceive the beam in our own eye, how very evident is the straw in our neighbor’s! Though unsuspecting of the bee in our own bonnet, how quickly we hear it buzzing in his!

A specimen of some of the extravagant vagaries of human wit may perhaps interest and amuse. To begin at the beginning: thinkers have endeavored to imagine what was going on before the Creation.

In the seventeenth century, a mystic writer composed a work on the occupations of God before the creation of the universe! Nearly all of it is incomprehensible, but a few sentences will give an idea of its style:

“To ask what God was doing before the Creation is an impertinence, a puerility.… It is certain that the eternal God who made this earth by the power of his word had no need of the world and all the creatures it contains—he had lived and reigned before Time began, happy and contented in the paradise of his essence and in the essence of himself.… He was contemplating his only Son, not made, not created, but begotten from all eternity; in the eternal Word he contemplated the archetype, the world of the world, angels, souls, and all things. In conclusion, we may say that God, before the creation of the world, did something and did nothing.…”

Singular problems, most daringly [Pg 711] resolved, have been presented respecting the epoch of the Creation. Chevreau, in his Histoire du Monde, 1686, tells us that, according to some writers, the earth was created in the spring; according to others, equally good authorities, on a Friday, the 6th of September, at four o’clock in the afternoon!

A learned Italian of the last century, Monsignor Baiardi, in the course of a conversation with the Abbé Barthélemy, mentioned that he was about writing an abridgment of universal history, and that he intended to commence his work with the solution of one of the most important problems of astronomy and history. His desire was to determine the exact spot in the firmament in which God had placed the sun when he made the earth. “And,” says Barthélemy, “he had just discovered it, and showed it to me on a globe.”

Our common father has been the subject of an infinite number of curious suppositions, not to say crack-brained fancies. The Talmudists, for instance, have constructed the following programme of Adam’s first day of life:

In the first hour, the Creator kneaded the clay of which man was made, and moulded the outlines of his form.

In the second hour, Adam was perfected and capable of action.

In the fourth hour, God called to him, and commanded him to give names to the beasts, birds, and fishes.

In the seventh hour, the marriage of our first parents took place.

In the tenth hour, Adam sinned.

In the twelfth hour, the penalty of labor began.

James Salien, a Jesuit of the seventeenth century, tells us in his Annales Ecclesiastici that, “while man was being created, the divine hands, ambrosial face, and admirable arms of his Creator were visible to him.”

The Arabs have a tradition that Adam, when first created, stretched from one extremity of the earth to the other. But after he had sinned, God pressed him down with his almighty hand, and thus diminished his height to nine hundred cubits. The Creator, it is added, did this at the request of the angels, who regarded the gigantic mortal with strange fear.

According to Moreri, Adam possessed a profound knowledge of all the sciences, especially of astrology, many secrets of which he taught to his children, besides engraving two tables of observations on the movements of the planets. All the learned doctors of the Middle Ages are agreed in ascribing the possession of immense science to Adam. The angels themselves, they say, were inferior to him in knowledge; and they relate as proof of this that God, having heard them speak of man with contempt, determined to confound them by asking them what were the names of certain beasts which he called into his presence at that moment. The angels could not answer; man, summoned to the task, gave each animal its due appellation without hesitation.

Adam, being thus endowed with unlimited knowledge, would have been culpable towards his posterity if he had left none of it behind him. We are accordingly told that he composed two works, one upon the Creation, the other upon the Divinity. Having been present, we may almost say, at the first, and conversed familiarly with the second, he was able to tell us something interesting [Pg 712] about both, and it is our misfortune that the two works have been lost. It is, however, said that they survived the Deluge, for a Mahometan author relates that Abraham, being in the country of the Sabeans, opened Adam’s chest, and found in it not only our progenitor’s writings but also those of Seth.

Opinions are various concerning the form the tempter assumed to deceive poor Eve. It has been asserted that Sammaël, the prince of devils, came to her mounted on a serpent as large in girth as a camel; and then again it is said that Satan borrowed the form of the serpent, and made it more seductive by the addition of a sweet maiden’s face! This tradition has been adopted by poets and painters.

As the name of the forbidden fruit is not mentioned in the Book of Genesis, conjecture has had full scope. Northern nations believe that it was an apple; southern people that it was a fig or citron. Rabbi Salomon thinks that Moses concealed the name of the fruit purposely, fearing that, if it were known, nobody would ever eat of it.

According to St. Jerome, Adam was buried in Hebron; other learned authors say on Calvary; either assertion is difficult of verification, for both Hebron and Calvary only date from the Deluge. “Barcepha alleges,” says Bayle, “that a highly esteemed Syrian doctor had said that Noe dwelt in Judea; that he planted in the plains of Sodom the cedar-trees with which he afterwards built the ark; and that he carried Adam’s bones into the ark with him. When he came out of the ark, he divided these bones among his three sons; the skull fell to the share of Sem, and when the descendants of Sem took possession of Judea, they buried it in the very spot where the tomb of Adam had once been situated.” The reader will doubtless feel that Barcepha’s allegation settles the question!

In 1615, a shoemaker of Amiens published a treatise entitled De Calceo Antiquo. In this history of shoes, the writer begins at the beginning of the world, and gravely informs us that Adam made the first pair from the prepared skins of beasts, the secret of tanning having been taught him by God himself!

In the last century, Henrion, a French Orientalist, and a member of the Institute of France, conceived the idea of composing an exhaustive work on the weights and measures of the ancients, and presented a specimen of his labors to the Academy of Inscriptions, to which he belonged. It was a kind of chronological scale of the differences in man’s stature from the epoch of Adam’s creation to the time of our Saviour.

Adam, he stated, measured one hundred and twenty-three feet, nine inches; Eve, one hundred and eighteen feet, nine and three-quarter inches; Noe, one hundred and three feet; Abraham, twenty-seven feet; Moses, thirteen feet; Hercules, ten feet; Alexander, six feet; Julius Cæsar, five feet.

He remarked upon this scale that “though men are no longer measured by their stature, if Providence had not deigned to suspend such an extraordinarily rapid rate of diminution, we, at this day, should scarcely dare to class ourselves, with respect to our size, among the large insects of our globe!”

Towards the middle of the seventeenth century, an attempt was made to wrest from Adam the honor of being the first man. Isaac de la [Pg 713] Peyrère pulished a work in 1655, entitled Præadamitæ, seu Exercitatio super versibus 12, 13, 14 Capitis V. Epistolæ B. Pauli ad Romanos, in which he endeavors to prove that there were two creations of men—the first on the sixth day, when God created man, male and female; which, he asserts, means men and women in all parts of the earth, progenitors of the Gentiles. The second creation, he says, did not take place until some time after, when God made Adam to be the father of the Jews. Those who adopted this idea were called Preadamites. La Peyrère lived to abjure his opinions at the feet of Pope Alexander VI.

Such are a few of the many odd ideas upon the Creation and the first man which human wit, that “dangerous instrument” when not kept within due limits, has been continually devising ever since the beginning of history. The logic of the nineteenth century rejects them all; nevertheless, while we laugh at the extraordinary suppositions of our ancestors, it is pleasant to observe that, even in the most extravagant about our common father, the sentiment of the first man’s innate nobleness is always present. Adam always shines forth greater and grander than his sons—stronger, both physically and mentally. The old fathers of the church, nay, even the pedants of the Middle Ages, adhered to the Scripture text, and believed that in the “looks divine” of the first human pair

“The image of their glorious Maker shone,

Truth, wisdom, sanctitude, severe and pure.”

Is it not curious that the queerest crank of all concerning Adam—that which strives to prove that he was an ourang-outang—should have been reserved for our own days of culture, of philosophical research and science?

NEW PUBLICATIONS.

Spiritualism and Allied Causes and Conditions of Nervous Derangement. By William A. Hammond, M.D. 8vo, pp. 366. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. 1876.

It is evident, from the appearance of this work so speedily after the publication of a larger volume on Diseases of the Nervous System, that Dr. Hammond has contracted the cacoëthes scribendi in its worst shape. He is not easy unless the pen is in his hand, and so delightful must be to him the sensation of a calamus currens that, we fear, he pauses not to reflect over the fate of the cyclical writer of old whose long-continued parlurient efforts resulted in the production of a ridiculously small animal. For all that, he must be quite jealous of his reputation as a strong-minded and rational man, since he has undertaken the vindication of reason, even at the expense of reasoning. We give him credit indeed for research, but of that doubtful sort which delights in jumbling together facts gathered from the most opposite sources—

Rudis indigestaque moles—

in order that a boastful parade of erudition might impart weight to his otherwise feather-light conclusions. A certain lack of method in the handling of his subject is what first impresses the reader of Dr. Hammond’s latest lucubration, and stamps the writer as illogical in the last degree. So-called spiritual [Pg 714] manifestations are by him included in the same category as the pious acts of the saints, who doubtless would reject with horror the fantasies of Katie King and the friponnerie of Home. Under the head of “curing mediums” we read of cures wrought by some obscure personage called St. Sauveur, which, if true, we are willing to accept, but which, like all unauthenticated cases of the sort, we are free to admit or disallow as the weight of evidence justifies. But, we ask, what relevancy to the heading of this chapter can possess the case of a woman laying an egg, or of another giving birth to two rabbits? If any such there be, we confess our inability to discover it; for certainly in those cases there is no question of curing. Neither can we perceive what induced the author to adopt Kerdac’s absurd division of spiritual agents into “physical mediums,” “seeing and auditive mediums,” and “curing mediums,” since clearly the first caption covers the whole ground. This is a sin against that canon of method which forbids one branch of a division to overlap another. Then the doctor never can discriminate between essential differences and accidental resemblances; and if a so-called medium should, by slight of hand or electro-magnetism, produce phenomena resembling the miraculous achievements of the saints, pop they both go into the same category of frauds or victims to a hallucination. He never dreams as being within the range of possible things that personal sanctity on the one hand has any power which does not belong on the other to deception or mental imbecility. It is refreshing to see how he gets these things mixed together, and with what complacent readiness he relegates all believers in the supernatural to the regions of blind ignorance and grovelling superstition, while he calmly stands on the undimmed hill-tops, or sublimely soars through the placid atmosphere of pure reason. Dr. Hammond rejects à priori the possibility of an occurrence not due to the operation of natural agents, and hence he is necessitated constantly to indicate or suggest an explanation of what is most marvellous and obscure. This, of course, is a very difficult procedure, and hence we need not be surprised at the following ingenious, if not entirely logical, scheme he has devised for making straight paths that are crooked, and smooth those that are rough. Whenever he has in hand the consideration of a general principle, he illustrates it by reference to a case which the common tenets of science can readily elucidate. This elucidation he deems amply sufficient to establish the principle, and then he tacks on, as to be accounted for in the same manner, a mass of cases of every shade and degree of intricacy, often having no relation to the principle by the light of which he pretends to judge them, or to the case he adduces in illustration of the principle. The chapter on somnambulism will serve as an example of this sort of paralogism. He divides this exceptional condition of consciousness into natural and artificial. Somnambulism produces two typical instances of both. In the one case a young lady rises in her sleep, dresses herself, goes into the parlor, lights the gas, and intently gazes on the picture of her deceased mother. Sulphurous fumes are disengaged under her nose, quinine is placed on her tongue, the corners of her eyes are touched by a lead-pencil, and still she remained motionless and insensible. The same person soon after acquired the power of placing herself in the somnambulic state by concentrating her attention on a passage of a philosophical treatise. These cases are, we will grant for sake of reasoning, explicable on the principle of automatism, but what, we ask, does the case of St. Rose of Lima possess in common with these, or how can the principle of automatism be made to apply to her case? This saintly personage dwelt in a climate where mosquitoes were numerous and vicious, yet she enjoyed entire immunity from their sting, while worshipping in a little arbor built by her own hands; and this, she averred, was done in consequence of a pact by virtue of which the blood-thirsty little insects agreed to strike their notes in praise of the divine Being. Either the statement of Görres and its verification in the bull canonizing St. Rose must be rejected in toto, or admitted without any slipshod attempt at explanation as that which Dr. Hammond offers. He pretends that if such a thing did happen, it must be in consequence of the saint’s hypnotizing the mosquitoes, and thus obtaining control over them. But is it possible that hypnotized mosquitoes would continue to drone out their peculiar music even [Pg 715] to a livelier measure than usual, or would ferociously attack all other persons except St. Rose?—for, as Dr. Hammond facetiously(?) remarks, she was not filial enough to include her mother in the bargain. We have here, then, a case which differs essentially from that of the somnambulic lady mentioned, and one that stubbornly refuses to be accounted for in the same manner. The somnambulic young lady exhibited a condition strikingly abnormal; there was complete loss of sensibility and power to observe what was taking place around her, while the mosquitoes became more tuneful than ever, and followed the natural bent of their instinct towards all but the little saint, who made them join her in singing the praises of their mutual Creator. Yet Dr. Hammond would have us believe either that the story is untrue or that the mosquitoes were hypnotized. And this is his mode of conducting warfare against the supernatural: Doctus iter melius. The blunt scepticism of Paine or Hobbes is more tolerable than this skim-milk reasoning. He does not hesitate even to intimate that the prophet Daniel possessed this mesmeric power, and thus escaped the fangs of the enraged and hungry lions into whose den he was cast. The same inconsequence of reasoning may be traced in the conclusion drawn from the experiments of Kircher and Czermak; Kircher having noticed that a hen with tied legs ceased to struggle, when a chalk-line was drawn before its eyes, in the belief that the line was the string which tied it, and that so long as the line remained all efforts at self-deliverance were useless. The good Father Kircher sought no further explanation of the phenomenon till Czermak, in 1873, proved that a true state of hypnotism or artificial somnambulism had been induced. To place the matter beyond doubt, he modified and repeated the experiment, so that now we cannot but accept this explanation, and say of Kircher’s merely:

“Si non e vero e ben trovato.”

This hypnotic condition of the lower animals once allowed, Dr. Hammond rushes to the conclusion that therein is to be sought and found the only true solution of the control which at times the saints of the church exercised over them. This is certainly the most perverse logic that can be conceived of. As well might we infer from the fact that certain characteristic features attend death by strangulation, and that these have been scientifically studied, therefore all animals died this death, and so reject as apocryphal all circumstances pointing to another possible mode of exit from life’s cares. The reasoning is entirely parallel to Dr. Hammond’s when he says that Czermak having demonstrated the hypnosis of hens and craw-fish, and himself a similar condition in dogs and rabbits, therefore whatever we read or hear of in reference to a completely different state of things we must equally set down to hypnosis as the cause. It is on this account he scouts the notion of bees depositing their honey on the lips of St. Dominic, St. Ambrose, and St. Isidore, or of following them into the desert and obeying their commands. If, indeed, we accept the lamp which science kindly furnishes, and, enlightened by its light, call those miraculous occurrences the effect of hypnosis, we may perchance escape the charge of credulity.

In this last sentence we confess to have fallen into an error which, however, we will not correct for the sake of the salutary reflection it has stirred up within us. We said: “Unless we accept the lamp which science kindly furnishes,” etc., thereby seeming to intimate that we are enemies to science, whereas nothing could be farther from our purpose. True science is founded on the eternal principles of truth, and, itself shining out with God’s holy light, can never go astray. But there is a pseudo-science, a spurious affair, which has donned the garb of truth and assumed its name, and which men, calling it science, wonder and are amazed that science and religion so often find themselves in antagonism. If men were always careful to discriminate between what is founded on unquestionable facts on the one hand, and the airy hypotheses of highly imaginative scientists on the other, and not bestow the dignified appellative of science on these latter, they would not be so easily captivated by the gilded sophistries of Draper, or allured by the glitter of Hammond’s showy erudition. This en passant.

In speaking of the cures said to have been accomplished by St. Sauveur, Dr. Hammond makes this striking and pregnant remark: “If St. Sauveur had really been the great healer he is said to have [Pg 716] been, we should find his doings recorded in a thousand contemporaneous volumes, and every school-boy would have them at his tongue’s end. Neither do facts go begging for believers, nor will they remain concealed in obscure books.” Now, these two sentences fairly teem with fallacies. In the first place, the alleged performances of St. Sauveur are by no means regarded as authoritatively established or widely known, as Dr. Hammond himself subsequently indicates; how, then, even if true, could they have found their way into a thousand contemporaneous volumes? Besides, the age in which St. Sauveur lived differed in this respect from ours: that the recital of even the most marvellous occurrences spread very slowly, and never very widely; how, then, even if true, could the exploits of St. Sauveur have ever obtained much notoriety at the time? And chief of all, there is that inherent spirit of scepticism in every man which prompts him, often in the face of the most positive evidence, to reject whatever is stated to have taken place in derogation of physical law, or else to assign a purely physical reason for it. It is this sceptical tendency which will ever stand in the way of the ready and universal acceptance of supernatural events, however well attested, and, in this respect, essentially distinguishes them from facts of the natural order. It is the operation of this tendency which has driven Dr. Hammond himself into his illogical position, and will leave him there till he subordinates this prejudiced feeling to the higher promptings of his intellect. Long before him Voltaire gave expression to this sentiment when he declared that he would more willingly believe that the whole city of Paris had been deceived, or had conspired to deceive, than he would that a single dead man had risen from the grave. Herein lies the whole philosophy of Dr. Hammond’s position, if philosophy it can be called. He sets out with the conviction that a supernatural occurrence is impossible, and he is consequently determined to reject all testimony of whatsoever sort, no matter how weighty, and which he would readily allow in scientific affairs, which goes to support their authenticity. Historical testimony is of no avail, the good sense and discrimination of individuals goes for naught, when weighed against the flimsiest and shallowest so-called scientific explanations. Whenever a saint either performed a miracle or was himself the subject of a miraculous affection, Dr. Hammond concludes that he was epileptic or cataleptic, or suffering from some derangement of the nervous centres. Of St. Teresa he remarks: “The organization of St. Teresa was such as to allow of her imagining anything as reality; and the hallucination of being lifted up, as I shall show hereafter, is one of the most common experienced by ecstatics.” He thus places the saint in the light of a feeble-minded woman, of weak judgment and puny intellect, whereas all writers agree that in the various reforms she introduced into her religious community she exhibited the rarest good sense, moderation, and vigor of mind. The same remark is applicable to St. Thomas of Villanova. But enough. Rational criticism should be expended on other subjects. The savant who compares Bernadette of Soubirous to the monks of Mount Athos, who go into ecstasy by placing their thoughts on God and their eyes on their navel, cannot expect much dignified criticism. The book is calculated to produce an unfavorable impression against the church in the minds of sciolists and those who are apt to be influenced by the authority of a name. We have already expressed our views on Dr. Hammond’s psychological attainments, and this present volume, so far from inducing us to alter them, rather inclines us to think that our strictures were unduly lenient. The comments which our June article elicited from the press go far to show that the intelligent portion of the community will not accept as genuine science a mere jingling Greek nomenclature—e Græco fonte parce detorta—and that, Draper and Hammond to the contrary, commonsense is not yet so rare as but yet to be common. The style of the book is good, the English pure, and the description graphic. It is well adapted, consequently, for popular reading, and will no doubt have a wide circulation—tant pis.

German Political Leaders. By Herbert Tuttle. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. 1876.

If Mr. Tuttle were one of the hired scribes of the Berlin Press Bureau, we should have looked for just such a book as he has written. A genuine “mud-bather” [Pg 717] could not have shown himself either a more unfair partisan or a more flippant and inaccurate narrator.

Had the book appeared on its own merits, and not as one of a series of biographies, edited under the supervision of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, we should have passed it by like any other piece of book-making; for it is merely a catch-penny performance, and was most probably never meant to be anything else. This volume is of itself sufficient to show how utterly worthless is the claim put forth by Putnam’s Sons that the whole series is to be made reliable in every statement of fact. Bismarck, we are told, was a youth of very tender nature, and is even yet a devout and pious Christian. “His domestic tastes were always strong; his longing for a wife and household of his own would seem to have been very acute, till in 1847 it was satisfied by his marriage with Joanna von Putkammer.”

The truth is, Bismarck was a wild and reckless youth, who distinguished himself at the university by fighting some twenty-five duels and by taking the lead in the boisterous and riotous debauches habitual with so many German students. As a young man he continued this mode of life on his paternal estates, where he was known as Der Tolle Bismarck—Mad Bismarck. His favorite drink at this time was a mixture of porter and champagne. His letters to his sister show that the “acute longing for a wife” is only in the imagination of Mr. Tuttle. “His whole career,” says this writer, “previous to entering the Prussian ministry, was one of study and preparation, … at the university he was a profound and philosophical student of history, particularly that of his own country.” He never took a degree, and he was a profound and philosophical student of nothing except fencing, boxing, and hunting. Mr. Tuttle does not even quote correctly the sayings of Bismarck, which are known to every newspaper reader. Bismarck said: “Germany must be made with blood and iron”; and Mr. Tuttle makes him say: “The battles of this generation are to be fought out with iron and blood.”

The sketch of Dr. Falk is a still sorrier performance. In an attempt to sum up the relations of the church and the state in Prussia from 1817 to 1862, he says: “Accordingly the Catholics made grave advances along the whole line of social, educational, and political interests.… The church, or the ecclesiastical element, wielded paramount authority in the public councils” (p. 29). Nothing could be more false, nor would one who knows anything of Prussian history commit himself to a statement which can be excused from malice only by being supposed to proceed from gross ignorance.

We might cite fifty passages from this book in which bitter and vulgar prejudice against the Catholic Church has led the author into palpable and unpardonable blunders. Dr. Krementz is the “obstinate and disobedient bishop of Ermeland.” “The complaints of the Ultramontanes are both extravagant and absurd.” The leaders of the Catholic party “as the servants of an infallible spiritual master, were apparently placed above those restraints of moderation, courtesy, and truthfulness which apply in secular matters.… They led their hearers into tortuous mazes of sophistry, they wrapped the subject in clouds of paltry fallacies, at the command of bishops whose gospel is light.” Dr. Falk’s courage “has stood the ordeal required of every statesman who excites the hatred and exposes himself to the vengeance of the pupils of the Jesuit Mariana. He has been threatened with assassination quite as often as the emperor and Bismarck.”

The fact that a book written by an American, for Americans, and published by a leading American house, should evince the most thorough and earnest sympathy with the relentless persecution of the Catholic Church in Germany, throws a very unpleasant light upon our much-talked-of love of fair play and religious liberty.

The will to make martyrs and confessors of the bishops and priests of the United States is not wanting to Mr. Tuttle or Mr. Higginson, if the language of this book may be taken as an evidence of their real sentiments. The only Catholic leader whose biography is given in this volume is Lewis Windthorst, and this is the character which he receives: “He would be the most daring and consistent of sceptics if his interests had not made him the most faithful of believers. Even his religious professions spring from one form of unbelief. To be a free-thinker requires the exercise of faith in human reason and in most of the results of human inquiry, while by espousing [Pg 718] the Catholic religion he proclaimed his disbelief in all positive and uninspired knowledge. He doubts everything that is true and believes only what is doubtful.” Since he cannot deny the ability of Windthorst, he makes him a hypocrite; and then, suddenly forgetting what he has just said, he supposes Windthorst to be a sincere believer only to declare him a fool.

We must repeat it. If Mr. Tuttle, during the four years which he has passed in Berlin, had been a pensioner of the “reptile fund,” he could not have written more unworthily.

Faith and Modern Thought. By Ransom B. Welch, D.D., LL.D., Professor in Union College. With introduction by Tayler Lewis, LL.D. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. 1876.

Contrary to the intention of the author, the title of his work is absurdly tautological, when interpreted by its contents. The impression conveyed by the title page would lead us to expect, did in point of fact lead us to expect, at least an orderly and careful analysis of the subjects chosen. In this we have been disappointed, not by the good-will with which the author labors, but by his want of success. The work is composed of six chapters which might have been published independently of one another. Of these the first is valuable as an aggressive demonstration of the materialistic and irrational tendency of certain modern professors. The fifth and, perhaps, the sixth possess a similar value; while the rest of the book, although fairly written, is comparatively worthless.

The author is manifestly devoted to Christianity; his mind is sensitive to the repulsive features of modern heathenism; he seeks to defend the nobler order of ideas. But the trouble is that his brief is not full. He does not know his case. His theological speculations are crude even to rawness, and the point d’appui of his structure is not only vague and inconsistent, but is shored up with declamation which serves to impart an additional appearance of insecurity to that which is already feeble. It is rather ludicrous to behold an evangelical Protestant, at this late day, endeavoring to undo the whole work of the Reformation, by trying to make faith appear reasonable, or by seeking other grounds for it than his own interior inspiration. Nevertheless, this is a step in the right direction. The writer claims to be a searcher after truth. If so, we can scarcely imagine that he will rest satisfied with his present work. The faith which gave to Christianity its organization, and which converted the ancient world, is no such vague chimera as the shadowy and subjective persuasion to which the author clings. The pious wish and conviction to which Dr. Welch adheres may serve to occupy and quiet his own active mind; but it is less than impotent to compel the assent of others. Dr. Welch seeks to call attention to the ideas contained in the Bible. He must have sense enough to perceive that this very attempt is something beyond his ability, and implies a living power having the right and capacity to speak for the Bible. Men will not listen to Dr. Welch in his well-meant endeavor to obtain a hearing. The inconsequent and abortive assumption on the part of the author of that duty which used to be accomplished by the teaching church, and which belongs to her or else to nobody, and the futile effort to give a coherent account of how he gets from a conviction of the necessity of revelation to belief in evangelical Protestantism, will nullify that part of the work which is good and render it merely another stumbling-block in the way of thoughtful men. We trust that it will do as little harm as possible, and that the author will eventually find some other occupation more congenial to his vigorous and reverent spirit than his present task of attempting to hold himself and others in unstable equilibrium.

Achsah: A New England Life-Study. By Rev. Peter Pennot. Boston: Lee & Shepard. 1876.

This is a capital story, or “study,” as the author very rightly calls it, of New England life. The character are all sui generis, such as only a small, narrow, sufficiently well-to-do New England town could produce, while one of them, Deacon Manlius Sterne, is a creation. Never have we seen that peculiar union of service of God and service of Mammon, which Christ pronounced to be impossible, so admirably portrayed as in this typical New England deacon, who himself would be the first to quote our Lord’s words condemning such service to a business rival, but who at the same [Pg 719] time could very easy satisfy his own conscience on the matter, and find what he would consider a religious way out of the difficulty. God’s religion looks a very small and mean affair among these New England Christians. This very book, we take it, is a revolt against the sham and littleness of such a life. The writer seems possessed of the best intentions, though not of the profoundest knowledge of Christianity. His reflections, for instance, on the death of Dr. Steinboldt are a little out of place in a Christian’s mouth. Thus, he apostrophizes death: “Sent of God, to rich and poor alike, to kings and emperors and peasants, to all nations and peoples, this good physician comes to fulfil Christ’s crowning promise of rest to all who are ‘weary and heavy laden.’” To which we say, all very well; only that in the present instance “this good physician” happens to come in the form of suicide to a murderer, who, to add to his delinquencies, was a quack.

It was a mistake of the author, too, to make one of his characters, an excellent Catholic apparently, attend Protestant service on the Sunday, instead of going to the Catholic chapel in the town and hearing Mass. However, he is evidently very favorably inclined towards Catholics, so we will not quarrel with him on so palpable a slip.

“It has pleased God to give us no very clear idea of the great future, and so we speculate and wonder and dream, each after the fashion of his own heart; and one is quite as likely to be right as another. Thank God that he has elevated the mysteries of life and death above the realms of human reason, and left each to aspire to the future of his own imagination, to long for the heaven of his own desires.” This sounds to us little above the Turk’s dream of Paradise, who, by the bye, according to our author, “is quite as likely to be right” as the Christian. All this is a mistake. Our Lord has left us something far more definite to long for than the heaven of our own imagination and desires.

Again: “Madame Wandl, though a ‘bigoted Catholic,’ was more charitable than these free and enlightened Dickeyvillians, and, when the two talked together on matters of religious faith, it was the harmonious meeting of two extremes of belief, one elevating the humanity of Christ to the level of godliness, the other reducing the character of God to the level of a perfect and idealized humanity. Those who read this page will instantly decide which was right, but out of every ten, five will decide in one way and five in another; and as for me [the author], I don’t propose to create a majority one way or the other by throwing myself into the balance, but shall rest contented if I can preach Christ’s gospel of love acceptably and intelligently to my people” (pp. 222, 223).

It seems to us very plain from this and other passages that the Rev. Peter Pennot is far from having made up his mind as to who Christ is. He tells us practically, in the passage just quoted, that he will not say that Christ is at once true God and perfect man. Until he satisfies himself on this point, it is to be feared that his preaching of Christ’s gospel of love will not bear much fruit. It is one thing to preach the Gospel of the Son of God, another to preach the gospel of a being about whom we entertain great doubts.

We have been led aside by such points as these from the main story. The author writes so earnestly and honestly that we cannot but look upon his uncertainty with regret. For the rest, Achsah is as enjoyable a story as we have read for many a day. The author seems to us to have all the gifts of a novelist. He has wit, humor, pathos, and an unforced sarcasm that is very telling. His story runs along without a halt. There is a pleasant, innocent love-plot, and some highly sensational matter is introduced in a very unsensational manner.

Meditations and Considerations for a Retreat of One Day in each Month. Baltimore: Kelly, Piet & Co. 1876.

This little book has been composed for the benefit of those who have or wish to have the most excellent practice of putting aside one day in the month for a religious retreat. Whatever cultivates in us the habit of serious reflection upon the affairs of the soul is of inestimable value, since without some practice of meditation and self-examination it is almost impossible to lead a religious life; and we know of nothing better adapted to create in us this reflective character of mind than what is called the monthly retreat. This devotion is general in religious [Pg 720] communities, but it may also be easily followed by persons in the world without interfering with the daily routine of life enough to attract the attention of any one. The collection of meditations before us will, we hope, encourage many to make proof of the efficacy of the monthly retreat. We would suggest, however, that in another edition an introduction be added, giving explanations concerning the nature and practice of this devotion, pointing out how persons engaged in worldly occupations may most easily perform these monthly exercises.

Science and Religion: A Lecture Delivered at Leeds, England. By Cardinal Wiseman. St. Louis: Patrick Fox, 10 South Fifth Street. 1876. (For sale by The Catholic Publication Society.)

This lecture is one of the ablest and most interesting lectures of the late Cardinal Wiseman. It proves in a conclusive and at the same time most agreeable manner that “science has nowhere flourished more, or originated more sublime or useful discoveries, than where it has been pursued under the influence of the Catholic religion.” In demonstrating this truth, the eminent writer has given a great number of facts not generally known to the reading public, which prove the deep indebtedness of science to Catholic Italy for many of its most valuable truths and discoveries.

The publisher has done his part in a praiseworthy manner.

Revolutionary Times: Sketches of our Country, its People and their Ways, one hundred years ago. By Edward Abbott. Boston: Roberts Brothers. 1876.

This is a very interesting and tastefully printed volume of two hundred pages, containing a great many items of interest with regard to the habits and customs of our American forefathers in the beginning of our national history, a glance at the state of literature, the press, and education, with many entertaining sketches of the “worthies” of that period.

From the chapter on “Political Geography” we cull the following extract, which gives an idea of the style of the work:

“The colonization of the West was yet a dream of the Anglo-Americans, the designs of France and Spain standing in the way of its fulfilment. The present great State of Ohio had not a white settlement. St. Louis was a Spanish town. What is now Indiana had but a single settlement, that at Vincennes. Detroit was a far-distant outpost sheltering a few hundred pioneers. This whole region was an unbroken waste, saving at these few scattered points, which were in large measure military and trading stations. Over all the Indian had free range. Adventurers were exploring the lakes and the rivers, and currents of emigration were only slowly setting in; and on the 9th of October, 1776, three months after the Declaration of Independence, two Franciscan monks, indefatigable missionaries of the Roman Church, took possession of the Pacific coast by the founding of their mission of San Francisco, the germ of the modern city of that name.”

The New Month of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. From the original French. By S. P. Philadelphia: Peter F. Cunningham & Son, 29 South Tenth Street. 1876.

This neat and beautiful little manual cannot but be of service to every lover of the Sacred Heart, especially at this season of the year. This month is prolonged into thirty-three days, corresponding with the thirty-three years of our Saviour’s life upon earth, and is furnished with appropriate meditations and pious practices, calculated to inspire devotion and excite the love of Christians towards the Heart of their Divine Lord. It is sufficient to say of this little work what the venerable Archbishop of Cincinnati says of it in his recommendation—that “it is perfectly free from all blemish on the score of faith, morals, and piety.” Truly, a high commendation.

Notiones Theologicæ circa Sextum Decalogi Præceptum. Auctore D. Craisson. Parisiis: Benziger Bros.; New York: The same.

A certain remnant of Jansenistic rigorism among the French clergy is assigned by the author of this treatise as one of the reasons which induced him to write on the subjects indicated by the title of his book. In the work itself we have failed to discover anything of importance which may not be found in almost any text-book of moral theology.

[Pg 721]

THE

CATHOLIC WORLD.

VOL. XXIII., No. 138.—SEPTEMBERR, 1876.

THE RISE OF RELIGIOUS LIBERTY IN THE UNITED STATES.

The Constitution of the United States has these provisions:

“No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.”—Art. VI.

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”—First Amendment.

It is thus the case that, as originally framed, the Constitution simply provided that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States,” but did not, in terms, prohibit Congress from erecting a state religion or interfering with the free exercise of religion otherwise than as regards office. The First Amendment was therefore adopted, in order that, as amended, the Constitution should forbid Congress from intermeddling in any way whatever with religious matters; and it has hence passed into the general understanding that the government of the United States has no religious character or powers whatsoever, but is purely a secular organization, contrived and devised for purely secular ends. As stated in the eleventh article of the treaty of Jan. 3, 1797, between the United States and Tripoli, “the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion” (Rev. Stats. U. S., “Treaties,” p. 756).

It being thus the case that religious liberty, as we now understand it, did not spring full-orbed and complete into existence in the United States, it may be of interest to trace the stages of its development. The provision that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion” owes its immediate origin to the representations of the conventions of a number of the States upon adopting the Constitution of the United States (1 Stats. 97), such States being New Hampshire, New York, and Virginia (4 [Pg 722] Journ. Cong., 1782-8, App. pp. 52, 53, 55). Back of these representations lay a first cause which can only be understood by a reference to the condition of the colonies at the outbreak of the Revolution. From A View of the Constitution of the British Colonies in North America and the West Indies, at the time the Civil War broke out on the Continent of America—a work published in London in 1783 by Anthony Stokes (a loyalist Welshman, who, as a barrister in the British West Indies from 1762 to 1769, and the royal Chief-Justice of Georgia from 1769 to 1783, had peculiar opportunities of becoming conversant with his topic)—we learn that the Church of England was established by law in most of the colonies in 1776. The View says: “The clergy in America do not receive tithes, but in most of the colonies before the civil war (except the New England provinces, where the Independents had the upper hand) an Act of Assembly was made to divide the colony into parishes, and to establish religious worship therein according to the rites and ceremonies of the Church of England; and also to raise a yearly salary for the support of each parochial minister” (p. 199). With the exception of South Carolina, our author does not specify by name the colonies in which this system obtained, but from other sources we have that information. The charter of New Hampshire provided “that liberty of conscience shall be allowed to all Protestants, and that such especially as shall be conformable to the rites of the Church of England shall be particularly countenanced and encouraged,” which substantial establishment existed in that colony up to the Revolution (Town of Pawlet v. Clark, 9 Cr. 292). The first constitution of New York, that of April 20, 1777, recognizes a like establishment by providing for the abrogation of “all such parts of the common and statute law, and acts of Assembly, as establish any denomination of Christians or their ministers.” Dr. David Ramsay, the contemporary historian of the Revolution, says: “In Connecticut all persons were obliged to contribute to the support of the church as well as the commonwealth.… The Congregational churches were adopted and established by law” (1 Hist. U. S., p. 150); also: “The Church of England was incorporated simultaneously with the first settlement of Virginia, and in the lapse of time it also became the established religion of Maryland. In both these provinces, long before the American Revolution, that church possessed a legal pre-eminence, and was maintained at the expense not only of its own members but of all other denominations” (id. p. 220). As to the establishment of the Church of England in Virginia, see also Terrett v. Taylor, 9 Cr. 43. From art. 34 of the first constitution of North Carolina, that of Dec. 18, 1776, which inhibits taxation “for the purchase of any glebe, or the building of any house of worship, or for the maintenance of any minister or ministry,” it is inferrible that a like establishment existed in that colony. In South Carolina Chief-Justice Stokes mentions the Church of England as established by law (View, p. 199), and the constitution of that State of March 19, 1778, secured “the churches, chapels, parsonages, glebes, and all other property now belonging to any societies of the Church of England, or any [Pg 723] other religious societies” (art. 38). In Georgia the Church of England was established by colonial statute of March 15, 1758 (Watkins’ Dig. 52). In Massachusetts a colonial statute of 1716 established a compulsory religious establishment which remained up to the framing of the State constitution in 1780, the Assembly providing all towns declining to do so for themselves with “a minister qualified as by law is provided”—namely, “an able, learned, orthodox minister, of good conversation”—and imposing taxes for his support (Chalmers’ Colonial Opinions, p. 49; I Ramsay, Hist. U. S., p. 150).

From the foregoing it will be gathered that at the outbreak of the American Revolution some form of church establishment ordained by law was familiar to the people of Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, New York, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. “In Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Jersey there never was any established religion” (I Ramsay, Hist. U. S., p. 232). One of the incidents of the religious establishments in the colonies where they existed was that the clergy thereunder were governmental appointees. In Massachusetts, under the act of 1716, the Assembly settled ministers in the unprovided towns; in Maryland the proprietary had the advowsons (Chalm. Col. Op., 42); and in the provincial establishments or king’s governments, as New Hampshire, New York, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, the royal governor had the right of collation or appointment (Stokes’ View, p. 199). Another incident was the church rates or taxes, above referred to. At the outbreak of the Revolution, then, two-thirds of the colonies were face to face with a religion established or favored by law; with a clergy appointed by government; and a general taxation to uphold one and maintain the other. The dissatisfaction thus engendered is best evidenced by the care which the people of the colonies, then States, took, in framing their constitutions, to forbid the continuance of such a system where it then existed, or to prevent its adoption where it was not as yet known.

The New Jersey constitution of July 2, 1776, provided “that there shall be no establishment of any one religious sect in this province in preference to another” (art. 19); “nor shall any person within this colony ever be obliged to pay tithes, taxes, or any other rates for the purposes of building or repairing any church or churches, place or places of worship, or for the maintenance of any minister or ministry, contrary to what he believes to be right or has deliberately and voluntarily engaged himself to perform” (art. 18); and so sacred were these provisions deemed that an oath was prescribed for all members of the legislature, engaging them never to assent to any law, vote, or proceeding to annul, repeal, or alter any part or parts thereof (art. 23).

The Virginia constitution of July 5, 1776, declares “that religion, or the duty which we owe to our Creator, and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force and violence; and therefore all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience, and that it is the mutual duty of all to practise Christian [Pg 724] forbearance, love, and charity toward each other” (art. 16); and while this does not in terms equal the New Jersey provisions ante, the Supreme Court of the United States has construed it as equipollent, saying in Terrett v. Taylor, 9 Cr. 43: “Consistent with the constitution of Virginia, the legislature could not create or continue a religious establishment which should have exclusive rights and prerogatives, or compel the citizens to worship under a stipulated form or discipline, or to pay taxes to those whose creed they could not conscientiously believe.”

The constitution of Delaware of Sept. 20, 1776, provides: “No man shall, or ought to, be compelled to attend any religious worship, to contribute to the erection or support of any place of worship, or to the maintenance of any ministry, against his free-will and consent.… Nor shall a preference be given by law to any religious societies, denomination, or modes of worship” (art. 1, § 1).

The North Carolina constitution of Dec. 18, 1776, provides “that there shall be no establishment of any one religious church or denomination in this State in preference to any other; neither shall any person, on any pretence whatsoever, be compelled to attend any place of worship contrary to his own faith or judgment, nor be obliged to pay for the purchase of any glebe, or the building of any house of worship, or for the maintenance of any minister or ministry, contrary to what he believes right or has voluntarily and personally engaged to perform” (art. 34).

The Georgia constitution of Feb. 5, 1777, says: “All persons whatever shall have the free exercise of their religion, provided it be not repugnant to the peace and safety of the State; and shall not, unless by consent, support any teacher or teachers, except those of their own profession” (art. 56).

The New York constitution of April 20, 1777, abrogates “all such parts of the common and statute law, and acts of Assembly, as establish any denomination of Christians or their ministers.”

The early constitutions of Maryland, South Carolina, and Massachusetts enunciated substantially the same principles as the other organic laws above set forth, but did not entirely destroy the connection of church and state. The Maryland constitution of Aug. 14, 1776, says: “Nor ought any person to be compelled to frequent, or maintain, or contribute, unless on contract, to maintain any particular place of worship or any particular ministry: (yet the legislature may, in their discretion, lay a general and equal tax for the support of the Christian religion; leaving to each individual the power of appointing the payment over of the money collected from him to the support of any particular place of worship, or minister, or for the poor of his own denomination, or the poor in general of any particular county).”

The South Carolina constitution of March 19, 1778, says: “No person shall by law be obliged to pay towards the maintenance and support of a religious worship that he does not freely join in or has not voluntarily engaged to support” (art. 38), but in the same article ordains that “the Christian Protestant religion shall be deemed, and is hereby constituted and declared to be, the established religion of this State,” extending this description [Pg 725] to “all denominations of Christian Protestants in this State.”

The Massachusetts constitution of March 2, 1780, says: “No subordination of any sect or denomination to another shall ever be established by law” (part i. art. 3), but allowed taxation to support “public Protestant teachers of piety, religion, and morality in all cases where such provision shall not be made voluntarily” (id.), with this qualification, however: that “all moneys paid by the subject to the support of public worship and of the public teachers aforesaid shall, if he require it, be uniformly applied to the support of the public teacher or teachers of his own religious sect or denomination, provided there be any, on whose instruction he attends; otherwise it may be paid towards the support of the teacher or teachers of the parish or precinct in which the said moneys are raised” (id.)

If we state correctly—as we have not those documents by us—the New Hampshire constitution of June 2, 1784, provided that “no person of any one particular religious sect or denomination shall ever be compelled to pay towards the support of the teacher or teachers of another persuasion, sect, or denomination, … and no subordination of any one sect or denomination to another shall ever be established by law” (part i. art. 6), but that, subject to these provisions, the legislature might authorize local taxation to support “public Protestant teachers of piety, religion, and morality” (id.); and the Pennsylvania constitution of Sept. 28, 1776, provided “that no man can, of right, be compelled to attend, erect, or support any place of worship or to maintain any ministry against his consent, … and that no preference shall ever be given by law to any religious establishments or modes of worship.” In Connecticut and Rhode Island the royal charter continued the fundamental law until 1818 in the former and 1842 in the latter State; but, lest it may be thought that in these States no opposition to an established church was manifested, it is proper to remark that, upon ratifying the Constitution of the United States, the Rhode Island Convention suggested as a highly desirable amendment “that no particular religious sect or society ought to be favored or established by law in preference to others” (1 Elliot Deb. 334); and in the Connecticut Convention Oliver Wolcott, in urging the ratification of that instrument, refers to an inclination in that assemblage to favor a like amendment, and says: “Knowledge and liberty are so prevalent in this country that I do not believe that the United States would ever be disposed to establish one religious sect, and lay all others under legal disabilities. But as we know not what may take place hereafter, and any such test would be exceedingly injurious to the rights of free citizens, I cannot think it altogether superfluous to have added a clause which secures us from the possibility of such oppression” (2 Elliot Deb. 202).

We may thus say that, upon becoming States, the American colonies declared with one voice that no religious establishment should possess a legal pre-eminence in their several jurisdictions. In the Federal Convention Charles Pinckney proposed to make it a part of the Constitution of the United States that “the legislature of the United States shall pass no law on [Pg 726] the subject of religion” (Journ., May 29), and thus apply to the general government the rule previously adopted by the States, which proposition failed. Mr. Pinckney then submitted this proposition: “No religious test or qualification shall ever be annexed to any oath of office under the authority of the United States” (Journ., Aug. 20), which was unanimously adopted (Journ., Aug. 30), Mr. Madison giving us this much of the debate: “Mr. Pinckney moved to add: ‘But no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the authority of the United States.’ Mr. Sherman thought it unnecessary, the prevailing liberality being a sufficient security against such tests. Mr. Gouverneur Morris and Gen. Pinckney approved the motion. The motion was agreed to, nem. con.” (5 Elliot Deb. 498). Upon the final revision the words “the authority of” were struck out (Journ., Sept. 12). When the Constitution was submitted for ratification, considerable uneasiness was manifested at the failure of Mr. Pinckney’s resolution that “the legislature of the United States shall pass no law on the subject of religion,” and upon ratifying the instrument the New Hampshire, New York, and Virginia Conventions urged the adoption of an amendment to that effect. The North Carolina Convention, while declining to ratify at its first session, assigned the same emendation as desirable, as did also the Rhode Island Convention upon ratifying; though, as the First Amendment had then been proposed by Congress and was before the people, the action of Rhode Island was not one of the causes leading to its submission. The New Hampshire Convention recommended this amendment: “That Congress shall make no laws touching religion or to infringe the rights of conscience” (4 Journ. Cong., 1782-8, App. p. 52). The New York Convention: “That no religious sect or society ought to be favored or established by law in preference to others” (id. p. 55). The Virginia (id. p. 53), North Carolina (id. p. 60), and Rhode Island (1 Elliot Deb. 334) Conventions severally proposed “that no particular religious sect or society ought to be favored or established by law in preference to others.” In the Maryland Convention it was suggested as a desirable amendment “that there be no national religion established by law”; but, that body concluding to ratify the Constitution without proposing amendments at that time, no final action was had on the proposition (2 Elliot Deb. p. 553); and thereupon the change was made.

Thus it became a part of the Constitution of the United States that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” In many, perhaps we may say most, other particulars the Constitution was, when framed, an experiment, but in this the fathers of the republic had the lamp of experience to illuminate their path. While a myth to us, an established church had been a substantial reality to them, and their verdict thereupon was, that upon every ground of justice, interest, and harmony no religious sect or society ought ever to be favored or established by law in preference to others in these United States.

The second clause of the First Amendment, that Congress shall [Pg 727] make no law prohibiting the free exercise of religion, is substantially included in the other provisions cited at the opening of this paper, and need not be here specifically considered. It is a casus omissus provision which speaks for itself. The provision that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States” opens, however, another field of inquiry.

At the outbreak of the American Revolution the colonists were deeply imbued with the intolerant spirit of their English ancestors as respects Roman Catholics, infidels, and Jews, and naturally impressed those feelings on their earlier governmental declarations and institutions. As the struggle progressed this aversion wore away, and on the final settlement of the present American system of polity we find the fathers of the republic formally renouncing their original prepossessions in favor of religious tests. So far as regards Jews and infidels, the citations now to be given will need no special comment; but as respects Roman Catholics, it is proper to premise that the ancestral antipathy of the colonists to those of that faith had been particularly sharpened by the old French war, closing by the peace of 1763.

In 1705 the following questions were propounded to the Attorney-General Northey: “Whether the laws of England against Romish priests are in force in the plantations, and whether her majesty may not direct Jesuits or Romish priests to be turned out of Maryland?” In reply he first takes up 27 Eliz., c. 2, making it high treason for any British-born Romish priest to come into, be, or remain in any part of the royal dominions, and says: “It is plain that law extended to all the dominions the queen had when it was made; but some doubt hath been made whether it extendeth to dominions acquired after, as the plantations have been.” He next considers II William III., c. 4, subjecting any popish bishop or priest who shall exercise any ecclesiastical function in any part of the British dominions to perpetual imprisonment, and says: “I am of opinion this law extends to the plantations, they being dominions belonging to the realm of England, and extends to all priests, foreigners as well as natives.” Lastly, he says: “As to the question whether her majesty may not direct Jesuits or Romish priests to be turned out of Maryland, I am of opinion, if the Jesuits or priests be aliens, not made denizens or naturalized, her majesty may, by law, compel them to depart Maryland; if they be her majesty’s natural-born subjects, they cannot be banished from her majesty’s dominions, but may be proceeded against on the last before-mentioned law” (Chalm. Col. Op., 42). And that this was the accepted state of the crown law as late as May 29, 1775, appears from an address of that date of the American Congress to the inhabitants of Canada, wherein they are asked to make common cause with the other colonies, and told: “The enjoyment of your very religion on the present system depends on a legislature in which you have no share and over which you have no control, and your priests are exposed to expulsion, banishment, and ruin whenever their wealth and possessions furnish sufficient temptation” (1 Journ. Cong., p. 75, Way & Gideon ed., Washington, 1823). It was also the case that a number of the royal [Pg 728] charters under which the colonists had been accustomed to live denied religious liberty to Roman Catholics. The charter of New Hampshire provided “that liberty of conscience shall be allowed to all Protestants” (Town of Pawlet v. Clark, 9 Cr. 292); that of Massachusetts read: “For the greater ease and encouragement of our living subjects, inhabiting our said province or territory of Massachusetts Bay, and of such as shall come to inhabit there, we do, by these presents, for us, our heirs and successors, grant, establish, and ordain that for ever hereafter there shall be a liberty of conscience allowed in the worship of God to all Christians (except papists) inhabiting, or which shall inhabit or be resident within, our said province or territory” (Chalm. Col. Op., 48). The charter of Georgia, as of force up to 1752, ordains: “There shall be a liberty of conscience allowed in the worship of God to all persons inhabiting, or which shall inhabit or be resident within, our said province, and that all such persons, except papists, shall have a free exercise of religion” (White’s Hist. Coll. Ga., p. 9). The charter of Rhode Island—which recites that it was granted the petitioners therefor because “they have freely declared that it is much on their hearts (if they be permitted) to hold forth a lively experiment that a most flourishing civil state may stand and best be maintained, and that among our English subjects, with a full liberty in religious concernments”; and ordains “that all and every person and persons may, from time to time, and at all times hereafter, freely and fully have and enjoy his own and their judgments and consciences, in matters of religious concernments, throughout the tract of land hereafter mentioned, they behaving themselves peaceably and quietly, and not using this liberty to licentiousness and profaneness, nor to the civil injury or outward disturbance of others; any law, statute, or clause therein contained, or to be contained, usage, or custom of this realm, to the contrary hereof in any wise notwithstanding,” and which, to us, seems to guarantee absolute freedom of conscience—was interpreted by the colonial government as excepting Roman Catholics, Dr. Ramsay saying: “Since the date of the charter the form of the government has suffered very little alteration. An act was passed, in 1663, declaring that all men of competent estates and good conduct, who professed Christianity, with the exception of Roman Catholics, should be admitted freemen” (1 Hist. U. S., p. 156).

With this much we come to the Continental Congress which met at Philadelphia Sept. 5, 1774, to consider the relations of the colonies to the parent state. It at once became apparent that one prime grievance alleged against the crown was the act of Parliament (14 Geo. III., c. 83), passed early in that year, respecting the boundaries and government of the Province of Quebec, as Canada was called after its cession to England by the peace of 1763, which extended the limits of that province southward to the Ohio, westward to the Mississippi, and northward to the boundary of the Hudson’s Bay Company; qualified Roman Catholics to sit in the provincial council; applied the French laws, dispensing with juries to civil cases, and the English practice to criminal; and secured the Catholic clergy their estates and [Pg 729] full liberty in their religion. Massachusetts was particularly indignant at this statute, and the Congress had scarcely organized before the following resolution was presented with others from Suffolk County in that State: “10. That the late act of Parliament for establishing the Roman Catholic religion and the French laws in that extensive country now called Quebec is dangerous in an extreme degree to the Protestant religion and to the civil rights and liberties of all America; and therefore, as men and Protestant Christians, we are indispensably obliged to take all proper measures for our security” (1 Journ. Cong., p. 11). On the 10th of October Congress, having considered “the rights and grievances of these colonies,” “Resolved, N. C. D., That the following acts of Parliament are infringements and violations of the rights of the colonists; and that the repeal of them is essentially necessary in order to restore harmony between Great Britain and the American colonies, viz., … the act for establishing the Roman Catholic religion in the province of Quebec, abolishing the equitable system of English laws, and erecting a tyranny there, to the great danger (from so total a dissimilarity of religion, law, and government) of the neighboring British colonies, by the assistance of whose blood and treasure the said country was conquered from France.… To these grievous acts and measures Americans cannot submit” (id. pp. 20-22).

The main work of the Congress of 1774 was the famous “Continental Association,” which is, in brief, a solemn engagement on the part of the colonies to break off commercial relations with Great Britain until such time as divers obnoxious acts of Parliament were repealed. It opens by arraigning the British ministry for adopting a system of administration “evidently calculated for enslaving these colonies,” and proceeds to specify among other instruments to this end “an act for extending the province of Quebec, so as to border on the Western frontiers of these colonies, establishing an arbitrary government therein, and discouraging the settlement of British subjects in that wide-extended country, thus, by the influence of civil principles and ancient prejudices, to dispose the inhabitants to act with hostility against the free Protestant colonies whenever a wicked ministry shall choose to direct them” (id. p. 23). The Congress also resolved upon addresses to the people of Great Britain, to the inhabitants of the colonies represented in the Congress, to the king, and to the people of Canada. That to the people of Great Britain says: “Know that we think the legislature of Great Britain is not authorized by the Constitution to establish a religion, fraught with sanguinary and impious tenets, or to erect an arbitrary form of government in any quarter of the globe” (id. p. 27). It then charges that at the close of the French war a plan of enslaving the colonies was concerted “under the auspices of a minister of principles, and of a family unfriendly to the Protestant cause and inimical to liberty,” and says: “Now mark the progression of the ministerial plan for enslaving us.… By another act the Dominion of Canada is to be so extended, modelled, and governed as that, by being disunited from us, detached from our interest, by civil as well as religious [Pg 730] prejudices, that by their numbers daily swelling with Catholic emigrants from Europe, and by their devotion to administration so friendly to their religion, they might become formidable to us, and, on occasion, be fit instruments in the hands of power to reduce the ancient, free, Protestant colonies to the same state of slavery with themselves. This was evidently the object of the act; and in this view, being extremely dangerous to our liberty and quiet, we cannot forbear complaining of it as hostile to British America.… Nor can we suppress our astonishment that a British Parliament should ever consent to establish in that country a religion that has deluged your island in blood, and dispersed impiety, bigotry, persecution, and murder through every part of the world” (id. p. 30). The memorial to the colonists also refers to the Quebec act, “by which act the Roman Catholic religion, instead of being tolerated, as stipulated by the treaty of peace, is established,” and says: “The authors of this arbitrary arrangement flatter themselves that the inhabitants, deprived of liberty, and artfully provoked against those of another religion, will be proper instruments for assisting in the oppression of such as differ from them in modes of government and faith” (id. p. 37). To reassure the colonists, it concludes: “The people of England will soon have an opportunity of declaring their sentiments concerning our cause. In their piety, generosity, and good sense we repose high confidence, and cannot, upon a review of past events, be persuaded that they, the defenders of true religion and the asserters of the rights of mankind, will take part against their affectionate Protestant brethren in the colonies, in favor of our open and their own secret enemies, whose intrigues for several years past have been wholly exercised in sapping the foundations of civil and religious liberty” (id. p. 38). The petition to the king represents as one of the obstacles to a restoration of harmony between the colonists and the crown the act “for extending the limits of Quebec, abolishing the English and restoring the French laws, whereby great numbers of British Frenchmen [sic] are subjected to the latter, and establishing an absolute government and the Roman Catholic religion throughout those vast regions that border on the westerly and northerly boundaries of the free Protestant English settlements” (id. p. 47); reminds the monarch that “we were born the heirs of freedom, and ever enjoyed our right under the auspices of your royal ancestors, whose family was seated on the British throne to rescue and secure a pious and gallant nation from the popery and despotism of a superstitious and inexorable tyrant”; and adjures him “for the honor of Almighty God, whose pure religion our enemies are undermining,” and “as the loving father of your whole people, connected by the same bonds of law, loyalty, faith, and blood,” to withstand the ministerial plan (id. p. 49).

The terrific arraignment of the Roman Catholic religion made in these various state papers will show to what an extent the colonists were unfavorably disposed toward that faith at the inception of the Revolutionary struggle. The fourth and last address, however, adopted remains to be noticed, and in this appears the first indication of that [Pg 731] spirit of universal religious liberty and toleration which afterwards became one of the main animating impulses of the American system of government. The Journal, unfortunately, does not disclose the name of the wise and just man who drew up this document, but the internal evidence points to John Dickinson of Pennsylvania, who afterwards prepared the Articles of Confederation (1 Secret Journ., p. 290). Oct. 21, Thomas Cushing of Massachusetts, Richard Henry Lee of Virginia, and Mr. Dickinson were appointed a committee to prepare an address to the inhabitants of Quebec, and, as adopted, this urges the Canadians to make common cause with the other colonists, setting before them their rights as British subjects, and saying: “What is offered to you by the late act of Parliament in their place? Liberty of conscience in your religion? No. God gave it to you; and the temporal powers with which you have been and are connected firmly stipulated for your enjoyment of it. If laws, divine and human, could secure it against the despotic caprices of wicked men, it was secured before” (1 Journ., p. 42). The address then imagines the president, Montesquieu, urging his countrymen to unite with the English colonists, and concludes: “We are too well acquainted with the liberality of sentiment distinguishing your nation to imagine that difference of religion will prejudice you against a hearty amity with us. You know that the transcendent nature of freedom elevates those who unite in her cause above all such low-minded infirmities. The Swiss cantons furnish a memorable proof of this truth. Their union is composed of Roman Catholic and Protestant states, living in the utmost concord and peace with one another, and thereby enabled, ever since they bravely vindicated their freedom, to defy and defeat every tyrant that has invaded them” (id. p. 44).

May 10, 1775, another Congress met. Blood had been shed; it was seen the sword must decide the event; and from this time the American Congress may be said to have remained in permanent session until the government under the Constitution was inaugurated. May 26, 1775, John Jay, Samuel Adams, and Silas Deane were appointed a committee to draught a letter to the people of Canada, which, as adopted, urged them to unite with the other colonists, declaring “the fate of the Protestant and Catholic colonies to be strongly linked together”; and adding: “The enjoyment of your very religion, on the present system, depends on a legislature in which you have no share and over which you have no control; and your priests are exposed to expulsion, banishment, and ruin whenever their wealth and possessions furnish sufficient temptation” (id. p. 75). This failing, Congress came closer by directing Robert Livingston, Robert Treat Paine, and J. Langdon, Nov. 8, 1775, to proceed to Canada, and there use their utmost efforts to procure the assistance of the Canadians in Gen. Schuyler’s operations, and to induce them to enter into a union with the other colonies, the instructions mentioning as one inducement to be held out: “And you may and are hereby empowered farther to declare that we hold sacred the rights of conscience, and shall never molest them in the [Pg 732] free enjoyment of their religion” (id. p. 170). This also failing, a third effort was made to the same end by appointing Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Chase, and Charles Carroll of Carrollton—the latter not a member of Congress at the time, but selected as a Roman Catholic (2 Ramsay Hist. U. S., p. 65)—commissioners to Canada, May 20, 1776, instructing them: “You are farther to declare that we hold sacred the rights of conscience, and may promise to the whole people, solemnly in our name, the free and undisturbed exercise of their religion; and, to the clergy, the full, perfect, and peaceable possession and enjoyment of all their estates; that the government of everything relating to their religion and clergy shall be left entirely in the hands of the good people of that province and such legislature as they shall constitute; provided, however, that all other denominations of Christians be equally entitled to hold offices, and enjoy civil privileges and the free exercise of their religion, and be totally exempt from the payment of any tithes or taxes for the support of any religion” (1 Journ., p. 290). This failed in turn, but the fathers were long loath to relinquish their hopes of the accession of Canada. The Articles of Confederation provided that “Canada, acceding to this confederation, and joining in the measures of the United States, shall be admitted into and entitled to all the advantages of this Union; but no other colony shall be admitted into the same, unless such admission be agreed to by nine States” (art. 11); and guaranteed that each State should be protected in its religion by the common strength of all (art. 3). It is further memorable that the King of France co-operated with the Americans in the attempt to secure the accession of Canada to the Union, and that in accordance with the royal instructions the Count d’Estaing published an address on the 28th of October, 1778, in his majesty’s name, to the Canadian French, adjuring them by every tie of lineage and religion to make common cause with the United States. The priests, in particular, were besought to use their influence to this end, and reminded that they might become a power in a new government, and not be dependent on “sovereigns whom force has imposed on them, and whose political indulgence will be lessened proportionally as those sovereigns shall have less to fear” (2 Pitk. U. S., p. 68). This, however, like all the invitations of the American Congress, was in vain. The contemporary fact was—and no doubt the British crown officers took care to have it well known throughout Canada—that while England was enacting laws to exempt the Canadians from her anti-Catholic statutes, and to indulge them with full liberty of conscience in their ancestral Catholic faith, the American Congress was solemnly resolving and declaring “that we think the legislature of Great Britain is not authorized by the constitution to establish a religion fraught with sanguinary and impious tenets in any quarter of the globe.” “Nor can we suppress our astonishment that a British Parliament should ever consent to establish in that country a religion that has deluged England in blood, and dispersed impiety, bigotry, persecution, murder, and rebellion throughout every part of the world.” So sharp a contrast had a powerful effect [Pg 733] on the sixty-five thousand Roman Catholics who then inhabited Canada, according to Stokes (View, p. 30), and is, in all human probability, the reason why that extensive country is not a part of the United States to-day. That invaluable contemporary authority, Dr. Ramsay, assures us that the predilections of the Canadian masses were in favor of a union with the other colonies, but “the legal privileges which the Roman Catholic clergy enjoyed made them averse to a change, lest they should be endangered by a more intimate connection with their Protestant neighbors.”

The founders of the republic seem early to have perceived the mistake of yielding to what they termed in their first overture to Canada “the low-minded infirmity” of religious prejudice, and the severe recoil of that error in this case had much to do with their subsequent prohibition of religious tests.

Recurring now to the States, we find a religious test prescribed as a qualification to office in a number of the early constitutions. The New Jersey constitution of July 2, 1776, provides “that no Protestant inhabitant of this colony shall be denied the enjoyment of any civil right merely on account of his religious principles; but that all persons professing a belief in the faith of any Protestant sect, who shall demean themselves peaceably under the government as hereby established, shall be capable of being elected into any office of profit, or trust, or being a member of either branch of the legislature, and shall fully and freely enjoy every privilege and immunity enjoyed by others their fellow-subjects” (art. 19). The North Carolina constitution of December 18, 1776, says “that no person who shall deny the being of God, or the truth of the Protestant religion, or the divine authority of either the Old or New Testaments, or who shall hold religious principles incompatible with the freedom and safety of the State, shall be capable of holding any office or place of trust or profit in the civil department within this State” (art. 32). The Georgia constitution of February 5, 1777, says that the members of the legislature “shall be of the Protestant religion” (art. 6). The South Carolina constitution of March 19, 1778, provides for “a governor and commander-in-chief, a lieutenant-governor, both to continue two years, and a privy council—all of the Protestant religion” (art. 3); that “no person shall be eligible to sit in the House of Representatives unless he be of the Protestant religion” (art. 13); and “that all denominations of Christian Protestants in this State demeaning themselves peaceably and faithfully shall enjoy equal religious and civil privileges” (art. 38). In this State the governor was sworn “to the utmost of his power to maintain and defend the laws of God, the Protestant religion, and the liberties of America” (Grimke’s Laws So. Ca., 297). The Delaware constitution of September 11, 1776, provided the following oath to be taken by all members of the legislature: “I, A. B., do profess faith in God the Father, and in Jesus Christ his only Son, and in the Holy Ghost; and I do acknowledge the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testament to be given by divine inspiration” (art. 22). The Maryland constitution of August 14, 1776, provided that “a declaration of a [Pg 734] belief in the Christian religion” (Bill of Rights, art. 35) should be a qualification to office; and “that every person, appointed to any office of profit or trust shall, before he enters on the execution thereof, … subscribe a declaration of his belief in the Christian religion” (Const., art. 55). The New Hampshire constitution of January 5, 1776, while not expressly prescribing a religious test, is understood by the provision continuing the body of the colonial law in force to have required all members of the legislature to be of the Protestant religion. The spirit occasioning the above tests was remarkably manifested in the convention framing the New York constitution of April 20, 1777. An article granting “to all mankind the free exercise of religious profession and worship” being under consideration, John Jay, afterwards the first Chief-Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, moved to add the following: “Except the professors of the religion of the Church of Rome, who ought not to hold lands in, or be admitted to a participation of the civil rights enjoyed by the members of, this State until such time as the said professors shall appear in the Supreme Court of the State, and there most solemnly swear that they verily believe in their consciences that no pope, priest, or foreign authority on earth has power to absolve the subjects of this State from their allegiance to the same; and, farther, that they renounce and believe to be false and wicked the dangerous and damnable doctrine that the pope, or any other earthly authority, has power to absolve men from sins described in and prohibited by the holy Gospel of Jesus Christ, and particularly that no pope, priest, or foreign authority on earth has power to absolve them from the obligation of this oath,” which was lost—yeas, 10; nays, 19; one county divided (Sparks’ Life of Gouverneur Morris, vol. i., p. 124). The Pennsylvania constitution of September 28, 1776, required members of the General Assembly and civil officers to sign “a declaration of belief in one God, the creator and governor of the world, the rewarder of the good and the punisher of the wicked,” and also to make “an acknowledgment that the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament are given by divine inspiration” (Stokes’ View, p. 81).

It will thus appear that the early constitutions of New Jersey, North Carolina, Georgia, South Carolina, and New Hampshire made a profession of Protestantism, and those of Maryland, Delaware, and Pennsylvania made a belief in Christianity, a qualification for office; and so the fundamental law of those States remained until after the ratification of the Constitution of the United States.

In 1787 the Federal Convention met, and, as has already been stated, while declining to make it a part of the Constitution that “the legislature of the United States shall pass no law on the subject of religion,” did insert in that instrument the provision that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.” Or, in other words, the Federal Constitution did not inhibit Congress from creating a religious establishment, but did forbid it to prescribe a religious test as a qualification to office; while, per contra, the State constitutions, while prohibiting such an establishment, admitted [Pg 735] such tests. We have seen how the States conformed the Federal Constitution to their own in the article of the inhibition of an established church, and are now to inquire how the State constitutions modelled themselves upon the Constitution of the United States so far as respects the prohibition of religious qualifications for office.

When the Federal Constitution was proposed for ratification to the State conventions, considerable opposition was manifested in some of those bodies to this prohibition. It was alleged that, as the Constitution stood, the Pope of Rome might become President of the United States, and there was even a pamphlet published to sustain that objection (4 Elliot Deb., p. 195). In the North Carolina Convention, in particular, a hot debate occurred. Mr. Abbott said: “The exclusion of religious tests is by many thought dangerous and impolitic. They suppose that if there be no religious test required, pagans, deists, and Mahometans might obtain offices among us, and that the senators and representatives might all be pagans” (id. p. 192). Mr. Iredell referred to the deplorable results of religious tests in all ages, and said: “America has set an example to mankind to think more modestly and reasonably—that a man may be of different religious sentiments from our own without being a bad member of society.… But it is objected that the people of America may, perhaps, choose representatives who have no religion at all, and that pagans and Mahometans may be admitted into offices. But how is it possible to exclude any set of men without taking away that principle of religious freedom which we ourselves so warmly contend for?… I met, by accident, with a pamphlet this morning in which the author states as a very serious danger that the Pope of Rome might be elected President. I confess this never struck me before; and if the author had read all the qualifications of a President, perhaps his fears might have been quieted. No man but a native or who has resided fourteen years in America can be chosen President. I know not all the qualifications for pope, but I believe he must be taken from the college of cardinals; and probably there are many previous steps necessary before he arrives at this dignity. A native of America must have very singular good fortune who, after residing fourteen years in his own country, should go to Europe, enter into Romish orders, obtain the promotion of cardinal, afterwards that of pope, and at length be so much in the confidence of his own country as to be elected President. It would be still more extraordinary if he should give up his popedom for our presidency. Sir, it is impossible to treat such idle fears with any degree of gravity.… This country has already had the honor of setting an example of civil freedom, and I trust it will likewise have the honor of teaching the rest of the world the way to religious freedom also. God grant both may be perpetuated to the end of time!” (id. p. 193 et seq.) Gov. Johnston said: “When I heard there were apprehensions that the Pope of Rome could be the President of the United States, I was greatly astonished. It might as well be said that the King of England or France or the Grand Turk could be chosen to that office. It [Pg 736] would have been as good an argument.… It is apprehended that Jews, Mahometans, pagans, etc., may be elected to high offices under the government of the United States. Those who are Mahometans, or any others who are not professors of the Christian religion, can never be elected to the office of President or other high office but in one of two cases: First, if the people of America lay aside the Christian religion altogether, it may happen. Should this unfortunately take place, the people will choose such men as think as they do themselves. Another case is, if any persons of such descriptions should, notwithstanding their religion, acquire the confidence and esteem of the people of America by their good conduct and practice of virtue, they may be chosen” (id. p. 198). Mr. Caldwell said: “There was an invitation for Jews and pagans of every kind to come among us. At some future period this might endanger the character of the United States.… I think that in a political view those gentlemen who formed this Constitution should not have given this invitation to Jews and heathens” (id. p. 199). Mr. Spencer said: “Religious tests have been the foundation of persecutions in all countries. Persons who are conscientious will not take the oath required by religious tests, and will therefore be excluded from offices, though equally capable of discharging them as any member of society” (id. p. 200). Mr. Spaight, who had been in the Federal Convention, said: “No test is required. All men of equal capacity and integrity are equally eligible to offices. Temporal violence may make mankind wicked, but never religious. A test would enable the prevailing sect to persecute the rest” (id. p. 208). Mr. Wilson “wished that the Constitution had excluded popish priests from office” (id. p. 212). Mr. Lancaster said: “As to a religious test, had the article which excludes it provided none but what had been in the States heretofore, I would not have objected to it.… For my part, in reviewing the qualifications necessary for a President, I did not suppose that the pope could occupy the President’s chair. But let us remember that we form a government for millions not yet in existence. I have not the art of divination. In the course of four or five hundred years I do not know how it will work. This is most certain: that papists may occupy that chair, and Mahometans may take it. I see nothing against it. There is a disqualification, I believe, in every State in the Union; it ought to be so in this system” (id. p. 215).

In the Massachusetts Convention there was considerable debate on the same clause. Mr. Singletary “thought we were giving up all our privileges, as there was no provision that men in power should have any religion; and though he hoped to see Christians, yet, by the Constitution, a papist or an infidel was as eligible as they” (2 Elliot Deb., p. 44). Several members of the convention urging that the provision “was a departure from the principles of our forefathers, who came here for the preservation of their religion; and that it would admit deists, atheists, etc., into the general government,” Rev. Mr. Shute said: “To establish a religious test as a qualification for offices in the proposed Federal Constitution, it appears to me, sir, would be attended [Pg 737] with injurious consequences to some individuals, and with no advantage to the whole.… In this great and extensive empire there is and will be a great variety of sentiments in religion among its inhabitants. Upon the plan of a religious test the question, I think, must be, Who shall be excluded from national trusts? Whatever answer bigotry may suggest, the dictates of candor and equity, I conceive, will be, None. Far from limiting my charity and confidence to men of my own denomination in religion, I suppose and I believe, sir, that there are worthy characters among men of every denomination—among the Quakers, the Baptists, the Church of England, the papists, and even among those who have no other guide in the way to virtue and heaven than the dictates of natural religion. I must therefore think, sir, that the proposed plan of government in this particular is wisely constructed; that as all have an equal claim to the blessings of the government under which they live and which they support, so none should be excluded from them for being of any particular denomination in religion. The presumption is that the eyes of the people will be upon the faithful in the land; and, from a regard of their own safety, they will choose for their rulers men of known abilities, of known probity, of good moral characters. The Apostle Peter tells us that God is no respecter of persons, but in every nation he that feareth him and worketh righteousness is acceptable to him. And I know of no reason why men of such a character, in a community of whatever denomination in religion, cœteris paribus, with other suitable qualifications, should not be acceptable to the people, and why they may not be employed by them with safety and advantage in the important offices of government. The exclusion of a religious test in the proposed Constitution, therefore, clearly appears to me, sir, to be in favor of its adoption” (id. p. 118).

These utterances form so excellent a commentary on the last clause of the sixth article of the Constitution of the United States that it is to be regretted that we know no more of their admirable and sagacious author than that he was the Rev. Daniel Shute, of Hingham, in Suffolk County, and voted on what the original journal calls “the decision of the grand question” in favor of ratifying the Constitution; as did also his colleague, Major-General Benjamin Lincoln.

Recurring to the debate, Col. Jones “thought that the rulers ought to believe in God or Christ, and that, however a test may be prostituted in England, yet he thought, if our public men were to be of those who had a good standing in the church, it would be happy for the United States” (id. p. 119). Major Lusk “passed to the article dispensing with the qualification of a religious test, and concluded by saying that he shuddered at the idea that Roman Catholics, papists, and pagans might be introduced into office, and that popery and the Inquisition may be established in America” (id. p. 148). Rev. Mr. Backus said: “I now beg leave to offer a few thoughts upon some points in the Constitution proposed to us, and I shall begin with the exclusion of any religious test. Many appear to be much concerned about it; but nothing is more evident, both in reason and the Holy Scriptures, [Pg 738] than that religion is ever a matter between God and individuals; and therefore no man or men can impose any religious test without invading the essential prerogatives of our Lord Jesus Christ. Ministers first assumed this power under the Christian name, and then Constantine approved of the practice when he adopted the profession of Christianity as an engine of state policy. And let the history of all nations be searched from that day to this, and it will appear that the imposing of religious tests hath been the greatest engine of tyranny in the world. And I rejoice to see so many gentlemen who are now giving in their rights of conscience in this great and important matter. Some serious minds discover a concern lest, if all religious tests should be excluded, the Congress would hereafter establish popery or some other tyrannical way of worship; but it is most certain that no such way of worship can be established without any religious test” (id. p. 149).

In the Conventions of Virginia (3 Elliot Deb., p. 204), and Connecticut (2 ib. p. 202), and in the South Carolina Legislature (1 id. p. 312), the same clause was discussed, but more briefly, and after the final ratification of the Constitution the principle of the provision seems to have been universally conceded as correct. The Georgia constitution of May 6, 1789, the first new State constitution adopted after the inauguration of the government under the Constitution of the United States, omitted the qualification that members of the General Assembly should be of the Protestant religion; the South Carolina constitution of June 3, 1790, the next adopted, omitted the same test, as also all the former provisions making the Protestant religion the State faith, and provided that “the free exercise and enjoyment of religious profession and worship, without discrimination or preference, shall for ever, hereafter, be allowed within this State to all mankind” (art. 8, sec. 1), and from this time forward it may be taken as the case that as fast as the States remodelled their constitutions of the Revolutionary era the religious-test provisions were formally omitted, and in the interim passed sub silentio.

The immediate cause of this universal abrogation of religious qualifications for office was, as we have seen, the sixth article of the Constitution of the United States, but beyond this were some potent operative causes. The loss of Canada was one. Dr. Ramsay, who tells us that he had access to all the official papers of the United States up to 1786, when he ceased to be a member of the Congress under the Confederation (pref. 2 Hist. U. S.), says: “The province was evacuated with great reluctance. The Americans were not only mortified at the disappointment of their favorite scheme of annexing it as a fourteenth link in the chain of their Confederacy, but apprehended the most serious consequences from the ascendency of the British power in that quarter” (id. p. 71). It was felt too late that the indiscreet utterances of the Congress of 1774 respecting the Roman Catholic religion had led to this loss.

Another operative cause was the yearning desire of the early statesmen of the United States to invite and secure foreign immigration. As early as the address of Congress of Oct. 21, 1774, it was noticed that the population of Canada was “daily swelling with Catholic emigrants from Europe”; and after the peace of 1783 showed that Canada was to remain a British possession, it was seen that to impress an anti-Catholic character on the government of the United States would tend to build up that province at the expense of the United States, and that only by proffering religious as well as civil liberty could this country hope to divert that emigration to its own shores. Some of the States had already suffered, when colonies, from legalizing inequalities in religion, and that, too, had no doubt its weight; Ramsay telling us that the legal pre-eminence of the Episcopal Church, and its maintenance at the expense not only of its own members but of all other denominations in Virginia and Maryland, “deterred great numbers, especially of the Presbyterian denomination, who had emigrated from Ireland, from settling within the limits of these governments” (1 Hist. U. S., p. 220).

Another cause operating in favor of a removal of religious tests to office was the eminent services rendered the States in the establishment of their independence by two Catholic powers, France and Spain. It is currently supposed that it was not until after the Americans, by their capture of Burgoyne at Saratoga in 1777, had demonstrated their power that they received efficient assistance from those nations; but the contrary is the case. Before the Declaration of Independence Silas Deane was sent to France for assistance, and contemporaneous with the Declaration large supplies of money and arms were furnished by that power. Arms, clothing, and ammunition for 25,000 men and 100 field-pieces were asked by [Pg 739] Congress, and the response of his Christian majesty was 2,000,000 livres in money and small arms, 200 field-pieces, the best in the royal arsenals, a credit for 1,000,000 livres with the clothier-general of the French forces, and the services of Monsieur Coudray, the best military engineer in the royal army, and as many of his officers as were needed (1 Pitk. Hist. U. S., pp. 387, 500). Spain also assisted the Americans with 1,000,000 livres as early as May, 1776 (id. p. 411). Still another 1,000,000 livres were added by France before the treaty of 1778; and to appreciate fully the various pecuniary aids given by this power to the United States during the struggle, the reader may well consult the treaties with that power of 1782 and 1783 (Rev. Stats., “Treaties,” pp. 214-9). Prior to 1778 some 3,000,000 livres were advanced, and from that time to 1782 some 18,000,000 more were granted and an endorsement given to Holland for 10,000,000 in addition. In 1783 a further grant of 6,000,000 livres was made, making 37,000,000 in all. All expenses of commissions, negotiations, etc., were borne by France and made a present to the United States, as also all the interest accrued during the entire war on the debt, and the total principal of the sums forwarded in 1776, for all of which benefactions the most lively acknowledgments were made by the United States in the treaties referred to above. Nor were French fleets and armies wanting. In July, 1778, a French squadron of twelve line-of-battle ships and four frigates reached the United States under Count d’Estaing (2 Ramsay Hist. U. S., p. 258). In 1779 the same commander appeared off the Georgia [Pg 740] coast with 20 ships of the line and 11 frigates, and some 3,500 French troops, infantry and artillery; and at this time occurred the bloody assault on the British entrenchments at Savannah, where Gen. Lincoln, at the head of 600 Continentals, and d’Estaing at the head of the French infantry, charged side by side, 200 of the Americans and 637 of the French being left on the field. In July, 1780, still another French fleet arrived at Rhode Island with 6,000 troops (2 Pitk. 117). In 1781 Count de Grasse arrived with 28 ships of the line and 3,200 French troops under the Marquis de St. Simon (2 Ramsay, p. 427). In 1782 a French fleet of 34 ships of the line, having on board 5,500, rendezvoused in the West Indies to draw off the British by an attack on Jamaica, and here sustained an appalling defeat at the hands of Admiral Rodney. The French troops were so crowded on the vessels that in one ship alone 400 men were killed, and the total slaughter amounted to thousands (id. p. 5). In the same year we find 7,000 French regulars at Yorktown; and from the contemporary accounts the French engineers and artillery were eminently instrumental in forcing the surrender of Cornwallis, particularly Major-General du Portail, Brigadier-General Launcy, Col. Gouvion, and Capt. Rochefontaine, who were thanked and promoted by Congress and warmly commended to their sovereign (id. p. 438; 4 Journ. 290).

Nor was Spain backward in her efforts. Before the Declaration of Independence she sent the Americans 1,000,000 livres (1 Pitk. 411). In 1777 she forwarded several cargoes of naval stores, cordage, sail-cloth, anchors, etc., from Bilboa (id. p. 528). In 1779 she declared war against Great Britain, and carried on a campaign in Florida with such vigor as to drive out the British from that province. In 1780 an immense Spanish armament appeared in the West Indies to co-operate with the French in creating a diversion in that quarter, the combined fleet numbering thirty-six ships of the line, crowded with troops (2 Ramsay, 374). In 1782 a grander attempt was made in the same field, the combined French and Spanish navies numbering sixty ships of the line, with an immense number of frigates and smaller armed vessels, and conveying thousands of land forces. The first attempt failed by the appearance of a mortal disease which decimated the Spanish troops, and the latter by the bloody defeat of the French by Admiral Rodney. In the course of the war the Spanish navy received a terrible blow at Cape St. Vincent, though the Spanish admiral, Don Juan de Langara, fought till his flag-ship was a mere wreck and his fleet was sunk or taken. One vessel in particular, the San Domingo, of 70 guns and carrying 600 men, blew up, and all on board perished (id. p. 372).

To sustain American independence, in short, French and Spanish blood was poured out like water. The arms, the gold, the ships, the armies of the two great Catholic powers were given in unstinted measure to the United States, and on the establishment of the present polity of the republic it would have been disgraceful beyond measure to have fixed therein a stigma on the faith of those friends in time of need. In answering the congratulations of the Catholic clergy and laity on his first accession to [Pg 741] the presidency, Gen. Washington said: “I presume that your fellow-citizens will not forget the patriotic part which you took in the accomplishment of their Revolution and the establishment of their government, or the important assistance which they received from a nation in which the Roman Catholic faith is professed” (Cath. Al., 1876, p. 63). Possibly, also, the demeanor of the French troops may have removed many misapprehensions and prejudices against their religion. Madison, who was an eye-witness of their march through Philadelphia, where Congress was then in session, in 1782, en route to Yorktown, highly applauds their regularity and decency of conduct in his letters of that date (Mad. Papers); and speaking on the same subject Dr. Ramsay, also then in Congress, says: “The French troops marched at the same time and for the same place. In the course of this summer they passed through all the extensive settlements which lie between Newport and Yorktown. It seldom, if ever, happened before that an army led through a foreign country, at so great a distance from their own, among a people of different principles, customs, language, and religion, behaved with so much regularity. In their march to Yorktown they had to pass through 500 miles of a country abounding in fruit, and at a time when the most delicious productions of nature growing on and near the public highways presented both opportunity and temptation to gratify their appetites. Yet so complete was their discipline that in this long march scarce an instance could be produced of a peach or an apple being taken without the consent of the inhabitants” (2 Hist. U. S., p. 434). Allies of this character were in high favor with the American people, and most gratefully remembered at the time of the final settlement of civil government in the United States, not to speak of the influence of the Continental soldiery, who, no doubt, bore in mind their brethren in arms at Savannah and Yorktown, and recalled Washington’s general order whereby the black cockade of the American army was mounted with a white relief in honor of Catholic France (2 Ramsay, p. 358).

To conclude, then, the provisions of the Constitution of the United States bearing on religion are not mere ill-considered generalities, but positive convictions based upon long and sore experience. The prohibition of a national religion or of any governmental interference with spiritual persuasions owes its origin to the actual existence in former days of church establishments, the hierophants wherein were appointees of the political power, and the expenses whereof were compulsorily borne by those of other creeds. And the inhibition of religious tests for office arises out of the fact that the history of this country demonstrates it equally impolitic, ungrateful, and dishonest to require such qualifications in these United States.

[Pg 742]

ASSISI.

“St. Francis be my speed!”

Think of being taken into Umbria, preternatural Umbria, where every olive-sandalled mountain is full of mysterious influences, and every leaf and flower of the smiling valleys seem to breathe out some sweet old Franciscan legend, by a steam-engine bearing the name of Fulton! It was hard. Not but we have the highest respect for—nay, a certain pride in—that great inventor; still it seemed a positive grievance to find anything modern in what was to us a world of poetry and mediæval tradition. We wished, if not to gird ourselves humbly with the cord like Dante, at least to put ourselves in harmony with one of the most delicious regions in the world, where at every step the lover of the classic, of art, or of the higher mystic lore finds so much to suit his turn. The name of Fulton sounds well along the Hudson, but to hear the shriek of an engine awaken the echoes of the Apennines, and see it go plunging insensibly through the very heart of poetical Umbria, along the shores of “reedy Thrasimene,” through “the defiles fatal to Roman rashness,” was a blow difficult to recover from. It required the overpowering influences of this enchanting region, as every one will believe, to restore our equanimity.

Umbria is a mountainous region of the Ecclesiastical States that gradually ascends from the Tiber toward the Apennines, now called the Duchy of Spoleto. It is full of sweet, sunny valleys enclosed among majestic mountains, with a range of temperature that produces great variety of vegetation, from the pine and the oak to the orange and aloe, the olive and the vine. Its cliffs are crowned with sanctuaries which are resonant night and day with prayer and psalmody, or old towns, each with the remembrance of some saint whose shrine it guards with jealous care, or some artist or poet whose works have made it renowned, or some venerable classical recollection that clings to it like the vine which gives so much grace and freshness to the landscape. There is Spoleto, whose gates closed against Hannibal; Arezzo, where Petrarch was born; Cortona, with its “diadem of towers” and its legend of St. Margaret; Perugia dolente, which Totila only took after a seven years’ siege, and which Charlemagne placed under the sweet yoke of the Papacy; Montefalco, like a falcon’s nest on the crest of the mountain, famous for its virgin saint and its frescos of Benozzo Gozzoli; and picturesque Marni, where the Blessed Lucy when a child played with the Christorello. We pass Orvieto, with its wonderful proofs of past cultivation; the lake of Bolsena, with its isle where a queen died of hunger, and its shores verdant with the glorious pines sung by Virgil, at the foot of which Leo X., when a guest at the Farnese villa, used to gather around him the artists and poets of the day, to indulge in intellectual converse till “the azure [Pg 743] gloom of an Italian night” gathered around them with hues that spoke of heaven.

But over all hovers especially the grand memory of St. Francis, with which the whole of this beautiful region is embalmed. Along its valleys and mountain paths he used to go with Fra Pacifico, the poet laureate of Frederick II., singing their hymns of praise, calling themselves God’s minstrels, who desired no other reward from those who gathered around them but the sincere repentance of their sins. There is the lake of Perugia, where he spent forty days alone on an island among the sad olives, fasting in imitation of our Saviour, in continual communion with God and the angels—a spot now marked by a convent whose foundations are washed by the waters of the lake. There is the blue lake of Rieti, to which, in his compassion for God’s creatures, he restored the fish alive, with the four Franciscan convents on the hills that enclose it. There is Gubbio, with the legend of the fierce wolf he tamed, to which the people erected a statue—an unquestionable proof of its truth. There is the

“Hard Rock

‘Twixt Arno and the Tiber,”

where

“He from Christ

Took the last signet which his limbs two years

Did carry.”

Above all, there is Assisi with his tomb, one of the most glorious in the world after that of Christ, around which centred all the poetry and art of the thirteenth century. We caught our first glimpse of it at Spello—Spello on its spur of red limestone—where we were shown the house of Propertius, “the poet of delicate pleasures,” in full sight of Assisi, where was born one who sang of a higher love. Assisi stands on an eminence overlooking the whole country around, and we could not take our eyes off it all the way from Spello, till, glancing towards the valley below, we saw the towers and dome of Santa Maria degli Angeli, which encloses the sacred Porziuncula. We were now in the very “land of wonder, of miracle, and mysterious influences,” the first glimpse of which one can never forget. Think of a railway station close by the Porziuncula! We went directly there on descending from the cars.

St. Mary of the Angels is a vast church that stands almost solitary in the plain. It is modern also, and out of keeping with the venerable traditions of the place, which was a disappointment. The old church was nearly destroyed by an earthquake in 1854. The present one is of noble proportions, however, and has been compared to the garments of a queen that now clothe the humble sanctuary of the Porziuncula which stands beneath the dome, the first thing to strike the eye on entering the church. We hastened towards it at once, to pray where St. Francis so often wept and prayed, and where so many generations since have wept, and prayed, and found grace before God. It was here Picca, his mother, often came to pray before he was born, and where his birth was announced by mysterious songs attributed to the angels. St. Francis loved this spot above all places in the world; for it was here he was called to embrace the sublime folly of the cross, and where he laid the foundations of the seraphic order. It was here, in the year 1222, he beheld Christ and his holy Mother surrounded by a multitude of angels, and prayed that all who should [Pg 744] henceforth visit this chapel with hearts purified by contrition and confession might obtain full pardon and indulgence for all their sins. This was the origin of the celebrated indulgence of the Porziuncula, which the grave Bourdaloue regarded as one of the most authentic in the church, because granted directly by Christ himself. The treasures of the church were not dealt out so generously in those days as now, and thousands came hither from all parts of Christendom, in the middle ages, to gain this wonderful indulgence. When St. Bernardine of Siena came in the fourteenth century, he found two hundred thousand pilgrims encamped in the valley around. St. Bridget spent the whole night of one 1st of August praying in the Porziuncula; and still, when the great day of the Perdono comes (it lasts from the Vespers of the 1st of August till the Vespers of the following day), thousands flock down from the mountains and come up from the extremity of southern Italy. The highway is lined with booths where eatables and religious objects are sold. Processions come with chants and prayer. The great bell of Predicazione, originally cast for Fra Elias, is heard all over the valley from the Sagro Convento, announcing the indulgence. When the church doors open, an overwhelming crowd pours in with cries, and invocations, and vivas for the Madonna and St. Francis with true Italian exuberance of devotion.

The Porziuncula has wisely been left in its primitive simplicity, with the exception of the front, on which Overbeck, in 1830, painted the above-mentioned vision to St. Francis with true pre-Raphaelite simplicity. The remainder is just as it was in the time of the saint; only its rough walls have been polished by the kisses of pilgrims, and hung with pious offerings. Lamps burn continually therein as if it were a shrine.

Back of the Porziuncula is the low, dark cell St. Francis inhabited, and where he ended his days. It was here, while he was dying, two of the friars sang his Hymn of the Sun, which breathes so fully his love for everything created. And when they ceased, he himself took up the strain, to sing the sweetness of death, which he called his “sister, terrible and beautiful,” in the spirit of Job, who said to corruption: Thou art my father; to the worm: Thou art my mother and my sister.

Then we were taken into the recess where St. Francis so often chastised his body, which he regarded as his beast of burden that it behoved him to beat daily and to lead around with a halter. When dying, he is said to have begged pardon of this old companion of the way for inflicting so many stripes on it for the good of his soul. There is also the Cappella delle Rose with the Spineto—a little court once filled with coarse brambles, but now aflush with roses. Here St. Francis, being tempted to renounce a life in which he was consumed with watchings and prayers, for his only reply threw himself among the thorns, which, tinged with his blood, were immediately changed into roses. They bloom here still, but without thorns, and their petals are stained as with blood. If transplanted elsewhere, the stains are said to fade away and the thorns to come forth again. It was twelve of these roses, six red and six white, the saint bore with him into the Porziuncula when the great Perdono of the 2d of August was granted—roses [Pg 745] that for ever will embalm the church, and that have been immortalized by artists all over Italy and Spain.

The immense convent of Observantine friars adjoining is now solitary and desolate. The Italian government has turned the inmates out of this cradle of their order, with the exception of two or three, who are left as guardians of the church. The hundreds of poor, once fed at their gates in time of need, now take revenge on the passing traveller, and fasten themselves on him with pertinacious grasp. But who can refuse a dole where St. Francis has made Poverty for ever glorious?

From St. Mary of the Angels we went winding up the hill to Assisi. Its base is clothed with the olive, the vine, and the fig, but its sides are as nude and destitute as the Bride of St. Francis. Above, on the right, rises the tall campanile of Santa Chiara over the tomb of St. Clare. At the left is the fortress-like edifice of the Sagro Convento on the Hill of Paradise, once known as the Colle d’Inferno, where St. Francis desired to be buried among malefactors. This monastery against the mountain side stands on a long line of double arches that seem hewn out of the very cliff. It is one of the most imposing and most interesting monuments in Italy, and astonishes the eye by its bold, massive, and picturesque appearance, quite in harmony with the old mediæval city. It has been called the Sagro Convento ever since its consecration by Pope Innocent IV. in 1243—the Sacred Convent, par excellence. Santa Chiara and this convent of St. Francis seem like two strongholds at the extremities of the town to protect it from danger. Between them it rises in terraces, crowned by a ruined old citadel of feudal times. The declining sun lighted up its domes, and towers, and venerable gray walls as we ascended, and made it seem to our enraptured eyes a seraphic city indeed.

Half way up the hill we came to the Spedalicchio—the ancient ’Spital where St. Francis so often came to take care of the lepers. It was here, as he was borne on a litter to the Porziuncula by the friars, a few days before his death, he begged them to stop and turn him around, not to take a last look at the city he loved—for the eyes that had wept so many tears were now blind—but to bless it with uplifted hands, in solemn, tender words that have been graven over one of the gates:

Benedicta tu civitas a Domino, quia per te multæ animæ salvabuntur, et in te multi servi Altissimi habitabunt, et de te multi eligentur ad regnum æternum.—A city blessed of the Lord art thou, because by thee many souls shall be saved, and in thee shall dwell many servants of the Most High, and from thee many shall be chosen to reign for ever and ever!

With what emotion one enters its gates!… We drove through old, narrow, ascending streets, silent and monastic, named after the saints; past old rock-built houses of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, with the holy names of Jesus and Mary over nearly every door; flower-pots with pinks and gillyflowers in all the windows, even the poorest, or on ledges, or set in rings projecting from the walls; and women spinning under the old archways like St. Clare, who, we are told, even when wasted and enfeebled by her austerities, sat up in bed and span linen of marvellous fineness.

Our hotel was close to the Sagro Convento, and, though extremely fatigued, [Pg 746] we at once hastened to the church, not to examine its treasures of art, but to pray and find repose of heart overburdened by the flood of memories that come over one in such a place as Assisi. Then we returned to our room, and sat at the window looking off at the setting sun and golden sky, and the shining dome of St. Mary of the Angels, and the broad plain where was held the famous Chapter of Mats in St. Francis’ time, with its narrow river winding through it. It was like the page of a beautiful poem laid open before us. St. Francis loved these hills clothed with the pale olive, this valley covered with harvests and the vine, the free air and azure heavens, the running stream, a fine prospect; and we sat long after the rich, glorious convent bells rang out the Ave Maria, gazing at the fair scene before us. Purple shadows began to creep up the rugged sides of the hill, the golden light faded away in the wrest, the dome over the Porziuncula grew dim, and the valley was covered with the rising mists. It was time to close the window.

We spent most of the following day in the church. It is the very inflorescence of Christian art, a great epic poem in honor of St. Francis. A pope laid the corner-stone. All Christendom sent its offerings. The most celebrated architects and painters of the time lent the aid of their genius. One would think it had grown out of the hill against which it is built. Its azure vaults starred with gold, its ribbed arches that bend low like the boughs of a gloomy forest, the delicacy of its carvings, its marble pavement, its windows with their jewelled panes, and above all its walls covered with mystic paintings that read like the very poetry of religion, need almost the tongue of angels to describe them. M. Taine says: “No one, till he has seen this unrivalled edifice, can have any idea of the art and genius of the middle ages. Taken in connection with Dante and the Fioretti of St. Francis, it is the masterpiece of mystic Christianity.” It was the first Gothic church erected in Italy.[192] It is built in the form of a cross, in memory of the mysterious crucifixion of St. Francis. Its walls are of white marble, in honor of the Immaculate Virgin; and there are twelve towers of red marble, in memory of the blood shed by the Holy Apostles. It consists of two churches, one above the other, and a crypt beneath, where lies the body of St. Francis. The upper church is entered from a grassy terrace on the top of the Hill of Paradise. The lower one opens at the side into an immense court surrounded by an arcade. This under church, with its low Byzantine arches, full of the mysterious gloom and solemnity so favorable to pensive contemplation and prayer, has often been supposed typical of the self-abasement and mortified life of St. Francis. Its delicious chapels, with their struggling light, are well calculated to excite sadness, penitence, and tears. The crypt beneath, with its horrible darkness, its damp walls and death-like stillness, and its one tomb in the centre awaiting the Resurrection, is a veritable limbo; while the upper church, with its lofty, graceful, upspringing arches, all light and joy, is symbolic of the transfigured soul of the seraphic Francis in the beatitude of eternal glory.

But how can we go peering around this museum of Christian art, as if in a picture-gallery? It would be [Pg 747] positively wicked. The knee instinctively bends before the saintly forms that people the twilight solemnity of the lower church. It was thus we gazed up at Giotto’s matchless frescos of the three monastic virtues on the arches over the high altar, which stands directly above the tomb of St. Francis—Poverty, Chastity, and Obedience—fit crown indeed for that “meek man of God.” We remember seeing them during the Forty Hours’ Devotion, when the candles lit them up wondrously; the figures came out in startling relief; the angels seemed actually hovering over the divine Host below. The most celebrated of these paintings is the Spozalizio sung by Dante—the mystic espousals of St. Francis with Poverty, the lady of his choice.

“A Dame to whom none openeth pleasure’s gate

More than to death, was, ‘gainst his father’s will,

His stripling choice: and he did make her his

Before the spiritual court by nuptial bonds.”

This was not an original conception of Giotto’s or Dante’s. They only gave a more artistic expression to the popular belief. There was not a cottage in Umbria that did not believe in these espousals of St. Francis with Lady Poverty, who had, says the Divine Poet, lived more than a thousand years bereft of her first bridegroom, Christ; and it was from the lips of the poor and lowly they gathered the significant allegory. It was also before their time St. Bonaventura wrote: “St. Francis, journeying to Siena in the broad plain between Campiglia and San Quirico, was encountered by three maidens in poor raiment, exactly resembling each other in age and appearance, who saluted him with the words: ‘Welcome, Lady Poverty,’ and suddenly disappeared. The brethren not irrationally concluded that this apparition imported some mystery pertaining to St. Francis, and that by the three poor maidens were signified Poverty, Chastity, and Obedience, the sum and beauty of evangelical perfection, all of which shone with equal and consummate lustre in the man of God, though he made the privilege of poverty his chief glory.”

Dante with all his pride, and Giotto with his repugnance to poverty, even when consecrated by religion, chose one of the most democratic of subjects when they depicted these sacred espousals of St. Francis; for it was the people he identified himself with in this union. He wedded for better and worse the sorrows and misery, the misfortunes and groans, of Italy,[193] and when dying,

“To his brotherhood,

As their just heritage, he gave in charge

His dearest Lady, and enjoined their love

And faith to her.”

The church teaches that the poor are Christ’s suffering members; that it is he who is hungered and athirst in the sick and destitute; to him is every alms given. St. Francis gave his whole being to Poverty thus identified with Christ—a bride chosen only by a few elect souls in these days of luxury and self-indulgence, but in whom the Christian philosophers of the middle ages found an infinite charm. Plato represents Love with bare feet and tattered, disordered garments, to signify the forgetfulness of self that gives all and reserves nothing. It is in this sense the choice of evangelical poverty is one of the highest expressions of love to God in the Catholic Church.

“O hidden riches! O prolific good!” exclaims Dante. And no one ever understood its value more [Pg 748] than St. Francis, the glorioso poverello di Christo, who was, says Bossuet, “perhaps the most desperate lover of poverty ever known in the church.”

“O Lord Jesus!” cries St. Francis, “show me the ways of thy dear Poverty.… Take pity on me and my lady Poverty whom I love with so much ardor. Without her I can find no peace. And it is thou, O my God! who hast inspired this great love. She is seated in the dust of the highway, and her friends pass her by with contempt. Thou seest the abasement of this queen, O Lord Jesus! who didst descend from heaven to make her thy spouse, and through her to beget children worthy of thee, who art perfect. She was in the humility of thy Mother’s womb. She was at the manger. She had her part in the great combat thou didst fight for our redemption. In thy Passion she alone did not abandon thee. Mary, thy Mother, remained at the foot of the cross, but Poverty ascended it with thee.[194] She clung more closely than ever to thy breast. It was she who lovingly prepared the rude nails that pierced thy hands and feet; she who didst present thee with gall when thou wast suffering from thirst.… Thou didst die in her loving embrace.… And even then this faithful spouse did not forsake thee. She had thy body buried in the grave of another. She wrapped thy cold limbs in the tomb, and with her thou didst come forth glorious. Therefore thou hast crowned her in heaven, and chosen her to mark thy elect with the sign of redemption. Oh! who would not choose Lady Poverty above all other brides? O Jesus! who for our sakes didst become poor, the grace I beg of thee is the privilege of sharing thy poverty. I ardently desire to be enriched with this treasure. I pray thee that I and mine may never possess anything in the world of our own, for the glory of thy name, but that we may only subsist, during this miserable life, on that which is given us in alms.”

How foreign this seems to the spirit of our age; and yet it is the science of the cross, of which we need an infusion to counterbalance the general worship of Mammon. Coleridge seems to have caught a glimpse of the beauty and dignity of poverty when he wrote:

“It is a noble doctrine that teaches how slight a thing is Poverty; what riches, nay, treasures untold, a man may possess in the midst of it, if he does but seek them aright; how much of the fiend’s apparent bulk is but a fog vapor of the sickly and sophisticated mind. It is a noble endeavor that would bring men to tread the fear of this phantom under their firm feet, and dare to be poor!”

Giotto represents St. Francis receiving his bride from the hands of Christ himself. Her head is crowned with roses and light, but her feet are bleeding from the thorns of the rough way. Her cheeks are hollow and pale, but her eyes are full of fire. Her garments are worn and in tatters, but she is beautiful with modesty and love. Hers is the tempered spiritual beauty of one who has been chastened by misfortune, but there is nothing of the degradation of human passion. It is the poverty of country life, free, modest, unabashed, but ennobled by an expression that religion alone can give. Worldlings attack her with blows, and a dog, that last friend of the poor, is barking at her with fury. Angels, beaming with joy and admiration, encircle these mysterious nuptials. Below, in one corner, are the vices of the times personified—the rapacity of the nobility, and the greed of monks who have become unmindful of their obligations. At the left is the youthful Francis sharing his mantle with a beggar, while an angel above is ascending with the garment to heaven. The central figure in the painting is the radiant [Pg 749] form of Him who took upon himself the likeness of the poor, on whose condition he now confers fresh dignity by perpetuating a love of poverty in the person of Francis and his order. Over all are angels of sacrifice offering to God the riches that have been abandoned for the love of him.

Philosophy, poetry, and religion are all in this wonderful allegory, which has shone here nearly six hundred years as a memorial and a perpetual admonition to the followers of St. Francis.

Chastity is represented under the veiled form of a maiden who has taken refuge in the tower of a fortress, defended by a triple wall, and guarded by Innocence and Fortitude. She is kneeling in the attitude of prayer, while angels bring her a crown and a palm. Before the castle gates are depicted the divine means of purifying the human soul: Baptism, with the cardinal virtues in attendance, and an angel bearing the robe of innocence; Penance, in her hood and garb of serge, or, as some say, St. Francis receiving new members into his fold, among whom may be seen Dante in the habit of the Third Order; and angels of Expiation consigning unseemly vices to the purifying flames of a yawning gulf.

Sancta Obedientia, the least pleasing of these paintings, is represented by the monastic yoke placed on the shoulders of a novice. Prudence and Humility are at his side; the former, entrenched behind a barrier with mirror and compass, has two faces, one examining the past and the other considering the future. Humility is bearing a torch. The old Adam of the human heart, under the form of a centaur, is put to flight by these virtues.[195]

In the midst of these three priceless jewels is represented St. Francis radiant with holiness, in a rich deacon’s dress, on a throne of gold, and surrounded by angels who hymn his praise. Never was mortal more glorified on earth than the humble St. Francis, out of whose tomb has grown this richest flower of mediæval art.

On the wall of the left transept is a sublime painting of the Crucifixion by Pietro Cavallini—one of the most important monuments of the school of Giotto, who was one of the first to soften the representations of the awful sufferings of Christ by an expression of divine resignation and beauty of form. The Byzantine type of the twelfth century, still scrupulously adhered to, was repulsive and expressive only of the lowest stage of human suffering, as all know who have seen the green, livid figures of Christ on the cross by Margaritone, who died of grief at seeing his standard of excellence set aside and despised. Cavallini, whose piety was so fervent that he was regarded as a saint, had scruples, however, about condemning as an artist what he had knelt before in prayer, though he widely departed from the old school. Nothing could be more beautiful or pathetic than the angels in this picture, who are weeping and wringing their hands with anguish around the dying Saviour.… Among the figures below is Walter de Brienne, Duke of Athens, then (in 1342) at the head of the Florentine republic, for whom this picture was painted. He is on horseback with a jewelled cap, clothed in rich robes, and, strange to say, with a nimbus around his head, which seems to have been a symbol of power as well as sanctity in those days.

It was one of Cavallini’s Christs [196] [Pg 750] that spoke to St. Bridget at St. Paul’s without the walls of Rome; and he was the architect of the shrine of Edward the Confessor at Westminster Abbey.

At the foot of the altar beneath the Crucifixion is buried Mary of Savoy, granddaughter of Philip II. of Spain, a member of the Third Order of St. Francis, who often came here to venerate his tomb and seek counsel of St. Joseph of Copertino, then an inmate of the Sagro Convento.

All the chapels of this lower church are famous for their frescos by noted artists. Simone Memmi, the friend of Petrarch, and painter of Laura, has covered one with the life of St. Martin, who, like St. Francis after him, divided his cloak with a beggar, remaining for ever a symbol of the divine words: I was naked and ye clothed me. The Maddalena Chapel is covered with the legend of the

“Redeemed Magdalene,

And that Egyptian penitent whose tears

Fretted the rock, and moistened round her cave

The thirsty desert,”

by Puccio Capana, who became so attached to Assisi that he settled there for life.

The melancholy Giottino adorned the chapel of St. Nicholas with his usual harmony of color. On the arches of the chapel of St. Louis of France a Franciscan tertiary, Adone Doni, painted the beautiful Sibyls which Raphael admired and imitated at Santa Maria della Pace in Rome. Taddeo Gaddi, the godson and favorite pupil of Giotto, has also left here many touching and beautiful paintings. In fact, all the renowned artists of the day seemed to vie with each other in adorning this monument to the memory of St. Francis, and some of their works were offerings of love and gratitude. To the artistic eye they are models worthy of study, but to us pilgrims so many visions of beauty and holiness.

In the sacristy is the most authentic portrait of St. Francis in existence, by Giunta Pisano—a lank, wasted form that by no means reflects the charm the saint most certainly had to attract so many disciples around him, to say nothing of his power over the beasts of the earth and the birds of the air. Two marble staircases lead down to the sepulchral chamber where lies the body of St. Francis. This crypt, or third church, as it is sometimes called, is of recent construction, and, though not in harmony with the upper churches, is a prodigious achievement, dug as it is out of the rock on which the whole edifice rests. It is of the Doric order, and in the form of a Greek cross, and lined with precious marbles. It is dark and tomb-like, being lighted only by lamps around the bronze shrine, which stands in the very centre. The body of St. Francis had lain nearly six hundred years in the heart of the mountain, shrouded in a mystery that had given rise to many popular legends. When brought here in 1230, it was still flexible as when he was alive, and the mysterious stigmata distinctly visible. This was four years after his death. It was then shown to the people in its cypress coffin, amid the flourish of trumpets and the shouts of the multitude, and put on a magnificent car drawn by oxen which were covered with purple draperies sent by the Emperor of Constantinople, and escorted by a long procession of friars with palms and torches in their hands, chanting hymns composed by Pope Gregory IX. himself. Legates, bishops, and a multitude [Pg 751] of clergy followed. But the car was guarded by the magistrates of Assisi, and so fearful were the people lest the body of their saint should be taken from them that, when it arrived at the Colle d’Inferno, they would not allow the clergy to take possession of it, but buried it themselves in the very bowels of the earth. Hence a certain mystery that always hung over the tomb.

It is related that the third night after his burial the mountain was shaken by an earthquake and surrounded by an unearthly light. The friars, hastening to the place where they knew their patriarch lay hidden, found the rock rent asunder and the saint standing on his tomb with transfigured face and eyes raised to heaven. Gregory IX. is said to have come to witness the prodigy, and left this inscription on the wall: Ante obitum mortuus; post obitum vivens—Before his death, dead; after death, living.

It became a popular belief that this body, which bore the impress of the Passion of Christ, would never see corruption, and that he would remain thus, ever living and praying, in the depths of his inaccessible tomb.

In 1818 Pius VII. authorized the Franciscans to search for the body of their founder. After continued excavations in the rock for fifty-two days, or rather nights (for they worked in the silence and secrecy of the night), they came to an iron grate that protected the narrow recess where lay the saint. It was then the crypt was constructed to receive the sacred body. The same old grate is before the present shrine, and the sacristan thrust his torch through the bars, that we might catch a glimpse of the remains of one

“Whose marvellous life deservedly were sung

In heights empyreal.”

Around this glorious tomb all the Franciscans of Assisi, before they were suppressed by the present Italian government, used to gather every Saturday at the vesper hour, to chant, with lighted tapers in hand, the Psalm Voce mea ad Dominum clamavi, sung by St. Francis when he was dying. It has been set to music by one of the friars in a grand air known as the Transito because it celebrates the transit of the saint to a higher life. This became one of the attractions of the place which kings and princes considered it a favor to hear, but of course it is no longer sung. Let us hope that this forced suspension is only transitory.

At the door of the crypt are the statues of Pius VII., in whose pontificate it was constructed, and Pius IX., a member of the Third Order, who has surrounded it with twelve bas-reliefs representing the life of the saint.

A long flight of stone steps leads from the lower court to the terrace before the upper church, which is grassy and starred with daisies. This church is as lofty and brilliant with light as the other is gloomy and low-browed. Cimabue and Giotto adorned its walls with paintings that are now sadly defaced, but they have a fascination no modern artist can inspire, and we linger over them as over the remembrance of some half-forgotten dream, hoping to catch a clearer view before they fade for ever away. Above are scenes from the Holy Scriptures—a glorious Biblia Pauperum, indeed, it must have been when fresh from the artist’s hands; and this is especially the church of the people, as the lower one is that of the friars. Below is the wondrous life of St. [Pg 752] Francis, a poem in twenty-eight cantos, by Giotto, the painter of St. Francis par excellence, who never seemed weary of his favorite subject.

There are over one hundred stalls in the choir, delicately carved by Sanseverino, with curious intarsia-work representing the popes, doctors, and saints of the Franciscan Order.

The beautiful lancet windows of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries are “suffused with lessons sweet of heavenly lore,” glorious in color, which gives marvellous hues to Cimabue’s angels who hover in the arches with “varied plume and changeful vest.” The lower church is that of poor mortals who struggle with earth and grope for the light. This one depicts the glory of the saints, and is a symbol of Paradise.

Connected with the church is the Sagro Convento, which is entered by an arched passage lined with portraits of distinguished Franciscans. There are four large cloisters, now solitary but for the ascetic forms painted on their walls, and the silent tombs of the dead friars. Long corridors, lined with saints of the Order, lead to the narrow cells intended for the living. Two refectories were shown us, one large enough to contain two hundred and fifty persons, with Silentium in great letters on the wall over the fine Cenacolo by Solimena. Opposite the latter is a Crucifixion by Adone Doni, with Jerusalem and Assisi in the background, and SS. Francis and Clare at the foot of the cross. Narrow tables extended around the room, with seats against the wall on which the Benedicite is carved.

But the most striking feature of this vast monastery is the immense gallery on the western side, like an arcade on the brink of a precipice, with a torrent in the depths below. This was constructed by Sixtus IV., whose statue is at one end. It affords a grand view over the whole Umbrian valley. Montefalco, Spello, and Perugia are in full sight; below is the Porziuncula; in the distance the purple Apennines, with the glorious Italian sky over all. One needs no better book of devotion than this page of nature.

On the other side of the monastery the windows look down on the garden of the friars with charming walks on the side of the mountain amid olives and cypresses.

It was not till the second morning we began to explore Assisi. What queer old lanes, up and down hill, we passed along, the walls covered with moss and ferns out of which green lizards darted! The streets were grassy and noiseless, being mostly inaccessible to carriages. Coats-of-arms are sculptured over many of the massive old portals, accompanied, perhaps, with some religious symbol. On one was Viva Gesu e Maria! Another had Ubi Deus ibi pax. Every few moments we came to a lovely fresco of the Madonna—too beautiful a flower to bloom on the rough highways of life. Everything was old and quaint, and in harmony with the traditions of the place; everything redolent of the middle ages and of the memory of St. Francis. Assisi is full of monuments that perpetuate some incident of his life. There is San Francesco il Piccolo—Little St. Francis—an oratory on the site of the stable where he was born, with the inscription:

Hoc oratorium fuit bovis et asini stabulum

In quo natus est Franciscus mundi speculum;

—This chapel was the stable of an [Pg 753] ox and ass, wherein was born Francis, the mirror of the world.[197]

The Chiesa Nuova—the New Church, but over two hundred and sixty years old—was built by Philip III. of Spain on the site of the house of Pietro Bernardone, the father of St. Francis, and has always been under the protection of the Spanish crown. It is in the form of a Greek cross, with five domes in memory of the five mystic wounds of the saint. Over the entrance are graven the arms of Spain. A flock of white pigeons was around the door. A young friar with mild, pleasant eyes came forward in his brown habit to show us the church. Some portions of the original house of Bernardone have been preserved; among others, a low, round arch with an old door held together by iron clamps. And at the left is the low cell in which St. Francis was confined three days by his father for selling some of his goods to repair San Damiano. In it is a statue of the saint, kneeling with folded hands, before which we found flowers and a burning lamp. Around the central dome are statues of celebrated Franciscans: St. Louis of Toulouse, St. Clare, St. Diego, and St. Elizabeth of Hungary. In the presbytery is shown St. Francis’ chamber.

In the bishop’s palace is the room where St. Francis stripped off his garments in the presence of his father, and the bishop covered him with his mantle. It contains a painting of the scene.

There is an oratory where once dwelt Bernard de Quintavalle, the first disciple of Francis. Here he saw the saint upon his knees all night, weeping and exclaiming, Deus meus et omnia—My God and my all! and conceived such a veneration for him that he

“Did bare his feet, and in pursuit of peace,

So heavenly, ran, yet deemed his footing slow.”

The church of St. Nicholas is where they consulted the Gospel to know what manner of life they should lead.

On our way to all these places, so touching to the heart of a Catholic, we passed the theatre named for Metastasio, who was enrolled among the citizens of Assisi, and whose father was a native of the place. We visited likewise the portico of the temple of Minerva, now a church, which is one of the finest specimens of Greek art in Italy. Goethe stopped at Assisi on purpose to visit it, but, like our own Hawthorne after him, passed by the marvels of art around the tomb of St. Francis.

It must not be supposed that all this while we have forgotten St. Clare, the moon in the heavens of the Franciscan Order, of which St. Francis is the sun, as Lope de Vega, the celebrated Spanish poet, and, by the way, a Franciscan tertiary, says:

“Cielo es vuestra religion

Y como sol haveis sido,

Quereis que haya luna Clara

Mas que su mismo appellido.”

We now went to visit her shrine, which is in the church of Santa Chiara, on the very edge of the hill at the western extremity of Assisi. The so-called piazza in front is rather a broad terrace from which one looks directly down on the tops of the olives below. The church is of the purest Gothic style of the thirteenth century, with enormous flying buttresses to preserve it from earthquakes. Its lofty campanile [Pg 754] with open arches is one of the prominent features of Assisi. Adjoining is the monastery of Clarists, that looks more like a castle with ramparts and battlements. We entered the sculptured portal between two lions growling over their cubs, and found ourselves in a great church without aisles, almost without ornament, cold, severe, and deserted. It was once nearly covered with paintings, of which only a few remain. Over the main altar are encircled some of the celebrated virgin saints who early gave their souls to heaven: Agnes, Cecilia, Catherine, Lucy, Clare—a Corona Virginum indeed, full of delicacy and expression, painted by Giottino. In a side chapel is an interesting old picture of St. Clare, said to have been painted by Cimabue thirty years after her death. It represents her with noble but delicate features, a fair complexion and smiling lips, and majestic in form. In fact, she was of uncommon stature. The body of her sister Agnes is in a tomb over the altar.

This church was first known as St. George’s, but took the name of St. Clare after her body was brought here for burial. Here the canonization of St. Francis took place. Through a grate that looks into the nuns’ chapel, we saw by the light of a candle the old Byzantine crucifix—of the tenth century, at least—which spoke to Francis at San Damiano: Vade, Francisce, et repara domum meam quæ labitur. It is painted on wood, with the Maries and St. John at the foot, and angels hovering over the arms of the cross.

A broad staircase leads down from the nave to the subterranean chapel recently constructed for the shrine of St. Clare. Her sacred remains, by the permission of Pius IX., were, in 1850, taken out of the narrow recess in the rock where they had lain five hundred and ninety years. All the bones were found perfect. One hand was on her breast, the other at her side with the remains of some fragrant flowers. On her head was a wreath of laurel, the leaves still green and flexible; and scattered around her were leaves of wild thyme. These remains were borne solemnly through the city she and St. Francis have made so illustrious. Children strewed the way before them with flowers and green leaves, after the fashion of Italy, and young maidens followed with lilies in their hands. In this manner they were taken to the Sagro Convento, stopping at six convents on the way, and brought back at night by the light of torches. They are now in a beautiful Gothic chapel, partly due to the liberality of Pius IX. Two nuns in gray showed us the shrine. St. Clare lies on a rich marble couch, with a lily in her hand, and the rules of her rigid order on her breast, surrounded by lamps. We also saw some of the long, fair hair cut off at the Porziuncula, and some of the fine linen she spun with her own hands.

Passing through an old gateway a little beyond Santa Chiara, we left the city and strolled leisurely down the long, steep side of the mountain, along a charming road lined with hedges and groves of olive-trees. The fields were bright with poppies, the trees melodious with birds, and the burning sun of Italy as intense as the soul of St. Francis, who must often have trod the same path. At length we came to a Madonna in a niche, at the corner of a group of buildings, with a few faded flowers before her, and, in a minute more, to an old church and monastery that looked as if they [Pg 755] needed again the restoring hand of St. Francis. This is San Damiano, homely and simple, but like a bird’s nest on the mountain-side, half hid among olives which, gnarled and twisted and split asunder, looked as old as the convent itself. It seemed a fit dove-cot for the gentle Clare and her companions, whom St. Francis established here in quietness and solitude.

A small court leads to the church, before which is a portico with a fresco of St. Clare repulsing the Saracens. These Saracens were in the employ of Frederick II. On their way to attack Assisi, ravaging the country as they went, they came to San Damiano, and scaled the convent walls in the night. The poor nuns, in their terror, took refuge around the bed of St. Clare, who, though ill, rose by the aid of two sisters, and, taking the Blessed Sacrament in her hands, she went forth on the balcony, chanting in a loud voice: “Thou hast rebuked the heathen, thou hast destroyed the wicked, thou hast put out their name for ever and ever!” This unexpected apparition in the darkness of night, amid the light that streamed around the uplifted Host, so terrified the infidel band that they took immediate flight. All Assisi resounded with hymns of joy. But a few days after they returned anew, vowing to take the city. Then Clare and her companions covered their heads with ashes, and, prostrating themselves before the altar, wept and prayed till the enemy was dispersed by the valiant citizens. This was on the 22d of June, 1234, on which day the inhabitants of Assisi vowed an annual pilgrimage to San Damiano in gratitude for their deliverance.

Everything in this convent has been left in its primitive simplicity. The bell is merely suspended from the wall. The rafters are bare. The buildings are of unpolished stone. Everything bears the impress of the evangelical poverty its inmates embraced. But nature supplies what is lacking in art. The site is delicious. The view from the terrace is lovely, with the dear Porziuncula in the distance, and the fertile valley radiant in the sun.

Several steps lead down into the little, sombre church, which is only lighted by two small windows. There are some old frescos on the wall, a few votive offerings falling to pieces, tarnished wooden candlesticks on the altars, and faded flowers, as if fresh ones would be out of keeping. In an oratory at the right is a miraculous crucifix, carved out of wood by a Franciscan friar in the sixteenth century. The head is said to have been finished by an angel while the artist slept, and, in fact, has a wonderful expression, which changes with different points of view. On the steps of the altar beneath sat a child with olive complexion and coal-black eyes, eating a crust. She looked as if she might have been left behind by the Saracens. Not another soul was in the church. She had doubtless strayed in from a neighboring house with the usual liberty of the free-and-easy Italians, who have nothing of the awe of northern nations in the house of God.

On the left side of the church are several objects that belonged to St. Clare—a bell with too sharp a sound for so sweet a saint, her breviary, and the ivory ciborium, curiously carved, with which she repulsed the infidel host.

Going through the chancel, we came to the choir of the first Clarists, precisely as it was in the thirteenth century—small, dim, and of extreme simplicity. The pavement [Pg 756] is of brick. The stalls are plain wooden seats, now worm-eaten, which turn back on wooden pivots. There is only one narrow window with little panes set in lead. The decayed door turns on a wooden bar inserted in grooves. Old lecterns stand in the centre, and the list of St. Clare’s first companions, who sang here the divine praises, hangs on the wall. In one corner is the recess where the wall gave way to hide St. Francis from the fury of his father. The saint is here painted in the red Tuscan vest of the time, such as we see in pictures of Dante.

By this time the guardian of the church had arrived, and he took us into the refectory, which is gloomy and time-stained, with low Gothic arches, once frescoed. There are two windows with leaded panes, and worm-eaten tables around the blackened walls, with the place in one corner occupied by St. Clare. At one end is painted the miracle of the loaves, now half effaced; for it was here Pope Innocent IV., who had come to visit the saint, commanded her to bless the frugal repast. Confused, she knelt down and made the sign of the cross over the table, which was miraculously imprinted on each of the loaves.

Then we went up the brick stairs, through narrow passages, past the small cell of Sister Agnes, with its one little window looking down into an old cloister with a well in the centre, and came to St. Clare’s oratory, where she performed her devotions when too infirm to descend to the choir. Close by is the room where she died, poor and simple, unpainted beams overhead, and the pavement of brick. The lover of art finds nothing here to please the eye, but to the religious soul there is a world of moral beauty. Here Pope Innocent IV. came to see her on her death-bed. “Know, O my soul!” she exclaimed as she was dying, “thou hast a good viaticum to go with thee, an excellent guide to show thee the way. Fear not. Be tranquil, for He who created thee, and has always watched over thee with the tender love of a mother for her child, now comes with his sanctifying grace. Blessed be thou, O Lord! because thou hast created me.”

One of the nuns asked to whom she was speaking so lovingly. “Dear daughter,” replied she, “I am talking to my blessed soul.” Then turning to another sister, she said: “Seest thou not, my daughter, the King of Glory whom I behold?” And their eyes being opened, they saw a great company of celestial virgins clothed in white coming down out of heaven with the Queen of all saints at their head. And her soul at once departed to join them.

The death of St. Clare is the subject of one of Murillo’s masterpieces, a picture that resumes, as M. Nettement says, all the hopes and fears of Italy. The earth is wrapped in darkness. The sick-chamber, with its inmates, is veiled in obscurity. But the heavenly Jerusalem opens, dispersing the gloom and lighting up with its splendor the face of the dying nun, which beams like a star on everything around her. Such is the church, threatened on the one hand by the thick darkness of the world, but cheered on the other by a never-failing light from heaven like a great hope.

Ave, Mater humilis,

Ancilla Crucifixi,

Clara, virgo nobilis,

Discipula Francisci,

Ad cœlestem gloriam

Fac nos proficisci. Amen

[Pg 757] A steep mountain-path through the woods leads north of Assisi to the Eremo delle Carcere, composed of a cluster of houses among the ilex-trees, and five or six cells hollowed in the cliffs, to which St. Francis and his first disciples used to retire when they wished to give themselves up to the bliss of uninterrupted contemplation. No place could be more favorable for such a purpose. The wooded mountain, the wild ravine, the profound silence, the solitary paths, the sky of Italy—and God. What more did they need? There is the cave of St. Francis with the crucifix, carved with skill and expression, which he used to carry with him in his evangelical rounds, and the couch of stone on which he took his slight repose. Near by is the evergreen oak where the birds, who once received his blessing, still sing the praises of God. A place is pointed out where the demon who had tempted him cast himself despairingly into the abyss; and below is the Fosco delle Carcere, where flowed the turbulent stream which so disturbed the hermits in their devotions that St. Francis prayed its course might be stayed; and for six hundred years it has only flowed before some special disaster to the land. As may be supposed, it has not failed, as we were assured, to flow in abundance ever since the day Victor Emanuel set his foot in the Pontifical States.

Every branch of the Franciscan Order has a house at Assisi, but most of these communities have been dispersed by the Italian government. People are at liberty to dress in purple and fine linen, and indulge in every earthly pleasure; but to do penance, to put on sandals and a brown habit, and “clothe one’s self in good St. Francis’ girdle,” is quite another affair. Besides, the Franciscans are traditionally the friends of the people, and the influence they once exerted against the German emperors who oppressed Italy may not be forgotten. Frederick the Second’s ministers said the Minor Friars were a more formidable obstacle to encounter than a large army. The tertiaries of the middle ages exercised great influence in the moral and political world. They created institutions of mutual credit in the thirteenth century. At the voice of St. Rose, who belonged to the third order, Viterbo rose up against Frederick II.

This branch of the seraphic order embraced all classes of society. One hundred and thirty-four emperors, queens, and princesses are said to have belonged to it, among whom were Louis IX. of France, the Emperor Charles V. of Germany, Maria Theresa of Austria, etc. Christopher Columbus, Raphael, and Michael Angelo were also tertiaries. Princes assumed the cord on their arms, like Francis I., Duke of Brittany, who added the motto: Plus qu’autre, as if he, more than any one, revered the saint whose name he bore. Giotto has painted a Franciscan ascending to heaven by means of his girdle, and Lope de Vega makes use of the same image in his ode to St. Francis:

“Vuestra cordon es la escala

De Jacob, pues hemos visto

Por los nudos de sus passos

Subir sobre el cielo empireo

No gigantes, sino humildes.”[198]

[192] The upper church is of the Gothic style; the lower one, Lombard; and the crypt, Grecian.

[193] Ozanam.

[194] Dante’s actual words:

“With Christ she mounted on the cross,

When Mary stayed beneath.”

[195] In this allegory we have followed, in part the interpretation of M. Ozanam.

[196] This is carved.

[197] Several other saints have had the happiness of being born in a stable, as St. Joseph de Copertino and St. Camillo de Lellis; the latter from a pious wish of his mother that he might come into the world like the Son of God.

[198] Your cord is the ladder of Jacob; we have seen not the mighty, but the lowly of heart, mount up by its knots to the empyreal heaven.

[Pg 758]

SIX SUNNY MONTHS.

BY THE AUTHOR OF “THE HOUSE OF YORKE,” “GRAPES AND THORNS,” ETC.

CHAPTER III.

A LITTLE PLOT.

The next morning the girls set their possessions in order, brought out the few books they had thought worth while to take with them, and the little ornaments they had bought by the way, and scattered them about the rooms.

Among these objects was a large and populous photograph-book, which Isabel displayed to the Signora, introducing the strangers to her, and recalling to her memory the friends whose faces had changed beyond her recognition.

“This is Louis Marion,” she said; “and I shouldn’t be surprised if we were to see him here before long. We must introduce him to you—that is, if he should call on us. He used to be a great friend of ours, but, for some reason or other, he grew a little cool before we left, and didn’t even come to say good-by. I never could understand what was the matter. May be it wasn’t anything; and we were in such a bustle of preparation and taking leave of everybody that there was no chance to ask for explanations.”

The Signora looked with interest at this picture; for the person, though a stranger, had been much in her mind of late. His looks pleased her. It was a good face, not too handsome, but with fine eyes, and an appearance of strength softened here and there by some delicate finish. She had hoped most decidedly that he would come, and a letter which she had received that morning made her desire his coming more than before.

“I have no patience with Isabel Vane,” the writer declared energetically. “She is so wrapped up in herself, and so insensitive, that delicacy is quite thrown away on her. She is one of those persons who think no one can talk except those who will interrupt and talk loudly, and so, with the greatest apparent unconsciousness, she monopolizes all the attention of their friends, and sets Bianca aside as if she were a nobody. It never occurs to her that a gentleman may admire her sister; and yet Bianca is very much admired, in an odd, provoking kind of way. Most people, you know, attend to the loudest talker; and in the presence of Isabel her sister was sometimes almost neglected, even by those who were constantly thinking of her. Anybody with two eyes could see that Louis Marion liked her, and I am sure she thought he did, and that there was a sort of tacit understanding between them. They didn’t talk much together, but I’ve seen them manage to be near each other, and where they could hear each other’s voices, and one of them never left the company without glancing back and receiving a glance in return. At length, I don’t know how it came about, but [Pg 759] Isabel seemed to take his attentions to herself, and may be she said something about him to Bianca. Then a coldness grew up between her and Marion, and a thousand little complications helped it on, and he began to absent himself from the house, and Bianca pretended not to see him unless he came to speak to her, and so they separated, and all in consequence of the stupid conceit of a girl whom I could shake with a good will.”

We need not quote the letter further, though the writer, in the fulness of her heart, added several pages of amplifications on the theme, all which the Signora had read and re-read.

Bianca was arranging books on the table when the photograph-book was opened. She continued her employment a few minutes; but when they approached the page where Louis Marion’s picture was she turned away, and when his name was mentioned she was leaning out of the window, much interested apparently, in something going on in the street.

“Whose photographs are these?” the Signora asked.

“Oh! they are all family friends,” was the reply. “I might say they are mine, for I asked for the most of them. Neither papa nor Bianca would have thought of it. But they belong to the firm.”

The Signora prided herself on being a rather exceptionally honest and straightforward woman; but at this moment a very complicated little plot was forming itself in her mind. She could guess with how tender an interest Bianca might regard this photograph, but how impossible it might be for her to show anything but the utmost indifference to it, and how, sometimes, it might be a pleasure to contemplate it when she would not venture to do so. She could guess that it had been really given for her sake, though she had not been the one to ask for it, and what faint bloom of a downcast smile the gentleman might have seen in her face when it was put in its place.

“It is a darkish face, and the least in the world too small for the place,” the Signora said; “and so is this one next it.”

A word of cool depreciation is enough to take the lustre from a star with most people, and Miss Isabel Vane was no exception. If one abuses a person’s friends or ridicules their possessions, they may be stirred to anger; but that dispassionate, slighting way gives the deadliest of shocks to friendship.

“It scarcely does him justice,” the young lady owned; “and, as you say, the photographs are a little too small for their places. I must ask Marion for another when he comes, if he should come. The other I do not care about. He was simply put in to fill up. I must buy four more to put in these vacant places.”

“Stay!” the Signora said. “I have some which are worth more than merely to fill the vacant places; they will adorn the book.”

She brought from her room a little box of card-photographs, and began to select from them. “Here is the Holy Father on his knees before what seems to be the statue of St. Joseph holding the Child; and here are four cardinals and a patriarch. See how well they fit in! Do you mind my taking these two out?”

“Oh! no.” Isabel was too much pleased with these notable additions to her gallery to care for the two indifferent acquaintances who made [Pg 760] room for them. But as the Signora carelessly, and quite as a matter of course, tossed the two cards into the box where their substitutes had been, she saw that Bianca had turned from the window and was regarding them. Even in the half glance she cast she could know that the turning had been sudden, and that the girl’s head was held very high.

The Signora rose. “Well, children, if we are going to Santa Croce we must start in an hour. It is a great festa there, and I think there will be a crowd. Didn’t Bianca promise to braid my hair in a wonderful new way? I remembered it this morning, and have only given my locks a twist about the comb, and they are on the point of falling about my shoulders in the most romantic manner.”

She would not seem to see the faint shade of disturbance with which Bianca followed her from the room. She well knew that in seeming to slight the one that tender heart held dear she had chilled the heart toward herself; but that was not to last long, neither the pain nor the displeasure. She slipped a white dressing-sack on, seated herself before the long mirror, and shook her hair down. “Now, my dear, make me as beautiful as you like,” she said; and, taking the box of photographs she had brought with her on her lap, began to turn them over. “You had better take charge of these,” she remarked, laying the two at the top aside before beginning her survey of the others.

Bianca said nothing, but her hands, combing out the long, fair locks, were a little unsteady, and her face blushed in the mirror, a swift, startled blush.

“Three strands, my dear,” the Signora said. “I never fancied a braid of any other sort for the hair. More than three strands always seems to me like a market-basket on the head of a market-woman. I always thought very elaborate hair-dressing vulgar and unbecoming. I like the way yours is done this morning.”

Bianca’s hair was in a few large satin-smooth curls tied back with a ribbon of so fresh a green as to be almost gold, and the Signora knew that, after a careful brushing, five minutes had accomplished all the rest. There were no curl-papers nor hot irons; it was only to brush the tress about the pretty fore-finger, and it dropped in glossy coil on coil.

“Many people do not like curls,” Bianca said. “But it seems a pity to straighten out and braid curly hair. I think nature meant such hair to have its own way, just like vine tendrils, though the use may not be so evident.”

She spoke with a certain quietness, not cold, yet not cordial, and kept her eyes fixed on the braid her skilful fingers were weaving rapidly.

The Signora took up the photographs she had laid aside, glanced at one, and dropped it, then looked at the other for some time in silence. “What fine, earnest eyes he has!” she said at length. “There is even something reproachful in their expression, as if he were looking at one who had doubted him. I do not doubt you, sir. On the contrary, I am disposed to have the utmost confidence in you. Moreover, I shall be happy to see you in Rome.”

She laid the photograph carefully on the other, and, closing her eyes, resigned herself entirely to the care of her pretty handmaiden. There was silence for a few minutes while the braids were being finished; then [Pg 761] she felt a soft hand slip down each cheek with a caressing touch. “Open your eyes, carissima mia,” said a voice as soft, “and tell me how these are to be arranged. Will you have them looped or in a crown?”

The thin ice was quite melted; and when the hair-dressing was finished, Bianca went off to her own room, bearing the treasure that had been put into her possession in such an artful manner. “It makes me feel very twisted to act in such a crooked way; but if it is a crooked it isn’t a dark way. And the dear child is so happy!” the Signora thought.

A shower was passing to the south when our party came out of the church at noon, and the sun was so veiled that they sent their carriage on, and walked from Santa Croce to St. John Lateran. They could see a pearly stream of water pouring down far away from a dark spot in the sky to a dark spot on the earth; but the clouds over their heads were as tender and delicate as the shadows of maidenhair ferns about a fountain. They lingered till every one had passed them, and, when they came to the last mulberry-tree of the beautiful avenue, there was left only a contadino lounging on the stone bench there. He was a spectacle of faded rags and superb contentment, and seemed to have neither desire nor intention to leave the place for hours; but when he saw them look longingly at the seat, he rose, saluted them with an indescribably shabby hat, in which were stuck three fresh roses, and relinquished the bench to them.

Bianca sighed with delight as she glanced about, but said nothing. The others seemed disposed to talk.

“I heard this morning, Signora, what made me understand your admiration for the Italian language,” Mr. Vane said. “While you three were in the church I went outside the door, and presently, as I stood there, I heard two men talking behind me. Of course I did not understand a word they said, but I listened attentively. I never heard such exquisite spoken sounds in my life. The questions and replies made me think of the beautiful incised wreaths and sprigs on your candelabra. There wasn’t a syllable blurred, as we constantly hear in our own language; but I am sure every word was pronounced perfectly. When the two seemed to be going, I looked round and saw two Capuchin monks with bare ankles, and robes faded out to a dull brick-color.”

“Those same faded robes may cover very accomplished men,” the Signora said. “Some of them are fine preachers. I wish we had more preaching in Rome. One very seldom hears a sermon. The first one I heard made the same impression on me, as to the language, that the talk of these monks has made on you. I did not understand, but I was charmed. It reminded me of—Landor, wasn’t it? writing of Porson:

“‘So voluble, so eloquent,

You little heeded what he meant.’

That was in St. Philip Neri’s Church.”

“Dulness is inexcusable in a Catholic preacher in any language,” Mr. Vane said. “If they should not have much talent of their own, they have such a wealth to draw from—all the beautiful legends and customs, and the grand old authors, and the lives of the saints. A dull Protestant preacher has the Bible, it is true; but, as a rule, I find that only the eloquent ones use that source of wealth freely, or know [Pg 762] how to use it. One of the most eloquent Catholic preachers I ever heard used to make his strongest hits by simply refraining from speech. I recollect one sermon of his where he spoke of St. Augustine, whom I thought he was going to describe, but whom he made appear more brilliant by not describing. ‘His genius,’ he began, then stopped, seemed to search for words, at last threw his head back and clasped his hands. ‘Oh! the genius of St. Augustine,’ he exclaimed. Of course the tribute was more splendid than the most rolling period could have been. Nearly all his effective climaxes were like that—noble words breaking up into silence, like a Roman arch into a Gothic.”

“You will have to renounce your Gothic, Bianca,” the Signora said; “at least, while you are in Rome. You won’t even want to see it here, and you may lose your taste for it as church architecture. I sometimes think I have, though I was once enthusiastic about it. Now the single column or the massive pier, with the round arch above, seems to me the perfect expression of a perfect and serene faith. It is a following of the sky-shape. The complications and subtilty of the Gothic are more like the searching for truth of an aspiring and dissatisfied soul. When I go from under the noble arches and cupolas of Santa Maria Maggiore to the church of St. Alphonsus Liguori, just beyond it, I receive an impression of fretfulness and unrest.”

“I should be sorry to give up Notre Dame de Paris and the two churches at Rouen,” Bianca murmured half absently, her soft, bright eyes gathering in all the beauty within their ken.

Isabel was differently employed. She was busy noting facts in a little plethoric book with yellow covers and an elastic strap that she always carried in her pocket. “Do you know how long and how wide this open space between the two basilicas is?” she asked of the Signora, holding her lead-pencil suspended.

“Oh! it is long enough for a nice walk, you see, and broad enough to see everything at the other side without bumping your eyes. That is the city wall opposite, you know.”

“I’d like to know how many acres there are,” Isabel said to herself. “I believe I could measure it by my eyes. Let me see! It’s a foot to that stone. Five and a half feet make a rod, pole, or perch. Five and a half that distance would go to the next tree. A rod, then, from me to the tree. Now for a rood! Sixteen and a half—no! How I do forget! Three barley-corns make one inch, twelve inches make a foot, five and a half feet make a rod, pole, or perch, sixteen and a half rods, poles, or—bah! that isn’t it. Signora, will you be so good as to tell me how many rods make a rood?—that is, if it is rods that they make roods of. I used to know it, but there’s a hitch somewhere.”

“How should I know, my dear?” asked the Signora with mild surprise.

“Oh! don’t measure things, Bell!” pleaded her sister. “Remember London Tower.”

For Miss Vane had presumed to ask the superb “beef-eater” who escorted them through the Tower how thick might be the walls, the solidity of which he was enlarging upon, and the cool stare with which he drew the eyes of the whole party upon her, and the gently sarcastic “I do not know; I have never measured them,” with which he replied, [Pg 763] had silenced her for the whole afternoon. “That was because I had asked something he could not answer,” she said, in telling the story. “And his manner was so imposing that it was hours before I could rid myself of the impression that I had put a very absurd and improper question. He didn’t refuse sixpence, though, for a piece of ivy from Beauchamp Tower,” she added, shrugging her shoulders.

“Bell,” whispered her sister, “I’ll tell you about the rods and roods, if you won’t measure any more.” Then, having received the promise, she explained the “hitch,” which has doubtless left its little tangle on many a youthful memory.

A woman with a white handkerchief on her head came along, and beckoned to the ragged man with the roses, who was still lounging near, and the two went off together.

“Did you notice how she beckoned?” the Signora asked. “I always notice that here. They beckon as if indicating the feet, the palm of the hand being downward, the fingers toward the ground. We beckon with the palm and fingers upward, indicating the head. It used to confuse me, and I fancied myself sent away with a refusal when I was invited to enter. You will have to learn their signs. A certain shrug and raising of the eyebrows mean no. Another no—an odious one to me—is to wag to and fro the uplifted forefinger of the right hand. This is nearly always accompanied by a compression or puckering up of the mouth. But, my dear friends, it is time for luncheon. Shall we go?”

They rose slowly, and slowly strolled across the open space where art and nature lived peacefully together. No busy hands and spades uprooted the plots of wild-flowers, infantile little pink convolvuli, snowy daisies, and all their blue and yellow kin, that had sprung up here and there in the gravelled plain, or the detached tiny plants that make each its own solitude, spreading its small leaves out over the pebbles, and raising its delicate head freely, as if to induce the passer-by to pause and admire for once the exquisite grace of the weeds he despised.

“I wonder if any one but Ruskin ever stopped to look at weeds!” the Signora said. “It was he, I think, taught me. I first thought of it on seeing an illustration in Modern Painters. It was a bit of weed-covered earth seen close, as one would see it when lying on the ground—only a little tangle of leaves and grasses; but, touched by his pen and pencil, its beauty was revealed.”

“I sometimes think,” Bianca said, “that it is a mercy we cannot see all the beauty there is about us; for, if we did, we should do nothing but stand and stare for ever.”

“One might do worse than stand and stare at beauty for ever,” her father replied. “I’ve no great opinion of business.”

She slipped her hand in his arm before answering, knowing that inaction was a subject that always found him a little sensitive. “That depends, you know,” she said. “When the business is to make your tea or hem your handkerchief, why it wouldn’t do for me to be going into trances.”

Isabel took his other arm. “But when the business is measuring places for the pleasure of knowing and telling how large they are, or when it is taking the census, or any of those countings of units, then he despises it.”

“When the business is poking a [Pg 764] nose in other people’s business, I certainly object to it,” he said.

Walking along, he drew the two fair hands that clung to him into his own, and clasped them together against his breast, smiling down into the girls’ upturned faces; and for a moment the three, in their mutual affection and confidence, forgot the Signora. She walked on in front of them, her eyes cast down, and seemed to desire to remain apart. A silence fell upon them all—perhaps a sense of the silence about them, or perhaps that silence that always follows an expression of deep and tender affection, as when through the light and varied chat of a company is heard the tone of a musical instrument, and all the talk ceases for a moment; or, it may be, some touch from within or from without had reminded them that it was the day of the Holy Cross.

The drive home was very quiet, the Signora pointing out now and then some object of superlative interest as they passed it. “This is St. Clement’s, an ancient church over a still more ancient church. Mustn’t it be delightful to go digging under your house some day to repair a drain, or do some such thing, and presently come across the arch of a buried door, then, digging farther, find the whole door, then a mosaic pavement and a column of verde-antique, and so on, till a whole temple is revealed where you expected to find only earth and stones? Some such thing happened here. There is the Roman Forum a little beyond. Need I introduce this ruin to you?”

She pointed to the Colosseum, and then left them to their reflections. “Drive through the Via della Croce Bianca,” she said to the coachman, “and under the Arco dei Pontani. Then pass Santa Maria in Monti, and go up Via de’ Santa Pudentiana.”

She saw them look eagerly at the beautiful fragments of Pallas Minerva and Mars Ultor she had chosen the route to show them; but they asked no questions, and she volunteered no explanations.

When they reached home the windows were all closed, and the curtains and persiane half drawn for coolness, and there was such a fragrance in the rooms that they all exclaimed. Every tall vase was crowded full of roses pink and yellow, and every little one held a bunch of deep purple violets.

“Could any one leave a prettier card?” the Signora asked, displaying her treasures. “When I find heaps of violets and roses in the spring, I always know who has been here during my absence. It is Mr. Coleman,” naming her bachelor friend of the semi-weekly cup of tea. “I bespeak for him a kind place in your regards. He is faithful, honest, obliging, and refined. I am under obligations to him for many kindnesses.”

“Marion says that violets are the Mayflowers of Italy,” Isabel remarked; “that they come as plentifully at the same time, and are sold as universally, as the trailing arbutus in New England.”

“And see what a deep blue they are!” the Signora said, leading the conversation away from Marion. “These came from the Villa Borghese. I know by the color. Oh! the fields are full of flowers now. You will, perhaps, see some this evening. There are almost always a few people come in this night of the week—people who never find me at any other time. It isn’t a reception, you know. I don’t bind myself. Among them [Pg 765] will be your Italian teacher; so you can arrange when to begin studying. I sent him a note this morning. And, stay! Apropos of violets, I have something lovely to show you.”

She opened a little case that the servant had given her as she entered. “These were left while we were out. I had ordered some changes to be made in them. See! they are the Borghese violets set in dew and petrified.”

The case contained a brooch, a pair of bracelets and sleeve-buttons, all of plain and highly polished silver, in each of which was set a large, deep-purple amethyst.

“Why did I never think of a silver setting?” Bianca exclaimed. “I always admired amethysts till they were set; then I found them spoilt. It was the ugly purple and yellow contrast. These are lovely, and just suit you, Signora mia. How I wish I could wear such things!”

“And why can you not?” Mr. Vane asked, with all the simplicity of a man who can admire results without understanding what produces them.

“Because they would make me look like a starless twilight,” the girl replied. “I should be obliged to paint my cheeks if I put on such colors. Poor me! I could wear only rubies, or opals, or diamonds, perhaps emeralds set in diamonds.”

Her father’s face assumed that sad and troubled expression a man’s face always wears when one he loves wishes for something out of his power to give. “Are you not rather young, my dear, to wear much jewelry?” he asked doubtfully.

“He thinks I am pining for trinkets,” she said smilingly. “Certainly, papa, I am altogether too young, and am, moreover, disinclined to wear it. Don’t look so sad about it! My ribbons and flowers satisfy me quite. I shall beg some rosebuds of the Signora for this evening, and you shall see how much prettier they will be than rubies, besides having perfume, which rubies have not.”

Isabel had arranged the bracelets around her neck, and fastened the brooch in her lace ruffle.

“They do make one look three shades darker,” she said, and sighed deeply in taking them off. “I would like to go dressed in jewels from head to foot,” she added.

But, as Isabel was always sighing to possess every beautiful thing she saw, and, if it were possible, would have had the Vatican for her abode and St. Peter’s for a private chapel, nobody took her longings very much to heart; the less so, moreover, as she managed to live a very gay and happy life in spite of those unsatisfied longings.

Other pretty things had come in during their morning’s absence: a pile of books, old copies of the Italian poets newly bound over in white vellum with red edges to the leaves, a pile of Roman photographs which were to be sent to America, and a collection of little squares of marbles, porphyries, and alabasters, a stone rainbow, destined also for America.

“But we need photographs in Rome,” the Signora said. “Looking at them, we discover a thousand beauties which we missed when we saw the original.”

A strange croaking sound drew the attention of the girls to the windows, and they saw a little caravan of crates carried past on carts, going from the railway station to the great markets of the city. [Pg 766] Out of the holes in these crates protruded heads and necks of every sort of fowl—turkeys, hens, ducks, and pigeons. The poor wretches, huddled and crowded together, seemed to know that they were on their way to execution, and to implore the pity of the bystanders.

Bianca pressed her lips together and said nothing; Isabel leaned out and contemplated them with a smile. “Those dear turkeys!” she said with the greatest affection.

“You like them?” the Signora asked, rather surprised that any one should choose pets so grotesque.

“Yes, immensely!” was the reply. “They’re so nice roasted.”

And then, obliterating this painful and awkward reminder of what lay under the surface of their daily comforts, came a piercingly-sweet chorus of trumpets, twenty trumpets playing together. A regiment was passing, going from a camp in one part of the city to a camp in another part. The men were dressed in gray linen, and, in the distance, were hardly to be distinguished from the street, and their bearing was not very soldier-like; but the wild and sunny music gave a soul and meaning to them, and, rising through the hot and silent noon, stirred even the most languid pulses.

“War will never be done away with till trumpets are abolished,” Mr. Vane said. “I have no doubt that even I should make a very good fighter if I had a band of them in full blast at my elbow while the battle lasted. It wouldn’t do for them to stop, though. Fancy a charge for which no trumpet sounded! It would no more go off, you know, than a gun would without powder. Why doesn’t somebody take care of that child?” he concluded abruptly.

For a soiled little wretch was sitting directly in the street, on a cushion of dust, and staring contentedly at the soldiers as they passed, as unconscious and unafraid as if it had been a poppy sprung up there between the paving-stones, instead of a human being with a body out of which the soul might be kicked or crushed.

“Somebody is taking care of it,” Bianca said. “Everybody is taking care of it.”

In fact, the long line of soldiers made a tiny curve to accommodate this bit of humanity, and the tide of life passing at the other side made another, like a brook around a stick or stone. At length a woman, not too much afraid, certainly, snatched the child away, and, in the face of the world, administered a sound castigation, the meaning of which, it was to be hoped, the child understood.

“I never saw such countryfied things happen in any other city,” Mr. Vane said. “It is, perhaps, one reason why life here is so picturesque. Nobody, except the small class of cultivated people, behaves any differently in public from what they do in private, and the common people do not pretend to be what they are not.”

“I wish sometimes that they were a little less sincere,” the Signora remarked coldly. “One could spare that portion of the picturesque which offends against decency. They seem to have no respect for public opinion; though, perhaps,” she added, “public opinion here is not worthy of much respect. It tolerates strange customs, certainly. The workmen hammer away and saw stone all day Sunday at the house opposite, and nobody protests, [Pg 767] that I know of. Some clergymen did think of complaining against the work going on on Sunday in the piazza above, but it would have been in vain for them, of course. Let us go to luncheon, please. I am in danger of becoming ill-natured, so many things here annoy me. Do you remember the old Protestant missionary hymn about ‘Greenland’s icy mountains’? Two lines of it often occur to me here:

‘Though every prospect pleases,

And only man is vile.’

I shall think better of them when I have had something to eat. Hunger makes one critical. I fancy that critics are always badly-fed people. I’m very sure that if Dr. Johnson had had a comfortable dinner before he sat down to my last book, he would never have cut it up so—the book, I mean. A good roastbeef would have taken the edge quite off his blade. A dinner,” said the Signora, waxing eloquent as she seated herself at a very pretty and plentiful table—“a dinner is the most powerful of engines, and wealth is powerful only because it will procure dinners. A person whom you have fed is obliged to serve you, and the person whom you are going to feed never finds you ugly or uninteresting.”

Bianca contemplated her friend with an expression of grieved astonishment. “How can you talk so with all these flowers in the room listening to you?” she exclaimed.

“Besides, you are going to feed me, but I never saw you so near being ugly. I think, indeed, you are a little bit ugly.”

The Signora laughed pleasantly. “If I had known that the dearest flower in the room was going to find a reproachful tongue for me, I should never have uttered such shocking opinions. Never shake your sunny locks at me. It was not I who said it; ‘twas hunger. It was Bailey’s wolf. You do not know Clive Bailey? He will come this evening, and I think you may be interested in him. I must tell you about his wolf. The poor fellow was, at the age of twenty, left poor indeed; suddenly found himself without a cent in the world, after having been brought up with the expectation of a competency, and studiously educated to do nothing. Fortunately, his taste had led him to read a good deal, and he had also a fancy for writing fiction. It was being thrown into the sea to learn to swim. He began to write for the cheap newspapers, always intending to find some other employment; but what with the necessity of writing a great deal to keep himself alive, and the shock to his sensitive nature of finding himself in such a situation, he only succeeded in living the life he had stumbled into, without power to make another. It was the old story of poor writers, with, however, a pleasant ending in this case. He managed to squeeze a fair novel out of intervals in his drudge-work, and that won him a better market. In the height of his success he gathered those first sketches into a volume, and published them, giving the name of the author as A. Wolf, Esq. When somebody, not knowing the book to be his, asked him what Wolf it was who wrote those sketches, he answered: ‘The wolf at my door.’ And he insists that the same wolf is the most voluminous writer the world has ever produced, and that the title-pages of at least half the books written should bear his name. Buon appetito!”

[Pg 768]

CHAPTER IV.

“A FLOCK OF SHEEP THAT LEISURELY PASS BY.”

Several persons came in that evening from seven to nine. First appeared Mr. Coleman, a mild-looking, bald-headed man of an uncertain age. Isabel immediately absorbed him. Next followed a new-comer in Rome, on whose card was inscribed “Mr. Geo. Morton.” After having seen him once, the Signora was guilty of dubbing him Mr. Geometrical Morton. “He is ridiculous, but excellent,” she told her friends while describing him. “He never laughs, because he thinks there is nothing laughable in creation, every whim of nature, human or inanimate, being the result of a mathematical principle, and every disorder only order under an extraordinary form. Of course this is neither new nor peculiar; but he announces it as if it were new, and has a peculiar manner of clapping his measuring instruments on to everything. Not a bit of cirrus can pass over the sky nor your mind, but instantly he will tell you the philosophy of it. In fine, he strips everything to the skeleton, and cannot see that it is a bore, but calls it truth, as if the flesh and drapery were not truths also, as well as more graceful. I had a quarrel with him when he was here last—or rather, I got out of all patience, and scolded him almost rudely, and he listened and replied with the most irritating patience and politeness. I suppose he thought there was some mathematical reason for my being angry, and was studying it out with his great, solemn eyes. He’s kind and honest, I am sure, and as handsome as a picture. I pity the woman he will choose for a wife, though. If she should scold, he will bring out the barometer; if she weep, the rain-gauge; if she should be merry and affectionate, he will consult the thermometer. Ugh! he makes me feel all three-cornered.”

This gentleman made his salutations with the most perfect gravity and courtesy, and, after considering the situation a moment, seated himself by Bianca.

“Well, what conclusions have you arrived at concerning Rome?” he asked, after a few preliminary remarks.

“None,” she replied; “but I have made a good many beginnings; or I might say I have arrived at some fragmentary conclusions.”

“As what?” he persisted gently, desirous to make her talk; for she had shrunk so shyly from him that her father had come to her other side, which was unique. The young man had not often the opportunity to study a shy feminine specimen.

“Oh! well,” she said doubtingly, then laughed; “apropos of papa’s checked clothes, which distress me, I have discovered that the clergy are the only well-dressed men in Rome. The others do not look like gentlemen. But the long robe, whatever the color of it, and the cloak they are always arranging, are so graceful, the hat is so picturesque, and, above all, the buckles on the shoes please me.”

“Below all, you mean,” her father remarked.

[Pg 769] The young man looked the least in the world disconcerted; for he wore every day a suit of the same objectionable check cloth. Besides, he was not prepared to take on himself the instruction of a young woman whose tall father chose to assist at the lessons, and put in his word in season and out of season.

At this moment Mr. Clive Bailey made his appearance. His bright, clever face lighted up at sight of the new-comers, whom he had been expecting with interest, having heard a great deal about them.

“I hope you intend to make Rome your home,” he said to Mr. Vane. “The Signora has suggested such a possibility.”

“You compliment me more than you do our country,” Mr. Vane replied. “I have been told that it would be unpatriotic for me to prefer any other country to America as a residence. People talk that way. At the same time I should like to stay, and I have an impression that North America, as a whole, will not be aware of my absence.”

“Oh! I don’t mean to disparage any country,” Mr. Bailey said promptly; “only the climate is so hard. Those northeast winds whistle through my button-holes. By the way, a friend of yours asked me to-day if you had arrived, and would have come up to-night to see, if he had not been engaged: John Adams. You recollect him?”

“John Adams? Of course I recollect him. But what brought him here? I never heard him speak of Italy but to abuse it.”

“Oh!” the young man said, lowering his voice a little, and glancing at the Signora, who was near them, “he was brought by the same reason that brought him before, and will keep him this winter—to wit, to woo.”

“To woo! To who?” retorted Mr. Vane.

“Not a whit of your to who!” replied the other with a laugh.

“What are you quoting Wordsworth for?” asked the Signora, overhearing the last part of their talk.

“Apropos of Mr. Adams, Signora,” Mr. Vane said, looking at her attentively.

She blushed and seemed annoyed, and, as if about to say something, finally turned away without speaking. It displeased her to have her name used in connection with that of any gentleman, and, besides, she did not mean to marry Mr. John Adams.

Here the door opened with a little breeze and three persons entered: a bright-eyed, beautiful young lady with a somewhat Jewish cast of face, who produced the impression that a bird had fluttered in, and, following her, a young girl of not more than sixteen, and an elderly woman, evidently a companion.

The Signora met the new-comer cordially.

“My dear countess, I do not know whether you are more welcome or unexpected.”

“I have but two minutes,” the young lady said in the prettiest breathless manner. “I am just on my way to dine out, and stop to ask a favor. But first let me introduce my friends.”

They were a young baroness from the Azores Islands, who had spent ten years in Egypt with her father, and was now on her way to her native country to join her husband, and her lady companion.

“She has to leave Rome the day after to-morrow,” her friend explained, [Pg 770] “and wants an introduction to Monsignor M——. She wishes to take some things from him to a friend of hers; and you know one doesn’t often have an opportunity to send to the Azores direct. Now, dear Signora, if you would be so very kind as to introduce her to Monsignor. You know I am not acquainted with him.”

“I will take her to him to-morrow morning,” the Signora said. “But they need not go now, if you do.”

“I was going to ask your hospitality for them while the carriage takes me, for I have to call for cousin Anne. And now, will you do me the favor to make me acquainted with the friends who have come to live with you? I must apologize for my abrupt coming and going.”

She made her apologies in the most graceful and simple way, and looked at Bianca a little lingeringly in meeting her, as if struck by her face. “I meant to call on you first,” she said to the sisters, “and will come to-morrow, if you permit me.”

The Signora followed her out to the landing. “I want a glimpse of your dress,” she said. “You know I never go out after dark; and yet I do so like to see a lady dressed for the evening.”

The countess smilingly threw back the long white cloak that covered her from head to foot, and displayed a beautiful silk robe of so pale a blue as to be almost white. Pink roses fastened the rich lace in the square bosom and loose sleeves, and looped the braids of dark hair, and she wore no jewels but some large strung pearls on her neck and wrists.

“It is lovely!” the Signora exclaimed, and looked admiringly after the lady as she tripped down the stone stairs, holding her rustling robes up about her.

Going back, she found Mr. Coleman and Bianca trying to entertain the rather stupid lady companion, Isabel taking her first lesson in mathematics, and the girl baroness, a dark, plain, talkative little creature, chatting away in very good English to Mr. Vane.

“I never saw my husband but once,” she said. “We were always betrothed since we were babies, but his father, the old Baron of Santa Cruz, had him sent to school in Lisbon, and I was always in a convent. My mamma was dead, and I had no brothers nor sisters, and papa was in Egypt. He has a high office there. Then Pedro came home from Portugal, and I went to papa. Two years ago we met in Rome and were married, so that I could go to him later with my companion. Papa couldn’t leave to go to the Azores, and Pedro couldn’t come again for me.”

She told the story in a very childish, simple way, and seemed to regard her marriage as quite a business-like and proper arrangement.

“You think that you will like Fayal as well as Cairo?” Mr. Vane asked kindly, pitying this child-wife who seemed to have so little of family affection to surround her in the most important time of her life.

“I cannot think, I cannot remember it,” she said. “When I try, it is Paris or Rome that comes up, and I get confused. If I should not like it, I shall ask Pedro to take me somewhere else. He has written me that he will always do everything I wish him to do.”

Mr. Vane scarcely felt a disposition to smile at this perfect trust. He found it pathetic.

“But I would like to go to your country,” she resumed with animation. “Pedro’s sister Maria went [Pg 771] there for a journey when she married, and she wrote me the most wonderful things. Perhaps she did not tell the truth. She may have been writing something only to make me laugh. You will not laugh if I tell you?”

Mr. Vane promised to maintain his gravity at all risks.

“Well,” she said confidentially, “Maria wrote me that the snow there is whiter than sea-foam on the rocks, and that one can walk in it and not be wet, and that carriages drive over and make a solid road of it, just as if the streets were paved with smooth, white marble, and that, at the sides, it piles up and stays in shape, like heaps of eider-down. It isn’t true, is it?”

She looked at him doubtfully and searchingly while he assured her of the correctness of the picture.

“And, more than that,” he said, “I have seen the snow so deep and solid that men would cut it in great blocks like Carrara marble, and, when they were standing in the place they had dug, you couldn’t see their heads over the top of the drifts. Did you ever see ice?”

“I saw some this morning, but it wasn’t white,” she said. “A carload of it went past the hotel. It was grayish and crumbly. The men had cut grass and weeds and piled over it to keep it from the sun.”

Mr. Vane, too, had seen this pitiful apology for the glorious crystal blocks of New England ice-cutters as he looked from his window that morning, and had indulged for the moment a feeling of scornful pride. “Fancy that mat of fresh grass and wild-flowers trembling over one of our ice-carts or snow-drifts!” he had said to Bianca. “Yes,” she had replied, but at the same moment had pointed out to him a lovely compensation for the absence of these frigid splendors in the land of the sun. Beneath their window passed two men, bearing each on his head a large basket, one flat, and covered with camellias laid singly, a pink by a white one, each flower glistening with freshness; the other deep, and heaped with pink roses and buds, among which might be seen yellow roses tied in large, nodding bunches. Yes, the snow of the tropics was a snow of flowers.

The Signora passed near enough to Isabel and her companion to catch a part of their conversation. “Since you entered this room,” the gentleman was saying, “you have doubtless, either consciously or unconsciously, gone through with a good deal of swift reasoning. Some people you have liked more, others less, and in both cases the feeling, as you would call it, has been the result of a certain calculation as exact as anything in mathematics could be. You have been pleased with one for certain manners, or looks, or for certain qualities which you believe him to possess; and there are also exact and mathematically calculable reasons why these things should please you.”

Isabel looked edified, but puzzled. “If, then,” she ventured, “there is so much more reason in us all than we are aware of, why need we correct ourselves? I should think we might be all the better satisfied with what goes on in our minds, and let them arrange their own processes without troubling ourselves.”

“No,” he said with earnest gravity. “There are good reasons and bad reasons; and by knowing why we may correct the bad reasons. For example, your tooth aches; the reason is because there [Pg 772] is a defective spot in it. You go to the dentist, and the pain ceases. Or you do not fancy a person; the reason is because that person does not flatter you, and you are fond of flattery. You correct your inordinate love of praise, and thus appreciate the worth of one who tells you the truth, and also make it more easy for him to praise you sincerely.”

“But all this takes so much time,” she said, seeing that he waited for a response.

“It is for such uses that time was given us,” he replied.

She struggled for another objection, her mind rapidly becoming swamped in the conversation. “Then you think that we can arrange and order all our feelings, and make our hearts as regular as clocks; and if we lose a friend, by examining why he died, and why we grieve for him, we can reason ourselves into indifference.”

“No,” he said again. “We can undoubtedly subdue the violence of unreasonable grief by such examination, but there are deep and ineradicable reasons why we should grieve when we lose those dear to us.”

The girl’s eyes brightened. “Why,” she said, “it all seems to me only a difference of terms. You mean just what everybody means, only you say everything, and others haven’t time nor wit for that. It all amounts to the same thing in the end. We say, ‘Such and such a thing is natural,’ where you say it is mathematical, voilà tout.”

He began to say something about the natural including both good and bad, while his meaning was to exclude the bad; but the Signora took pity on his victim, and stopped his eloquence by offering him a cup of tea.

“He will take the tea,” she thought, pouring another cup, “because the beverage is agreeable to the palate and refreshing to the body, and, by consequence, enlivening to the mind, and he will see the whole subject worked out to its smallest part as he stirs in the sugar. He will put in sugar because—because—dear me! I wonder what is the good reason for putting sugar in tea! How uncomfortable it all is! I should go mad with such a man about me all the time. And yet how well-bred, and earnest, and handsome he is! If only it might happen that he would mellow with time, and learn to take subjects by their convenient handles, and not spread them out so! He makes me remember that I am a skeleton, with—pah! How glad I am I don’t know all about my bones!”

“What are you studying out, Signora?” asked Isabel at her elbow.

“I am trying not to see everything crumble at once into its elements,” she replied distressfully. “My dear, if you will make that man talk like a human being, I shall be thankful. Find out if he has a heart, or only a triangle instead; and just watch his fingers to see if there are little scales and figures marked along the insides of them. He is worth rescuing. I like him.”

The little baroness went, and more people came in. It was after Ave Maria, and they were obliged to light the candles, and close the windows and shutters on the street. But the great sala needed not to be closed, for no one could see into it, and so the exquisite twilight was left free to enter, with only the soft light of a single hanging lamp to shame its tender radiance. This [Pg 773] inner light, the steady, deep-hued flame of olive oil, burning in an antique bronze lamp, made the room softly visible, and, shining out into the garden, turned the yellow gold of the jasmine blossoms into red gold here and there, and made the snow-white of the orange-flowers look like a sun-lighted drift of the north.

TO BE CONTINUED.

A JOURNEY TO THE LAND OF MILLIARDS.[199]

There is much in a title. Many an insignificant if not objectionable individual is widely welcomed and sweetly smiled upon because he boasts a “handle to his name”; and that which is true as regards man is equally so of books. Many a shallow and worthless production, like the monstrosities produced in the floral world by fancy horticulturists, becomes “the rage” from its pretentious or, as the case may be, its unpronounceable name.

There is, then, much in the title of a book; and yet, had M. Victor Tissot sent into the world his Voyage au Pays des Milliards under the sober superscription of “Travels in Germany,” although it might not so immediately have attracted the public eye, it must ultimately have secured the attention and interest it so justly merits, and which have necessitated the issue of nine editions in the course of a few weeks.

This interest is sustained throughout the book by the varied information it contains respecting facts connected with Prussianized Germany, which are related not only with that happy fluency of style which is the gift of most literary Frenchmen, but also with a justice of reasoning and fairness of appreciation of which one of his nation dealing with such a subject might not always be found capable.

The work professes to be simply notes de voyage addressed to a friend; a series of sketches which introduce the reader in a familiar manner—“looking at everything, listening everywhere”—to this new Germany, such as she has sprung forth, sword in hand, from the brain of Herr von Bismarck.

The first part of the book relates to Southern and Central Germany.

France, before the time of her misfortunes, was wont to say with her old university professors, Qui non vidit Coloniam non vidit Germaniam,[200] but now the proverb is changed, and it must rather be said, “He who would see Germany must see Berlin.” In the vast Germanic body, Berlin has alike usurped the place of head and heart; she it is who conceives, meditates, contrives, commands; she who deprives and bestows, legislates and executes; and she who distributes glory. Towards her flow the life and warmth of that Germany which is now no [Pg 774] more the land of picturesque and simple legends, sweet ballads, Gothic dreams, holy cathedrals, but the land of blood and iron. The knight Albrecht Dürer no more finds his steps arrested in the enchanted forest of poetry and art, but rides rough-shod over the high-roads of Europe, armed with a needle-gun, and with a spiked helmet on his head.

“Had we but known,” sighed France, after the war—“if we had only known!” Yes, often enough has it been repeated that her ignorance respecting her neighbors, of all that they were secretly designing and silently doing, was one chief cause of her disasters.

“Had we but known!” “Well, then,” writes M. Tissot, “for the future let us know! Let us be aware that the Germans ransack our country in every sense; that they study our language, manners, customs, and institutions; following us step by step, and spying us everywhere, until they know France more thoroughly than we know it ourselves. For thirty years past has their spyglass been busily scrutinizing every corner of our land.… Let us then learn to do among them what they do among us: the weak place in the breastplate of the German Colossus is not very difficult to discover.”

In going forth to repel invasion, Germany has suffered herself to be carried away by the spirit of conquest, and has returned home with a rear-guard of vices which before she knew not, and under a despotism which it had cost her the struggle of centuries to break. Having departed from the path of humanity and civilization, she has gone back to her wild forests despoiled of her studious leisure and with the tradition of her ancient domestic virtues well-nigh lost; while, a prey to all the material appetites, she forgets God, or else denies him, and no longer believes in anything except the supreme triumph of her cannon.

From fear of being attacked by the revolution, she enters into an alliance with it. In proof of this, we have but to observe with what gratified attention the socialists, not only in Germany but all over Europe, watch the moral decomposition which is going on in this atmosphere of materialism and of pride. They know very well that the day is sure to come, and is perhaps not far distant, when “they will make a descent into the arena with their knotted clubs; and that this argument will suffice to put to flight the gentlemen whose wisdom has discovered the soul to be composed of cellular tissue, and has shut up patriotism in a membrane.”

The Catholics also act with energy in the strength of their (for the most part passive) resistance to an oppressive and unjust power, whose hypocritical excuses render it as contemptible as its tyranny makes it odious in the eyes of every upright man, whether Catholic or Protestant.

“From a distance,” says M. Tissot, “it might be easy to deceive one’s self into a doubt as to the dangerous nature of so many alarming symptoms, but on the spot I know for a certainty that an attentive listener cannot fail to hear the pulsations of a nation disturbed to its very depths, and ill at ease. Is it,” he asks, “as a means of escape from impending dangers, and to prepare the minds of the people for a skilful diversion, that the parliamentary orators and the official Prussian press keep them in a continual ferment of warlike excitement, and appear to regret the milliards [Pg 775] left behind on the banks of the Rhone and the Garonne? This is the opinion of thoughtful minds, for it is on the field of battle only that a reconciliation between the Catholics and their adversaries can be expected to take place.”

Before visiting the imperial capital, the traveller on whose work the present observations are principally based begins with the southern states, “being desirous of interrogating those ancient provinces which have sacrificed their autonomy to a gust of glory, and of asking if the mess of pottage is still savory, or whether, awakening from recent illusions, there is not some regret for the good old times.”

After visiting Ulm, with its enormously increased fortifications; Stuttgart, the sunny capital of Würtemberg; and the little university town of Heidelberg—respecting all which places M. Tissot has much to say—the impression resulting from his observations is that South Germany was duped and alarmed into submitting to Prussia. With regard to Frankfort, no longer the free city of past times, his conviction is that the real population, quite as much as that of Metz and Strassburg, detests the sight of the spiked helmets and the sound of the Prussian fifes and drums (the latter shaped like small saucepans), constantly passing through the streets.

The particulars of the Prussian occupation of this city in 1866 are still fresh in the memory of its inhabitants. “The history of those days,” M. Tissot tells us, “has never been written.” We will give in his own words the account he received from an eye-witness:

“On the 6th of July, the Senate announced to the townspeople the impending entry of the Prussians, ‘whose good discipline was a sure guarantee that no one would be exposed to inconvenience.’

“In spite, however, of this ‘good discipline,’ all the banking-houses hastened to place themselves under the protection of the foreign consuls, and hoisted American, English, French, or Swiss colors. The streets were as deserted as a cemetery.

“The Prussians did not arrive until nine in the evening, when they made a triumphal entry. At their head, with his sword drawn, rode General Vogel von Falkenstein; music played, drums beat; there was noise enough to wake the dead. Billeting tickets had been prepared for this army of invaders, who, however, preferred to select their own quarters. The troops divided into squadrons of 50, 70, 100, or 150 men, and, led by their officers, forced their way into houses of good appearance. The inmates, who had, in some cases, retired for the night, ran bewildered through their rooms. The officers, finding ordinary candles on the tables, held their pistols at the throats of the women, and ordered them to bring wax-lights. But their first care was to demand the keys of the cellar, after which they passed the night in drinking the best wines, making especial havoc among the champagne.

“Next day, General Vogel von Falkenstein, surnamed Vogel von Raubenstein, or the bird of prey, caused to be read and posted up in the streets a proclamation establishing the state of siege. He suppressed all the newspapers, prohibited all private réunions, and announced moreover a long list of requisitions.

“On the 18th of July, General von Falkenstein, who the day before had compelled the town of Frankfort to purchase from the contractor of the Prussian army many thousands of cigars, now demanded that there should be delivered to him 60,000 ‘good pairs of shoes,’ 300 ‘good saddle-horses,’ and a year’s pay for his soldiers—promising, in return, to make no other requisition upon the inhabitants.… On the 19th they brought him six millions of florins; but as, in the course of that same evening, General von Falkenstein was called to command elsewhere, the Senate received anew, on the morning of the 20th, a note expressed as follows:

“‘Messieurs the senators of the city of Frankfort are informed that their town [Pg 776] is laid under a contribution of war for the amount of twenty-five millions of florins, payable within twenty four hours.

“‘Manteuffel.

“‘Headquarters, Frankfort, July 30, 1866.’”

“Three of the principal bankers of Frankfort were immediately delegated to present themselves before General Manteuffel, to remind him of the promises given by his predecessor, and to entreat him to withdraw this fresh imposition. All that they obtained was a delay of three times twenty-four hours.

“‘I know,’ said Manteuffel to them, ‘that I shall be compared to the Duke of Alva, but I am only here to execute the orders of my superiors.’

“‘And what shall you do if, between now and Sunday, we have not paid?’ asked a member of the deputation—‘you will not——?’

“‘I read the word on your lips,’ rejoined the General; ‘alas! yes, I shall give up the town to pillage.’

“‘In that case, why do you not at once, like Nero, set fire to the four corners of Frankfort?’

“To this sally General Manteuffel contented himself by answering: ‘Rome arose only more fair from her ashes.’[201]

“Before quitting the General, the deputation asked whether this imposition would be the last.

“‘On my part, yes; I give you my word of honor for it; but another general may come and replace me, with orders of which I know nothing.’

“The threat of the pillage and bombardment of the city spread with the rapidity of lightning; the burghers and bankers contributed together to pay the ransom.

“Five days later, General de Roeder sent for the President of the Chamber of Commerce, to whom he read the following telegram, which he had just received from M. von Bismarck:

“‘Since the measures hitherto taken have not been found sufficient to obtain their object, close, from this evening, all the telegraph and post-offices, the hotels, inns, and all public establishments; prohibit the entry into the town of any persons, and of every kind of merchandise.’

“These few facts, selected from innumerable others of a similar kind, and which are of warranted authenticity, are sufficiently edifying.”

We may add, that with memories like the foregoing we cannot wonder that Frankfort, once the free, is now the irreconcilable, city.

But we hasten on to glance at the capital, where, more plainly than anywhere else, may be seen the impress of events more recent still. Space fails us to do more than merely refer to the descriptions given of the material city, its public buildings, its homely palace, its long, monotonous lines of streets, “ruled straight by the cane of the corporal-king,” and built right and left of the pestiferous Spree; the colossal arsenal, piled with the captured arms of France, and which is to Berlin what their cathedral is to other European cities. Leaving all this, and much besides, we will briefly consider the effects of the late war and of the milliards of France upon the people of Germany.

On entering Berlin the visitor, as he leaves the railway carriage, is greeted by the sight of a large placard posted up at the four corners of the station, and bearing the appropriate warning, “Beware of Thieves.” This is a small indication of a momentous fact; for if, from her very beginning, Prussia has chosen Mars for her tutelar divinity, her worship of Mercury since the last war has left him but a divided throne.[202]

Like the arsenal, the Bourse sums up the recent history of Prussia. The greed of gain has in fact taken entire possession of the people, and in no other European city is covetousness so ferocious or the thirst for gold so ardent as in the Prussian capital. Princes, ministers of state, and high functionaries of [Pg 777] the crown meditate financial combinations, and launch into speculative investments, from which they intend to secure large profits; tradespeople and manufacturers invent skilful falsifications, whether in figures or in merchandise; students of the university arrange lotteries—all, great and small, rich and poor, are alike in search of prey.

In a pamhlet published by Herr Diest-Haber, under the characteristic title of Plutocracy and Socialism (“Geldmacht und Socialismus”) are to be found revelations which are anything but edifying, and supported by proofs, respecting the more than questionable probity of certain ministers of high position in the state. Gustaf Freitag, also, wrote in 1872: “Great evils have resulted to us from victory. The honor and honesty of the capital have greatly suffered. Every one is possessed by a senseless passion for gain: princes, generals, men in high administrative positions, all are playing an unbridled game, preying on the confidence of small capitalists, and abusing their position to make large fortunes. The evil has spread like fire; and at the sight of this widely extended corruption it is impossible not to fear for the future.”

The army is also tainted. In 1873, an aid-de-camp of a small German prince, whose services in the war had brought him nothing, thought well to indemnify himself, and by forging his master’s signature pocketed the sum of 300,000 thalers from the coffers of the state.

But the example is set in high quarters, where in everything might is made to overrule right. Could it be expected that so many thrones confiscated, without a thought of justice; so many provinces seized, to form the lion’s share; so complete an overthrow of the most ordinary moral principles; treaties torn up like false bank-notes; a policy at the same time so crafty and audacious, could fail to find sedulous imitators in a people naturally prone to rapine?

The arrival of the five milliards upset the equilibrium of the German brain. Every form of speculation sprang from the ground like fungi after a shower; everything—breweries, grocery companies, streets, roads, canals—was parcelled out in shares. Houses were sold at the exchange, and in the course of two hours had five or six times changed their owner. In eight months, the price of tenements was doubled; fifty or sixty persons would dispute the possession of a garret. In 1872, the average number of persons inhabiting a house of three or four stories (the usual height in Berlin) was from fifty-five to sixty-five, or ten persons to a room. Masons made fortunes, worked ten hours, went in a cab from the stone-yard to the restaurants, and drank champagne in beer-glasses. A simple brick-and-mortar carrier earned five thalers a day; and small bankers’ clerks, at the present time out of situation and shoe-leather, paraded in white kid gloves in the first boxes of the theatre—not to speak of far worse extravagances still. Societies of share venders fiercely quarrelled with each other over the purchase of feudal castles in the neighborhood, which were to be transformed into casinos on a large scale, with theatre in the open air, artificial lakes and mountains, Swiss dairies, and games for every taste. But this dream of the Thousand-and-one Nights did not last a year. The temples of pleasure are bankrupt, [Pg 778] and “the police have seized Cupid’s quiver.” The whole of Germany—“the nation of thinkers,” as her philosophers love to call her—was dazzled by the deceitful mirage, and so fierce was the eagerness for gain that at one time it was scarcely prudent to go to the exchange without a revolver. Fights were of constant occurrence, and ardent speculators would collar each other like stable-boys.[203] Before the close of 1872, nearly eight hundred and fifty different shareholding investments had sprung up. The middle classes, the representatives of honest and laborious industry, have been the principal victims of these hollow speculations; and in a public report made by the Governor of the Bank of Prussia, January 1, 1873, it was stated that in the course of two years several millions of thalers had been extorted by unscrupulous adventurers from the credulous public.

In various ways it is evident that, if France paid dearly for her defeat, Germany is paying far more dearly for her glory, besides having so mismanaged matters that peace to her is more costly than war. Herr Schorlemer-Ast lately declared in the Reichstag that the financial burdens of the empire, from her system of complete and permanent armament, are crushing all classes. “The milliards,” he says, “that we have received are already converted into fortresses, ships-of-war, Mauser rifles, and cannon; the military budget has this year increased by nineteen millions of marks, … and into this budget we cast all our resources, all our reserves, all our savings, but never can we meet its demands; and thus the land becomes more and more impoverished.” There is another method, also, by which the “eminently moral” government of the Emperor seeks to increase its resources, and this is by lotteries. A Protestant minister observing to his majesty that these lotteries were a very bad example, the latter replied, “You are mistaken; they are instituted to punish already on earth the cupidity of my people: the great prize is never drawn.”

Fresh imposts are also created; but the time for these is scarcely the present, when, according to the testimony of Germans themselves, commerce languishes, the manufacturing interest is passing through a crisis of which it is impossible to foresee the end, and on all sides arise murmurs and complaints. And yet we hear of proposals like that of Herr Camphausen in the Reichstag, namely, to “demand more labor from the artisan and pay him less for it.” A profitable subject, truly, for communist declamation must this be; and well might Bebel, the notorious socialist of Leipzig, say, “Prussia is doing our work for us; we need but fold our arms and wait,” and his colleague, Liebknecht, declare that “M. de Bismarck has done more for the radical interest than five socialist ministers could have done. The people see with bitterness how little has been gained by sacrifices so great. The expense of living has doubled since the war, but the salaries have not increased in proportion.… In the manufacturing districts there is fearful distress.… Families of five or six persons obliged to starve on a thaler a week! See what the milliards have done for us! No wonder that month after month sees ten or fifteen [Pg 779] thousand Germans emigrate to other lands.”

We pass over the dark portraiture of “misery and crime” in Berlin, and also the information respecting the reptile agency of the official press, the political dye-house of the empire, whose business it is to color all communications with the hue required by the prime minister. Nor have we space to dwell on the state of education in Prussia, which is far behind the rest of Germany,[204] nor the falsification of history and even geography in its educational books. We cannot, however, forbear producing the lesson with which the studies of the day begin in the primary schools.

The master holds up before his pupils the Emperor’s portrait, asking, “Who is this?”

Making a reverential bow, they answer, “His majesty the Emperor.”

“What do we owe to him?” resumes the teacher, in a grave and impressive tone.

“We owe him obedience, fidelity, and respect; we owe him all that we have and all that we possess.”

Would any child, unless a German or a Russian, find its loyalty increased after two or three weeks of this daily exercise? We doubt it.

The Catholic clergy proving a hindrance to the government in the application of its new catechism, the law on secular instruction was passed to force them out of the schools: the state, henceforth sole master, can form at the will of Cæsar, not Christians, but soldiers or slaves, which are more in accordance with its taste—all that is taught being made to converge to the one end of blind and absolute submission to secular power.

God being set aside to make way for the Emperor and his Church trampled under foot for the good pleasure of the prime minister, we or our children may see the fulfilment of the prediction written thirty or forty years ago by Heinrich Heine, in which, after announcing the reconstitution of the Germanic Empire, he says: “The Empire will hasten to its fall; and this catastrophe will be the result of a political and social revolution, brought about by German philosophers and thinkers. The Kantists have already torn up the last fibres of the past, the Fichteans will come in turn, whose fanaticism will be mastered neither by fear nor instinct. The most of all to be dreaded will be the philosophers of nature, the communists, who will place themselves in communication with the primitive forces of the earth, and evoke the traditions of the Germanic pantheism. Then will these three choirs intone a revolutionary chant at which the land will tremble, and there will be enacted in Germany a drama in comparison to which the French Revolution shall have been but an idyl.”

[199] Voyage au Pays des Milliards. V. Tissot. Paris: Dentu.

[200] He who has not seen Cologne, has not seen Germany.

[201] “I have this dialogue from one who was present.”—M. Tissot.

[202] M. Tissot’s book contains some painful pages having relation to the votaries of Venus also, to which we need do no more than allude.

[203] The Tribune for August 1, 1872, has the following: “Never has the liquidation been so quiet as to-day. Not a single box on the ear was given in full exchange, nor had the syndic to interfere on account of abusive language.”

[204] “Prussia is of all Germany the country which contains the largest number of persons unable to read and write,” is the testimony of Herr Karl Vogt.

[Pg 780]

A QUAINT OLD STUDIO IN ROME, A QUEER OLD PAINTER, AND A LOVELY PICTURE

The exterior does not indicate the remotest relationship with a studio. I must have misunderstood the père’s directions. I wish these artists would show some consideration for errant humanity, and number their quarters. Now, that wall which begins on the street and backs in behind the rubbish-pile might pass for a parapet but for the green door with a bell-rope dangling from the upper panel, which compromises its military character at once. It might pass for a convent wall. Indeed, the little church which seems to have been pushed entire right out of the farther end might be accepted as a very respectable declaration to that effect. But a more accurate observation of the premises is fraught with diffidence in the latter conjecture. A portion of an unpretentious dwelling-house, which is incorporated with that part of the wall abutting on the Via del Colosseo, and the appearance at one of the windows of a fossilized old woman who proceeds to hang out linen, dispel effectually the monastic probability intimated above. But why indulge in speculations? The most summary, and after all most rational, way of solving my doubts is to approach the green door, pull the bell-cord, enter, and, si monumentum quæris, circumspice. Pulling the bell-rope produced an inquiring bark from a dog within. Then the door opened slowly, and just wide enough to admit a visiting card, insinuated edgeways. But, as if not liking my appearance, it closed with a short but very decisive slam. I took a short survey of my person, with the view of assuring myself that there was nothing in my dress or carriage which would excite a suspicion bearing reference to burglary. I had just come to a conclusion very flattering to my integrity, when a shrill female voice screamed from across the way, “Tira! spingi!”—Pull! push! I turned my immediate attention to the practical application of these laconic instructions. Nothing to pull but the bell-rope, nothing to push but the door. Another tug at the hemp, a canine response from within, the door opened as before, I pushed, entered, and the slamming process was repeated. I turned around with the view of confronting the slammer—a rope, a pulley, and a weight. He has a taste for mechanics, thought I. At the top of a few steps I saw a friendly-looking house-dog, who sniffed apologetically, and then whisked himself about, as if expressing a hearty welcome. If I had not had positive reason afterwards to arrogate to myself this compliment, I should have gone away with the conviction that the dog sniffed with satisfaction because the mingled odor of lemon, of orange, and of a hundred fragrant flowers which floated on the air was inexpressibly gratifying. I found myself in a quadrangular enclosure not unlike the cloister of a convent. The central plot was planted with orange and lemon trees, and with every kind of vegetable. It only lacked the traditional well in the centre, with the iron-bound bucket resting [Pg 781] on the edge, and the iron rods for pulley, wrought into the form of a cross, to make it a perfect little cloister. ‘Tis true that the resemblance might be impaired by the large chicken-coop in the corner, which emitted a chorus of cackling suggestive of a prosperous barnyard. But a flourishing coop is no contemptible accessory to the effects of a religious community; and as for its encumbering the cloister, that is very easily explained. The consideration of the civil power for religious communities has disencumbered them of all their property outside the walls, and even extended itself to everything within that is worth taking care of. A marble pavement of variegated pieces, formed into mosaics of no definable pattern, extends around the garden. The walls of the house are studded with fragments of sarcophagi and frieze-work—here the hand of a child, there a lion’s head, yonder a foot—while these are interspersed with lamps of terra-cotta, such as are found in the Catacombs; and, high above all, a row of Roman vases let into the wall as far as the neck gives it the appearance of a battery of cannon. The well, which, sunk in the centre of the garden, would have completed the picture of a cloister, is over against the wall. An attempt had been made to apply a fly-wheel and a crank, with some other complicated machinery of ropes and pulleys, to the process of drawing water, but evidently didn’t approach a success, as the crank is rusty and the rope frayed with age and exposure. On the other side of the garden stands a large cistern of water literally alive with gold-fish. The house itself is built around the garden, save the portion enclosed by the wall. It is but one story high generally. It seems, however, that the builder, some time after the completion of the lower story, wanted to try the effect of another story; so, with an utter disregard of architectural designs and proportions, he raised the four walls at the fenestral apertures of which the fossil appeared. I ascertained afterwards that this addition forms the “apartments” of her antiquity. On the corner diagonally opposite arises a similar portion, which is reached by stairs on the outside—evidently the residence of the lord of the premises. A railing extends around the roof, while vines on trailers and a great fig-tree, which towers out of the garden and up to the roof, give the establishment quite an Oriental aspect. We only want a patriarch taking his evening promenade on the roof, and we have Syria in the shadow of the Colosseum. While I was contemplating all this the dog barked impatiently, ran ahead to an open door underneath a pent roof, and then trotted back, giving me to understand that he was very impatient to usher me in there. A Maltese cat appeared on the scene, walked furtively around me, inspected me from head to foot, and finally came to a halt in front of me and fixed his great, amber eyes upon me with an inquiring look, as which should say, “Are your intentions peaceful?” My addressing him by the name of “puss” seemed to satisfy him, and he trotted on with the dog.

The first object which met my gaze as I entered the door caused me to start back with a shudder; for I was not prepared for such a sight. On a table, stretched at full length, lay a human skeleton, with the head turned towards the door. It seemed to have taken that position of itself, with a view of seeing who passed in and out. The floor was littered with cartoons and bits of old lumber. [Pg 782] In a corner stood an ancient-looking painting of a skeleton seated in a meditative attitude—one bony leg crossed on the other, the elbow planted on the knee, and the chin resting on the hand. It had not the appearance of a caricature, for the lipless mouth and fleshless jaws wore a solemn and awful expression, which the most intemperate and frivolous fancy could not associate with the ridiculous. The walls, too, were covered with cartoons of different sizes, some of which were very beautiful. One especially struck me with admiration. It represented the Eternal Father gazing out into the chaotic darkness which preceded the great act of volition, “Fiat lux.” The perfection of the actus purus and existentia, which are identical in God, was powerfully expressed in the intensely active expression of the eyes and forehead. While all this occurred to me, a consciousness of the spirit of love, which mellowed and softened the sternness of that face, affected me. Passing another door, I found myself in a large room painted a Pompeian red. My first impression was that I had walked into the laboratory of an alchemist—a very justifiable impression. A long table in the middle of the room was crowded with vials of all sizes and every variety of form, containing liquids of the strangest colors. Crucibles, mortars, glass tubes, bellows, scales, and spirit-lamps were scattered over the table confusedly. A row of shelves garnished one of the walls, and upon them were arranged, in something like order, busts of different sizes and casts in plaster of arms, legs, feet, and hands. From the beams of the ceiling dangled a number of little cherubs of Berninian propensities—that is to say, they were very plump, very short, and kicked and doubled themselves up into the most impossible attitudes for little fellows of their exaggerated proportions. These, coupled with several chunks of half-wrought clay tumbled promiscuously into one corner, and a number of modelling tools, a sponge, and an elevated stool, would perhaps incline the visitor to the belief that he was in the sanctum of a sculptor. The other three walls were covered with pictures representing a variety of subjects, sacred and profane. Here a muscular, sightless Samson coped with the pillars of the temple of the Philistines, to the seemingly intense interest of a demure cardinal on the opposite wall. There Justice poised her scales in front of a sketch, which the most unpractised eye would have no difficulty in recognizing as the work of Fra Angelico, portraying the Last Judgment. The activity of the devils as they scourged the damned into the bottomless pit is striking. Farther on a “Battle of the Centaurs” afforded an interesting anatomical study. But the sweetest picture of all was a little one not over a foot square, which represented with vivid simplicity the dispute between the two hermits, St. Paul and St. Anthony. The latter holds up one hand argumentatively, and points with the other to the untouched loaf, while his earnest face seems to say: “Paul, take up the loaf and break it.” Paul looks respectful, but not overcome. He leans upon his long staff with both hands, and contemplates the loaf with a face betokening his resolution not to touch it, at least until more conclusive arguments be adduced; and, after all, it is a quiet, domestic sort of a [Pg 783] picture. Beside this was another of about the same dimensions—one that pleased the eye not so much as the heart. It was St. Jerome in the wilderness. The crucifix is suspended high upon a thin sapling, and the great doctor kneels off at a distance, and prays with his hands joined before his breast. It is one of those prayerful pictures which recall Fra Bartolomeo, but the coloring was Timoteo Vite’s, and none else’s. In the corner of the room nearest the window I observed a ladder, made of iron bars, fastened into the wall, which terminated in a trap-door in the ceiling. At the foot of this ladder, right under the window, stood what seemed to be a sedan-chair. It was covered on all sides with oilcloth turned wrongside out. Before this chair stood an easel, on the easel a small picture, which I perceived was being touched by a brush; and I observed, furthermore, that the brush was manipulated by a hand of powerful proportions, such a hand as would have been enough of itself to build up that strange old house from the foundation-stone. Then a man’s head, adorned with gray locks and an old cap with a pair of turned-up flaps, emerged from the darkness, and I saw a pair of dark, bright, benevolent eyes smiling up at me. The face was bronzed, the beard gray and not heavy, but growing in a heavy instalment around the mouth and chin, then light on the under jaws, and developing into a bushy abundance in the direction of the ears. It was a pleasant, happy face, still possessing the ingenuous expression of the happy boy. As he worked himself out of the nook in which he was ensconced, and stood up to welcome me, giving me at the same time a grip of that powerful hand which I associated above with the construction of the house, but which then referred me to a blacksmith-shop, I had an opportunity of surveying his figure.

I should have said, rather, I saw an old dressing-gown of brown stuff which buttoned closely at the chin, was tied around him with a rope, and terminated in a pair of heavy brogans. I introduced myself by stating that the père had requested me to call and see how the picture was doing. “Ah! there it is,” said the old man, and a smile of happy excitement mantled upon his face as he looked at the little picture on the easel, La Notte del Correggio. He gazed more intently than before, and then sank down quietly on one knee and scanned the face of the kneeling Virgin Mother, in whose face is reflected that wonderful intense light which concentrated in the face of the Child, as if desirous of seeing underneath the coloring. “The spirit of Correggio is here,” continued he in a musing strain; “no man living possessed his secret of blending colors into one another. I will not touch the face of the Child.”

“Then you believe,” said I, “that this is an original?”

“I feel it,” added he warmly. “Correggio may repeat himself, but he cannot be copied, at least in two pictures, his Giorno and his Notte. The dominating, character of Correggio’s paintings in oil, that something which proclaims him on the instant, is the coloring, penetrating and brilliant as enamelling—of such a kind that the lights assume an indefinable splendor, the shadows have a depth and transparency which no painter, and much less a copyist, ever produced, save Correggio. There”—and he arose and drew the curtain over [Pg 784] the window, until the room was nearly dark—“you need no light to see that picture; it has its own light in the divinity which is effulgent from the face of the Infant. Tell me the copyist who effected this, and I will venerate him as Correggio’s other self.”

A word of explanation is necessary here. The Notte is a picture representing the Nativity. The Child is in the arms of the kneeling Mother. “The radiant Infant, and the Mother who holds him, are lost in the splendor which has guided the distant shepherds. A maiden on one side, and a beautiful youth on the other, who serves as a contrast to an old shepherd, receive the full light, which seems to dazzle their eyes; while angels hovering above appear in a softened radiance. A little farther back Joseph is employed with his ass, and in the background are more shepherds with their flocks. Morning breaks in the horizon. An ethereal light breaks through the whole picture, and leaves only so much of the outline and substance of the forms apparent as is necessary to enable the eye to distinguish objects.” This picture is at present in the gallery of Dresden, and the foregoing is the description of it given by Kugler. The same writer adds in a note: “Smaller representations of this subject, with similar motives and treated in the same manner as the Dresden picture, exist in various places. An excellent little picture of the kind is in the Berlin museum, No. 223, and is there ascribed to the school of Correggio.” That Correggio himself reproduced smaller representations of this scene, preserving only the three prominent figures of the Infant, the Mother, and St. Joseph, is notorious. It was a favorite subject of the great master’s, as is evident in the very counterpart of the Notte, because of its wonderful light—St. Jerome, or Giorno—“Day.” Coindet, in his Histoire de la Peinture en Italie, speaking of the Notte, says that, on account of the celestial light which emanates from the divine Child, the picture “has been called ‘Night,’ just as the St. Jerome is often called ‘Day,’ by the Italians, who thus express the striking light of that picture. Is it necessary to say that that light is as harmonious as it is brilliant, and that the celebrity of those two pictures, ‘Night’ and ‘Day,’ is due above all to the perfection of the chiaroscuro?”

The picture which the old man was restoring is one of the “smaller representations” spoken of by Kugler. It required no restoration as far as the coloring was concerned. That was deep and brilliant as ever. Not the lights but the shadows needed retouching, and the old man showed himself a good artist, as well as a reverent admirer, when he said he would not touch the face of the Child. The wonderful durability of the coloring, which every one knows to be one of the grand characteristics of Correggio’s productions, is admirable in the little picture. M. Coindet says that frequent analyses of some of Correggio’s paintings, with the view of discovering the secret of this durability, have produced results more curious than useful. Upon the chalk, he says, the artist appeared to have laid a surface of prepared oil, which then received a thick mixture of colors, in which the ingredients were two-thirds of oil and one of varnish; that the colors seemed to have been very choice, and particularly purified from all kinds of salts, which, in process of time, eat and destroy the picture; and that the before-mentioned use [Pg 785] of prepared oil must have greatly contributed to this purification by absorbing the saline particles. It is, moreover, commonly believed that Correggio adopted the method of heating his pictures either in the sun or at the fire, in order that the colors might become, as it were, interfused, and equalized in such a way as to produce the effect of having been poured rather than laid on. Of that lucid appearance which, though so beautiful, does not reflect objects, and of the solidity of the surface, equal to the Greek pictures, Lomazzo says that it must have been obtained by some strong varnish unknown to the Flemish painters themselves, who prepared it of equal clearness and liveliness, but not of equal strength. The history of the little picture in question is not known to any precision. It was brought to Rome from Madrid by the late Cardinal Barili, who received it as a present from a Spanish nobleman while he was nuncio to the court of Madrid. After the death of the cardinal it was exposed for sale with many other pictures, mostly of indifferent merit. The probabilities are that it would have fallen into the hands of some son of Jewry, and disappeared, perhaps for ever, into a dark and dingy lumberroom of the Ghetto. A better fate was in store for the gem. The père saw it, admired it, purchased it, and rested not until he had placed it in the hands of the venerable artist in the quaint old studio, of whom no better eulogium can be pronounced than that implied by the members of the Academy of St. Luke, who, having been requested by Prince Borghese to hold a consultation on the restoration of Raphael’s “Deposition,” unanimously chose the old man to do it. He has since been entrusted with the delicate and important commission of restoring the principal pictures in the gallery of the Vatican. That he did justice to the little Notte requires no proof. He possesses the necessary requisites for such a task—the skill of an artist, the love of an artist, and the humility of an artist. The picture is now in New York City, and, as an old painter once said laconically, in pronouncing his opinion on a painting, “ex ipsa loquitur”—it speaks of itself. But I have left the old man standing outside the parenthesis, palette in hand, and a smile irradiating his countenance which would be the instant destruction of legions of blue fits. He saw me look inquiringly at the prayerful St. Jerome, and divined my desire of knowing something, about it.

“Painted by Timoteo Vite,” said he, “and I’m to copy it for the good père and send it off to America. Going to be in good company, too!” And he pointed his thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the lightsome “Night.”

Then I turned towards the “Dispute of the Hermits.”

“That was an effort of mine when I was eighteen. I never thought it would go to the New World when I worked at it.”

Laying down the palette, he asked me if I wished to walk around the house. I was only too glad of the invitation. As we passed out of the door he pointed towards the ladder in the corner, and said laughingly:

“Jacob’s ladder when it rains; only there are no angels ascending and descending. My room is above—an old man’s contrivance.”

As we walked up on the roof, he narrated with the complacency of a little boy how he built the house himself; how he was somewhat discouraged [Pg 786] in digging the foundation when the folks laughed at him; how he built the outside wall first, to hide himself from the observation of the passers-by, and after that he got along finely. At this juncture I stopped to examine a large cage on the roof. It contained several white mice.

“They are pleasant little fellows, especially when the moon shines,” said my host, and, stooping down, he opened the little door, whereat several of the little creatures ran out into his hand.

Replacing them with some difficulty—for they seemed reluctant to be shut up again—we went down the stairway and over to the part of the building opposite the studio. As we passed the door I looked in again at the grim skeleton, and then turned away quickly. But he laid his hand gently on my shoulder, and said:

“You young people don’t like the sight of skeletons, because they tell an unpleasant truth very plainly. I call that skeleton the Naked Truth; it’s a splendid antidote against a disease called pride.”

As we passed the chicken-coop he had to caress a few favorite bantlings. Then came an old storeroom, then a carpenter-shop, then a blacksmith-shop, where he told me he did all his own carpentering and smithing; then a hole in the wall containing a wheelbarrow, pickaxes, and spades, with which he amused himself in the evening, as, indeed, the lovely little garden attested. The gold-fish in the cistern seemed to be his especial favorites. When he dipped his hand in the water they all flocked around and nibbled it vigorously. Nor did they evince the slightest disinclination to be caught. I remarked that the cistern was large enough to bathe in.

“Precisely,” he answered; “I made it for that purpose—the fish were a second thought. I learned to swim in there. It is very pleasant on a warm evening.”

I asked him how long he labored in building up his little home.

“Seven years, like Jacob; only the patriarch had the advantage of me there, too—he got a Rachel in the end, and I have only—” He paused and looked about him. The friendly dog and cat had appeared on the scene, a hen began to cackle boisterously, which left no doubt in the minds of the neighbors that the great feat of laying an egg had just been achieved. The little shadow which saddened his face for a moment passed away in an instant, and he completed the sentence—“this live-stock.”

“And your art,” I subjoined.

“And my art,” he admitted pleasantly. “Say,” he added, as he saw me moving towards the steps which led down to the garden door, “do you think the good père would like to sell that picture?”

I thought not—I was sure he would not; and, with a promise to come and see him often, I left him. I have gone to the old studio repeatedly since, and each visit has been a new confirmation of my first impression—that he was the happiest old artist in the Eternal City.

[Pg 787]

LETTERS OF A YOUNG IRISHWOMAN TO HER SISTER.

(FROM THE FRENCH.)

June 13.

What a lovely day, my sister! Everything is singing, around and within me; my mother is making rapid progress in her convalescence. Baby has five double teeth, and Lucy is radiant; Adrien, Gertrude, and Hélène left us this morning to be present at the marriage of which I have already told you; René and his brothers are gone out; Berthe and all the darlings in the country; Lucy is going out, and your Georgina is by the side of the reclining-chair. Poor mother! how sweet it is to watch her revive. Johanna’s Bengalese birds, brought hither to enliven our dear invalid, are hopping about gaily in their gilded cage; my beautiful exotics are flowering in the jardinière; everything is living, animated, radiant. My mother can now converse; all her wishes are now for her complete recovery, that the two sisters may meet. But first we shall fulfil our vow, and go to tread the holy mountain upon which the Blessed Virgin Mary placed her heavenly foot, and hang our ex voto in the beloved sanctuary. To revisit La Salette without you, my Kate, will be to me both sweet and bitter.

Hélène has no secrets from me; she permits me to read her journal—pious effusions of a soul belonging wholly to God. If I did not fear to be indiscreet, I would transcribe for you these pages, all palpitating with divine love.

Yesterday I took all the small population to the fair. The displays in the open air, under gigantic chestnut-trees, made them wild with delight, but Aunt Georgina willingly shut her eyes and ears. In the evening there is so much noise and animation, it rather reminds one of Vanity Fair. How sweet is solitude when one returns! Kate, as time goes on, the more my happiness increases in solidity and depth. René appears to me still more attractive, more gentle, good, and handsome than ever. I fear the future, since happiness is an exception.

Margaret tells me to-day of her arrival in Paris; you will see her before I do. “I can but bless God,” she writes, “for having mingled wormwood with the honey of my golden cup; I should have loved earth too well.” Poor Margaret! I persist in my opinion that she is mistaken, and that her imagination deceives her. Can you imagine what a whole life would be without sunshine and without love?

Mme. de T—— has long been insisting that I should consent to set out with René, but I should not forgive myself if I were to leave her side, feeling that I am necessary to her. It fatigues her to speak, and I understand her look. How good is God to have given me another mother! Lucy is going to spend two months with hers. Her communicative gaiety, her cheerful spirit, and her lively chatter make her valuable to us, not to speak of [Pg 788] her excellent qualities. To amuse our beloved invalid we got up a little drama yesterday, and some tableaux vivants. It was superb.

Here I have been interrupted to give my mother some music. I played her the Symphony in La.

And hereupon, dear Kate, I make you my best curtsy, and hasten away to René.

June 16.

Thanks to “this ingenious art of painting speech and speaking to the eye,” we already know that Hélène has apparently enjoyed herself very much on her last appearance in the world. Adrien and Gertrude have despatched quite a volume to my mother. Gertrude will carefully keep the white and vapory toilette of her daughter, who had, she says, a charming expression, like that of an exiled angel, in those drawing-rooms where she was the admired of every eye. They announced their return for the 18th. It seems to us all as if they had been absent for months. Separations, departures—these are the real crosses of life.

Read the Beatitudes, by Mgr. Landriot. It is very fine, this eloquent commentary on the magnificent words of our Saviour. The beati qui lugent too often finds its application.

The last four days I have been to Hélène’s paralytic. The poor woman was quite confused at my eagerness, while I was so happy to wait upon her that I would willingly have done so on my knees. My charities will not be rewarded in heaven; I have too much sense of pleasure in them, too much enjoyment. God is present to me in the poor. “May God bless you, my ladies!” This is the most delightful adieu I have ever heard.

René, to whom I have given a detailed account of my morning, says that he should be curious to see me doing the house-work for my good old woman. I have probably done it very badly, but then I shall soon become used to it. Benoni keeps his sweetest smiles for me, and I am teaching him your name. A thought of Mgr. Dupanloup often comes into my mind: “The borders of the Ganges, which send us Oriental pearls, have not given us simplicity; I have found it in the heart of a child.” Picciola is rich in it—in this sweet and charming simplicity which is the sister of innocence. “Would you not consent to give her to me?” I said yesterday to Berthe. This morning the pretty dove came leaping into my room, exclaiming, “Now I have two mammas! Good-morning, mamma!”

Adieu for the present, my sweet one.

20.

Dearest, we set off to-morrow. My mother declares that she will not be completely cured except at La Salette. Hélène is enthusiastic about it. What a festival! What joy!

I am pressed for time. We are packing up. All is commotion; every one coming and going; everybody calling everybody else. Picciola runs from room to room with outstretched hands, offering her services. I send you a kiss. Unite yourself to us. René will write to you when we are in the train; an impossibility to me. I shall pray for Ireland.

La Salette, June 20.

Why cannot we die here, dear Kate? It is truly the vestibule of heaven. I have no need to describe to you the landscape, the chapel, my emotion on finding myself [Pg 789] again in the same place where we had prayed together so much. My mother is making wonderful progress, and would fain not set out again any more. René, to whom I had described it all, assures me that the reality surpasses my poetic pictures. How sweet and good a thing it is to pray together, and to be at the very well-spring of graces! Hélène is overflowing with joy. Adrien and Gertrude weep no more.… And we are soon to see and embrace you again, to spend a month near to you. I think we shall be in Paris on the 12th of July. Dearest Kate, I regret you here! Oh! the inconstancy of my poor heart, so happy to give up to God the better part of itself, and then desiring to take it back again. The gifts of the Lord alone are without repentance. O sweet, delightful, perfect friend! nothing can separate our souls, always fraternally united in the adorable Heart which gave itself for us.

La Salette! La Salette! To say to one’s self that here, where we tread, Mary has passed; that her voice, more melodious than all the harps of Eden, has been heard upon these heights; that this sky has beheld her tears, her propitiatory and beloved tears, mysterious pearls which should be gathered up by a seraph; to pray here, where the Mother of the Saviour has herself taught prayer; oh! what felicity: Ecce quam bonum et quam jucundum habitare fratres in unum! Beloved, I have prayed for you, and soon now I shall see you. “Dear Georgina,” my mother said to me yesterday, “may God reward you for the sacrifice you have made for me!” Between this super-excellent mother, René, Hélène, and myself there passes a continual interchange of thoughts and feelings, and I could even say amongst us all.

Yours now and always, my sister.

* * * * *

August 12, 1867.

What, already? so soon? and we must resume our correspondence! Again I have quitted you, my Kate, my visible angel guardian … Hélène is also gone. The heavenly Spouse has placed in his own garden this delicate and charming flower, for which this world had no dew that was pure enough. “Let us be saints,” she writes to me; “it is only at this price that we may purchase heaven.” And I answer her: “It is also only at this price that this life is endurable; that the departures, the separations, the pain of absence, too sensible an image of death, can be courageously accepted.” Dear Kate, where shall we find each other now? May God protect you! Brittany enchants me. I walk along the beach; make people tell me all the legends of the country; hunt with René; but most often slip away into the little village church, or into the chapel of the château. We have an organ, and consequently superb festivals. Our almoner is a college friend of my brother’s; he has been kind enough to undertake Arthur’s education for a time, and we are all very glad of this arrangement; this good abbé is really a learned man; the little girls are profiting largely by his stores of information, and we are busy with collections, botany, maps, etc. This savant is moreover a traveller: he is lately returned from the new world! And hence we have stories of most exciting interest. My Picciola dreams about them. In short, the new-comer has already turned all the heads of the infantine world, and our Breton life will be at the [Pg 790] very least as animated and joyous as our life at Orleans.

I am expecting Margaret, who says that she is coming to visit me, without naming the day. Our habitation is beautiful, antique, vast; with halls like those described by Sir Walter Scott. It is surrounded by immense woods, and brightened by a profusion of flowers. There too is the sea, blue and profound, image of life, with its waves and hidden rocks. I never look at it without an inexpressible longing to pass over it to behold again my Ireland. Kate, Kate, what a charm do not memories possess!

René is writing to you. I have not described to you my rooms, so exquisitely ornamented according to my own taste. Let us praise God, my sister!

August 13.

An unexpected visit; some Irish friends, the W——s. “We come to reconcile ourselves,” said Lady Helen gracefully to me. My mother-in-law gave them a most cordial reception, and they remained with us two days. You may imagine how happy I was. What details we had to communicate! Marie de S—— is at rest in God; no one had written to tell me. Beautiful and holy soul, remember us on high! The old men, almost centenarians, whom we left in our dear native place, are living yet, and death has stricken down another victim, in the brightness of youth and future prospects, George D——, only six days older than I am, and who died far from his home. He was brought back by his mourning family to the vault at V——, where his brother already reposed. He died a really holy death, … that is a consolation. They say that his father is distracted with grief. Dear Isa, whose aspirations tended towards the cloister, is giving up her happiness to remain in the world, there to pray, suffer, and comfort her family in their sorrows. Gerty is grown even prettier than she was—a lily. How much I have been questioned about my Kate!

A letter to-day from Lizzy who lovingly reminds me of my promise. It will be for next spring, I think. I took our guests to the village, the presbytery, the church, the asylum, and the hospital; all of which are either founded or supported by the liberality of Mme. de T——. A carriage!…

It was Margaret, dear Kate; not my Margaret of former times, warmhearted and open, talkative and gay, but Margaret pale, suffering, and yet finding again a spark of joy as she pressed me in her arms. I am going to devote myself entirely to her; she must be cured, and if possible undeceived. Aid me with your prayers!

August 25.

This dear festival of St. Louis makes me want to write to you. It is five o’clock; René is sleeping soundly; I have slipped on a dressing-gown, and now, after a prayer, I come to you, my beloved Kate, my sister by nature and affection. A balmy breeze reaches me through the half-open window, the aërial concerts are beginning, the universal prayer ascends to God. My soul is glad, like nature. After many hesitations, much feeling my way, and on René’s advice, I addressed myself to Lord William himself.… It was a very delicate matter, and my timidity was up in arms; but Margaret’s life was in question. How I set about it I do not in the least know; my good angel was with me. The excellent lord thanked me almost with tears; the melancholy of our friend was too evident to him, and he had tried in [Pg 791] vain to break through the wall of ice that had grown up between them. All is now at an end; and we have convinced Margaret, who is reviving again to happiness. I know not what evil tongue had so poisoned the golden cup of “the prettiest woman in England.” The truth is that Lord William’s brother wanted to marry the young, portionless maiden of whom I spoke to you, whose views were above this world and fixed on heaven. Filial piety keeps her where she is, for she attends upon her grandfather—blind, like Homer and Milton, and like them a poet, says Lord William, who, being himself enthusiastic about poetry, was a frequent visitor to his relative, the aged bard, and thus unconsciously gave rise to the absurd story too easily believed by Margaret. How she regrets not having sooner sought into the truth of the matter! I am enchanted at this explanation, and also because my mother insists that our “dear English” shall not leave us for a month. We are planning excursions without end. Lord William and René are inseparable; my sisters dispute as to which shall have Margaret, who is more ravishingly beautiful than ever. Her fine voice rings majestically in the chapel; yesterday we went en masse to surprise Mme. de T—— because it was her fête. You cannot imagine the effect of our choirs. René, Adrien, Edouard, everybody, the English peer too, sang. Your Georgina played the organ—not without tears of emotion.… My mother said she was in heaven. All day long bouquets and hommages were arriving; these good Bretons are so grateful, so pious! To-morrow we go to Auray, next week to Solesmes, … a long way, … but I would willingly go to the world’s end.

Margaret almost worships the babies. Alix scarcely leaves her; Gaston has his private and his state visits to her. My Picciola is so intelligent that English has soon become easy to her. I converse with her in my mother’s tongue; we pray together. Am I not happy, dear Kate? Everything smiles upon me. Often I meditate upon the benefits which I have received from an all-merciful Providence, and especially upon my happiness in my friends. Apropos to this subject, I recollect a sad but charming remark of Louis Veuillot’s upon departures, those great sadnesses of life: “There are flowers of friendship that we have sown, and which spring up, but which we must abandon when their fragrance is sweetest!”… He goes on to speak of forgetfulness; the mourning wreath thrown by the oblivious world on the tomb of vanished friendships, and sorrowfully says, “All the flowers of human life are perishable!” Is it an illusion of my youth to believe that my affections are like the flowers of heaven, inaccessible to decay, strong against storms?… After the love of God, the first and greatest good, the surest element of even terrestrial happiness, I have friendship, and I rejoice in it with enchantment; then I have the love of my good René, so pure and Christian a love, which makes of our two souls one single being, in an indissoluble union; then reading, with its varied emotions, study, the faculties of enthusiasm, of admiration, of comprehension.… Oh! how fair is life. When I speak of friendship, it is the tender affection of my Kate that is especially in my mind—a tenderness to which I owe all that I am. Dearest and best beloved, I sometimes ask myself [Pg 792] how it is that you have been to me a sister so unique, and finding no other motive for this choice affection than your loving charity, I bless God, who has permitted this to be in his merciful designs, which I cannot sufficiently adore. When I make my thanksgiving after communion, I am fond of taking a general survey in my heart, so as to include in it names and memories, and after speaking to Jesus of all the souls in whom I am interested, I never fail to ask our rich and mighty Sovereign to bless, together with me, all who love or have ever loved me.…

God guard you, carissima!

August 29.

News from Ireland: Ellen is in great trouble; her son has a mucous fever which leaves small hope of his life. Alas! everywhere there is mourning and death. Poor friend! so Christian and so pious, so courageous under trials, how she must suffer, in spite of her fortitude and resignation! Have you often met with people so sympathetic as this amiable Ellen?—a heart of gold, full of tenderness and devotion, in so delicate a frame. It seems to me as if the tears which she drives back by her mother’s bed of suffering (who is still in great danger, as Margaret has written you word), and by the cradle of her beautiful little Robert, fall on my heart. Let us pray for her!

René is telling you about our pilgrimage to Auray. What happiness to be there with these good and dear friends, and with my mother, whose health is most satisfactory! Why are not you also here, dear Kate? Oh! I never cease to miss you, although I repeat to myself that nothing is wanting to my felicity.

Yesterday was the feast of St. Augustine, the great doctor of love. Would that I could love like him!… M. Bougaud has written the life of St. Monica, which I am told is very fine. Adrien left the book at Orleans. I had read the introduction, which is written in an excellent and elevated style. “It is the poem of the most incomparable love that ever was.” O Saint Augustine, pillar of the church, defender of the faith! pray for those who fight; obtain for them that love which purifies and sanctifies suffering, that holy and perfect love which alone is the life of the soul! I have a special affection for St. Augustine. His was so ardent and enthusiastic a nature; his lofty soul so great, so indomitable, and so athirst for happiness; then, after his conversion, how courageous was his faith, how apostolic his eloquence, and, above all, how mighty was his love of God, which, as it were, consumed him! In all this we behold with admiration the infinite mercy of the Creator. Do you recollect Ary Scheffer’s lovely picture of St. Monica and St. Augustine by the sea? One could spend hours before those already transfigured countenances, studying their thoughts, which are rendered almost visible by the genius of the artist.

Read a letter by Mgr. Dupanloup on the death of Cardinal Altieri. We still live in the times of men like Borromeo and Belzunce; the church never grows old. Cardinal Altieri was Bishop of Albano. The cholera broke out in that small town with such violence that a hundred persons died in a night. Mgr. Altieri assembled his servants and asked if they were willing to follow him to Albano. He set out, accompanied by one alone, and his almoner, [Pg 793] and taking with him his will, to which he added a codicil. After three days, spent in heroic acts of charity and devotedness, he was attacked by the malady, and died in the arms of two other cardinals, who, happening to be at Albano when the scourge appeared, had not quitted the post of honor. This death is a great loss to the church. Mgr. Altieri was Camerlinga of the Roman Church, the highest dignity after the Pope. Louis Veuillot, in his biography of Pius IX., says: “There is no name and no character more Roman than that of Altieri.” The cardinal was only sixty-two years of age. Pius IX. at once desired to find him a successor. A messenger of the Holy See was sent to Mgr. Apollini: “It is necessary to set out immediately for Albano.” “I am ready,” was Mgr. Apollini’s reply. Is it not fine? What page of Homer equals this page in the history of the church? The Zouaves are also doing wonders of charity at Albano: making themselves Gray Sisters for the living, and burying the dead; they are sublime. May God have pity on poor Italy! Mgr. Dupanloup concludes his letter by a few words full of sadness and apprehension. O my God! will not the eloquence of genius, the supplications of thy saints, the sufferings of thy martyrs, disarm thine anger? By the side of these solemn scenes yesterday’s paper contained a curious article: the “miracles” of the Zouave Jacob, of whom you must have heard, dear Kate. What times we live in! On the one hand we have spiritism, magnetism, all sorts of communications with demons, and on the other the wonderful development of noble thoughts, institutions of all kinds in aid of every form of misfortune, men of the highest genius raising imperishable monuments to the glory of God and the church! If our time is one of great errors and many troubles, it is also a time of great virtues and noble acts of devotion. Margaret told us that when passing through Périgord she stopped at Cadouin, where the holy Sudarium of our Lord is offered to the veneration of the faithful. Before this august relic she prayed with indescribable emotion for our incomparable Pontiff, who is following in the footsteps of our Saviour up Mount Calvary. The revolution is about to march against Rome; what will be the consequence? “Tu es Petrus.” … With this word one can understand the peace, serenity, and confidence of Pius IX. Suffer not, O Lord! that so many wandering and guilty sons shall die fighting against their own Father!

* * * * *

September 6.

The sacrifice is consummated: Ellen has witnessed the death of her baby—her joy and pride. “Her husband comforted and sustained her like a Christian,” Lizzy writes. The paroxysm of her maternal anguish was fearful.

A child should never die before its mother; it is against nature, and is almost more than the heart can endure; the help of God is necessary; let us pray for her, my Kate. This dear, much-tried, heartbroken mother thought of me in her sorrow, and sent me a few lines. You will read them and will weep with me over this page of woe. I seem still to see that charming group: Ellen coaxing Robert to try and take his first steps, and he sending us kisses. All these joys, that golden dawn, those earliest days—who can bring them back to Ellen? May God console her, and may the [Pg 794] sweet angel who strengthened Jesus at Gethsemani tenderly wipe away her tears! Margaret is as grieved as I am. Our trip to Solesmes is somewhat delayed; we are expecting more guests. I have just finished a splendid chasuble, which I take the liberty of sending to your address, my dearest Kate—in the first place, that you may admire it, and, secondly, that you may kindly let Mme. G. know about it, as she will have to complete my work. Have I mentioned to you a letter from the Bishop of Orleans to the faithful of his diocese on the festivals of Rome, and the approaching opening of an œcumenical council? It is splendid; there is magic in his style.

You do not forget Zoë de L——? Margaret met her in Paris, poor, and looking terribly aged. Through some inexplicable folly, she made an absurd marriage, and the change of position, her unexpected disappointment, the trials of heart and mind she has undergone, have altogether upset her. “It was ten minutes,” Margaret writes, “before I could recognize her.” Perhaps you could see her, dear Kate, and cheer her up a little. La belle Anglaise and I want to be of service to her, and you must be our medium; René is writing to his banker, to place the necessary sum at your disposal. I will enclose the card on which Margaret wrote the address of this unfortunate Zoë.

Dearest Kate, pray for Ellen. There is, then, no such thing as perfect happiness in this world. If it were not for the compassion I feel for those whose troubles affect me so deeply, I should be too happy. How kind René is! He is angelic! I cannot note down to you, or I should have to write volumes, the thousand intimate and charming details which make my life a paradise.

Hélène rarely writes; when she does, it is as a seraph might. She is happy; she has entered into the place of repose which she has chosen, in the hollow of the rock, where the dove loves to hide; she has found her ideal. Gertrude reads on her knees the poetic effusions of her child.

Dear Kate, may all heaven be with you!

September 15.

My dear one, excursions are robbing me of all my leisure, but not of the time to think of you. A pouring rain has interfered with our projects for to-day, and all the children have fled to Mme. Margaret, who takes a lively interest in these juveniles. Yesterday was the birthday of this delightful friend. We busied ourselves in preparations, whilst, at my request, Lord William drew his somewhat wondering Margaret away to the park. A solitary little drawing-room was rapidly transformed; it looked so pretty in the evening, with a profusion of flowers and lights, wreaths of ivy twining round the mirrors, and an illumination of the heroine’s initials! She was greatly touched and delighted; Picciola recited some beautiful verses written by Edouard, and we presented her with bouquets, carvings, and paintings. A concert brought the entertainment to a close. Mme. de T—— will not hear of the departure of our dear friends. “Sisters ought not to leave each other before they are compelled,” she says. Kind, excellent mother! Yesterday we walked along the coast so often sung by the poet Brizeux, whom René quotes with so much Breton fire and fitness. “Look there,” Adrien whispered to me, “at all that pretty [Pg 795] little brood!” Under the shadow of an oak about a hundred paces from us a dozen children were preparing a dînette.[205] How handsome they looked in their tatters, with their healthy and intelligent faces! Arthur had a bright thought: he proposed to Picciola, who was carrying the cake-basket, to share theirs among the poor little children. All the babies joined in the festivity, and bonbons and delicacies were freely distributed. Margaret sketched this pretty picture in her album. You see our walks are not without their charm.

On Monday, I visited a pious canoness who lives alone in a sumptuous residence. I was delighted with the kind and cordial welcome she gave me, and spent with her three of the most enjoyable hours I ever passed in my life. Mme. de Saint A—— is fifty-three years of age, though she appears older; she has been exquisitely beautiful. Now she is better than that—she is a saint; and next to the deep joys of the Eucharistic table, I do not think there is any greater enjoyment than to converse with such as she. The old castle overlooking the ocean has an antique and lordly aspect, with a certain character as of something religious, like a cenobite whom death has forgotten, kneeling by the borders of a lake. The sea in this place forms a sort of inland bay, or quiet lake, in which the great trees of the park seem to take pleasure in reflecting themselves. The dwelling has been visited by the dukes of Brittany, and one wing of the castle still bears their name. We ascended the steps of the staircase of honor, up which the noble mail-clad warriors so often rode mounted on their chargers. The room of Mme. de Saint A—— is entirely white, like the soul of the pious lady. It opens into the chapel. On each side of the altar several funeral epitaphs show this temple of prayer to be also the temple of memories. Mme. de Saint A—— showed us some water-colors worthy of Redouté, painted by her great-grandmother; and some wood-carving which excited the liveliest admiration of the gentlemen. It was impossible to quit this Eden; we admired the grottoes and plantations, and remained for déjeuner. We seemed to be in another world in this Thebaid of the coast. We kissed the trunk of an immense chestnut whose protecting boughs had overshadowed many generations, and which has a higher title to glory from having in ’93 preserved from revolutionary fury the stone statue of the Madonna which now guards the chapel. I shall never forget this visit—twenty leagues from our residence—nor the expression of that saintly face, the look and words which accompanied the kind pressure of my hand at the moment of departure.

Mme. de Saint A—— has lost all her dear ones by death. God and the poor still remain to her, a heritage worthy of her heart. Her artistic and literary tastes are a great resource for her in her solitude, which is occasionally shared by some friends at a distance, who are faithful to this “fragment of the past,” as she said in showing us the castle.

One hall, that of “the libraries,” contains treasures. Adrien, who is an enthusiastic and learned archæologist, eagerly examined its contents. Several rare manuscripts have passed into his possession; we came home laden with riches. My share is a beautiful water-color [Pg 796] drawing. Shall we ever see this hermitage again?

Dear Kate, René and Margaret have finished their letters before me. Adieu and á Dieu!

Dreamed of Ireland, her emigrants, her martyrs. Oh! how dear our sacred island is to me.

September 20.

Kind, loving, and beloved sister, three letters in your welcome handwriting are come to me at the same time. Thanks for what you have done for Zoë; she has written to tell me about it, and of your zealous endeavors to make her more courageous. I have no more anxiety about our poor friend since you are in her neighborhood.

René has procured for me Femmes Savantes et Femmes Studieuses,[206] by Mgr. Dupanloup.

It is an excellent book, elevated and at the same time practical, and quite in accordance with the views of my dear husband. Our studies together are truly profitable? The good abbé is very alarming just now. He says that blood will be shed in France, much blood; with other sinister predictions. May God guard you, dearest Kate!

The village is in mourning: five deaths this week. One is that of the father of seven children; Margaret is placing six of them with the Sisters at P——. The rich English lady makes herself almost worshipped by our Bretons.

Ellen has written to me; she is more calm, but wonders that she can live.… Her mother, broken down by this last blow, sank three days after Robert. To force her away from the sad associations of home her husband is taking her to Scotland, where they will remain until the spring. I wish they were with us; we would try to comfort them. Ah! Kate, how I pity mothers.

Finished the full-length portrait of René for our mother. How I have enjoyed working at it—dear, kind husband! At this moment he is playing Thalberg’s Moïse, and I hasten to join him. I should not be Irish if I did not love poetry and music.

Love me as I love you, dear sister.

September 28.

I am in a state of transport, dearest! For eight days past we have been almost constantly in the carriage, and have seen Solesmes and its jewels of stone, the handiwork of artists full of faith such as our times do not find in their successors. Only imagine, dear Kate: I saw nothing at Solesmes but the church and Sainte Cécile! On coming out I closed my eyes, the better to recall those visions of beauty before which death would seem more sweet. Beneath an arched roof on the right two personages are placing Our Lord in the sepulchre; these are Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea, the former in a rich Oriental costume and the latter in a dress of the time of Louis XI., which looks singular enough at first sight. Sitting before the tomb, St. Mary Magdalene, bending low, with her head resting on her hands, abandons herself to grief. It is very beautiful Kate. Of all that I have seen that looked living in sculpture, nothing ever impressed me so much. This Magdalene is the jewel of the whole. She seems to live and breathe; nothing could render the expression of sorrow and of prayer in her countenance, nor the naturalness of her posture; one feels as if she might raise her arms, and that her mouth [Pg 797] might utter her lamentation; one feels that her eyes are overflowing with tears.… Follow me now into the chapel on the left. Here is the swooning of the Blessed Virgin, in a deep niche over the altar. Again, our Lady, kneeling in ecstasy, supported by St. Peter and St. John, is about to receive communion from the hands of her risen Son. In this mystic idea there is to my mind exquisite poetry. Almost all the apostles and the holy women are there; the figures in this group are very numerous, and there are among them heads of an ideal beauty. I have looked so long at these more than artistic, almost heavenly, works, that they will long remain in my mind. The entombment of the Blessed Virgin faces that of Our Lord, and is strikingly effective. The position of our Lady is admirable, and there is something heavenly in her countenance, which love transfigures even in death. St. John, St. James the Less, Dom Bougner, an abbot of Solesmes, who by a pious anachronism had himself represented in this solemn scene, and another saint, hold the corners of the shroud. All four are excellently rendered. St. Peter is leaning over our Lady, and contemplates her with an indescribable expression of love. This figure is one of the most attractive of all. Behind are the holy women, whose looks betoken the deepest grief, and some of the apostles, who are speaking to each other. All these figures are admirably grouped; not one lessens the effect of the rest, and the whole scene is of touching grandeur. It was difficult to tear one’s self away from the contemplation of those animated and speaking forms.… There are other groups: Jesus in the midst of the doctors, the Assumption, the Coronation; wonderful works by men who have remained almost unknown. Why were you not there, dear Kate? This is always the cry of my heart, which wants you everywhere.

To see Dom Guéranger formed part of our plan. When one has read his Sainte Cécile and his admirable pages on the Temporal Power of the Popes, it is a happiness to listen to him in his monastic humility. What a fine head he has!—a countenance so expressive of both intellect and sanctity, and such vivacity and genius in his look! We were present at the Benedictine Office, but went first to Sainte-Cécile, a monastery of Benedictine nuns which Dom Guéranger is building at some distance from the abbey. It will be splendid: magnificent cloisters, and in the middle of the great quadrangle one of those marvellous fountains that we used to admire in the pictures of the cloisters in Spain.

Benediction, in the abbey church, was very beautiful. At the moment when the benediction is given a dove descends upon the altar; the sight is striking when the heart is already predisposed to heavenly emotions. When, at the conclusion, the monks stood up to chant the Te Deum, that song of the eternal Jerusalem which I never hear without a thrill of inward joy, I felt an indescribable impression of happiness and peace. Oh! how sweet it must be to serve God thus, and spend one’s life in study and in prayer.

Dearest Kate, may God bless you, may he bless us all, and may he deliver Ireland!

October 2.

To-day Sarah B—— takes a lord and master. God grant that she may be happy; that her heart, so upright, delicate, and loving, may [Pg 798] not be disappointed! She is in communication with Margaret, to whom she has related the causes of her almost rupture with Mary. Both had suffered greatly from the loss of that affection which for twenty years had filled their life; this marriage draws them nearer together. Mass has been said for her, in this sweet corner of our Brittany, this oasis. Margaret is about to leave us. What bitterness is linked to every separation! How often our heart is divided, our life cut in twain, and our happiness destroyed! We went on Monday to C——, where we have an aunt, superior of a convent of the Visitation. “Convents do not change, like the world,” said René, when we came out from the parlor; “it even seems to me that these ascetic faces do not grow old. And I know men of forty years of age who appear to be sixty, so much have passions worn them out. Why is not every Christian house a monastery? Why do not all men love our good God?”… My aunt was very affectionate; promises of prayers were mutually exchanged.… I am prayed for in many sanctuaries, in many retreats, pious homes of refuge for wounded souls and for timid doves, dwellings where lilies bloom, and where the Holy of Holies makes his habitation. And everywhere, on every coast on which a Catholic hand has planted the Cross of Christ, I am prayed for, in virtue of this great communion of saints, this dogma so divine and so full of comfort, the sweetest of all, it seems to me, giving hope for those who do not yet pray for themselves! Oh! can I wonder that the religious life, to which our Saviour promised a hundred-fold in this world and paradise in the next—this life of self-renunciation and of sacrifice—has stolen my Kate from me? Madame de P——, Lucy’s mother, is seriously ill; and her son the abbé, the grand-vicaire, the holy priest, the joy and consolation of her heart, is with her. All the Edwards have just left us; Gaston has been ill, and is recovering slowly. His pale, gentle face so little resembles that of the rosy boy who smiled so gaily upon us only a few weeks ago, that we are all pained at the change. I trust God will spare this pretty little angel to dear Lucy; but were the hosts of heaven to open their ranks to receive this little brother, who, however, pitying the mother, would think of pitying the child? Oh! what have I said? In my desire for heaven I was almost forgetting earth!

Lady Sensible, Marguérite, is gravely working in the embrasure of the window at a set of baby-linen which she will have made entirely herself. This child will be a remarkable woman; there is something singularly attractive about her; she talks little, but thinks much, and her words are full of solidity and good sense. She is charmingly pretty; last winter, in her little dress of black velvet over a blue silk skirt, she looked like the daughter of a king.

Dearest, here is your letter, in the white hands of Picciola, and a letter from Hélène, triumphantly brought to me by Alix! Kind little angels! who possess the understanding of the heart, and so read mine. Thanks, dear sister; may our Mother in heaven repay to you all the love you bear me!

Margaret leaves to-morrow; she is gone to say good-by to her poor people. What a kind, sweet friend she is! and now the ocean is soon to separate us.

Pray for the travellers, beloved Kate, and for your own Georgina.

[Pg 799] September 13.

This autumn set in icy cold; to-day the weather has been mild and the sun splendid; it was like a resurrection; my spirit revived with nature. How I miss Margaret! She has had a prosperous journey. “The aspect of everything is changed.” God be praised!

A kind visit this morning from a neighbor, the Baroness de T——, mother of three sweet children, whom she brings up herself. This charming woman is in deep mourning for her brother; riches are no shield from the unlooked-for strokes of death. In positions where people are in possession of everything, it must be dreadful suffering to be helpless to detain here below, at the price of all one’s gold, those who are carried off by death. We are said to be on the point of a grievous and terrible crisis; I can easily believe it; it is the general expectation of minds. Everything suffers; all families are stricken in those dearest to them, all is trouble and distress. M. V. R. is dead at Dublin, without confession, without hope, without God! Is there no angel for these poor wanderers, to make one ray of light shine before their eyes? Nelly, the mourning Nelly, confides her grief to me: “What a night of anguish! and what tears I shed! No priest beside this dying bed; my mother in despair, I on my knees, my eyes dried up with weeping, doubting if it were a dream or a reality, and wondering whether so many ardent prayers must be in vain! The only religious ornament in the room was a little picture I had drawn when a child, and which my poor uncle had not observed, or else tolerated it on my account; its subject was the conversion of a sinner. This seemed to me providential. I could not believe that this life, so troublous, so agitated, and so sinful, so far from God and from the practice of religion, could go out without one spark of divine light to illuminate it, or without some thought of penitence finding entrance, which might obtain pardon before eternity.… Alas! I have but one hope, and I cling to that in the fulness of my trouble like one who is shipwrecked to a fragment of the vessel; it is that, in passing judgment on a soul, God is mindful of all the prayers that will be offered for it!”

Poor Nelly! how well I understand her. I hope, I hope; who knows what passes in that supreme moment, in that terrible grappling of death with life, between divine mercy and the sinner, who may in one instant make an act of perfect contrition and love?

Would you like to have a page out of Hélène’s journal, the receptacle of her inmost and most secret confidences, which she left with her mother, and which René and I read with enthusiasm? “‘Knowest thou the land where the orange tree blossoms?’ was the vague question of the melancholy Mignon to all around him; and I, for my part, ask everywhere, ‘Knowest thou the land whither flows all my love? Knowest thou the land to which mount my desires? Knowest thou Carmel, the sacred mountain where I shall possess my God?’ I also could say, “Knowest thou this beloved home, where I have so often sat with gladness in my heart? Knowest thou this mother who loves me with so true a love, this father so fond and tender, these kind, indulgent brothers, this noble-hearted grandmother, all this charming family who have made my life so sweet and golden?… O nature! and I am about to leave all these! I [Pg 800] communicated this morning, the Feast of St. Teresa, the illustrious and seraphic lover of God, the fairest flower of Carmel, the glory of the church, a soul so strong and lofty in her perfection that she no longer desired any happiness in this world, and repeated, ‘Lord, let me suffer or die!’ Edouard Turquety, the sweet Catholic poet, has written some beautiful verses on this sublime thought. O great St. Teresa, eagle of love! whose flight reached to such heights, draw me after you; detach me from earth, gain for me that I forget for God all which is not God!

“‘Emporte-moi, douce pensée,

Effusion d’un cœur jaloux,

Je suis la veuve délaissée

Emporte-moi vers mon Epoux.’”[207]

Dear Kate, do you not doubly love our Hélène?

October 21.

Do you know the Meditations on the Way of the Cross, by the Abbé Perreyre? I find in this book a comprehension of suffering which can only belong to a superior mind, and one which has drunk from one of the bitterest cups of life. There are passages in it which seemed to thrill me, especially this thought, that “trial breaks souls and forces them to shed around them floods of love.” I like to pass before your kind eyes all that I read and admire. René yesterday quoted me a beautiful thought of Mgr. of Orleans on La Moricière: “A man is a prism; the rays of God pass through him; it is not he who is beautiful—it is the rays, it is God; but without him we should not see them.” Read on Sunday, by the same genius, the postscript to the letter of M. Rattazzi; it is admirable for its power, expression, and lofty feeling. The Archbishop of Rennes has written a few lines to Mgr. Dupanloup full of warmth and energy. It is said that our troops are going to Rome. God grant that it may be so, for his own glory, for the safety of Pius IX., and for the honor of our poor France! Oh! must it be written on the page of our history that the eldest daughter of the church has forfeited her mission, and that she has failed to say to the abettors of the revolution, “You strike not my father with your sacrilegious hand without first passing over my body”? I am indignant and amazed at beholding the Catholic world remain as if stupefied when it ought to rise as one man to defend the holy Pontiff. René and his brothers have all served under the Breton hero in the cause of Pius IX. Adrien’s two sons are gone to fight under his banner; they set out of their own accord, after receiving the blessing of their father, mother, and grandmother. Pray for them, my Kate! Gertrude is on her Calvary. Our Brittany will be worthily represented at Rome. Sursum corda! God keep you, my well-beloved!

October 31.

Splendid weather! the air full of warm, poetic odors. I have been rather unwell, but am better again; do not be uneasy about me, dearest. Good news from every quarter, but sadness at home, for Gertrude and Adrien are leaving us, having heard that one of their sons is ill at Rome; so they hasten thither with all speed. I should like to accompany them, it is so delightful to travel. Mgr. of Orleans has written to his clergy, requesting prayers for the Pope and the army of Italy. There [Pg 801] is just now a certain movement of religious enthusiasm in France. Numerous volunteers are enrolling themselves in the pontifical army, and there are among them those who leave their children, their young wife, or their betrothed; and the bishop says that if there are at the present time mothers weeping over a son who has died a martyr in the holiest of causes, there are those who weep still more bitterly because they have no son.… Is not this the highest expression of Christian patriotism? Rome is the fatherland of the Catholic universe; happy indeed are her defenders!

Evening.—I have just come in from a long walk, alone, on the sands. René is gone with his brother as far as Tours, whence he will not return before to-morrow; my mother had to write, and to pray; the good abbé had undertaken the charge of all the children; the grown-up people were variously occupied; I wanted to enliven my solitude, and have been to visit my poor people, and in the presence of immensity have lifted up my soul. It was the hour of twilight, which had therefore a double attraction. I love solitude in the evening; the soul, disposed by the calm of nature for meditation and prayer, rises without effort to God. I do not like to shorten these moments, and willingly prolong them until it is dark. There is always a certain solemnity which attaches to things that end. If we thought of it well, how much we should be impressed by the close of a day! How many souls there are who will not see another! How many sheep have this very day quitted the green pastures of the Good Shepherd! How many tears have the angels gathered up! Tears of the mother shed over the coffin of her first-born, over a son who is fighting, over a youth who is going astray; tears of sorrow, of repentance, of holy joy, tears of all, alas! and for every cause. Is there a human eye that knows not tears? Oh! how many things one day contains. It may be a prodigal child brought back; an upright life sanctified by sacrifice, a martyrdom, a consecration to God. It may be an overflowing of evil and impiety, and, on the other hand, prayer poured out in floods before the altar. A great church-festival, a first communion, a far-distant island conquered to the Gospel, a battle gained over the enemies of the faith—these, these are a day! Oh! the history of a day would be long.… Whilst the glittering world, returned from its pleasures and festivities, slumbers beneath its gilded ceilings, the world of charity has already made the angels smile, the world of poverty has already suffered, the world of industry is at work, the apostolic world embarks on the vast ocean or sets foot on unknown shores, the world of science studies and sounds the deep abyss of learning, the world of prayer, the truly Catholic world, prays to God, sings his praises, writes, speaks, teaches, lives for God! Everything revives, and in this immense concert of humanity, wherein are heard so many discordant notes, to which so many voices are daily wanting, the Eternal Ear distinguishes the most imploring notes—the notes of supplication and repentance. Evening comes, and the day ends; a useless day for many of God’s creatures, a golden day for some. And the angels of night spread the shadows over cities and solitudes, while the angel of justice and the angel of mercy, two [Pg 802] white-winged seraphs, inscribe in the Book of Life the good and evil of this day; while, in the splendor of eternal light, the heavenly concert incessantly continues.… Oh! when shall we behold this day?… Pale dawns of this world, fleeting hours, days without beauty, you are but a point in a life, and this life has but one day; and this day, what is it “in the ocean of ages,” what is it in Eternity?

Hélène speaks to me of heaven: “Oh! day of deliverance, cloudless day, when I shall behold my God, when I shall drink of the torrent of eternal delights, and mingle my feeble voice with the harmonies of the heavenly Jerusalem, my soul sighs for thee!…”

Edward and Lucy return to us to-morrow, glad and happy; their mother is recovered. Good-night, my Kate!

TO BE CONTINUED.

[205] A “little dinner,” in which everything is usually on a small scale.

[206] “Learned and Studious Women.”

[207]

Bear me away, sweet thought,

Fruit of a jealous heart;

From lonely widowhood,

Oh! bear me to my Spouse.

ONE HUNDRED YEARS AGO.

It was the December of 1775. The British colonies in America were agitated with wild excitement. News had been received of the unsuccessful attack on Quebec by the Continental troops under Montgomery and Arnold, and of the fall of the brave Montgomery.

The friends of the colonial cause had set great hopes on the success of this enterprise, which would give them the command of the St. Lawrence, and deprive the British of a most important arsenal for their permanent supply of troops and munitions of war. They were grieved and desponding over the disastrous result, while the loyalists, rejoicing at the check thus given to the progress of the rebellion, looked confidently for its speedy close, the restoration of the royal governments, and the return of the several provincial governors who had discreetly abdicated at the first outbreak, and retired to safer quarters. No doubt their enthusiastic public demonstrations of joy assisted in fanning to a flame the smouldering elements of resistance among the colonists, who, exasperated at the persistently oppressive measures devised and forced upon them by the mother country, were even beginning to utter whispers of an entire disruption, and a formal assertion of rights, in a declaration of independence.

Near a pleasant village in the northern part of New Jersey there stood—and may be standing yet, for the builders of those days had an eye to permanency in the solid structures they reared—a farmhouse of spacious dimensions, built in the favorite gambrel-roofed style then customary in country dwellings. Mr. Foote, the owner of the mansion, and of many broad acres around it, was a fine specimen of a country gentleman after the old English pattern. Bigoted in his attachment to everything English, he clung tenaciously to all the customs and traditions which his father, in transplanting them to American soil, had cultivated with [Pg 803] an ardor all the more vehement for the difficulty of assimilating them to an order of things so entirely different from that in which they had formerly existed. These traditional treasures he had bequeathed to his children as a sacred legacy of far more value than the paltry lands, tenements, and appurtenances they would inherit from him, and so his son continued religiously to regard them.

Early in life he married a lady from the neighboring village who had been reared in the same sentiments of devotion to the mother country. After a few years of happy domestic life in their retired home, she died, leaving him with a family of five lovely daughters. Some years later he married a widow from Philadelphia, whose only child by her former marriage was the wife of a banker in that city, Mr. von Francke.

Not far from the dwelling of Mr. Foote, and still nearer to the village, was the residence of Mr. Thorpe, a handsome building conformed to the fashion of European suburban mansions. He was also an Englishman in his tastes and habits, but of a less tenacious cast than his neighbor, whom he often annoyed by assailing some of his cherished whims and humors. Nevertheless, they lived on terms of the most cordial intimacy and friendship.

Mr. Thorpe married the only child of Mr. Earle, a banker in Philadelphia, who was the senior partner of Mrs. Foote’s son-in-law. She was a beautiful and highly accomplished lady. Endowed with rare ability, discrimination, and firmness, no sophistry could mislead the nice sense of justice which governed all her decisions. Her father’s position and financial operations had opened a wide circle of acquaintance in all the cities of the new world, and his fine social qualities, combined with the fascinations of his gifted daughter—whose mother had died when she was too young to realize the loss—attracted crowds to his hospitable mansion. Great was the surprise in the fashionable city circle among whom she moved when she chose from the host of her admirers a plain country gentleman, of unquestionable merit, it was true, but of very simple, not to say rustic, manners and retiring habits.

She brought to her secluded home all the refined graces and elegant embellishments of her former one, and sustained perfectly, in the midst of her rural associations, the quiet dignity that had always distinguished her; while she continued to exercise the generous hospitality to which she had been accustomed in her father’s house.

Some years previous to the beginning of the war of independence, her father retired from active business, left his affairs in the hands of his partner, Mr. von Francke, and went to share his daughter’s home, now adorned with seven fair sons, so tenderly beloved by their grandfather that he could not bear to be separated from them. New Jersey was then, as it is still, a thoroughfare between the States of the Atlantic coast. From the first settlement it had been the most turbulent of the provinces. Always violently agitated by territorial and political questions, it was prepared to enter with vehemence into the merits of those which had arisen between the colonies and the mother country. In none of them were the exciting topics of the day discussed [Pg 804] more fiercely, pro and con, than in this.

During the stirring events of the years immediately preceding and following the memorable “’76” the house of Mr. Thorpe, much to the chagrin of his intolerant neighbor, became the rendezvous of many prominent men, most of them old friends of his father-in-law, of all shades of political opinion, and of every religious and non-religious party.

Through the holidays of Christmas and New Year’s the two families always entertained a multitude of friends, and there was a round of festivities between them, in which the neighboring villagers participated. Mr. Foote, who, as might be expected, was a Tory of the most malignant type, selected his guests from the class who were in sympathy with him, and accused his more moderate neighbor of treason, because he, his father-in-law, and his lovely wife tolerated persons of different views, and acknowledged the force of their objections to British rule.

Fifty years later it was my good fortune, among the felicitous chances of a specially favored childhood, to pass the greater portion of three years under the roof of a house built after the precise pattern of Mr. Foote’s, though of somewhat smaller dimensions, in a little village on the south bank of the St. Lawrence. Here his youngest daughter, Anna, resided, and shared her home with her step-sister, Mrs. von Francke, from Philadelphia, the widow of Mr. Earle’s partner, who occupied a suite of rooms set apart for her use, and was always attended by her waiting-woman, a smiling German matron somewhat advanced in years and very fond of children. It was my delight the moment school hours were over and the ceremony of dinner despatched—for the habits of the stately old English home, and the late dinners with their successive courses of fish, flesh, and fowl, were as rigidly preserved through all the changes and chances of founding a home in the wilderness as they had been under more favorable circumstances—to mount the stairs with “Auntie Francke,” now much past eighty, but as sprightly as myself, and while my companions, the daughters of the house, were indulging in a wild game of romps outside, draw my little arm-chair—she had a half-dozen of them provided for the small members of the household—to her side in the corner of the cheerful wood fireplace, and listen to her stories of other times.

As I have said, she was then past eighty, but the certainties of a position which placed her out of the reach of such cares and anxieties as surround ordinary lives, united with a serene temperament alive to all tender sympathies, had preserved the youth of her heart to atone for the ravages of time and adorn the decaying shrine with undying verdure and sweetness.

After the lapse of more than fifty years, how well do I remember the graceful attitudes of the erect form, the carefully-adjusted drapery of her rich, old-time costume, and, above all, the loving gleam of her mild black eye as it rested upon me at such times! The maternal instinct of her affectionate heart, never having found its proper object in offspring of her own, overflowed towards all the young within her reach, and her room was a perfect museum of winking and crying dolls, strange puzzles, dissected [Pg 805] pictures, flocks of magnetized ducks and geese, with miniature ponds wherein to exercise them by aid of a steel pencil—of all wonderful toys, in short, which she procured on her annual trips to Philadelphia, and was wont to set as traps to catch the little folk she so dearly loved. Her waiting-woman was an apt assistant in pursuit of such small game; and it has often been a wonder to me since how, with their precise, methodical ways and exquisitely tidy, punctilious habits, they could endure much less enjoy, the dire confusion and anarchy which resulted from these captures.

For my own part, I was by nature a quiet, reserved child. Though I could join tolerably well in a wild frolic, I preferred the chimney-corner and a story, for which I was a most persistent beggar when there was any chance of success. From my earliest childhood stories relating to history, and especially to the history of our own country, enthralled me beyond all others. This fancy had been fed by constant association in my own home with grandparents who had borne an active part in the scenes of the Revolution. They entertained many old friends whose memories were also stored with incidents and anecdotes of that period. Thus their interest was kept alive and their conversation constantly directed to the political and social events of those days, which opened the mind of their eager young listener, almost prematurely, to subjects of grave import quite beyond what would seem natural or appropriate for one of tender years.

What a treasure, then, was “Auntie Francke” to me when I was taken from my quiet home in the woods, and left a trembling, homesick little stranger—much less as to size, indeed, than in age—under the hospitable roof of these dear friends of my mother in former years! On the score of that friendship I was received there to attend the village school with the daughters of the family, all older than myself. Mrs. von Francke’s room became at once my solace and delight, and even the Tales of the Arabian Nights melted into utter insipidity before the wondrous sketches she could give of “the times that tried men’s souls.” For she had entertained daily at her home in Philadelphia, as familiar friends, General Washington, Pulaski, De Kalb, Rochambeau, La Fayette, De Grasse—all the foreign worthies, in short, together with a host of our own countrymen whose names will be household words as long as our nation exists. Her husband was brought into constant intercourse with such men by virtue of his occupation, and his inclination led him to extend to them most freely the hospitalities of his home.

When my companions would break into my chosen hiding-place in search of me, and find me the fascinated listener of their aged relative, they would warn her to beware what yarns she spun for my amusement; “for,” they said, “she will surely write them down and keep the record. If you could see what she puts upon her slate in school that has no relation to the horrors of arithmetic, you would believe she is to be of the unhappy number who take such notes!”

Whether acting upon the hint or no, I did indeed, when pondering in my own little nest of a room over what I had heard, jot down from time to time many scraps in [Pg 806] the words of my kind old friend, from portions of which the following sketch is gathered.

* * * * *

On the 24th of December, 1775, a large assemblage met at the house of Mr. Thorpe. The guests, many of them former friends and acquaintances of Mr. Earle, were brought together from different cities of the Atlantic States, with a sprinkling of the country friends of Mr. and Mrs. Thorpe. At the same time an equally large party assembled at the residence of my step-father, Mr. Foote, among them, of course, my husband and myself. The object of both was to celebrate the festivals of Christmas and the New Year according to old-time customs. It was arranged that they should all join in Christmas festivities at Mr. Foote’s, and open the New Year with Mr. Thorpe.

At that period, when the minds of the country were fermenting over questions of vital importance, it was not to be hoped that such leaders of the disaffected as were entertained under Mr. Thorpe’s friendly roof—with whom it was half-believed that he and his family were in perfect accord—would mingle very harmoniously with the guests selected by Mr. Foote for their high-toned loyalty to king and church. I confess to having watched the social results of intercourse between such discordant elements with great trepidation. Thanks, however, to the crystallizing power of courtly etiquette, now lamentably on the decline, the mutual irritation was suppressed or kept within limits of strict decorum, and the wonted hilarities of the joyous season were undisturbed by anything more serious than certain heart-burnings connected with questions of precedence on the line of march to the dining-hall. These questions were decided according to the political preferences of the respective hosts, quite irrespective of rank and station. Of course the decision rankled none the less fiercely on that account. I noticed, however, that at the table of Mr. Foote his neighbor’s guests accepted their allotments, even when placed “below the salt”—as the most prominent among them were sure to be—with a graceful nonchalance which, if assumed, was a height of self-control unattainable by the haughty friends of their host.

It was amusing to see how the “tables were turned” when it became the part of Mr. Thorpe to play the host. I was placed near my step-father, and listened carefully to his remarks addressed sotto-voce, as the different courses were brought in and removed, to his particular friend, the former private secretary of the ex-governor of New Jersey.

“To think,” he exclaimed indignantly, “of that young upstart Carroll, an acknowledged papist and open promoter of disaffection and disloyalty, being invited to take precedence of such as you in the house of a friend of mine!”

“I yield the precedence with pleasure, I assure you,” was the reply. “This young Carroll is a man of no ordinary mark. Of his political errors, if errors they must be called, I can only say it is to be deplored that British rule should have furnished him with the weapons he wields so powerfully against it. He is likely to prove a weighty and influential foe in politics and in his profession. I have been present in court when he was unwinding webs cunningly woven by leaders of the Maryland bar; and, analyzing them thread by thread, he would expose [Pg 807] their flimsiness with such convincing clearness and simplicity that the most unlettered juryman could comprehend it as fully as the learned jurists. He has wonderful command of language, and, with no attempt at eloquence, astonishing power in swaying the judgments and feelings of his audience.”

“The more shame for him!” exclaimed Mr. Foote; “when he might exert so potent an influence for king and country, that he should stoop to pervert his powers, and become the demagogue of a vile mob, for purposes of paltry private ambition!”

“That could hardly be his object. The suggestions of private ambition are all in the opposite direction. He has everything to lose in the probabilities before him, and but little to gain from the bare possibility of success in the future for the cause he has embraced.”

“Yes, thank God! there is scarcely the bare possibility of such a result. With the whole power of Great Britain against them, the rebels have little to hope for, and the punishment of this nefarious rebellion will be speedy and sure! Already the first note of triumph is sounded in the defeat of their troops before Quebec!”

“Perhaps you are right,” his friend replied; “but I have not been a careless observer of what is passing, and, if I do not greatly mistake the temper of this people, that disaster will only inspire them with new energy and determination. I regard the selection of George Washington to command their forces as a far more threatening token for British interests than this defeat at Quebec is for theirs. With such a leader, and the great mass of the people perfectly united through the length and breadth of this immense country to sustain him—even admitting that in the oldest settlements they are sparse, and those settlements widely scattered, and that their chief strength for the struggle lies in the very weakness and insufficiency of their resources—I confess I have grave misgivings that the conflict will be fearful and the victory dearly bought.”

“No doubt they will fight desperately, and will be sure of every papist in the country to a man! We have been altogether too tolerant with these seditious subjects of the pope. The rascals have crept in silently, until the provinces are filled with them. Scarcely a place of any size, except Boston, can be found that has not a popish Mass-house in full operation. They are gaining influence rapidly, too, with the American people. Observe, for instance, the company invited by our host. Yonder, next to that arch-traitor from Boston, John Hancock, and the plebeian philosopher, Ben. Franklin, sit a number of printers, five of whom, from as many different cities, are rank papists, kindred spirits of the guild, though not very polished. It is surprising to notice how many of the pope’s emissaries are printers! Convenient for disseminating error and sedition, you know; make good fighters, too. Then, on the opposite side of the table, are those fiery Irishmen, Fitzsimmons, Barry, and Moylan, with a long line of their fellows—rebels and papists all! Moylan has three brothers, I am told, of the same stamp. Near to us are French and Germans, of whom I know nothing but that they too belong to the pope, so it is fair to suppose they favor the rebellion. Then there is the Maryland delegation, led by Carroll—a pretty strong [Pg 808] showing for his Holiness at the New Year’s banquet of a private Protestant gentleman! It is too late to remedy the evil now, but it ought to have been taken in hand long ago. If it had been dealt with effectually in the beginning, I greatly doubt whether the colonies would now be in the condition we deplore.”

“It is not easy to deal with it effectually. The province of Massachusetts Bay was very vigilant and severe from the start to keep them out, or to exterminate them when they crept in, but they are there now in considerable force.”

“Yes, indeed; for I have been credibly informed that they not only lent their aid in that villanous tea-riot, but that the Puritan ranks at Lexington and Bunker Hill were largely increased by the pestilent dogs, who fought like tigers, and could not be made to understand when they were soundly whipped! Well, well! we shall see what is to come. It looks dark enough now, and, if matters are to go on as they threaten, I shall accept the invitation of the home government to loyal subjects, and remove my family to Nova Scotia.”

Here he struck the key-note of the strain that thrilled my heart with apprehension. I fell into a painful reverie, which so absorbed me that I heard no more. I knew well that secret agents had been through the country describing large and desirable tracts of land in Canada and Nova Scotia, to be given to all who would withdraw from the sections in revolt; and proclamations to that effect had also been recently published.

Should he fulfil his threat, my beloved mother would be removed to a great distance from me, and the difficulties of travelling in times of such disturbance were so great that it must be long before I could see her again, if ever. Then I grieved to think of a separation from my dear Anna, the youngest and loveliest of the five sisters, many years my junior, and my special darling. I had been permitted to take her home with me after the holidays every year, and keep her through the remainder of the winter. Now I was no longer to enjoy that privilege. Besides all this, I knew that a strong attachment existed between her and Charles Thorpe, which had been forming from their childhood with the full approbation of their parents. What troubles might now be in store for them also!

Indeed, as I meditated upon the public, social, and domestic aspect of affairs, I could see nothing cheering or encouraging. Here was this little rural village, whose inhabitants were entirely divided among themselves—a type of the national condition: fathers against sons, wives opposed to their husbands, sons and daughters-in-law against their fathers-in-law. It seemed to form a present and dismal realization of the description given by our Lord.

The minds of old and young, and of all classes in society, were so pervaded with a sense of impending evil as to cast a dark shadow over the festive season, and cause its gay assemblies to take the character of political meetings, where matters of fearful import were discussed with bated breath.

It was well known that Mr. Thorpe, his father-in-law, and their distinguished guests, with other leaders of the disaffected who were constantly arriving and departing, held conclaves every night that extended far into the “wee sma’ [Pg 809] hours,” many of which my husband was summoned to attend, to the intense displeasure of my irascible step-father, who denounced them all as a pack of infamous traitors, for whose treasonable practices hanging was the only proper remedy. Upon the whole, rankling irritation on the one part, and gloomy forebodings on the other, took the place of the cheerfulness proper to the season; and when the parties at the two houses dispersed to go their several ways, the leave-taking was a sad one for all.

Another year passed, and the Christmas of 1776 arrived. What changes those few months had wrought! Mr. Thorpe and his three oldest sons, John, Nathan, and Charles, had joined the Continental army early in the year. The father commanded the regiment of militia in which his sons served as privates. In one of the first engagements John was killed. Soon after Mr. Thorpe himself was brought home wounded and dying. He survived long enough to bequeath the cause to his wife and her father, and to receive the assurance that their lives and those of his surviving sons, with all their earthly possessions, should be devoted to its interests.

Mr. Foote had fulfilled his threat, and removed his family to Nova Scotia about the time when his life-long friend joined the “rebel” army. I had a brief and mournful interview with my mother before they left, and a stormy parting with my surly step-father, who was too much incensed against my husband and myself, for embracing the cause he so cordially hated, to be even coolly civil. His indignation was increased by the suspicion that we had influenced my mother’s sympathies in the same direction, though she very carefully abstained from manifesting any such tendency out of respect for his honest though misguided prejudices.

With him went a multitude of Church-of-England folk who were greatly regretted in that neighborhood; for they very generally acted from a sincere conviction of duty, and did not meddle unpleasantly with the opinions and decisions of their neighbors. A still greater number of Methodists went from New Jersey and Maryland to Canada and Nova Scotia, and their departure was the occasion for universal rejoicing to the friends of the country. The only regret was that they left a sufficient faction of their brethren to act as spies and informers in every village and neighborhood, and to bring all who differed from them in politics into serious trouble. We used to think we defined their position and character when we said, “They are all hand and glove with the Hessians!”

The Declaration of Independence on the 4th of July in that year had placed the day high in the calendar of those which mark the most glorious epochs in the world’s history. Meantime, discouragements had accumulated along the track of our army, until they culminated in that dreary autumnal retreat through New Jersey before the British forces which dispersed the hopes of our people as the winds scatter the leaves of the season. A little later the British took possession of Rhode Island. In the despair which followed these disastrous events society became utterly disorganized; and when Lord Howe and his brother-commanders of the British land and marine forces issued proclamations offering full indemnity and protection to all [Pg 810] who would “return to their allegiance,” multitudes, among whom were many who had been accounted our most steadfast friends, accepted the offer from alarm, even while their sympathies and best wishes were with the cause they thus abandoned. Not one Catholic was of their number; they had no faith in British promises.

Great was the revulsion when our troops rallied to such glorious purpose at Trenton and Princeton! Those who had fallen away in the hour of adversity, and found to their sorrow how utterly worthless were Lord Howe’s paper “protections” to shield them from the vile outrages of the plundering Hessians, now returned in crowds, offering themselves and all they possessed to General Washington to further his efforts. His headquarters were made that winter in a town near the little village where Mrs. Thorpe resided. Mr. von Francke visited him frequently at his quarters during the winter as the financial agent of many friends of the cause in New England and the Southern States. I improved those occasions to accompany him and visit my dear friend, Mrs. Thorpe.

She was exerting all her energies, time, and money to prepare clothing for the soldiers and necessary supplies for the army. The buzz of spinning-wheels and the clack of domestic looms were heard in her house from day-dawn until late at night. That house was a workshop of tailors and shoemakers, and her agents ransacked the country for leather wherewith to make shoes. Every friend who visited her was pressed into the service, and during each precious moment the busy needles were plied and the knitting-needles clicked while we were visiting and chatting of the past, the present, and the prospects of the future. Most religiously did she thus fulfil the promise made to her dying husband, and seemed to find solace for her great sorrow in occupying herself constantly to aid the struggle for which her beloved ones had given their lives.

My heart ached for poor Charles, dejected and lonely in his separation from Anna, and grieving over the stern refusal of her father to permit any intercourse between them unless he would abandon the rebels and join the standard of King George. To add to his distress, he had heard, through a friend of Anna, that her father had determined she should accept the suit of an influential officer of the government in Nova Scotia, a very dissolute man, who was captivated by her beauty upon their first meeting at a dance in the house of the governor. Charles knew so well her father’s despotic rule over his family that he feared she might be compelled to comply with his commands.

Deeply as I sympathized with the young people, I could not afford them the aid they entreated for communicating with each other through my letters to my mother. The principles of my religion forbade that I should do any act to encourage disobedience to a father. Yet I could not regret that the kindness of General Washington made amends for my refusal, by furnishing better facilities for their purpose than I could have furnished.

The three following years passed on, marked by fluctuating fortunes and many hardships for our devoted troops and their dauntless leader. The surrender of Burgoyne in the autumn of ’77, and the alliance with [Pg 811] France which followed, had awakened bright hopes of a speedy and successful termination of the conflict, but crushing reverses and bitter disappointments soon came.

The state of the currency baffled the strongest efforts and exhausted the resources of wise and able financiers. My husband, who was accounted extremely clever in affairs connected with the exchequer, was often driven to his wits’ end to provide for fearful contingencies, and then to confess his utter inability to meet further demands.

Mr. Earle placed his large fortune at the disposal of his country, and died soon after. His daughter gave better treasures when, with Spartan firmness, she yielded all her noble sons, one after another, for its defence.

In the terribly hard winter of 1779-80 General Washington again established his headquarters in New Jersey, in Mrs. Thorpe’s immediate neighborhood, and I went frequently to visit her when it was necessary for Mr. von Francke to go on financial missions to that place. Upon one of these occasions, early in the spring, what was my surprise to be greeted on the threshold by my beloved Anna, and to find that she was the happy bride of my desponding young friend of yore, Charles Thorpe, now a dashing lieutenant and prime favorite with the commander-in-chief. Their happiness was not unclouded, however; for they had been married without her father’s knowledge or consent. He had made every arrangement for her immediate marriage with the man whom he had chosen and whom she despised, and sent her to Boston to procure her trousseau. Very opportunely, General Washington made a journey to Boston about that time, with Charles in company as one of his aides. The wedding took place at the house of the friend with whom she was stopping. Many of Mr. Earle’s distinguished friends were present, and General Washington gave away the bride.

Her father was so enraged when he heard of it that he forbade her to enter his house again, or to expect that he would ever own her as his daughter.

* * * * *

When Mrs. von Francke reached this point in her story, she gave a bunch of keys and spoke some words in German to her waiting-woman, who soon brought forth from some hidden recess a small mother-of-pearl casket, with silver binding and clasps, of exquisite workmanship, and a package neatly folded and enclosed in an embroidered white linen case. The casket was first opened, and displayed a superb set of pearl jewelry, consisting of various ornaments for the coiffure, ear-rings, necklace, bracelets, brooch, waist-clasp, and buckles for the slippers. It was presented to Anna by Mr. von Francke when she departed for Nova Scotia. From the other package, after undoing many fastenings, designed to shield its contents from any possible contact with the air and dust, she drew a magnificent white satin dress, made in the old-time fashion, with an immensely wide skirt—for the crinoline of those days attained an amplitude far beyond the most extravagant expansion achieved a few years since by the leaders of ton—and a very long train. Around the lower part of the skirt a heavy pattern in leaves and flowers was embroidered with pure silver spangles and bugles [208] drawn on with silver thread; a tiny pair of white satin [Pg 812] shoes which would rival in size the celebrated glass slippers of the fairy tale, embroidered with material and pattern to match the dress, with the toes pointed, and the points turned back until they nearly reached the pearl buckle on the instep; a splendid white thread-lace over-dress, much in the mode of the modern polonaise; a very long veil of the same material, attached by the inevitable orange-flowers—these completed the suit, and, with the pearls, formed the bridal costume fifty years before of Anna Foote, now Mrs. Charles Thorpe.

After showing me two miniatures, painted on ivory in the most finished and delicate style, and mounted in elegant gold lockets—the one of Anna in her bridal dress, and the other of Charles in the full military costume of that day—the articles were all carefully returned to their receptacle and Mrs. von Francke resumed her narrative.

* * * * *

During the long visit I paid Mrs. Thorpe at that time—the spring of 1780—the village where the army was quartered, and the town near by, were the scenes of many parties, balls, and entertainments of every kind.

The French minister, M. Luzerne, successor of the first minister from France, M. Gerard, came to pass some weeks at the headquarters of the commander-in-chief. He was accompanied by many distinguished foreigners. Among them was Don Juan de Miralles, resident at Philadelphia, from the Spanish court. He had visited us frequently in that city with Count Pulaski and MM. Gerard and Luzerne. He was a most affable and accomplished gentleman and an exemplary Christian.

Upon their arrival the gay festivities were kept up with renewed zeal and brilliancy. But while in full activity they were brought to a sad and sudden close by the death of this gentleman after an illness of only two days. Mr. von Francke brought a Spanish priest to attend his last hours and conduct the funeral solemnities, which were celebrated in the most imposing and impressive manner. General Washington and his staff, all the foreign officers and ministers in full costume, walked as chief mourners. Many members of Congress came to pay this last tribute of respect to one who had, by his shining virtues and gentle manners, endeared himself to all who knew him.

When Charleston, S. C., was taken by the British in May, 1780, Nathan Thorpe was severely wounded. He was carried to the house of a German Catholic in that city to whom Mr. von Francke had given him letters of introduction. There he lingered between life and death, as it were, for many weeks. He was faithfully attended night and day by a disabled Irish Catholic soldier, who brought an Irish priest to instruct him and administer the last consoling rites of the church to him in his extremity. His youth and a robust constitution prevailed, however, and he recovered. During this interval an attachment had been formed between him and a lovely daughter of his kind host, to whom he was married the ensuing autumn. As his health was not sufficiently reinstated to permit his return to the army, he entered upon the practice of his profession as a lawyer in Charleston, and finally achieved brilliant success and a large fortune therein.

In June of that year Knyphausen, [Pg 813] with his Hessians, made a destructive raid through New Jersey, sparing neither friend nor foe; not even their Methodist cronies and instigators escaped rough treatment and severe losses, for which they received but slight commiseration from their fellow-sufferers, whose interests they had done all they could to injure and betray. Mrs. Thorpe’s property was seriously damaged and many valuable animals slaughtered by the merciless ruffians.

In July of the same year the French fleet under Count de Grasse arrived, and was welcomed with great joy by the whole country. The French troops commanded by Count Rochambeau were transported on these vessels. Soon after their arrival we became acquainted with that illustrious commander. I saw him for the first time at the celebration of Mass in our humble chapel. He was accompanied by Marquis La Fayette and Count de Grasse. After Mass Mr. von Francke, who had been in correspondence with them before, introduced me to them, and invited them to dine with us in our home, which invitation they accepted, and from that time they never failed to visit us when they were in Philadelphia.

In August the Continental forces, under General Gates, fought the bloody battle of Camden, S. C., and were defeated chiefly through the shameful failure of the militia to do their duty. The Maryland regiments, however—many of whom were Catholics—under their brave Catholic commander, Baron de Kalb, fought with unyielding firmness and desperation, atoning as far as possible for the poltroonery of their Protestant comrades of Virginia and North Carolina.

When even General Gates fled from the field, the Catholic soldiers advanced steadily and firmly to fight or die with the glorious De Kalb, who, when he saw others flying, drew his sword, and, shouting to his dauntless soldiers of the Maryland and Pennsylvania lines, “Stand firm, my boys, for I am too old to fly!” fell soon after, covered with wounds. The whole nation was in mourning when the news of his death was received. Demonstrations of sorrow were made in every city, and requiem Masses offered in the Catholic churches for the repose of his soul. Congress voted that the country should rear a fitting monument to his memory. It is still cherished by every true American heart, and will be as long as our people are faithful to themselves and to their country. He was one of Mr. von Francke’s dearest friends for many years, and we mourned for him as for a brother.

Through the remainder of that year, and during the spring and summer of 1781, discouragements in every form, and disasters that would have utterly dismayed a less determined people, surrounded our hapless country. The baseless currency became so depreciated as to be almost worthless. The iniquity of speculators, and the flood of counterfeits poured upon the colonies by Lord Howe, greatly increased difficulties sufficient in themselves to overwhelm the nation. Yet the courage and resolution of the people never faltered, and were fully responded to and sustained by the firmness of their representatives in the legislative assemblies of the different States and in Congress.

The heavy clouds began to break and our national prospects [Pg 814] to brighten in the early autumn of 1781. We had so often seen our fairest hopes suddenly blighted that we hardly dared to accept such promising tokens as seemed to be given from time to time only to save us from utter despair. Now, however, we were destined to witness a consummation, sudden, unlooked-for, and beyond the wildest expectations of the most sanguine, in the entire defeat and surrender of the British troops under Cornwallis, on the 19th of October in that year—an event which virtually closed the war and secured our independence.

Intelligence of this astounding event was conveyed through the whole country, with the speed of the wind, by special couriers despatched in every direction. It was said that the fine horses of Methodist Tories—which had been spared by the British troops when they captured all that were of any value belonging to our people—performed splendid exploits of speed in disseminating the glorious news, to the unutterable indignation of their crestfallen owners!

Our nation, so long accustomed to desolating evils, now burst forth into frantic demonstrations of joy. Bonfires blazed on every hill. Public parades, and processions with banners, crowded the streets of every town. Illuminations and fireworks turned the darkness of night into noonday splendor. The rural populations, old and young, flocked to the villages and cities to join in the universal expressions of jubilant patriotism. Services of thanksgiving were held by Protestants. High Masses were offered in Catholic churches, and the Te Deum was chanted there by Catholics marching in procession under the floating colors of the triumphant “Stars and Stripes.”

The members of Congress, of the Supreme Executive Council, and the Assembly of Pennsylvania, by special invitation of the French minister, attended in our church in Philadelphia during the celebration of divine service and thanksgiving for the capture of Lord Cornwallis. Our French pastor, Abbé Baudole, delivered an eloquent address upon the occasion.

New Jersey was more noisy than all the other States in her public manifestations of triumph. Nor was it unfit that she should be, since none had suffered so much in furnishing a common battle-ground and thoroughfare for the conflicting forces. Neither was it strange that she showed little toleration for the Tories at whose hands she had received persecutions, injuries, and insults of untold numbers and magnitude. Here, as elsewhere, the Catholic voice, the first that was raised in support of the conflict for independence, was also the first to plead, through both clergy and laity, for toleration and leniency toward these relentless foes of our country in her darkest hours.

Early in November we entertained a large and joyful party at our house. At our request General Washington and his lady presided at the reception of the guests. All the French and German officers with their attendants, the foreign ministers, and many of our own distinguished countrymen, military and civic, were present. Charles and Anna Thorpe were of my household at that time.

A succession of splendid private entertainments and public banquets was given in Philadelphia.

The joyful excitement was kept up by the nation through the following winter, and Mr. von [Pg 815] Francke was absent frequently as the invited guest at public festivals which would not excuse him from attendance, although his health was rapidly declining.

In May, 1782, my rejoicing was quenched for ever by the painful event which left me a widow. The long-sustained strain and mental anxiety to which my husband was subjected during all those years of national embarrassment had so worn upon his frame that, when final success was assured and the strain no longer required, he sank into a decline, for the arrest of which all remedies proved unavailing, and survived only a few weeks. No hero that gave his life on any of those bloody battle-fields was, more truly than he, a martyr for his country.

Mrs. Thorpe, Charles, and Anna were with me during the distressing scene and until I had consigned my beloved to his final resting-place. He had for so many years belonged to the public that it claimed the right to conduct the ceremonial, outside of the church; and it was celebrated with most impressive solemnity, both as a religious and civic rite.

From that time Philadelphia became intolerable to me. I closed my house and accompanied my kind and gentle friend to the home in New Jersey which was always open to the afflicted. Here I remained until Charles removed to St. Lawrence County, N. Y. —”then a dense wilderness—with his family. He had received a grant of lands from the government, which he exchanged for an extensive territory in that vicinity.

To that wilderness I came with my dear Anna to share the hardships and privations inseparable from the attempt to found a home in such a region. With these trials, wholly new to us, we have also received and enjoyed many blessings. She is surrounded by a blooming group of sons and daughters, and blessed with smiling, prattling grandchildren. We have seen a fine village grow up around us, and our country has been crowned with unexampled prosperity.

The one sole cloud over Anna’s happiness has been the stern refusal of my obstinate step-father, who still lives at a very advanced age, to forgive the daughter he so cruelly banished from his heart and home. I have often thought that, if the colonies had been subdued, he would have welcomed her back long ago. She has written many letters to him, but they are always returned unopened. My own dear mother died the year following Anna’s marriage. I saw her but once after her removal to Nova Scotia. The separation from her was one of the greatest trials of my life. Few indeed who have lived so long have suffered less from severe afflictions than I, and my heart swells with gratitude daily when I recall the varied blessings which the beneficent hand of Providence has poured upon my lengthened pilgrimage.

* * * * *

Some years later, when Mrs. von Francke was past ninety, I was on a visit to the dear friends of whom I have discoursed in this rambling sketch, when they received a message from Nova Scotia that the aged Mr. Foote was dying, and could not leave the world in peace until he had seen and been reconciled with his long-banished daughter. He requested that Charles should go with her.

There was bustling and packing in great haste. In a few hours after the message arrived they were [Pg 816] on board a steamer, bound for Quebec, en route for Nova Scotia. Mr. Foote lived some weeks after their arrival, and would not allow them to leave him for an hour. They remained until after the funeral.

Mrs. von Francke survived her step-father but a few months. All the elder members of the family have long since passed away.

It is many years since I have seen the lovely home of my childhood, or that other one, on the bank of the dear old St. Lawrence, where I passed so large a portion of childhood’s happy hours; but the memories connected with both, and with the dear friends who made those hours so happy, will never pass away.

[208] Elongated beads.

CONSUELO.

When, from the countless stars

That gem the azure vault above,

One flames and dies

Across our skies,

We mourn so bright a light

Is lost to sight;

And then—one brighter comes in view.

In trackless wastes

Our stars point true,

And, dying,

Ever thus renew.

When, from the countless homes

That deck this earth of ours,

One altar fire

Flames but to expire,

We mourn a loved hearth

So lost to earth;

And then—we build a new.

Wandering the world,

Our hearth-fires woo,

And, dying,

Ever thus renew.

[Pg 817]

SIR THOMAS MORE.

A HISTORICAL ROMANCE.

FROM THE FRENCH OF THE PRINCESSE DE CRAON.

XIII.

In the meantime Sir Thomas More had returned to his home at Chelsea. He felt at first a slight decree of uneasiness on account of the indiscretions of the Holy Maid of Kent, the evident malice with which Cromwell had drawn them out, and the eagerness with which he had interpreted them.

But as he was accustomed to resign into the hands of God the entire care of his future, and as there appeared to be nothing with which he could reproach himself in the short and accidental relations he had had with that woman, he soon recovered his former tranquillity, and thought no more but of how he might be able to render some new service to the queen. He knew she had set out for Leicester Abbey, and he had already found means of writing to the abbot, whom he remembered having received at the chancelry on some particular business concerning the rights of the abbey, and the father abbot had appeared, as well as he could remember, to be an honest and intelligent man.

Feeling satisfied that the queen had, ere that time, received his communications, he had gone towards evening to take a walk with his children in the country.

They were all seated on the green slope at Chelsea. The Thames flowed at their feet; the freshness of the verdure, the perfumed breeze that arose from the meadow, the balmy sweetness of the air, all united to render the moment a delicious one.

“See, dear father,” said Margaret, who was sitting at his feet (she always kept as near him as possible), “see how beautiful the river is! How it comes with its silver waves to kiss the rich and verdant meadow which extends so far before us! Look at those flocks of sheep, following the shepherds to the fold; how docile they are and obedient to their voices! And those dogs, how active and intelligent! Oh! how I love the evening, when the horizon yet burns with the red glow of the sun as he descends to light up other skies.” And Margaret paused to admire in silence the pure and inspiring beauties of nature by which she was surrounded, while her eyes sought those of her father, as if to interrogate him.

More smiled as he regarded her.

“Well, my dear daughter,” he said, “why not speak thy whole thought?”

For he loved to listen to the forcible sentiments she sometimes expressed, so characteristic of her melancholy and enthusiastic temperament.

“Why ask that, father?” she replied; “for my thought is sad—sad as all things that end. The day has gone, never more to return! It is like a precious pearl that [Pg 818] has been unstrung from a necklace where all are carefully numbered.”

“Thou art right, my daughter, and may be the happiness I have enjoyed this day in the midst of you will never more return!”

“What sayest thou, my father?” cried Margaret, alarmed. “Nay, wouldst thou leave us, then, and couldst thou live without thy children?”

“No, my child, no; but observe you not how the days of man are like the swift shuttle that flies to and fro in the hands of the weaver, and which he uses to trace, one after another, divers designs?”

“This one pleases me much,” said Margaret, smiling, “and I would like it to stop here.”

As she said this, she extended her hand toward Roper, who brought her a large bouquet of daisies [209] he had gathered for her in the fields.

“Here is my name written on my forehead by the hand of Roper,” she continued; and she placed the pretty white flowers amid the dark tresses of her lovely hair.

The father admired his beautiful young daughter, in whom, indeed, youth and beauty were united in all their brilliancy. Her small hands rested one upon the other; her white robe hung in graceful folds around, defining her perfectly-moulded form; her eyes, calm and serene in expression, yet shone with a thousand fires; one could read in their depths the strength and vigor of this young soul just entering upon life. Those features so calm and lovely, that union of charms and perfections, brought joy and happiness to the depths of the devoted father’s soul. He gazed at her in silence.

“A ray of eternal beauty lights up this beautiful countenance,” he said to himself. “This flower is born of my blood; it is being of my being, soul of my soul. Oh! blessed, blessed for ever be this child whom the Lord hath given to me! Margaret, my daughter,” he said after a moment’s silence, “tell me, I pray you, what is beauty?”

“Beauty?” replied Margaret, smiling at the unexpected question; and she raised towards him her eyes, whose lovely expression anticipated her answer.… “Well, … beauty is an undefinable thing,” she continued. “We recognize it in everything. Our souls are made to see it, to admire and love it; but I cannot, I believe, define it. It is there, and immediately we are enraptured with it. It is a ray of the glory of God; it is his power which flashes before our eyes, and our hearts are at once transported. The beautiful animal, full of life, strength, and agility, whose light and rapid steps seem scarcely to bend the delicate herbage of the field, his glossy coat permitting you to count his veins and admire the graceful and elegant proportions of his form; the plants rich with flowers and weighty with fruits; the birds with variegated plumage and tints of a thousand colors; the pure, azure skies of summer, the stars of night—such is beauty, my father; I feel it, but I cannot describe it to you otherwise.”

“Then, my dear child, what think you of the Being who has drawn all these things out of nothing, and who, by his powerful word, has given them everything, and preserves and watches over them all?”

“That he is,” replied Margaret earnestly, “the source and the veritable plenitude of all beauty; and [Pg 819] that if we could see him either with the eyes of the body or those of the soul, we should be perfectly happy, since he must be, and is necessarily, the sovereign perfection of all that delights in this world. And if you speak to me of eloquence, that moral beauty of soul which subdues and carries everything before it, I find in it but a new expression of that Sovereign Intelligence who has placed in our hearts the faculty of feeling and loving beauty, the strength and elevation of thought, which an Intelligence superior to our own is charged by it to communicate to us.”

“Then, my dear child, what think you of the unbeliever?”

“What do I think of him?” said Margaret, intently regarding Sir Thomas. “I will tell you: I do not think he exists.”

“How say you! that he exists not?”

“No, he does not exist, because he cannot. God has created us free, but that freedom has bounds. We cannot uncreate or make ourselves cease to be, and in the same way we cannot destroy our reason beyond a certain point; we may deny the truth with our lips, but we cannot prevent our hearts from believing it; we may arrange, assert, relate, or invent a falsehood, but we cannot convince ourselves that it is true. The sad science of the atheist compels him to remove God as far as possible from himself; to call him by a name formed of several strange syllables which do not represent him under any form to his mind; then when he has come to drive him beyond the bounds of his narrow intelligence, he denies his Creator with that tongue, with that life, and in the name of that reason which he received from him. Such a man must be a liar, although he would not be willing to walk proudly in the public ways with the tablet of liar attached to his shoulders.”

More smiled at the strong comparison of Margaret; and as he derived an extreme pleasure from these philosophical conversations, he continued thus:

“You believe, then, there are no atheists?”

“No,” replied Margaret, “there is not one in good faith, because the most ordinary reason is enough to prevent all doubt that the admirable chain of all being, over whom man is established master and king, has not been created by itself, and that it is the work of a Sovereign Intelligence who has foreseen and established all things by a science of prevision and of power far beyond all that we are able to see, all that we can feel, and all that we possess.”

“Nevertheless, Margaret, they will tell you that there is a force, a blind power, who has created all that.”

“Then,” replied Margaret ironically, “I will ask them what they understand by a ‘blind power’; for power means, it seems to me, that which can; but that which is blind can do, can will naught. Those, then, who by a happy chance see, wish, and know something, I would ask to add to the stature of a man the height of one cubit; to organize a head that understands how to solve mathematical problems, to compose music, poetry, to learn, remember, and speak. What think you, my father: would it not be very convenient to have in your cabinet some of those thinking heads, arranged on a shelf, as are pitchers and pipkins? Miserable creatures!” she continued, indignantly, “how they degrade [Pg 820] and dishonor mankind! And how do they dispose of their consciences? Why have they a conscience which commands them to do right and reproaches them for doing wrong, if it is not that man, born immortal, must one day render an account of all his deeds, and receive from God either a reward or punishment? No, it is not in weakness of the intellect that we must search for the origin of atheism, but in the corruption of the heart. If, then, the atheist denies God, he thereby testifies to his justice and power, even as the faithful bear witness to his goodness and mercy in acknowledging and honoring him. The one fears him because of the crimes he has committed; the other hopes in him because of the virtues he practises: behold the sole and only difference between the two men.”

“Well, my dear daughter,” replied More; “but the greater number of men who call themselves atheists follow only their own reasoning, as do you this moment, being almost always most profoundly ignorant of themselves and of their own nature, and entirely indifferent about the means of being instructed. Occupied solely with the present life, they attach themselves to mere sensual enjoyments, and, feeling that it would be necessary to abandon these in order to deliver their souls from the yoke of matter, they prefer thus to vegetate in forgetfulness of themselves and of all their duties.”

“Then, my father, you see that you agree with me on the point from whence I started out, which was that there are really no atheists, that the word is false, that it is taken in a false acceptation, and that it can only be properly defined in this way: ‘One who in his own heart is a liar.’”

While Margaret was conversing thus with her father, and the rest of the family were enjoying the repose of innocence and freedom, a man silently turned around the foot of the hill and followed slowly the path leading through the meadow. His face was darkly clouded with care; envy and malice were hidden in the depths of his heart. He reflected within himself in what manner he should approach the host whom he came to visit, and whom he perceived sitting on top of the hill. Thus in an immortal poem we find the fallen angel thrice making the circuit of the terrestrial paradise, seeking where he should enter in order to attack the man favored of God.

“Father, here is some one coming!” cried the youngest of More’s daughters.

And she ran, followed by the house dog, with which she had been very busy fixing on its neck a collar of leaves.

“It is a gentleman dressed all in black, who has a beautiful chain hanging round his neck.”

As she finished speaking Cromwell appeared.

“Ah! it is you, Master Cromwell,” said More, rising graciously. “Let me welcome you among us. How fares it with you?”

For the more Sir Thomas thought he had to complain of any one, the more he exerted himself by his kind and polite manner to assure him that he felt no bitterness in his heart; this was the cause of the cordial reception he gave Cromwell, whom he would otherwise have avoided.

“Well, I thank you,” replied Cromwell, casting, as was his custom, a furtive glance on all around him.

He at once encountered the eyes [Pg 821] of Margaret, which were fixed upon him with an expression of anger and scorn; for she could not endure him, having learned from the Bishop of Rochester how he had conducted himself in the hall of convocation, with what impudence he had sat himself in the midst of the assembly, and the manœuvres he had used to extort from the bishops an oath which must be followed by such fatal consequences.

He laughed to himself at the young girl’s displeasure, and made her a profound salutation. But she did not return it; and passing from the other side, she went and seated herself near her stepmother, who was knitting the leg of a stocking—the only employment in which she was passably skilled.

Cromwell remarked this movement; and if he was indifferent to it, he at least drew from it an inference as to the feeling of the family with regard to present affairs.

“Sir Thomas,” he said in a tone tinged with raillery, “I come, on the part of the king, to announce great news to you; it depends on yourself whether you find it good or bad. The king, our most gracious sovereign, is married, and he has espoused my lady Anne Boleyn.”

“The king married!” said Sir Thomas. “The king married!” he repeated. But he felt that Cromwell, who was aware of his great attachment to the queen, had only come to enjoy his discomfiture, or to watch him with some malicious design. He at once put himself on his guard, but turned visibly pale.

“He is married,” continued Cromwell. “The clergy laughed at him; but, by my troth, he has in his turn laughed at them! It was necessary that all this should come to an end. Yesterday his majesty advised the lords of his Privy Council of the decision he has taken of having the new queen publicly acknowledged. The communication should be made to-day in Parliament, and they will proceed immediately after to receive the oaths of all the members touching the succession to the throne, the supremacy of the king, and the separation from the Church of Rome.”

“Cromwell, can it be?” said Sir Thomas More, struck with consternation. “How rapidly all this has been brought about! And the queen, where is she?”

“Which one?” replied Cromwell, already affecting the tone of the court.

“Queen Catherine!” added More with a profound sigh.

“Ah! I understand. More obstinate than ever,” replied Cromwell in a tone of badinage. “She has retired to Easthampstead. We are occupied with her case now in council; she will be summoned to Dunstable, where an ecclesiastical commission will cut short all of her demands. Oh! all is over so far as she is concerned.”

More felt pierced to the heart, and each new expression of Cromwell wounded him afresh. He could not doubt but this cruel man had been sent to take an exact account of his slightest gesture and most insignificant word; he therefore vainly endeavored to restrain his feelings, but sorrow and the honest frankness of his nature carried him beyond the limits of prudence.

“Master Cromwell,” he said with dignity, “I know not why the king has sent you to me; but I think you know me so well that it would be useless for me, standing face to face with you, to disguise my sentiments; I therefore candidly acknowledge [Pg 822] that what you have told me penetrates me with a mortal sorrow. My heart is deeply attached to Queen Catherine, but I am, by my duty, still more devoted to the king. It is with the deepest grief that I see those who surround him, far from telling him the truth, think only of flattering him, that they may obtain new favors from his hands. And you, who are his adviser, I exhort and conjure you never to tell him what he can do, but what he ought to do; because, if the lion knew his strength, who would be able to subdue him? Until this time, as you know, we have not walked in the same road, nor have our eyes been turned to the same end; but now that I have entirely withdrawn from public life, when I can no longer cause you suspicion, when my sole and only desire is to live in obscurity, surrounded by my children, occupying myself with naught but the affairs of my eternal salvation, it seems to me I can disclose to you my inmost thoughts. I esteem you too highly to fear that you would abuse my confidence. Use your influence, then, with the king, if there yet be time, and try to arrest the disasters with which church and state are threatened!”

Cromwell felt confounded; come as a master, a triumphant enemy, he endeavored, but was unable, to recover himself in the presence of the calm and magnanimous virtue of a great man who seemed to place with confidence his destiny in his hands, and to esteem him sufficiently to exhort him still to fulfil his duty to his king and country. He experienced a momentary inspiration of good; but corrupt souls stifle such inspirations with the same facility that they are followed by the pure in heart. An instant’s reflection sufficed for him to recover his accustomed arrogance.

“That is an easy thing for you to say,” he replied, “having now, as you have just remarked, retired from public life. But for me it is very different; every day convinces me how dangerous it would be to resist the king, and I confess that I am by no means tired of life, and do not desire to lose my head on the scaffold, nor to die in poverty like that poor cardinal of defunct memory. That is why I must continue to act as I have done in Parliament, and I advise you to do the same; for, hearken, Sir Thomas: I have not come here of my own accord, but on the part of the king, to announce to you his intentions, and at the same time say to you that he has learned with great indignation of the correspondence you have kept up with that nun called the Holy Maid of Kent; that, notwithstanding, he will exercise toward you the utmost clemency, that he will strike your name from the bill of high treason which is entered against her, if he has reason hereafter to be satisfied with your conduct, and if you will publicly abjure the prejudices you have until this time manifested against Queen Anne, his spouse.”

“What say you, Master Cromwell?” cried Sir Thomas More. “I am implicated in the proceedings they have instituted against that woman?”

And the unhappy father looked round upon his children, who had gathered around him, and whom terror and alarm had rendered motionless.

“Master Cromwell,” he continued after a moment’s silence, “your visit is a cruel one; my children, at least, were not guilty, if any one else here is.” And his eyes rested [Pg 823] on Margaret, who stood pale and trembling with horror and surprise.

But Cromwell knew very well what he had come to do; it was part of his design that the grief and solicitations of More’s children should break down his resolution, and induce him to yield to all they wished to demand of him.

“Margaret! my beloved child,” said More, especially concerned for her, “grieve not. I fully hope to prove, as clearly as the light of day, that I have nothing with which to reproach myself toward my king, and that I am an entire stranger to the follies of that woman. Listen, Master Cromwell,” he continued, turning towards him, without manifesting the least emotion, “I pray you say to the king, my sovereign, that nothing could afflict me more than to know I had incurred his displeasure. Nevertheless, I hope to prove that he is mistaken with regard to the acquaintance I have had with that woman. I have seen her but once, in the Sion Convent, in a chapel, and then because the fathers urged me to converse with her a few moments, and tell them what I thought of her virtue. She appeared to me simple and true in her conversation. The replies she made to the few questions I addressed her seemed to proceed from an humble heart and a pious soul. Since that day 1 have not seen her. This winter some one spoke to me about her, and told me she had made some predictions about the king, and asked me if I wanted to hear them. To which I replied—and I remember it perfectly—that I wanted to hear nothing about it, and, if it was true she had anything to reveal to the king, it seemed to me at least entirely superfluous for any other man to inquire into it. This is the whole truth, and I beg you, Master Cromwell, to say to the king I hope to prove it in the most undeniable manner.”

“This woman is only an instrument,” replied Cromwell, affecting not to reply to what Sir Thomas had said; “they have only used her and her pretended revelations in order to cause the conduct of the king to be censured by his people. I very much fear they will be severely punished—those, at least, who have employed her for that purpose.”

“I know not what will come of it,” replied Sir Thomas in a cold and quiet manner. “If it is true that there is a criminal impostor disguised under the appearance of virtue, they would do well to expose and punish her rigorously.”

And there the conversation ended. However much Cromwell desired that it should be prolonged, he neither knew how to renew nor to continue it. He concluded, therefore, to affect a degree of zeal and friendship, and summoned all his hypocrisy to his assistance.

“Dear Sir Thomas,” he said, “as you said but now, we have not always been of the same way of thinking. Some day I may change my opinions; but at this time I cannot begin to tell you how much anxiety I feel on account of the king’s anger in your regard. It appears that they have excited him most terribly against you. You must have some secret enemy who is using these means for the purpose of lessening you in his estimation and making you lose his favor.”

More listened, thinking if indeed it could be Cromwell who spoke in this manner.

“Verily,” he answered, “I must fain think as you do, for I have naught on my conscience touching [Pg 824] that woman; and would to God I was in his sight as free from sin as I feel myself free from any thought of wrong or any transgression against our sovereign lord and king!”

“Sir Thomas, you have let your attachment to Queen Catherine show too plainly, and it is right well known that you are against the spiritual supremacy of the king.”

More made no reply. Tears arose in his eyes. He looked at Margaret. The young girl held one of her stepmother’s long iron knitting-needles, and seemed mechanically trying to sharpen the point with the end of her finger, which she turned rapidly around it. If Margaret had held a poignard, it was evident that she would have wished to plunge it into the heart of the traitor who stood before her. She said nothing, but her flashing eyes followed every movement he made. The others sat motionless, and Cromwell felt oppressed by the attention of all these souls weighing upon his own. He no longer knew what to say; he looked around, he hesitated, he tried to resume the conversation, and again broke down.

Sir Thomas, always kind, always considerate, wished to relieve him from this painfully embarrassing situation.

“Master Cromwell,” he said, “I see that you find it somewhat painful to tell me all you have learned that would be disagreeable to me; therefore let us retire from here. If it please you to sup with us, we will return to the house.”

“I do not think Master Cromwell is hungry,” said Margaret, changing color. “He is one of those men who subsist on evil as well as bread; it is a stronger and more bitter nourishment, the savor of which agrees better with their ferocious natures.”

“You are charming, charming, damsel!” replied Cromwell, turning toward her with that trifling manner, coarse and familiar, which he considered suitable to adopt in his intercourse with women farthest above himself.

“Margaret does not like compliments,” replied Sir Thomas More, who endeavored to repair, without seeming to have noticed them, the expressions of anger and scorn Margaret had permitted to escape her. “She is very sensitive,” he added.

“And very frank, it seems to me,” answered Cromwell quickly, in a tone insolent and easy.

“A little too much so, perhaps,” replied Sir Thomas gently; “but that is better than to be deceitful.”

“Are all these fields yours?” asked Cromwell.

“No, indeed, sir. I own very little land around my dwelling; besides, I gave a portion of it to Margaret, my daughter, when she became affianced to young Roper.”

Saying this, Sir Thomas turned and walked with Cromwell and his family towards the house. On their arrival Sir Thomas conducted Cromwell into his private cabinet.

“Listen, sir,” he said, after he had closed the door: “I would not wish to conceal from you that you have deeply wounded me by declaring in presence of my children that I had been accused of high treason. I have not been chief-justice so long without learning that this is the weight they will let fall on my head, and I know perfectly well that this accusation of high treason is like a glove, which they can make to fit any hand. As to what I think about the supremacy of the king, that I shall reveal to no man living. [Pg 825] But, at least, be so good as to tell me how this action against me began, and who are my accomplices.”

“The nun,” replied Cromwell (perfectly well instructed in the particulars of an affair he had invented and intended to direct)—“the nun is accused of high treason toward the king. Her accomplices are Master Richard, Dr. Baking, Richard Risby, Biering, Gold, Lawrence Thwaites, John Adisson, and Thomas Abel. As to yourself and the Bishop of Rochester, you are accused of connivance; but, after what you have told me, I doubt not you will be able to prove your innocence easily, and your name will be stricken out at the commencement of the prosecution.”

“The Bishop of Rochester!” exclaimed Sir Thomas, his hands resting on the table, and entirely absorbed in reflection. He recalled the night when Fisher, seated in the same chair now occupied by Cromwell, had implored him not to accept the seal of state, and, upon his refusing to take his advice, prayed God never to permit them to be separated, but that their lives might terminate in the same manner and at the same moment. Lost in the recollection of his tender friendship, More forgot the frightful character of Cromwell, which no one, however, better understood than himself. He took him affectionately by the hand.

“Dear Cromwell,” he exclaimed, “how is this? The Bishop of Rochester? Ah! I implore you have his name removed. Let them be revenged on me, but not on him. Mercy for my friend!”

Sir Thomas was on the point of telling Cromwell that he had heard them both accused on that fatal night at Westminster; but on reflection he forebore, supposing him to be entirely ignorant of their presence in the church.

“Alas!” continued Sir Thomas, “if I have offended the king, let them punish me; but Rochester, what has he done? Devoid of ambition, occupied entirely with the duties of his bishopric, devoted to the king, at whose birth he attended, loved, esteemed by him, how can they suspect him of wishing to injure his beloved sovereign? Master Cromwell, I beseech you intercede for him!”

That prayer was very well understood by Cromwell, but he feigned not to hear it. He had not come to sympathize with, but rather to enjoy the sufferings of a just man, one whom he still feared, although he had entirely supplanted him.

“Sir Thomas,” he replied, “I cannot see why you supplicate me in behalf of the Bishop of Rochester, as though I were able to do anything in the matter. Justice is there, to be rendered to him, and to you also, if you prove that you are entirely innocent of this charge.”

“In sooth,” said Sir Thomas, “I swear to you that I know nothing about it. I have never considered it of sufficient importance to investigate the character and veracity of that woman. I believe, and am very well convinced, that being the creatures and the children of God, in whom we exist and from whom we have received all things, he will sometimes, in his goodness, manifest his will to us by some extraordinary means and supernatural ways, and also that he can change or interrupt in a moment events of which he has himself marked out the course; but, at the same time, I believe that this truth can be abused either by weakness of [Pg 826] the mind, by error, or by folly. That woman, then, is perhaps guilty of no other crime than of having mistaken dreams for revelations; and if it is thus, I find that the more importance we give to trivial things, the more dangerous we make them, if in the beginning they were the cause of any inconvenience.”

“That is true,” said Cromwell; “but the king is very much wroth, and intends that this woman and all those who have believed in her shall be punished.”

“That alters the case,” replied Sir Thomas; and he paused thoughtfully.

“However,” said Cromwell, “there is a very sure way of conciliating his majesty, which is by praying my lady Anne to be your intercessor. If you wish it, I will request her, in your name, to intercede with the king for the Bishop of Rochester.”

“Ah!” said Sir Thomas.

He felt as though Cromwell had thrust a dagger into his heart. He bowed his head and was unable to utter a word. To save his friend by condescending to a base action—he had not courage to accept the condition.

“That is an assured way,” said Cromwell (and the vile wretch secretly applauded himself on the astute and skilful means he employed)—“infallible; a word from her will suffice.”

“No,” cried More, “no! The honor of my friend is as dear as my own. He would not will it.”

“He would not will it!” replied Cromwell, in an ironical tone. “What! would you, then, consider yourselves dishonored because she had interceded for him?”

“Ah! Cromwell,” cried Sir Thomas, regretting what he had said, “I implore you do not betray my situation!”

“I am far from betraying you, sir, since I offer you a very sure and very simple means of removing all that is dangerous in that situation. I can promise you that if you satisfy the king on this point, and if you testify that you accept and recognize him without any repugnance as supreme head of the church, not only will he pardon your fault, but he will overwhelm you with new favors.”

On hearing this proposal Sir Thomas looked steadily at him.

“Sir,” he said, “I thank you. I now understand what they ask of me, and why they have placed my name and that of my friend on the list of the accused, which, in reality, would not be able to reach or injure us. Now I have no longer any doubt. When will the trial begin?”

“What do you say?” interrupted Cromwell. “What! you refuse?”

“I refuse nothing,” said Sir Thomas modestly; “I only ask when the trial will take place, and when I must present myself at the bar.”

“But reflect on the wrong you do!” replied Cromwell.

“I have considered everything,” responded Sir Thomas.

“Ah! well, then, do as you please.… To-morrow the commission will assemble in the Tower, and I very much fear, from your obstinacy, that you will remain there.”

“In that event I will make my preparations to-night,” replied Sir Thomas.

At that moment Margaret hurriedly entered and announced supper, Cromwell took advantage of the occasion. He saw with great vexation the firmness of Sir Thomas, and, having promised the king that he would make him yield, he supposed the young girl would assist him in renewing the conference.

[Pg 827] “Damsel,” he said, inclining toward her,” I am glad you have come; for, although you have treated me but ill, I am here to render an important service to your father. Persuade him, then, to listen to me, and not consent to separate himself from you, perhaps for ever!”

“My God!” cried Margaret, “my father separate himself from us? What do you mean? Speak! what do you mean? With how many maledictions, then, do you come prepared to strike our house?”

“To-morrow Sir Thomas is summoned to appear before the council. Let him promise to take the oath the king requires, and his life will be spared!”

“Stop, sir!” cried Sir Thomas. “My children are not in the habit of judging my conduct nor of designating the path I should follow! Your pity is of the cruellest, sir! May God grant you a more sincere friend and a more genuine compassion than that you have offered me to-day! Go, Margaret; go tell your mother I wait for her.”

To this formal and decided expression of her father’s will Margaret dared not reply; she left the room, but felt that a fearful calamity had befallen her, of which she knew not yet the entire extent, and she descended slowly, pausing on each step of the stairway, wrapped in painful reflection.

Sir Thomas soon entered the hall with Cromwell, to whom he gave the first place at table, and who accepted without remorse such cordial hospitality on the part of a man whom he had resolved to corrupt or ruin entirely.

* * * * *

When night was far advanced, and Cromwell had departed from the abode into which he had entered only to bring sorrow and desolation, Sir Thomas returned to his cabinet, which he loved like an old servant whom we never regret so much as when it becomes necessary to part with him. He entered, with anxiety and sadness in his soul, and took his accustomed seat; he put the light he carried in the same place where he had placed it for so many years, and from whence it had shone on so many vigils and so many good actions, and he looked around him.

“To-morrow,” he exclaimed, “to-morrow I shall have to leave this abode where I have so long tended and seen my father die, where I have welcomed my first dear wife, where my children have been born!… When the swallow leaves her nest, she has a hope of returning to it again; but I, can I indulge in that sweet delusion? Is it not certain that my ruin is resolved on, and that the king’s indignation means death? To-morrow, when the day shall have dawned, I must assume a cheerful countenance, a serene composure, and say to them: ‘Adieu, my cherished children! I will return very soon.’ I will return very soon! Shall I be able to utter words that are so foreign to my heart? And Margaret—Margaret will weep for me all the days of her life. I shall never behold her young children, nor bless them when for the first time their eyes are opened to the light of day, and I shall never hear them try to repeat my name. Alas! why must it be that the king is annoyed at my breathing the air?—a man, too, confounded among a million of his subjects! Of what importance to him are the thoughts that lie hidden in the bottom of my heart? Why, Lord,” he cried, raising his hands toward heaven, “hast thou not stricken me from his memory, [Pg 828] and why hast thou suffered this prince of the earth to remember my name? Grant me an asylum where I may be able to finish out the days thou hast allotted me; the birds of the air find a shelter, the bears and ferocious beasts of the earth possess their dens, and no one comes to force them away! However, let thy will be done, and not mine.”

More remained for a long time leaning on the table. He then arose and walked the floor to and fro. He moved from place to place in the room; for he would be there no more, if they should summon and compel him to cave for ever his modest and beloved abode.

“They are all asleep,” he said. “I have consoled them. They have seen Cromwell with me, but they have not suspected that he brought the death-warrant of their father. A few hours of peace still remain for them, and to-morrow—to-morrow they will weep and feel that I am no longer with them! My eyes will no more behold my beloved ones; I shall no more hear their voices. They will seek me, but they will find me no more on earth.”

Here Sir Thomas was unable longer to contemplate with calmness the picture his imagination presented of the desolation and abandonment of his children. Looking around to be assured that he was entirely alone, he sank into a chair, and, bursting into tears, abandoned himself to the most bitter grief.

For a long time he remained thus. At length he arose; seeing that the clock in his cabinet was about to strike the hour of midnight, he returned to his table.

Taking up an enormous portfolio, he opened all the drawers. He took out a great number of papers and divers packages of letters; some of the latter were letters written by Margaret when a child, and he had preserved them as souvenirs of the progress of her youthful intellect; others were from the Bishop of Rochester; the greater number concerned a multitude of persons who had claimed or still sought his counsel and advice, his good offices, to reconcile their families, terminate their disputes, save them from dishonor, prevent their ruin by means of his credit and his money, and still more by the confidence and respect inspired in all by his virtues.

He untied the letters and threw them into the fire, where they were immediately consumed; for he knew with whom he had to deal, and how the most innocent things, the most trivial acts, would be brought up and construed into crimes against those who had held any intercourse with him. Those which concerned these persons he destroyed without regret; but when they had been entirely devoured by the flames, he turned with sadness to those of Margaret and the Bishop of Rochester, and could not summon sufficient resolution to cast them into the fire.

He looked at them and turned them over in his hands; they had given him so much pleasure! Those of his daughter had been dictated by the tenderest love; the virtues of his friend shone in every page of his, and proofs of attachment were inscribed upon every line, recalling the joys, the sorrows, and different events that had occurred during his entire life!

“Come!” he said with bitterness, “when Margaret shall no longer have a father, who will then have any use for these letters? Who will [Pg 829] treasure them up? And thou, O my friend! No, we shall not remain separated; for, O my God! thou hast declared that he who giveth up that which he loves for thy sake shall find it again; and if man, thy creature, gives thee an atom, thou wilt return him an entire world. Have we not received all things from thee? And what thou takest from us for a moment, is it not to return it to us again in eternity?”

He cast the letters into the fire, but turned away that he might not see them consumed. He then examined his book of accounts, and saw that they were correct. Besides, his estate was so small he found but little difficulty in administering it. After retiring from office he had divided his lands between his children, and each one of them knew the lot assigned her.

When he had finished all that, he again began to walk the room, and went toward the window; the night was intensely dark and the heavens obscured by a mass of black clouds.

“Well! I have some time yet,” he said, and turned to sit down. “Everything is arranged; Margaret will send my books. Now I am prepared to depart. It would seem that I am dead, and they come already to blot all traces of my existence from this place. Ah! how harrowing is the thought. My God! my courage fails. Help me, Lord! Animate by a breath of thy strength the weakness of thy servant; for I am the work of thy hands! Have mercy on me and succor me; for sorrow hath fallen upon me and I am utterly cast down!”

As he pronounced these words he thought he heard a sigh; he paused to listen, but heard nothing more, and came to the conclusion that his troubled imagination had deceived him. Again, however, he heard a slight noise; he then arose and proceeded to listen at the door opening into the library. Opening it very softly, what was his surprise on seeing Margaret! Her back was turned towards him, and a lamp burned beside her. He perceived that she had taken a number of books from the shelves, as she had a pile of them around her, and was leaning earnestly over the one she was reading. So intently was she absorbed that she did not hear her father enter. He advanced slowly until he stood behind her chair, and saw that she was reading a book of jurisprudence written in Latin according to the general custom of the times, and which contained detailed reports of all the trials for high treason; her handkerchief was lying beside her, and it was saturated with her tears. Sir Thomas turned pale; he was obliged to rest his hand on the table, which groaned under his weight.

Margaret turned around in alarm.

“My father!” she cried, “here at this hour!” And she ran to him and folded her arms around him, while her tears began to flow afresh.

“Margaret, what do you here?” he asked as he sank into a chair.

“My father, my father!” She burst into a torrent of tears, and could say no more.

“I thought you slept,” she added.

“Margaret, you should be in bed!” said Sir Thomas, endeavoring to control his feelings.

She fell on her knees before him, and, burying her face in her hands, sobbed aloud; her hair, loosened from its fastening, hung in dishevelled masses down to her feet.

“Margaret, you are weak!” said [Pg 830] More in an altered voice. “Is this the fruit of the lessons I have given you?”

“Dare you, then, say that I am weak, and reproach me because I weep for my father?” she replied, raising her head haughtily. “Do you no longer remember that I have never known a mother’s love, and that, since the day I left my cradle, you alone have directed all my movements, that in you alone have been centred all my affections, and to you have I always confided the most secret thoughts of my heart? You say that I am weak, when not a word of complaint has escaped my lips, when I have concealed my tears, weeping in the darkness of night, and when I have sat at table face to face with your executioner!”

“Margaret, my Margaret!” cried Sir Thomas; and he bowed his head on the shoulder of the child he so cherished, and pressed her to his bosom.

“Have I asked you,” she continued, turning away from him, “what you would do to escape from these tigers thirsting for blood? Have I advised you to recoil before them and lick the prints of their feet? No; I have come in silence to take counsel of the dead, some advice as to the crimes of the human race, because I have thought you would conceal your secret in your heart, and I would not be admitted to share it; that you would tell me what you did not believe, and I would not receive the truth from you. The truth!” she cried vehemently, and with a strength only lent her by excitement and suffering. “I know it now! I know, I feel, I have found out that very soon I shall see you no more; that I shall be alone upon the earth where I have found such joy and happiness in existing; that nothing will remain to me, and the future will be to me without a hope, and darkened for ever!”

“Margaret,” said Sir Thomas, “have compassion on your father!”

She then said no more, and they sat in silence, she with her arms clasped around his neck. She wept, and the tears continued to course slowly down her cheeks, whilst the lamp she had brought cast a feeble glimmer of light throughout the lengthy apartment, and over the rows of books arranged on the shelves; and thus the hours fled rapidly toward the fatal moment which she saw advancing with an agony indescribable.

O wicked and voluptuous prince! raise your head from your bed of down, draw aside the triple draperies of silk and gold that surround you; for your crimes keep vigil around your couch, and the justice of God numbers every tear you have caused to be shed! Far better would it be for you to sleep on an infected dunghill, in some obscure retreat; that your limbs, weary with toil and the heat of the mid-day sun, should tremble beneath the frosts of night, and that your hands were pure and free from iniquity in the presence of the most high God; for we cannot believe that man oppresses man without justice being meted out to him, or that the weak shall remain the prey of the strong. The day will come when a terrible vengeance shall fall upon the head of the impious, and he will see arrayed before him all the crimes he has committed. Then shall he cry aloud: “Why have I ever lived, and why has my mother ever borne me in her womb?” But light then will no longer be measured, night will have disappeared, century will no more follow century, and time shall be no more.

TO BE CONTINUED

[209] Margarita, Anglicè Margaret, is the Latin word for daisy.—”Transl.

[Pg 831]

A PROTESTANT BISHOP ON CONFESSION.

BY A CATHOLIC LAYMAN.

Bishop Atkinson, of North Carolina, in a “Charge” to the clergy of his diocese, took occasion to inveigh against auricular confession. To this Bishop Gibbons replied. The Protestant prelate now appears in “A Defence,” the purport of which we propose here to examine. Omitting any comment on the personal retort, we make our first quotation from the eighth page of this pamphlet:

“To object to the power of the priest to forgive sins is, according to this [the Roman Catholic] view, equivalent to objecting to the power of Christ to forgive sins. Is this to be maintained? Is this true?” Since to doubt Christ’s declaration is to call his power in question, we affirm that this is true and is to be maintained. If the words of Christ are fallible, it must follow that he who spoke them is also fallible. “Whose sins ye shall forgive they are forgiven,” and “Whatsoever ye shall loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven”: Falsify these statements, and we make God a liar. Of the exercise of this power St. Paul says to the Corinthians: “If I forgave any, for your sakes forgave I it, in the person of Christ”; and in condemning the incestuous Corinthian he judges him “with the power of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Now, if St. Paul was indeed acting with the power of our Lord Jesus Christ, and in his person, his absolution and condemnation were identical with Christ’s. If not, his arrogations were blasphemous and vain. But Bishop Atkinson asserts that “priestly absolution and the absolution of Christ are two entirely distinct things,” because the priest cannot have God’s infallible knowledge of the state of the soul, on which condition forgiveness depends.

Here is a confounding of things wholly different—the power of absolution, and knowledge infallible. Forgiveness does depend upon the state of the soul, and, whether it be Christ or one of his ambassadors pronouncing absolution, the conditions requisite are absolutely one. Nor Christ nor his priest can pardon the impenitent; but infallible knowledge of the state of the soul affects in no way the power of absolution. God reveals to any man his own soul’s condition, but to no man is given the power of self-absolution. So, also, he grants the power of absolution apart from the gift of infallible knowledge. The things are distinct and separate from each other. The latter of these powers our Lord alone possesses, but he seems not unfrequently, in the exercise of his ministry, to have purposely excluded all its influence over the former, to teach us that the two have no necessary dependence. Thus, he invests St. Peter with the power of the keys a short time before the fall of that apostle, and administers to Judas the clean Bread of Angels when he knows him to be a devil. Could a priest’s want of insight have results more appalling? But Bishop Atkinson here proposes [Pg 832] a method most ingenious for testing priestly power, a “practical test” to be applied as follows: “When the power of Christ to forgive sins was doubted, he wrought a miracle to prove it, and thereby silenced the gainsayers. When the power of the priest to forgive sins is doubted, as it very frequently and very seriously is, can he work a miracle to demonstrate it?”

To demand a miracle in the sacrament of penance as a “practical test” of sacerdotal power is also to require it in every other sacrament and sacerdotal function. Has Bishop Atkinson tested by this rule his baptisms, confirmations, communions, and, first of all, his orders? A “practical test” is of general application. When a child is baptized, the Episcopal clergyman thus speaks to the sponsors: “Seeing now, dearly beloved brethren, that this child is regenerate and grafted into Christ’s church, let us give thanks unto Almighty God for these benefits.” Here, should his “practical test” be demanded to verify this statement, could the bishop produce it? Again, at the end of a marriage he says: “I pronounce you man and wife,” and “Whom God hath joined together let no man put asunder.” Is the clergyman then God? Else whence this change from first to third person?

How far, we are asked, in the judgment of a “thorough-going Roman Catholic”—one who is blind enough to take God at his word, while all the world smiles at his childish credulity—does the priest’s power of absolution actually extend? In the ordination service of the Episcopalian Prayer-Book stands this Catholic formula:

“Receive the Holy Ghost for the office and work of a priest in the church of God, now committed unto thee by the imposition of our hands. Whose sins thou dost forgive, they are forgiven; and whose sins thou dost retain, they are retained. And be thou a faithful dispenser of the word of God and of his holy sacraments; in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.”

* * * * *

Now, the Catholic believes the church means what she affirms; that the literal declaration is the literal truth, since God himself spake it. He therefore receives the priest in Christ’s person, believing that the sins which he remits are remitted. But he knows the conditions upon which depends his cure when he seeks divine remedies. He knows that Christ himself cannot pardon the impenitent, and that the humble priest is not greater than his Master; but, upon the same conditions that the Son of God required, he believes the priest’s decision must be ratified in heaven. He remembers, too, the promises vouchsafed to those receiving, and the overwhelming curse pronounced on those rejecting, the messenger of Christ—a judgment more dread than that on Tyre and Sidon.

Though Bishop Atkinson denounces auricular confession, we are not to understand that he opposes all confession. Nay, he deems it sometimes salutary, “sometimes even obligatory, from the ignorance and doubts of the penitent, from the enormity of his crime, from his consequent tendency to despair. But it is a drastic medicine, not to be taken regularly, for thus taken it enfeebles the patient.” Does Bishop Atkinson really mean to tell us that a state of too great sanctity is one to be discouraged? that some bile of imperfection is essential to the health of the moral constitution? and that this the drastic medicine [Pg 833] would too thoroughly remove? If not, what does he mean? Did he look upon confession as a wicked imposition, we could readily comprehend his aversion to its practice; but this he denies, directing his attacks against auricular confession, which by the Council of Trent is thus defined: “A confession of all mortal sins, however secret, with all their circumstances, to a priest, in secret.” Here the bishop shudders—that secret mortal sins, with their attendant circumstances, should be matter of confession, and to a priest, in secret! To commit them in broad daylight would not be half so terrible! Confessing them in secret is that which most appalls him. Such, he gravely tells us, is not the rightful mode. The proper thing to use is a very mild dilution of this potent, drastic medicine—something that will soothe and lull the troubled conscience, not purge it of its guilt. To support his strong assertions, he appeals to Holy Scripture and to the early fathers. Here we have a long quotation from a work of Bishop Hopkins. From this we learn that “the apostles exercised their office of remitting or retaining sins; for the sins of those whom they thought fit (mark well the restriction) were remitted in baptism, while the sins of those whom they judged unfit were retained.” Again: “These inspired men required repentance towards God and faith towards our Lord Jesus Christ, and then administered baptism for the remission of sins to those whom they judged to be truly penitent.” In a word, they acted always in accordance with their judgment. Now, the basis of sound judgment is a thorough understanding of the cause to be adjudged, and without this understanding there can be no prudent judgment. Were our Lord’s apostles gods who could read man’s secret conscience? And if not, how could they know the matter they were judging, or give a righteous judgment until they knew the matter? And just here we would ask, What constitutes matter, if not mortal sins? Not venial sins, surely; for these no Roman Catholic is called upon to mention.

But why, some one may ask, must particulars be stated in making a confession? and what is your authority for the secrecy observed? To this we ask in turn, If a sin be stripped of its aggravating circumstances, will any man maintain that it is honestly confessed? and since God does not require us to confess our sins in public, should his faithful representative demand more of the penitent? Yet it is to these conditions that the bishop makes objection, and thus his “drastic medicine” is a talent in a napkin, a useless, dormant power not intended to be exercised. But what says the Church of England on this subject of confession? According to the bishop, she has left it “strictly voluntary”; but in her Visitation of the Sick we find this rubric: “Here shall the sick man be moved to make a special confession of his sins, if he feel his conscience troubled with any weighty matter. After which confession the priest shall absolve him (if he humbly and heartily desire it) after this sort:

“‘Our Lord Jesus Christ, who hath left power to his church to absolve all sinners who truly repent and believe in him, of his great mercy forgive thee thine offences; and by his authority committed to me I absolve thee from thy sins.’” “Here shall the sick man be moved to make confession.” Is it left so “strictly voluntary” as the bishop has declared it? And why now [Pg 834] to the sick man does the church propose confession, when in the time of health she never urged it on him? Is he now in a condition for this strange and stern requirement? But Bishop Atkinson would say: “It is only weighty matter he is called upon to tell.” Are not secret mortal sins the weights that now oppress him? And why is he exhorted to a special declaration? Is it not that death is near? But who is he that reckons the number of his days, and can certify unerringly how long he has to live? The thief in the night does not warn us of his coming. Behoves it not, therefore, that we live as dying men, lest, in an hour we think not, the Son of Man should come? If so, the rubric cited is appropriate to all. Thus, in his own communion, Bishop Atkinson will find that special confession to a priest is recommended, and that this confession has all that constitutes auricular, except the bond of secrecy which silences the priest. This is left to his honor or personal discretion, untrammelled by all vows. But the bishop further tells us he himself has heard confessions “which, if divulged, would not only have caused shame and anguish, but very probably have caused bloodshed—confessions,” he continues, “which I keep as sacredly as any Roman Catholic can those made to him.” This, in our humble judgment, seems to border on auricular.

We come now to the question of doctrinal development—a process, as the bishop thinks, for hatching any novelty that priestcraft may devise. To this system he attributes auricular confession, which, according to his reckoning, was first imposed upon the church by Innocent III.III. at the Fourth Lateran Council, in 1215. “And that this,” says he, “to the extent to which it was then carried, was a novelty in the church, is apparent from the tenor of the canon itself; for it requires that it shall be often read publicly in the church, so that none may plead ignorant of the case.” In the Book of Common Prayer, at the baptismal office, appears the following rubric: “The minister of every parish shall often admonish the people that they defer not the baptism of their children,” etc. Here, instructed by Bishop Atkinson, we learn, to our amazement, that the baptism of infants at a very tender age was first known in England after the Reformation, when this rubric was inserted. By his own line of argument we are forced to this conclusion: Had it not been a novelty, what need of this injunction? But, returning to our subject, does Bishop Atkinson forget that there existed heresies before the thirteenth century, and that their watchword, like his own, was “Purity of Faith”? All remnants of these sects, of however ancient origin, are in unity with us upon this point of doctrine. To the Protestants alone belongs the honor of rejecting it, and hence they stand at variance, not only with the Pope, but with the rest of Christendom.

With regard to the new dogmas that have lately been defined, as Moehler well expresses it, our unity of doctrine is in substance, not in form. As the Infant in the manger and the Victim on the cross, identical in substance, were yet unlike in form, so also truth, in broader light, assumes more striking aspect. Calculus is but a form of primary arithmetic. As in the natural order, so in the order spiritual, development is but the pulse of vigor and vitality. Even in the life of heaven itself they go “from strength [Pg 835] to strength.” The loftiest branches of the oak were once within the acorn; nor could they have developed save as they there existed.

Thus, to a grain of mustard-seed our Lord compared the church, and to the mite of leaven that leavened the whole lump. She is “the pillar and the ground of truth,” which if once shaken, truth itself must fall. To her alone is man responsible, since God commissioned her to teach the world and bring all men to knowledge of his truth. To her St. Chrysostom and St. Augustine bowed; to her St. Ambrose and St. Bernard yielded entire submission. Like Bossuet and Fénelon, the doctors of all ages—whatever their contentions and discussions, however wide their difference of opinion—have ever looked to Rome, and sought her final judgment as the decree of God.

Bishop Gibbons, in reply to the “Charge” of Bishop Atkinson, remarked the contradictory doctrines that prevail in the Anglican communion with regard to confession; some execrating it as a Romish innovation, while others, holding tenets identical with ours, preach and practise its observance as a sacrament of Christ. Bishop Atkinson professes to discover a parallel to this in the various opinions of the Catholic theologians with respect to the limits of the Pope’s infallibility. Let us see upon what grounds he establishes comparison, and how far the comparison is supported. Papal Infallibility is a dogma of the church, an article of faith, to be by all accepted under the last penalty of excommunication. With the Protestant the force of this dogma is experienced, not, indeed, as to the Pope, but with regard to Holy Scripture, which, as the word of God, he must hold to be infallible. Now, the general truth that the Bible is infallible the Catholic and Protestant both equally maintain. To doubt it would be heresy. But admitting, as we do, the general proposition, how many minor differences remain to be adjusted! The Catholic believes that the church alone is able to interpret Holy Scripture, and that without her guidance men may wrest God’s very word unto their own destruction; that the written Word requires some infallible interpreter before we can rely upon its meaning as infallible, since the Scriptures, though infallible, inspire not every reader with their own infallibility. But the common run of Protestants receive their Holy Bible as if it had been printed and handed down from heaven in the language, form, and binding with which they are familiar. They forget that, after all, it is a mere translation and as liable to corruption as any other text in the hands of a translator. The Pope they think presumptuous; the printer and translator infallible. But even here believers may hold diverse opinions with integrity of faith. “How far,” one may ask, “extends infallibility? Is it only in the spirit, or in the letter also? ‘Unless a man hate his father and his mother he cannot be my disciple.’ ‘If ye shall ask anything in my name, I will do it.’ With what exact restriction are these words to be received? Can errors typographical, misrenderings, etc., affect in any way the truth of the infallible? Are all the dates and numbers, in their common acceptation, infallibly correct? Does inspiration equally pervade the whole Bible, the Old and New Testaments? How must we understand St. Paul’s [Pg 836] teaching by command and teaching by permission? Was he in each infallible?” All these questions might arise among sincere believers holding the general truth that the Scriptures are infallible. As we have before observed, Papal Infallibility is an established dogma, an article of faith, and the questions now at issue among Catholic theologians are precisely of the nature of those among all Protestants with regard to Holy Scripture. When a definition of a dogma of faith has been promulgated to the universal church, it is acknowledged as infallible by all; but the Pope sometimes teaches in a less determined species, and then only can even the most lax theologians raise the question how far his teaching binds. Are disputes among the Anglicans analogous to these? Bishop Atkinson would stickle for his sacerdotal character; Bishop Whittle, of Virginia, would hoot the very notion. At Mount Calvary, in Baltimore, a child becomes regenerate in the sacrament of baptism; at St. Peter’s, five squares distant, no such change can be effected. At the former Mass is said and the Sacred Host is worshipped; at the latter the Host is bread, and to worship it is idolatry. For whether it be bread or the golden calf adored, such worship is idolatrous. And if the Host be Christ, not to worship is denial of our Blessed Lord’s Divinity.

Are the Quaker and the Mormon more at variance in faith? But Bishop Atkinson interrupts us. “I am not the church,” he says, “nor is Bishop Whittle, nor the pastors of the churches to which you have referred.” Be it granted; but we ask, then, What is your church’s teaching? Surely, one of you is wrong, and has the church no voice to decide the question for us? Can idolatry be taught in her communion with impunity? For, in Dr. Gramnici’s judgment, this is Mr. Richie’s crime: the worship of the creature instead of the Creator. It is too true. All that the Church of England boasts is latitude of doctrine. She has no power of utterance to define or to condemn. The wranglings of her children have silenced her for ever. The enormities of Darwin, if they threatened, could not rouse her; nor, roused, has she the unity to utter an anathema.

Having noticed many points on which we differ from Bishop Atkinson, in conclusion we remark one on which we quite agree. This is when, speaking of St. Bernard, he styles him “the great saint.” But the question upon which he appeals to this great father is hardly one on which we hoped to find the bishop laudatory. Having chosen him, however, to plead his cause against us, we needs must think that he supports his advocate, and holds him orthodox, at least, upon the point at issue—the Immaculate Conception. Let us hear what St. Bernard has to offer on this point. “Thou art that chosen Lady,” says he, “in whom our Lord found repose, and in whom he has deposited all his treasures without measure. Hence the whole world, O my most holy Lady! honors thy chaste womb as the temple of God, in which the salvation of the world began. Thou, O great Mother of God! art the enclosed garden into which the hand of a sinner never entered to gather its flowers. Thou art the paradise of God; from thee issued forth the fountain of living water that irrigates the whole world. The day on which thou [Pg 837] camest into the world can indeed be called a day of salvation, a day of grace. Thou art fair as the moon; the moon illumines the night with the light it receives from the sun, and thou enlightenest our darkness with the splendor of thy virtues. But thou art fairer than the moon; for in thee there is neither spot nor shadow. Thou art bright as the sun—I mean as that Sun which created the world. He was chosen amongst all men, and thou wast chosen amongst all women. O sweet, O great, O all-amiable Mary! no tongue can pronounce thy name but thou inflamest it with love.”

A DAY AMONG THE KIOWAS AND COMANCHES.

It was rather cold and frosty in the early January morning as we rode eastward from Otter Creek to the Kiowa and Comanche reservation, in the Indian Territory. Toward noon, however, the sun came out, brilliant and warm. The effect on the transparent covering of the trees and shrubs was dazzlingly beautiful. Some were encased in a bright armor, cunningly linked in chains of crescents. I detached a perfect “ice-plant,” with every curve of the stem, every nerve of the leaves, taken in ice. The humblest weeds on the prairie sparkled with frosty diamonds. But as the sun grew warmer they began to bend under their gorgeous burdens, as if wearied by their splendor, like tired beauties after a ball.

In the afternoon the weather was as clear and balmy as on a day in June. Our way lay through the most beautiful part of the Indian Territory. We skirted the southern slopes of the Wichita Mountains. These, as if in honor of our coming, exhibited all their jewelry in its brightest lustre. Down their dark slopes ran shining streams, like chains of silver adorning their broad breasts. Stones of gray and yellow and green and purple were heaped together in distracting profusion, the whole seen through the most surpassingly tender of violet tints, too delicate to be compared to the filmiest marriage-morning lace. As we proceeded the country became more and more diversified. Upland and vale succeeded each other in delightful variety. Beautiful glens, wooded slopes, bold mountain-crests, filled the landscape. The day had become warm enough to free the babble of the scores of pretty little streams that flow into the Cache. We rode through groves of mesquite and forests of oaks. The long, straight paths through the oak-woods made one think of the long alleys of Versailles. We pass along the Main Cache; the scenery is ravishing. To the right flows the stream. It is thickly wooded; and through the English effect, produced by the smoke of a prairie fire in the far distance, it brings back the memory of a railroad glimpse of the line of Windsor Forest. Occasional circles of oaks in the midst of noble stretches of upland render more striking the likeness to the park scenery of old England. To the left are the mountains. They actually furnish the luxury of rocks, covered with [Pg 838] moss and mould as green as you could see upon Irish ruins. What a joy was the spectacle of so lovely a region to our eyes, that had been starved for months on sand-hills and treeless deserts!

We passed hundreds of lovely sites for cottages, in pleasant nooks, sheltered from all cold winds by wooded slopes that opened towards the south and bounded semi-circular vales of marvellous fertility. Indeed, in beauty of scenery and in richness of soil I think this portion of the Indian Territory may be considered the garden of the western world.

But, alas! nothing earthly is perfect. The brightest prospect has its shadow. Over this seeming paradise, where you can see in a day’s journey the loveliest characteristics of the most favored climes, malaria spreads its black and baleful wings.

I visited the reservation of the Kiowas and Comanches soon after it was entered by one of the expeditions that operated against the hostile bands of these Indians and of the Cheyennes in the winter of 187-. This force had driven in a number of Kiowas and Comanches. It was a close race between the troops and the Indians. But the latter, having the great advantage of the start, throwing away all impedimenta, leaving their line of flight marked by abandoned lodges, lodge-poles, ponies, cooking utensils, etc., had won the race by a few hours only, and surrendered not a moment too soon. I wanted to see all I could see of Indians while opportunity offered. I visited the commanding officer of the adjoining military post, and made known to him my wishes. He received me with great courtesy and kindness, placed a vehicle at my disposal, and instructed his interpreter to accompany me through the Indian camps. The Indians had pitched their tepies in the timbered bottoms along the streams for several miles around the fort.

The interpreter was an “old Indian man.” I found him intelligent and polite. He had evidently been well brought up and fairly educated. His language was generally good; and when he indulged, occasionally, in a graphic, frontier mode of expression, it was easy to see that this was an after-graft, though not the less apt and piquant on that account. The Indians on the reservation were divided into two great classes, those under civil and those under military control. The former were under charge of the agent; the latter under that of the commander of the fort. These were again subdivided into the incarcerated, the enrolled, and the paroled (pronounced by the employees of the post and reservation, pay-rolled).

The imprisoned were again subdivided into two classes: the more guilty and dangerous, who were placed in irons and confined under strict surveillance in the post guard-house; and the Indians of less note and guilt, who were in confinement, but not in irons. Of the first the principal was White Horse, a Kiowa chief, a murderer, ravisher, and as great a general scoundrel as could be found in any tribe. These really “bad Indians” did not number more than half a dozen. The Comanches and Kiowas belonging to the second subdivision were confined within the walls of an extensive but unfinished stone building, intended for an ice-house, one hundred and fifty feet by forty. They numbered about a hundred and twenty.

[Pg 839] I told the interpreter I should like to begin by a visit to White Horse.

“Then,” said he, “we shall have to see the officer of the day; for the sergeant of the guard has orders to let no one visit White Horse without special instructions.”

Two old squaws, evidently in great distress, now came up to the interpreter, and, having shaken hands with him, began to talk to him with great eagerness.

“You’re in luck,” said the interpreter to me. “These are two of his mothers who want permission to see him.”

“Two of his mothers!” I exclaimed. “How many mothers has he, for heaven’s sake?”

“Only one regular one,” he replied, laughing. “The other is his aunt; but among these Indians the aunts also call themselves mothers.”

Accompanied by the two squaws, we went to seek the officer of the day. We soon found him. He was a tall, fine-looking, genial, impulsive Kentuckian, a cavalry officer. He went with us to the guard-house. He first took the interpreter and myself into the prison-room where White Horse’s five companions were confined. They looked greatly dispirited. They all shook hands with us with great warmth. I noticed the eagerness of the last hand-shaker, who seemed to fear that we might leave the cell before he had gone through the ceremony with each of us. Poor wretches! I presume they thought their hour was nearly come, and, like drowning men, they grasped even at the semblance of straws. They evidently had some rough idea of “making interest” with the victor “pale-faces” in a forlorn hope for pardon. They were effusive in their manifestations of friendship for the officer, who, with his revolver in his belt and his long cavalry sabre clanking at his heels, represented Force to them. Force is something Indians understand, and they respect its emblems. Indeed, most of them have been afforded but poor opportunities to understand anything else.

The officer then conducted us to a private room, into which he ordered White Horse to be brought. A clanking of chains was heard along the corridor, and White Horse, doubly ironed, stood in the door-way. He entered, not without a certain untutored majesty of gait, maugre his irons. He put out his manacled hands, and energetically went through the ceremony of hand-shaking, beginning with the officer of the day, and giving him an extra shake at the end.

White Horse was a large, powerful Indian. He wore a dark-colored blanket which covered his entire person. I could discern no indications of ferocity in his countenance. His face, on the contrary, had rather what I should call a Chadband cast. His flesh seemed soft, oily, and “puffy.”

White Horse’s mother and aunt were now permitted to enter. The mother rushed to her son, threw her arms around him, kissed him on both cheeks, while the tears rolled down her face; but she uttered not a word. The aunt kissed him in like manner. White Horse submitted to their embraces, but made no motion of responding affection. He seemed a little nervous under their caresses, and probably under our observation. The mother took hold of his chain, looked at it for a moment, and then came another paroxysm of silent grief, revealing itself in tears alone. [Pg 840] They sat on a rough wooden bench, White Horse in the centre, his mother on his right, his aunt on the left, each holding one of his hands in both of hers. White Horse uttered no sound; no gesture betrayed any emotion, yet I thought I could detect a moistening of the eye. This made me feel that I had no business there, gazing on his grief and that of the poor Indian women. I suppose I ought to be ashamed to say it; but the truth must be told, and I must confess that, villain as he was, I could not help feeling for him. Of course it was a weakness, but I am miserably weak in such matters. I believe I should have pleaded for mercy towards him, though he showed little mercy to others. There are few human beings who do not, at some time in their lives, need mercy shown them; and when they themselves cry out for it, it must be a great consolation to them to reflect, as they look back, that they, in their time, have not been deaf to the cries of others.

I signified a wish to withdraw, and left, accompanied by the officer and the interpreter. Before we were permitted to depart, however, we had to shake hands with White Horse and the two squaws. The women looked at us with an appealing expression, as if, in their poor, simple minds, they thought it possible that, in some way or other, we might have an influence on the fate of the son.

We next visited the unfinished building in which the one hundred and twenty lesser Indian criminals were confined. They were bestowed in a sufficiently comfortable manner. Common tents were ranged along the walls, and there were fires burning at proper distances down the centre of the building. The occupants of the tents were mostly engaged in gambling with monte cards and in various other ways. Your Indian is unfortunately “a born gambler.” They quitted their play, however, and crowded around us, eager to shake hands with us, and uttering the Indian monosyllabic expression of satisfaction, which sounds as if written “how.” This hand-shaking took some time, as every Indian insisted on going through the ceremony. When I supposed I had shaken my way through the crowd, I was touched on the arm, and, turning, met a face which was evidently not that of an Indian, though its owner was garbed in Indian guise. He put out his hand, saying “how” in the usual way. I said to him in rather “Brummagem” Spanish that he was not an “Indio.”

He shook his head and replied: “No.”

“Mejicano?” I asked.

“Si,” he replied with a broad grin.

The other Indians crowded around us, laughing and nodding their heads, ejaculating: “Mejicano! How! how!” and turning towards each other with gestures of wonder or admiration (exactly as I have seen the chorus do at the Italian opera). This was no doubt done with a rude idea of flattering me on my perspicacity. There are worse judges of human nature than the untutored Indian. I suppose there is very little doubt that, had I any power over their fate, the compliment would not have been thrown away on me, or on most men for that matter.

Of course they wanted tobacco, and we gave them what we had about us. They had a good deal to say to the interpreter. Every one had some little grievance to [Pg 841] complain of or want to be satisfied. At length, after some more hand-shaking, we escaped from them.

On leaving the prison-house we learned that we should not find the principal Indians in their camps until later in the day, as they were then collecting in the commanding officer’s office to talk about sending a party to find some of the Cheyennes, who, having been driven from the brakes of the Staked Plains, were supposed to have gone to southern New Mexico. The interpreter said I should have a good opportunity to see the “head men” there; we could visit the camps afterwards. To the office we went, and found there about fifteen or twenty chiefs, among them Little Crow and Kicking Bird, the head chief of the Kiowas. If ever there were a good Indian—and there are many very honest people west of the Mississippi who think that no live Indian can be good—I think Kicking Bird was a good Indian. During the recent troubles he never left his reservation, was constant in using his influence in favor of the whites, and never wavered in his fidelity to the government.

He was a fine-looking Indian, and had as winning a countenance as I have looked upon anywhere. The expression of his eyes was remarkably soft and pleasing. There was a quiet, natural dignity in his manners, tempered by great natural grace. I was taken by his appearance from the first, and shook hands with him with pleasure and sincerity, which was not the case on every occasion of hand-shaking that morning. Kicking Bird, as nearly as one can judge an Indian’s age (an Indian is generally as great a chronological difficulty as a negro), was then about thirty-five years old. He was somewhat above the middle height, richly but not gaudily dressed. Hanging by a loop from his left breast were a pair of silver tweezers.

After the “talk” was over and the arrangements for sending out the party agreed upon, every chief except Kicking Bird had some private “axe to grind”—something to ask for. As the presentation of these “private bills” was likely to take much time, we withdrew, mounted our wagon, and drove to the Kiowa camp.

The camps of the three tribes, Kiowas, Comanches, and Apaches, were pitched in the fringe of timber that borders Medicine Bluff Creek and the Main Cache. The day was bright and warm for the season. The scarlet and white blankets of the Indians, seen here and there among the trees, gave life and color to the landscape. Crowds of children gambolled and shouted, and seemed to enjoy themselves intensely. They had no idea they were the children of a doomed and dying race. There was no trace among them of the stoicism of the Indian of maturer years. No crowd of French urchins playing around the Tour Saint Jacques in the grounds of the Palais Royal, or the gardens of the Tuileries, was ever more full of gayety and espièglerie than these little savages. They threw their arms about and “kicked loose legs” as naturally and with as much abandon as any white children could have done. Some, more industriously inclined, built little tepies, or lodges; others made tiny camp-fires, playing “war-party”; others, with miniature bows and arrows, skipped along, shooting at the small birds that crossed their path. Now an urchin, more bold [Pg 842] than the rest, would hop alongside our wagon and return our “how, how” with compound interest. Emboldened by his example, others would follow, until we had a crowd of little red-skins of both sexes about us, hopping, laughing, and “how-how”-ing. Occasionally they indulged in a general shout of good-natured merriment, which may very probably have been caused by some more than usually good joke at our expense.

Our first visit was to Kicking Bird’s lodge. It was quite roomy, being a tepie of twenty-four poles. In rear of the lodge, and carefully covered by a paulin, like the carriage of any civilized gentleman, stood our friend Kicking Bird’s “buggy.”

Kicking Bird had not yet returned from the talk at the post. His wife, a buxom young squaw, profusely beaded, brightly blanketed, vermilion-cheeked, but not over-washed, did the honors. She had a child about ten months old—a lively, stout little red rascal, whose flesh was as firm as vulcanized rubber. The little wretch was just beginning to walk. He was in puris, of course. He took wonderfully to us. He would try to walk across the lodge to each of us in turn, falling at every other step, and getting up again with a loud crow of determination. Then he would toddle from one to the other, holding by our boot-tops as we stood in a circle around him, and being jumped as high as arms would admit of by each in turn, to his intense delight and the great enjoyment of his mother.

We walked through the camp and watched the squaws tanning buffalo-hides and preparing antelope-skins. I was very anxious to get a papoose-board, as a telegram from a medical friend had just informed me that there was an opportunity of utilizing such a piece of furniture in the family of a very particular friend. But I could not beg or buy one, even with the help of my friend the interpreter. We asked several squaws, but not one of them would sell. I heard afterwards that an extravagantly high price, backed by the Indian agent’s influence, failed to procure one. The squaws no doubt consider it “bad medicine” to sell a papoose-board.

A gaudily-dressed Indian, whose cheeks were streaked with paint of all the colors of the rainbow, approached us. In my civilized simplicity I supposed that this glaring individual was some very big chief indeed. I asked the interpreter what great chief he was.

“Some Indian plug,” responded that gentleman; “no chief at all.”

“How comes he to be so extravagantly adorned?”

“They can wear anything they can beg, buy, or steal.”

My mistake reminds me of a similar one made by Indians with regard to some white visitors. Col. —— visited an Indian camp, accompanied by some officers and a cavalry escort. The colonel and the officers were dressed in fatigue uniform, with merely gold enough about them to indicate their rank to a close observer on close inspection. The observed of all the Indian observers, however, was a “fancy” Dutch bugler, with his double yellow stripe and his bars of yellow braid across his breast. To him the most respectful homage and the greatest consideration were paid.

As we passed one of the Kiowa lodges, a young man, seemingly about twenty-five or twenty-eight years old, came out to meet us [Pg 843] with outstretched arms. With the exception of Kicking Bird, he was the most pleasing Indian I met. He was very fair-skinned for an Indian, bright, intelligent-looking, with a frankness of manner rare among Indians. He was presented to me as Big Tree, a paroled Indian.

The interpreter told me that, up to the time Big Tree was taken with Satanta, the former was an Indian of no note. He was innocent of crime, and achieved a reputation merely by his accidental associations with Satanta.

Notwithstanding the lesson I had received, when we met some gaudily-bedizened Indian I could not refrain from asking who he was.

The interpreter’s answer was invariably: “Only some Indian plug.”

We drove to the Comanche camp, and visited the lodge of Quirz-Quip, or “Antelope-Chewer.” I had met him at the “talk” in the morning. He recognized me and shook hands in a very friendly manner. Quirz-Quip’s countenance was not an attractive one. It was at its best then, however, for he was in high glee at his good fortune in reaching the reservation, even with the loss of almost everything he had, and the troops close at his heels. He only got in a few hours ahead of them, and they had been gaining on him hourly. As his dinner was ready, Antelope-Chewer invited us in to join him in the repast, and I accepted the invitation eagerly.

The lodge was a large and comfortable one. No doubt it had been kept standing on the reservation for the use of the squaws and children while Antelope-Chewer was on the war-path, and for a pleasant and safe resting-place for that gentleman when the troops made the war-path too hot for him. Mats were placed around the lodge. On these we sat tailor-fashion. Valises, made of buffalo-hide, scraped and painted in the usual Indian fashion, were placed at intervals around the tepie. The fire was in the centre, in a hole eighteen inches or two feet deep. The lodge was pleasantly warmed, and there was not the least smoke. Two young bucks occupied about four yards of the lodge. They lay stretched at full length on their backs. Each had a bow and arrow, with which he amused himself by toying. The arrow was in its place, ready to be sped. Ever and anon they would draw the arrows back to the head, and then relax the strings again. I felt that the rascals would have sent the barbs through us with pleasure, if they could only do so with safety. We were unarmed, it is true; but there were thirteen companies of cavalry and five of infantry within a mile and a half, and the chances of ultimate escape were more than doubtful. I should not wish to meet even my worthy friend Quirz-Quip off the reservation, if I were unarmed and no help near.

The young men merely nodded to us as we entered, without changing their positions or intermitting their bow-play. They gave us a half-careless, half-supercilious smile, and glanced at each other, as if they should say:

“Buffalo-Heart, my boy! what does the governor mean by bringing these fellows here?”

They seemed to look upon us as a pair of young scions of the old French noblesse might have looked upon a republican guard detail entering their private apartments in their ancestral château.

We shook hands and exchanged [Pg 844] grunts with the squaws and children. The interpreter joked Quirz-Quip about his race with the troops. The Indian laughed, indulged in several “how-hows” and buenos (the Comanches use a good many Spanish words), and shook hands with me again with great seeming cordiality. He was evidently very much elated by his good fortune in getting to a place of safety, and showed it by repeated chuckles.

Dinner being ready, we drew closer to the festive fire-hole in which the viands were cooking. As a not very comely old squaw put forth a not very clean hand and arm to serve the first course, a young gentleman who had joined our party made a precipitate retreat. The young fellow was troubled with a delicate stomach. Another gentleman, having tasted of the first course, said he found the tepie rather close and withdrew. There remained of our party, then, only the interpreter and my unworthy self to do honor to Antelope-Chewer’s hospitality.

The party assembled around the hospitable stew-pan consisted of the old squaw who did the honors of the camp-kettle; a younger squaw, plump and dirty, evidently the latest favorite; Antelope-Chewer and several little Chewers, ranging from six months to twelve years old; the aristocratic young bucks (whose food was handed to them by the old squaw), the interpreter, and the writer. The repast consisted of stewed buffalo meat served in the vessel in which it was cooked. Each convive takes his clasp-knife in his right hand, seizes one end of the piece of meat with the thumb and forefinger of his left, and cuts off a piece of the required size. It is “bad medicine,” as well as mauvais goût, to take more than you can consume. The manner in which salt was used struck me as being an improvement on our civilized mode of using it. It was served dissolved in water in a shallow vessel, and each guest dipped his piece of meat in the fluid. Of course if this method were adopted in our hotels or boarding-houses, I should wish to have my salt and water served in an “individual” salt-vessel.

There was no bread. The Indians on the reservation had received no flour for weeks. We had the Indian substitute for bread—the fat of the meat cut off in strips, pressed, and served separately, cold. There are worse substitutes. A cup of coffee (without milk, of course) concluded the repast. It was by no means bad. It was hot and strong, though not quite sweet enough, as the ration of sugar issued to the Indians was insufficient. I enjoyed it, however. It is only justice to say that Quirz-Quip’s coffee was much better than some I have tasted in railroad eating-houses and “end of the track” towns.

Dinner being over, we left the lodge to walk through the camp, and especially to visit and view a bridge made by the Indians themselves across the Medicine Bluff. It was a structure of mud and logs quite creditable to Indian ingenuity and industry. It showed that the lessons of their teacher—the beaver—had not been thrown away upon them.

We invited Antelope-Chewer to come with us to the fort bakery, and we would make him a present of a dozen loaves of bread. He consented, but said he wanted his squaw to go too.

“He wants her to carry back the bread,” said the interpreter.

We agreed, and got into the wagon. [Pg 845] Quirz-Quip desired that the plump and dirty squaw should ride inside with us. To this we would not submit, and insisted that she should take the seat beside the driver. Indeed, I felt already an itching sensation all over me—no doubt the effect of imagination; for the interpreter assured me there was no danger of anything of the kind, unless I should spend a night in a lodge. I assured him that such a thing was not at all probable. Nevertheless, and notwithstanding two or three baths, it was some days before my epidermis regained its accustomed tranquillity.

We drove to the Apache camp for our young friends who had fled from Quirz-Quip’s hospitality, and returned by the Comanche chief’s lodge to pick up the plump and dirty squaw. She had become tired of waiting, and had gone away, much to her lord’s disgust and our satisfaction.

We drove to the bakery and bought a dozen loaves of bread for Quirz-Quip. He wished us to drive him back to his camp with the bread. The interpreter told him we could not do it. Then the modest Comanche asked us to lend him the wagon to take the bread. The interpreter shook his head, and assured him that it was impossible.

“Then,” said Quirz-Quip, “how am I to get the bread to camp?”

“If you are too lazy to pack it,” said the interpreter, “you can leave, and be confounded.”

As we drove away, we saw him, with a rueful countenance, spreading out his blanket on the floor to receive the coveted bread but hated load.

On our return from the camps we passed by the agency. I asked what kind of a man the agent was. I was answered that he was “a good sort of man,” but “he knows nothing about Indians or their ways.”

“He is a Quaker, I suppose.”

“A kind of a made-up Quaker, like a good many of ‘em.”

We stopped at the agency door, and I was introduced to the agent. He was a gentleman in his manners, and looked to me like an honest man. There was to be an issue of blankets on the following day. The agent kindly said he would be glad to have me present, and if I would come he would send a wagon for me. I accepted at once.

The Indian agent was as good as his word. He sent a carriage for us about half-past eight next morning. The issue was to take place about half-past nine. It was nearly half-past eleven, however, before the Indians began to arrive. Your Indian is invariably unpunctual. You may set what hour you please, but you cannot make him come until he is quite ready. By half-past twelve they began coming in considerable numbers and the issue commenced. The women and children were out in great force, and were in high good-humor, chatting and laughing in the gayest manner possible. Each family ranges itself in a semi-circle; the chief, or male head thereof, stood about the centre of the chord. Each chief, after receiving the number of blankets to which he was entitled, tore in two a double blanket of each color; there were only black and white blankets to be issued that day, no scarlet ones, greatly to the disappointment of the squaws and children. Beginning at one end of the semi-circle, the chief threw a piece of each color at the head of the person for whom it was intended. It was caught with a shout of glee and many remarks, [Pg 846] evidently of a humorous nature, judging by the laughter with which they were hailed. Sometimes the dignified chief, with as near an approach to a smile as his dignity would allow, threw a joke with the blanket at the head of a dependant. His jokes, like those of all persons in power, were always greeted with applause. When the blanket was so thrown as to strike the recipient full in the face, the merriment was uproarious. Our friend Quirz-Quip was present, of course. He was very busy, getting all he could, and dividing what he got among his interesting family. He was harder to please than if he had always been a good Indian and had never left the reservation to go on the war-path.

The blankets were of very good quality. They were marked with the letters U. S. I. D. It was found necessary to stamp the blankets to prevent the Indians from gambling or trading them away to Mexicans in the summer.

Here and there some wretched squaws stood apart from the general throng, as if they were Pariahs among their sisters. They seemed utterly forlorn and miserable. They took no interest in the busy scene before them. Their faces wore an expression of blank hopelessness. The world had nothing for them in the present, nothing in the future. They came to the issue as mere drudges, to carry back the blankets to the camps. They had each an angular piece cut out of the nostril. This is the Scarlet Letter of the Comanches.

When the issue was over I visited the Indian hospital and had quite an interesting chat with the doctor. The Indians were then suffering a good deal from colds, influenza, etc., brought on by exposure at night, “making medicine”—i.e., performing incantations. As we went from the hospital to the carpenter’s shop, I met young Satanta, a paroled prisoner, son of the notorious Satanta who was delivered by the War Department to the civil authorities in Texas to be tried for murders and robberies committed by him within the boundaries of that State. Satanta, Jr., was a bright-eyed young man of twenty. He wore a long, straight red feather in his hat, and carried in his hand a bow, from which ever and anon he discharged an arrow as he went, and picked it up again.

An Indian, who evidently thought he was suffering under a very great grievance, now met us and talked very earnestly and excitedly to the interpreter.

“That Indian is smarting under the sense of some great wrong, real or fancied,” I said.

“Yes,” said the interpreter, smiling; “he has trouble with another Indian about a greyhound pup. I promised this fellow and another a pup each (I have the finest greyhounds in the Territory). The other fellow, while I was away, took both the pups, and won’t give this fellow his. They are just like children in many things.”

There was little doing in the carpenter’s shop. I was shown some work done by a young Indian which was fair, for an Indian. There were no Indians at work, but I was told that Kicking Bird’s son was to begin his apprenticeship the following week.

Nor was there anything doing at the school. There were hopes of opening it the following month, with twenty Apaches, twenty Kiowas, and the same number of Comanches.

The trader at the military post [Pg 847] was also the trader for the Indians. The store was thronged from morning to sunset by Indians of both sexes. Comanches, Kiowas, Apaches, hung around in groups, standing in the doorways, blocking up the windows, when they were closed, with their faces against the panes, or their heads and the upper part of their bodies thrust in when they were open. The majority of the trader’s store-idlers are women, young girls, and children. They are by no means backward in begging. The clerks told me it was not wise to leave anything on the counter even for a moment when the red brethren and sisters were in the store; they had to be watched as narrowly as fashionable white kleptomaniacs.

I was rather pleased with the appearance of the Indian agent. He seemed honest and frank. Of his ignorance or knowledge of Indians and their ways I can say nothing. “Old Indian men” are apt to think that, in the way of knowledge of Indians, they have pulled the ladder up after them.

I thanked the agent for his politeness, and said that, if he did not think it impertinent, I should like to ask a question or two for my own information and satisfaction. He replied that he would be very happy to give me any information in his power.

“Well,” said I, “not to mince matters, you know they say a great many hard things about Indian agents.”

“Of course I do. When I received this appointment, one of my most intimate friends wrote to me not to accept it, warning me that, were I as pure as snow, I should be denounced by everybody as a swindler and a thief before six months.”

“It is said that for several weeks the Indians on this reservation have been without bread. Is this true?”

“It is. The freight contractors have failed to deliver the flour. I cannot issue what I have not. To make up for the lack of flour, I issue four pounds of beef to each Indian daily.”

“It is charged that the beef is poor. Is this charge true?”

“It is. What can I do? Like a quartermaster or commissary, I can only issue what I have on hand. If I had not this beef, the Indians would have nothing to eat. I cannot throw it back on the contractor’s hands, and wait for a better quality of meat; for while I was waiting the Indians would starve or leave the reservation to find subsistence where they could.”

“What is the allowance of coffee and sugar?”

“Four pounds of the former and eight of the latter to one hundred rations.”

I now took a friendly farewell of the Indian agent, and went away with a vague impression that it is not the poor, subordinate official who makes most money out of the Indians, but freighters and “big contractors,” and perhaps more especially their financial “backers,” the speculators of the great Eastern cities.

On our way back to the post we met Kicking Bird returning to his camp. He was mounted on a large cream-colored mule. We stopped, shook hands with him, and chatted a little. The interpreter joked him about riding a mule. Kicking Bird laughed, and said that as he was going to live hereafter like a white man, like a white man he should ride a mule.

It was the last time I saw Kicking Bird. Shortly afterwards he delivered [Pg 848] up to the military authorities a number of the revolted Indians. Among them was a brother of one of his squaws. In revenge she poisoned the faithful chief.

Poor Kicking Bird! He had given his gorgeous war-bonnet to a veteran officer of the army as a token that he had left the war-path for ever. He proposed to teach his children the white man’s language and the white man’s peaceful arts. He fell a martyr to his fidelity to the government.

DE VERE’S “THOMAS À BECKET.”[210]

It is doubtful whether two years ago even the admirers of Aubrey de Vere looked for anything strikingly new or startling from his pen. His measure seemed filled. He was known and read as a poet whose melodious verse was the expression of thoughts lofty as well as tender, of profound meditations and large aspirations, of purity without fleck, yet cold almost as it was chaste. This were an enviable fame at any time, infinitely more so just now, when the ambition of our poets seems to be that of the prodigal, to waste their divine birthright on worthless objects, to live riotously, and finally, when all else is gone, to feed themselves and their readers on the husks of swine. Suddenly Alexander the Great appeared, and in the author we beheld a new man. At once his fame took wings, while he, with the unconscious ease of one who took his place by right, strode beyond the men of to-day, and entered into that narrower circle of larger minds whose names are written in brass, whose works live after them and become part and parcel of the English tongue. One sign of Mr. de Vere’s undisputed success was significant. It is only such a transcendent genius as that of Dr. Newman that can overleap the barriers which prejudice has set around the Catholic name. It is still true, though less so than formerly, that the grand old name of “Catholic” blazoned on a literary scutcheon is regarded as a bar sinister by the non-Catholic press. Yet even this difficulty of caste was overcome by Mr. de Vere, and his Alexander the Great was hailed by critics of every class and kind of thought to be a return to the palmy days of English drama, and a welcome addition to English literature.

Two years have passed, and a new drama is presented to us by the same author. From Alexander the Great to Thomas à Becket is a long stride and a trying one. It is a passage from the height of paganism to the height of Christianity. The hero of the one is the personification of the pride and the pomp, the glory and shame, the greatness and essential littleness, of paganism. The hero of the other is one of those men who throughout the Christian era, even up to our own times, have been found to stand up in the face of the princes of this world, and, if need be, pour out their hearts’ blood in confessing [Pg 849] Christ and upholding his kingdom on earth.

We may as well say at once that in the new drama we miss many things which in Alexander the Great won our admiration. We miss the sustained magic of those lines, almost every one of which is poetry of the highest order, yet so skilfully adapted that whosoever speaks them speaks naturally and in keeping with his character. In no place in Alexander the Great could one say, “Here speaks the poet,” “Here the rhetorician,” “Here the dramatist.” This much, indeed, is true of Thomas à Becket. We miss, too, the brilliant epigrams, the proverbial wisdom of the brief sayings thrown so liberally into the mouths of this character and that. We miss the sharp contact and contrast of character so perfectly worked out among the different types of Greeks. There is no place in the later drama for such a conception as Alexander himself, the slow growth and development under our eyes of his many-sided character, with his strong resolve, his dreams, his daring hopes, his insane ambition, his thorough, practical manner of dealing with things as they pass, his slow-coming doubts, his wonder at the world, at his own mission in it, and at the unseen power that rules them both from somewhere. Indeed, we cannot call to mind a like conception to this in any drama.

The reason for the absence of such features as these is plain. In the one case the poet was freer to follow the workings of his own imagination; in the other he is more closely bound down to history, to facts, to the very words often spoken by his characters. And how thoroughly he has studied his subject may be seen in the preface to the drama, which is an admirable, though condensed, history of the whole struggle between St. Thomas and Henry II. But in compensation for what we miss we find a robustness, an off-hand freedom betokening real strength, a truth and naturalness of coloring, a noble manner of dealing with noble things, a straightforward honesty that winks at no faults, on whichever side they lie, a boldness and vigor that never flag from the first line to the last. There is less art than in the other, but much more of nature’s happy freedom. Moreover, the interest of the drama is none the less really of to-day because it represents men who lived and events which occurred seven centuries ago. Has this century seen no Henries or his like? Who shall say that we have no Beckets? Are there no men to-day ready to stand up in the face of princes calling themselves Christian, to risk land and life and all they have in the cause of Christ, at the same time that they obey their princes, be they Catholic or non-Catholic, “saving their order” and “saving God’s honor”?

The whole world makes sad reply. And though in these scientific days it is not the fashion to dash the brains of God’s priests out in the sanctuary, a method equally effectual is adopted to quench, if possible, the spirit within them. They are drained of such means as belong to their offices by fine upon fine; every effort is made to compel them, as was the case with St. Thomas, to betray their trust, to recognize rebellious, apostate, and recreant priests. And at length, when there is not a penny left, they are either driven into exile, as was St. Thomas, or cast into prisons where their martyrdom consists of a thousand petty insults and deprivations, [Pg 850] and where, to take up recent examples, they are regaled on soup which is scientifically bad. After all, does there not seem something more magnanimous in the fierce brutality of the Plantagenet and his men?

The whole drama of Thomas à Becket turns on the struggle between the archbishop and the king, and there is no hesitation on the author’s part in deciding which side to take in the contest. Mr. de Vere has certainly the courage of his convictions, and he is bold in their expression in days when St. Thomas is still regarded by the great majority of English readers as a mischievous and meddlesome prelate who courted, if he did not richly deserve, his fate. Let us, with Mr. de Vere’s permission, picture to ourselves a moment his lost opportunity of making himself infamously famous. Had he, with his great gifts and acknowledged place in the ranks of literati, only taken the other side; had he painted St. Thomas according to the orthodox Protestant reading, how his book would have been devoured, and what reviews written of it down all the line of the anti-Catholic army of writers! What comfort Mr. Gladstone would have found in such a convert in his next tilt with the Rock! Were it not a thing simply natural in any honorable man to adhere to the side of truth, and, more, to satisfy himself of the truth where doubts were raised, we should call it noble in Mr. de Vere thus to spurn the example of so many gifted writers of his time whose great ambition seems to be to pander to the vices around them. Indeed, not the least interest attached to this drama lies in the treatment, by a calm, poetic, yet deeply philosophic mind, of the momentous struggle which it portrays—the struggle ever old yet ever new between church and state.

The drama is in five acts. The first opens at Westminster with the election of Thomas to the primacy, embraces his resignation of the chancellorship and first rupture with the king, and ends beautifully and solemnly with his consecration as Archbishop of Canterbury. This act is very interesting. It plunges at once in medias res. Not a line is wasted, and so natural is the coloring that one lives and moves among the men of long ago as completely as in Shakspere. Becket’s friends and foes come and go, and have their say about the new prelate and his appointment to the “Rome of the North.” Naturally, the appointment to such a see still filled men’s minds while the memory of Anselm lived,

“Stretching from exile a lean, threatening arm”

against the first Henry. It is plain from the start that Becket’s mitre is not to be wreathed with roses. Even were the king a tamer soul, the new archbishop leaves enemies behind him—time-serving prelates who hate an honest man, others who envy him his place, nobles, knights, and rascals who have felt his strong hand while chancellor. The scene shifts to Normandy and shows us Henry’s court at Rouen, presided over by his perfidious and vicious queen, Eleanor, whose bitter tongue ever fans the flames that threaten Becket, whom she hates. Here we see Henry at his best, when, as he thinks, all is going well with his scheme.

“Thomas, Archbishop—

That hand which holds the seal, wielding the staff—

The feud of Crown and Church henceforth is past.

… Henceforth I rule!

None shares with me my realms.”

[Pg 851] Here we have, too, a thrilling picture of his wrath when this pleasant scheme is at once knocked to pieces by Becket’s resignation of the chancellorship. And now the fight begins.

In the second act come up the memorable scenes at Northampton with the question of the “Royal Customs.” In these trying scenes, where king and prelate enter the lists against each other, the dramatist has exhibited a power worthy the occasion, and, to our thinking, they are the finest in the drama. We can only glance at them and pass on. The forces are marshalled: on the one side the power of the king with the bandit nobles—for most of them were little else—and the craven prelates; on the other Becket, his oath, and his conscience. The scene between Becket and the bishops, where they strive to break down his resolution, is admirable, as showing the inner character of the man, the steadfast churchman, military half, who has not yet quite lost that outspoken scorn he used so freely while still in and of the world. His brief replies are full of negative meaning, and, when he does break forth, the scorn of the king is puny beside his words.

“My lords, have you said all? Then hear me speak.

I might be large to tell you, courtier prelates,

That if the Conqueror’s was an iron hand,

Not less ‘twas just. Oftenest it used aright

Its power usurped. It decked no idiot brow

With casual mitre: neither lodged in grasp

That, ague-stricken, scarce could hold its bribe,

The sceptres of the shepherds of Christ’s flock.”

And never were there nobler words than these:

“Bishops of England!

For many truths by you this day enforced,

Hear ye in turn but one. The church is God’s:

Lords, were it ours, then might we traffic with it;

At will make large its functions, or contract;

Serve it or sell; worship or crucify.

I say the church is God’s; for he beheld it,

His thought, ere time began; counted its bones,

Which in his book were writ. I say that he

From his own side in water and in blood

Gave birth to it on Calvary, and caught it,

Despite the nails, his bride, in his own arms.

I say that he, a Spirit of clear heat,

Lives in its frame, and cleanses with pure pain

His sacrificial precinct, but consumes

The chaff with other ardors. Lords, I know you.

* * * * *

To-day the heathen rage—I fear them not;

If fall I must, this hand, ere yet I fall,

Stretched from the bosom of a peaceful gown,

Above a troubled king and darkening realm,

Shall send God’s sentence forth. My lords, farewell.”

And surely Becket might have spoken this:

“My king I honor—honoring more my God;

My lords, they lie who brand mine honest fame

With fealty halved. With doubly-linked allegiance

He serves his king who serves him for God’s sake;

But who serves thus must serve his God o’er all.

I served him thus, and serve.”

But we could quote all this magnificent scene.

In the third act Becket escapes to France, visits the exiled pontiff at Sens, and finally takes refuge at Pontigny. The calm of this holy and peaceful abode seems to permeate this portion of the drama, offering a happy relief after the late fierce storms. There he abides, “musing on war with heart at peace,” and his spirit, without slackening in its strong purpose, grows insensibly calmer, milder, and more humble. From this dwelling he is driven forth by order of the king, only, as the king himself bitterly says, to “stand stronger than before.” The persecution is turning against the persecutor, who confesses in words Shakspere might have written:

“I have lit my camp-fires on a frozen flood,

Methinks the ice wears thin.”

But he is a man as full of device as resolution, and at his back are men still fuller of device. The plot thickens, and at last even Rome seems to fall from the archbishop, and give him over to the power of [Pg 852] his enemies. Something of the old fierce spirit leaps up, and Rome itself is not spared, until he is reminded by John of Salisbury, his tried and faithful friend, of the Pope that

“Who sits there

Sits on God’s tower, and further sees than we.”

Whereupon Becket breaks out into a speech full of beauty and of truth, which we regret our limited space forbids us to quote. At the end of it the two cardinals enter to endeavor to find a way for patching up a peace between the archbishop and the king. It must be borne in mind that in those days the church was in sore straits: the pope in exile at Sens; an anti-pope backed by all the power of the German emperor. As Cardinal Otho truly says:

“A mutinous world uplifts this day its front

Against Christ’s Vicar! Save this France and England,

I know not kingdom sound.”

And here was Becket, the champion of the church, doing, in the eyes of many, what best he could to drive England also into the enemy’s camp. All these circumstances render the intellectual and spiritual duel between the archbishop and the cardinals one of intense interest, which again confirms what we noted in Alexander the Great, that Mr. de Vere has the true dramatic instinct of bringing together at the right place and right time opposing elements. It is the clash of contraries that imparts greatest interest to a drama, and the right working of the conflict that shows the dramatist’s skill. The contrast between the plausible, keen, politic, Italian nature, as it would be called by some, of Cardinal William, and the straight, unbending, single-minded nature of Becket, who is so rooted in his position that nothing but death could tear him from it, is perfect. The cardinal builds up a very strong case in a negative manner against the archbishop. He hints at mistakes on the latter’s part; he counsels yielding here and there, or rather puts it to Becket why such and such might not be instead of such and such. In fact, his Eminence shows himself a thorough diplomat in cases where the issue was not a duel to the death. It would be amusing, were it not something of a far higher order, to see how Becket, with a strong, straight sentence or two, cuts mercilessly, half scornfully, through the cardinal’s fine-spun webs one after the other as they appear, scarcely giving them time to rise. Cardinal William is at length nettled into breaking quite through the diplomatic ice, and bids the archbishop resign. Becket refuses to listen to any voice but that which proceeds from the chair of Peter, and with this the act closes.

The fourth act opens with a beautiful scene between the nun Idonea and the aged Empress Matilda, whose character, small part as it plays in the drama, seems to us one of the most finished of all. Henry is back in England, only to find

“All’s well; and then all’s ill: who wars on Becket

Hath January posting hard on May,

And night at ten o’ the morn.”

On the other hand, Becket, with half-prophetic eye, seems to see the beginning of the end. After each new struggle, each new humiliation, he rises greater because humbler, leaving the dross behind him. Here is his own estimate of himself:

“Once I was unjust.

The Holy Father sees as from a height;

I fight but on the plain: my time is short,

And in it much to expiate. I must act.

[Pg 853] (After a pause.)

I strove for justice, and my mother’s honor;

For these at first. Now know I that God’s truth

Is linked with these as close as body and soul.”

How true is this we all know. It only required a Luther to make of Henry II. a Henry VIII., and he had not stood so long in doubt as did the latter. The plot deepens. What an admirable touch it is that shows him, when the gravest news arrives from England, falling back a moment on his happier days at hearing of a smart retort given by his old pupil, the youthful prince! At last the king and Becket are brought together, and again in this long, historic meeting Mr. de Vere rises fully and easily to the level of the event. The inner vein of deceit for which he was marked shows through the monarch’s speech, and once a lurid burst of passion flashes forth like lightning and as quickly disappears. This prolonged scene, at the end of which the mask is almost openly thrown off by the king, ends the act, and is a fitting preparation for the consummation which is to follow.

The fifth act opens with preparations for the return of the archbishop to England. His heart and those of his friends are filled with the gloomiest forebodings. Ill-rumors thicken around them. Becket himself, in a speech of wonderful beauty and pathos, describes the “sinking strange” at his heart as, standing still on the French coast, he looks towards England. It is the flesh asserting itself and gaining a momentary victory over the spirit. He sails at length, and history tells us how he was received. It was a matter of life or death to his foes. There was only one end to a contest with a man of his stamp—either submission on their part or death to him. The drama hurries on towards the catastrophe. The queen fans the flame. As Lisieux says:

“Year by year

She urged his highness ‘gainst my lord the primate;

Of late she whets him with more complicate craft:

She knows that all she likes the king dislikes,

And feigns a laughing, new-born zeal for Becket,

To sting the royal spleen.”

The short scene in which the barbed words of the queen draw a contrast between Becket’s triumph and the king’s humiliation is one of the many dramatic gems set in this drama. So graphic is the scene as she rises on the throne, cup in hand, and cries:

“A toast, my lords! The London merchant’s son:

Once England’s primate—henceforth King of England!”

that we scarcely need Leicester to tell us:

“Behold her, Lisieux!

That smile is baleful as a winter beam

Streaking some cliff wreck-gorged; her hair and eyes

Send forth a glare half sunshine and half lightning.”

At last falls that memorable feast of St. Stephen, and the end comes.

“The man is changed. Seldom he speaks; his smile

Is like that smile upon a dead man’s face,

A mystery of sweetness.”

The saint is already looking beyond this world. Standing at the window, as we are told he stood, he looks out and beholds the ground robed in snow. Here is how his poet makes him speak of it:

“How fair, how still, that snowy world! The earth

Lies like a white rose under eyes of God;

May it send up a sweetness!”

What other poet in these days could give us so pure and perfect an image as that—a flower plucked, surely, from the paradise of poets? The sweetness is sent up. It rises from the martyr’s blood.

Such is an outline of this drama. The character, of course, on which [Pg 854] the attention fastens chiefly is that of Thomas à Becket, and we think that in the portrayal of this great character Mr. de Vere is as happy as in his Alexander. Becket is a very easy man to write about, but a most difficult one to set living and real before us. In him for a long time the layman and the clerk struggled for mastery. There is no possible doubt that up to the time of his elevation to the primacy he was a man who lived in, and to a very great extent of, the world. He rejoiced in pomp and pride, in large retinues, in splendid appointments, in ostentatious display. He was not at all averse to showing that the arm of the cleric could tilt a lance with the bravest knight. Yet through all the temptations of such a life as his he undoubtedly retained his purity of heart, a right sense of his true vocation, and an honesty of purpose that never swerved. Certain it is that, in procuring his appointment as primate, Henry thought he had, if not exactly a tool, a devoted friend and a sensible man, who would not forget the favors his monarch had showered on him, and would be troubled by no such nice scruples as vexed his predecessor, Anselm. Becket had shown himself to be a keen-eyed, resolute, active, honest minister, with no sordid touch in his nature, with an intense sense of duty to his king and country. Indeed, had he not been a Catholic cleric, in days when clerics lawfully assumed many a civil office, there can be little doubt that he would have been pronounced, even by Protestant historians, to be one of the best and truest English chancellors that ever held the seals.

At a day’s notice this man, by the express command and desire of the king, is sent back to his real duty—the tending of Christ’s fold. He obeyed against his will, foreseeing already something of the issue. But the fashion of the world is not brushed off in a day, however changed may be the heart and conduct. To-day he is the gay and brilliant chancellor of England, highest in the favor of his king; to-morrow, primate of England, and appointed to that post, as he knew, to betray it. The man is not yet a saint—very far from it; and in his seizing of this character just as the robes of the world were falling from him and he had donned the livery of heaven; in his awakening to the new and tremendous responsibility that had fallen upon him; in the gradual taming of his fiery and impetuous spirit; in the struggle between personal love for his royal master, pity for the disasters necessarily brought upon the kingdom by his action, and his clear conception of duty throughout all; in the slow braying of this spirit in the mortar of affliction until speck by speck all the dross was shaken and cast out, and the whole man left clean and pure for the sacrifice—in all this Mr. de Vere has shown the skill of a great artist. The obvious temptation for a Catholic in treating such a theme was to make Becket a saint too soon. Mr. de Vere has not fallen into this mistake, and the result adds largely to the effect of the drama. Not till the very last scene do we feel that Becket lives already above this world, and only awaits his translation. The night before his death the flesh still urged flight when he knew that death was coming surely and swiftly. And when the curtain drops for the last time on that terrible scene of the outraged sanctuary and the murdered archbishop, then do we surely feel [Pg 855] that the spirit of a saint and martyr has flown to heaven.

The conception of Henry is almost equally good. The following picture of him will be remembered:

“Your king is sudden:

The tidings of his march and victory reach us

Like runners matched. That slender, sinewy frame,

That ardent eye, that swift, onstriding step,

Yet graceful as a tiger’s, foot descending

Silent but sure on the predestinate spot—

From signs like these looks forth the inward man.

Expect grave news ere long.”

Excellent foils to Becket and to each other are Becket’s two fast friends, John of Salisbury and Herbert of Bosham. The contrast between the two is well drawn by themselves:

“John of Salisbury. Herbert, you jar me with your ceaseless triumphs,

And hope ‘gainst hope. You are like a gold leaf dropped

From grove immortal of the church triumphant

To mock our church in storm! For manners’ sake,

I pray you, chafe at times. The floods are out!

I say the floods are out! This way and that

They come a-sweeping.

“Herbert.Wheresoe’er they sweep

The eye of God pursues them and controls:

That which they are to him, that only are they;

The rest is pictured storm.”

A mightier hand than Mr. de Vere’s might own so graphic a picture as this:

“Go where I might, except among the poor,

‘Twas all one huge conspiracy of error,

Conspiracy, and yet unconscious half;

For, though, beneath, there worked one plastic mind,

The surface seemed fortuitous concurrence,

One man the hook supplying, one the eye,

Here the false maxim, there the fact suborned,

This the mad hope, and that the grudge forgotten.

The lawyer wrote the falsehood in the dust

Of mouldering scrolls; with sighs the court-priest owned it;

The minstrel tossed it gaily from his strings;

The witling lisped it, and the soldier mouthed it.

These lies are thick as dust in March.”

And the “reptile press” had not yet come into being!

There is not a weak line in this drama. It will be welcomed by all Catholics as a glorious illumination of the history which it pictures. Our boys should dwell on it in the schools. From no book can they gather a better idea of one of the most marked epochs in English history. It will, like Alexander the Great, bear reading and rereading, disclosing each time new beauties of thought and expression. Many of the speeches set one’s veins a-tingling, so vivid and real are they. The pictures of churchmen are a study. There is the prelate courtier, the prelate politician, the false ascetic, the blasphemous apostate, the timid prelate, who trembles between his conscience and his king. In striking contrast to these stand out Becket and his true men, while to and fro among the cleric gowns stalk the stalwart nobles, half-bandits, most of them, sick in turn of prelate and king. Mr. de Vere makes masterly use of these many opposite elements, groups, parts, and rearranges them with the highest dramatic effect.

The general tendency of English poetry in these days is downwards. It has gained nothing; it has lost much. It is least strong in its highest, the dramatic form. Without pretending to be at all dogmatic in mere literary criticism, we take this last statement to be indisputable. The failure, however, is not from lack of effort. There is surely some strange fascination about the drama. It would not be at all hazardous to say that nine out of every ten men with any literary pretensions, if they have not actually written dramas, have at least had the ambition and intention at some time or another to write them. What may be the precise reason for this general tendency towards that peculiar form of literature, unless it is that so very few succeed in it, we do not know, and do not [Pg 856] care to inquire just now. The unattainable, however, always possesses a strong fascination for aspiring minds; and as the dramatic literature of all countries is that which, though the least in quantity, has fastened itself most upon the hearts of the people, it is at least a worthy ambition which aims at this royal road to fame. The discovery of the North-west Passage has not been a more fatal lure to mariners than the drama to literary adventurers. Even men of approved position in other branches of literature, poets of fame, novelists whose names were household words, statesmen and philosophers, have failed at this last fortress that fame seems to hold only for her most favored sons. Here no art can win an entrance; the sweetest strains cannot charm the locks asunder, the profoundest thoughts cannot melt them. Nature and nature only holds the key.

A glance at a few of the writers of the century will reveal how true is this. Even Byron with his passionate soul, his strangely mixed nature, his bitterness and sweetness, his loftiness of thought and expression combined, his marvellous power over words, has written dramas which as poems are splendid, but as dramas wretched. Shelley was the only poet of his day who produced a really dramatic work, but its revolting subject unhappily removes it from clean hands. The lesser lights of our own day have each in turn attempted a like flight only to meet with disaster. Who thinks of Browning’s Strafford now? Who has cast a second glance at Swinburne’s Chastelard or Bothwell? Notwithstanding the “gush” with which it was at first hailed by some English critics, Tennyson’s Mary Tudor has fallen flat, both on the stage and off it, and honest men have come to the conclusion that it rather detracts from than adds to the well-earned and well-worn fame of the author. The only good purpose it has served was to bring to light a real drama on the same subject by the father of the author whose latest work now claims our attention. Of that we shall have something to say at another time. Even that proverbial philosopher, Mr. Tupper, was seized with the inspiration in this centennial year of ours, and we heard something of a drama wherein George Washington was to figure as the hero, but it faded out of sight before it had well appeared. Sad to say, our own Longfellow’s Spanish Student, the only drama he ever published, happens to be about the worst of his productions. Mr. Disraeli even, in his wild youth, perpetrated a drama which was presented some years since at a second or third class London theatre, and, we believe, almost ruined the management. At all events it failed. And Bulwer Lytton’s best known drama is not one-fiftieth part as good as his poorest novel.

Bold then is the man who would tread this royal road which is strewn with so many a brave wreck. Rash the man who, with name and fame established, with the well-won laurels of a lifetime on his brow, would add a final and a crowning leaf plucked from this garden of death. Happy the man who, in face of the thousand dangers that beset his path, goes on his way boldly, grasps and holds the prize that a thousand of his fellows have missed. Mr. de Vere has won this prize. His dramas are dramas and nothing else. They are not verses stitched together without a purpose and a plan. They are not mere description; [Pg 857] they are instinct with act. We hope and believe that one who has accomplished so much and so well in so short a time may, as we do not doubt he can, do much more. The prizes to be won in this, to Mr. de Vere, new field are as many as the aspirants; but the winners are few. As Catholics we are proud of such a poet. As readers and observers we rejoice in these degenerate days at seeing so resolute a return to loftier thoughts and purer, to great conceptions, to real English, which is free at once from the affectation of the archaic and from the flimsy jingle that tries honest ears, to a right depicting of scenes and events that have stirred the world.

[210] St. Thomas of Canterbury. A Dramatic Poem. By Aubrey de Vere, author of Alexander the Great. London: Henry S. King & Co. 1876. (For sale by The Catholic Publication Society.)

		Page
Abroad, How we are Misrepresented,		1
Allies’ Formation of Christendom,		689
American Revolution, Catholics in,		488
Are You My Wife?	22, 186, 316
Assisi,		742
Aude, The Valley of,		640

Brownson, Dr.,		366

Catholicity in the United States, Next Phase of,		577
Catholic Church in the United States, The, 1776-1876,		434
Catholics in the American Revolution,		488
Catholic Sunday and Puritan Sabbath, The,		550
Charitas Pirkheimer,		170
Charles Carroll of Carrollton,		537
Chillon, The Prisoner of,		857
Church and Liberty, The,		243

Daughter of the Puritans, A,		92
De Vere’s “Thomas à Becket,”		848
Devout Chapel of Notre Dame de Bétharram, The,		335
Dr. Brownson,		366

Easter in St. Peter’s, Rome, 1875,		255
Epigraphy, Sacred,		270
Eternal Years, The,	128, 258, 402, 565

Formation of Christendom, Allies’,		689
French Novel, A,		158
Frenchman’s View of It, A,		453

German Journalism,		289
Gladstone Controversy, Sequel of,		30

Hammond on the Nervous System,		388
Hobbies and their Riders,		413
Home-Rule Movement, Irish,	500, 623
How we are Misrepresented Abroad,		1
Hundred Years Ago, One,		802

Irish Home-Rule Movement, The,	500, 623
Italian Commerce in the Middle Ages,		79

Journey to the Land of Milliards, A,		773

Kiowas and Comanches, A Day among,		837

Labor in Europe and America,		59
Land of Milliards, A Journey to the,		773
Letters of a Young Irishwoman to her Sister,	464, 654, 687
Life and Works of Madame Barat, The,		592

Madame Barat, Life and Works of,		592
Miles Standish, Was He a Catholic?		668
Modern English Poetry,		213
More, Sir Thomas,	70, 224, 350, 517, 698, 817

Napoleon I. and Pius VII.,		200
Next Phase of Catholicity in the United States, The,		577
Notre Dame de Bétharram, The Devout Chapel of,		335
Notre Dame de Pitié,		116
Novel, A French,		158

Philosophy, Thomistic,		327
Pirkheimer, Charitas,		170
Pius VII. and Napoleon I.,		200
Plea for our Grandmothers, A,		421
Poet among the Poets, A,		14
Poetry, Modern English,		213
Poets, Some Forgotten Catholic,		302
Primeval Germans,		47
Prisoner of Chillon, The,		857
Protestant Bishop on Confession, A,		831
Prussia and the Church,		104

Religious Liberty in the United States, The Rise of,		721
Rise of Religious Liberty in the United States,		721
Root of Our Present Evils, The,		145

Sacred Epigraphy,		270
Scanderbeg,		234
Sequel of the Gladstone Controversy, A,		30
Sir Thomas More,	70, 224, 350, 517, 698, 817
Six Sunny Months,	606, 758
Some Forgotten Catholic Poets,		302
Some Odd Ideas,		710
Studio in Rome, A Quaint Old,		781

“Thomas à Becket,” De Vere’s,		848
Thomistic Philosophy,		327
Transcendental Movement in New England, The,		528
Typical Men of America, The,		479

Valley of the Aude, The,		640
Vittoria Colonna,		679

Was Miles Standish a Catholic?		668
Wild Rose of St. Regis, The,		379

Years, Eternal, The,	128, 258, 402, 565

POETRY.
Ascension, The,		377

Centenary of American Liberty, The,		433
Chorus from the “Hecuba,”		653
Consuelo,		816

Forty Hours’ Devotion,		223

Da Vinci’s “Virgin of the Rocks,” Lines on,		13

Lamartine, From,		424
Lines on Da Vinci’s “Virgin of the Rocks,”		13

Mysteries,		185

Sacerdos Alter Christus,		58
Sennuccio Mio,		233
Sunshine,		278

Vago Angelletto che Cantanas Vai?		7

NEW PUBLICATIONS.

Achsah,		718
Acolyte, The,		286
All Around the Moon,		430
Alzog’s Universal Church History,		279
Are You My Wife?		426
Asperges Me, etc.,		430
Authority and Anarchy,		288

Breviarium Romanum,		288
Brief Biographies,		142
British and American Literature, Student’s Hand-book of,		138
Board of Education, Report of,		431
Boston to Washington,		432
Burning Questions,		280

Cantata Catholica,		429
Catechism for Confession and First Communion,		280
Catholic Church and Christian State,		425

Daniel O’Connell, Popular Life of,		143

Eden of Labor, The,		139
Elmwood; or, the Withered Arm,		143
Episcopal Succession in England, Scotland, and Ireland,		432
Episodes of the Paris Commune in 1871,		431
Explanatio Psalmorum,		287

Faber’s Hymns,		282
Father Segneri’s Sentimenti,		142
Faith and Modern Thought,		718
Five Lectures on the City of Ancient Rome,		142
Flaminia, and other Stories,		431

Geographical Text-Books, Mitchell’s,		860
German Political Leaders,		716
Gertrude Mannering,		285
Glories of the Sacred Heart, The,		576

Haydon, Benjamin Robert, The Life, Letters, and Table-Talk of,		860
Histoire de Madame Barat,		425
How to Write Letters,		287

Labor, the Eden of,		139
Labor and Capital in England and America,		139
Lectures on the City of Ancient Rome,		142
Life, Letters, and Table-Talk of Benjamin Robert Haydon, The,		860
Life of Rev. Mother St. Joseph, The,		427
Life of Daniel O’Connell,		143
Little Book of the Holy Child Jesus,		288
Literature for Little Folks,		287

Meditations and Considerations,		719
Men and Manners in America One Hundred Years Ago,		860
Mitchell’s Geographical Text-Books,		860

Newman, Characteristics from the Writings of,		288
New Month of the Sacred Heart,		720
Note to Article on Thomistic Philosophy,		432
Notiones Theologicæ,		720

Outlines of the Religion and Philosophy of Swedenborg,		281
Ordo Divini Officii Recitandi,		141

Pius IX. and his Times,		288
Principia or Basis of Social Science,		428
Principes de la Sagesse, Les,		287
Publications Received,		288

Revolutionary Times,		720

Sancta Sophia,		859
Science and Religion,		720
Scholastic Almanac for 1876, The,		144
Segneri’s Sentimenti,		142
Sermons by Fathers of the Society of Jesus,		141
Story of a Vocation, The,		432
Spectator, The,		144
Spiritualism and Allied Causes,		713
Student’s Hand-book of British and American Literature, The,		138

Universal Church History, Alzog’s,		279

Voyages dans l’Amérique Septentrionale,		432

Wyndham Family, The,		430

CATHOLIC WORLD.

CATHOLIC WORLD.

HOW WE ARE MISREPRESENTED ABROAD.

LINES ON LEONARDO DA VINCI’S“VIRGIN OF THE ROCKS.”

A POET AMONG THE POETS.

ARE YOU MY WIFE?

CHAPTER XIV.

A SEQUEL OF THE GLADSTONE CONTROVERSY.

III.

PRIMEVAL GERMANS.

SACERDOS ALTER CHRISTUS.[26]

LABOR IN EUROPE AND AMERICA.[27]

SIR THOMAS MORE.

VI.

VAGO ANGELLETTO CHE CANTANAS VAI.

ITALIAN COMMERCE IN THE MIDDLE AGES.

A DAUGHTER OF THE PURITANS.

PRUSSIA AND THE CHURCH.

III.

NOTRE DAME DE PITIE.

THE ETERNAL YEARS.

III.

NEW PUBLICATIONS.

CATHOLIC WORLD.

THE ROOT OF OUR PRESENT EVILS.

A FRENCH NOVEL.[69]

CHARITAS PIRKHEIMER.[72]

MYSTERIES.

ARE YOU MY WIFE?

CHAPTER XV.

CHAPTER XVI..

NAPOLEON I. AND PIUS VII.[75]

MODERN ENGLISH POETRY.

ON THE FIRST OCCASION OF THE FORTY HOURS’ DEVOTION IN THE NEW CATHEDRAL OF BOSTON.

SIR THOMAS MORE.

VII.

SENNUCCIO MIO, BENCHE DOGLIOSO E SOLO.

SCANDERBEG.

THE CHURCH AND LIBERTY.

EASTER IN ST. PETER’S, ROME, 1875.

THE ETERNAL YEARS.

IV

SACRED EPIGRAPHY AND THE INVOCATION OF THE MARTYRS IN BEHALF OF THE DEAD.

SUNSHINE.

NEW PUBLICATIONS.

PUBLICATIONS RECEIVED.

CATHOLIC WORLD.

GERMAN JOURNALISM.[97]

SOME FORGOTTEN CATHOLIC POETS.

ARE YOU MY WIFE?

CHAPTER XVII.

THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY.[104]

THE DEVOUT CHAPEL OF NOTRE DAME DE BÉTHARRAM.

SIR THOMAS MORE.

VIII.

DR. BROWNSON.

THE ASCENSION.

THE WILD ROSE OF ST. REGIS.

HAMMOND ON THE NERVOUS SYSTEM.[114]

THE ETERNAL YEARS.

THE CHARACTERISTICS OF GOD’S GOVERNMENT—PROGRESSION.

HOBBIES AND THEIR RIDERS.

A PLEA FOR OUR GRANDMOTHERS.

FROM LAMARTINE.

NEW PUBLICATIONS.

CATHOLIC WORLD.

SONNET.

THE CATHOLIC CHURCH IN THE UNITED STATES,

A FRENCHMAN’S VIEW OF IT.[127]

LETTERS OF A YOUNG IRISHWOMAN TO HER SISTER.

THE TYPICAL MEN OF AMERICA.

CATHOLICS IN THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION.

THE IRISH HOME-RULE MOVEMENT.[139]

SIR THOMAS MORE

IX.

THE TRANSCENDENTAL MOVEMENT IN NEW ENGLAND.[147]

CHARLES CARROLL OF CARROLLTON.[148]

THE CATHOLIC SUNDAY AND PURITAN SABBATH.

THE ETERNAL YEARS.

CONSUMMATION.

LINES ON LEONARDO DA VINCI’S
“VIRGIN OF THE ROCKS.”

ALLIES’ FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM [190]